Environmentality: Military Maneuvers, the Ecosystem, and the Accidental

“The military isn’t waiting while Congress and the general public might be having some debate. They’re stepping out as they have on so many other things,” Cuttino said. “If there’s anybody that’s going to be at the forefront of how to save energy, reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions and become more efficient, it’s [the military], because it’s in their best interest,” Cuttino continued. “If they can do it well, it proves to the rest of us that we can do it well … We’re all going to benefit from what they’re doing.”
 

—Phyllis Cuttino, Director of Global Warming, Pew Charitable Trust (qtd. in Stillman)

“The Cold War was a specter, but climate change is inevitable.”
 

—Gordon Sullivan, Former US Army Chief of Staff (10)

“As to whether this [citizen-subject] figure, like a face of sand at the edge of the sea, is about to be effaced with the next great sea change, that is another question.”
 

—Étienne Balibar (55)

 
On July 27, 2008, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) brought together forty-five scientists, military strategists, policy experts, and business executives from Asia, South Asia, Europe, and North America to engage in a new type of military exercise: the Climate Change War Game. The exercise was supported by an extensive governmental, military, scientific, and business community, including the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, the Center for Naval Analysis, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, McKinsey Global Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Sustainability Institute, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Set in the year 2015, the war game began with the following premises: 1) the agreements made at the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference of 2009 did nothing to alleviate the production of greenhouse gases; 2) most nations around the world are physically confronting sea-level rises, floods, and droughts; 3) new information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) details that climate change will soon unfold faster and more dramatically than previously anticipated (the IPCC’s next report is due out in late 2014); 4) public concern for climate change will have increased substantially after having to confront more volatile and destructive weather events; 5) the accumulations of CO2s in the atmosphere will have reached 407 parts per million (ppm); 6) we are locked into this environmentally destructive pattern until at least the year 2050; 7) if this pattern continues, by the end of the century climate change will have reached catastrophic levels (see Burke and Parthemore).
 
Players of the game were divided into four groups, representing the planet’s four greatest emitters of greenhouse gases: China, India, the European Union, and the United States. The point of the game was to establish a framework that all could agree on for addressing long-term climate change. In addition to this scenario, the players were given nonfictional statistical figures of climate change projection models that were generated by the most recent IPCC data (the “A1F1” model made available to the public in 2011), and both the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Sustainability Institute were on hand to provide additional “non-fictional” (i.e., empirically-based) projections during the course of the game. Although ostensibly the point of the exercise was both to educate important international leaders on the reality of climate change and its growing effects on planetary status and intergovernmental relations and to generate practical solutions for the risks of probable international conflict, its goal was clear: “to explore the national security consequences of climate change” (Burke and Parthemore 6). Despite its attempt to bring together a massive international community, the game compulsorily reinvigorates and is symptomatic of the return of the late twentieth century’s most touted repressed: the nation state. (As we will see, however, this is a particular form of the nation state that, in part, leaves the traditional idea of the narrated nation and its homogenous cultural identity gasping and struggling to catch up in its wake.) At the level of the traditional form of the State, the key concern of impending climate change was the nation-State boundary—specifically the change in borders that will result from the rise of sea levels, and the need for greater border patrol in the face of the new, twenty-first century phenomenon of climate change refugees: the mass migrations that will threaten national structures and identities for the next century. The “findings” of the game—that is, the common ground for agreeing on how to address climate change—were governed by an intensely military mode of thought. National security formed he basis of this ontology, and was presented not simply as a main concern, but as the central “framework for understanding climate change” (7, emphasis added). In fact, the game had the effect of installing the military focus on national security in the minds of the players:
 

Participants widely accepted and responded to the security framework for understanding the consequences of climate change. Participants, who had diverse backgrounds, raised their level of knowledge and their acceptance of the current state of knowledge, including the range of consequences, the plausible projections associated with global climate change, and the ways in which national and global security will be affected.

(7)

 
These military “maneuvers,” I argue in this essay, constitute a new and formidable pressure on current theoretical formulations of the citizen-subject. The Climate Change War Game raises the level of a specifically militarized form of knowledge-production and extends it beyond the site of military life to become a generalized form of knowing, thereby affecting the constitution of State subjectivity. This extension, in other words, is not confined by a traditional conception of “the military,” in the sense of armed forces and structures such as the Department of Defense. Both the signifier and the event “climate change” were reterritorialized as vehicles for expanding the structural being of the military to the civilian register on the levels of conceptual production and thought itself: “Note that participants in this case did not equate ‘security’ with ‘military’ and in some cases noted that militaries were not the most important elements of national power in concerns about climate change” (Burke and Parthemore 7). Securitizing the nation state and maintaining the reproduction of national power were grounded in the significant need to break down any and all barriers between civilian life and military life.
 
At the level of representation, the militarized constitution of “military life” and its opposite, “civilian life,” names the two poles of what might be more clearly understood 1) as State-formed life and 2) as a citizen-subject life enacting an extra-State existence that Étienne Balibar has identified as the other, more radical and liberatory pole of the citizen-subject (I elaborate on this distinction below). These two poles might be better understood, that is, as the constitution of the citizen-subject by the State and as her (presumably) less colonized and more radical constitution as an actor understood in relation to a groundless liberation. (In this representational militariality, “civilian” should not be mistaken as the subject of “civil society” in Gramsci’s sense.) This breakdown of the borders of customary military configurations and identifications—taken as a productive outcome of the game—became a motif in the narrative summary of the game in its aftermath. The breakdown effectually redefined and exploded the supposed empirical neutrality of the scientist, the game’s other major player: the military community and the science community “were able to develop mutually intelligible positions and collaborate to develop a negotiating strategy” (Burke and Parthemore 7, emphasis added).
 
Despite the work of De Landa and Virilio—and recent work by people like Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Mike Hill—this indissoluble epistemological and ontological connection between the military, the sciences, and ecology, and the effects this trinity has on the constitution of subjectivity are relatively unacknowledged.¹ I am tempted to say there is even a studied blindness in effect here. While the popular press and its interpellated citizenry debate the “actuality” of climate change, and the conservative public denies its existence out of a sense of an anti-State, individualized succor for freedom, the military continues to expand its control of the planet’s ecosystems. In September 2009, the CIA opened its new branch, the Center on Climate Change and National Security. But as early as 1992, the CIA had begun to establish direct connections with climate scientists in the program known as MEDEA (Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis), which declassified satellite imagery for patriotic climate scientists). In 2006, the Center for Naval Analysis convened a military advisory board of retired, three-star and four-star admirals and generals to assess the impact of global climate change on key matters of national security, and to lay the groundwork for future military responses to the threats posed by this “unavoidable catastrophe.” And in the strategy of the climate change war game, a rationale develops based on the assumption of an empirical, clear-headed approach to the problem of climate change that in fact installs an axiomatic breakdown of the boundary between military and civilian modes of existence—a breakdown in the construction of the citizen, as we historically and ontologically understand this subjectivity. This breakdown then opens the door to the ontological supremacy of what I call environmentality: a new political ecological paradigm that functions by generalizing and normalizing a military pattern of thought across the various twenty-first-century ecological fields of concern—including human to human and human to nonhuman interactivity. Within this environmentality, the citizen-subject of late modernity is transformed into a militarized form of neoliberal subjectivity to become what we might call the green patriot.²
 
How do these developments in the State’s shifting relationship to the geopolitics of ecology in the age of climate change affect our understanding of subjectivity and citizenry, especially the kind of insurrectionary politics that, according to Balibar, is at the heart of legitimate democratic formulations in our contemporary occasion? Balibar argues that the citizen is “unthinkable” as an individual (despite the appearance of individuality within the discourse of modern neoliberalism); his subjectivity only makes sense through an “active participation in a politics that makes him exist” (51). But the citizen is not absolutely merged into this political field imaginary. As an entity, the citizen must be understood from the standpoint of a certain “indetermination,” the character of which is understood in and through a dialectic of being a “constituent element of the State” and the “actor of a revolution” (54). This antagonism of a being “being constituted” and a being in a “permanent state of a groundless liberatory struggle” names the contestatory and unending dialectical essence that Balibar identifies as the site of the citizen-subject. Thus the citizen can only be approached “from both the point of view of the State apparatus and that of the permanent revolution” (55). As a foundationless concept, “permanent revolution” requires a breakage in the systemic constitution of a State’s citizenry, which, we might add here, is both a breakage in subjectivity and a breakage in the system. (A breakage in a subjectivity without a breakage in the system would be an impossibility, since both are part of an indissolubly constituted discursive network.) It would seem, then, that such a concept of rupture is crucial to Balibar’s open-ended dialectic. Given the environmental-military events currently unfolding, what happens when a breakage in the State’s systemic constitution of itself and its subjects (the breakage, for instance, of global warming) begins to be incorporated into the State’s field imaginary at such an intense level that it begins to support the further closure of the State’s constituted structure—through the installment of “adaptation” and “security” measures rather than through the search for ecologically sustainable alternatives to current State formations of human existence? Or, in other words, what happens when the “enclosure” that is the State and its material reality are accepted within the terms of an end-of-history discourse—when the process of its metaphysical historical constitution has reached its fulfillment, in the sense of its completion and total expansion across the totality of existence, in the form of “nation-State” and “global security”? Or, to put it yet another way, what happens to the radical act of revolution when emergency conditions (as Agamben would say) and “homo sacer” become the rule? Current theoretical formulations of the citizen-subject, I argue in this essay, undergo a transformation when securitization goes global, and when the security State begins to constitute itself as the ground of human future existence (in direct opposition to the environment, which is understood to have failed as the traditional historical ground sustaining life). One of the key questions we need to address is the following: if the historical “other” in Balibar’s equation of the citizen subject is the colonized other of a European political citizenry, then what happens to that structure of otherness when the other becomes more radicalized as the environment itself, or as the other other of this environmentality: the climate change refugee suddenly deprived of her foundation in any State formulation of citizenry by the effects of global warming? This essay explores some avenues for considering these and other questions, and tries to contemplate the future potential for citizen-subject constitutions in the context of twenty-first century military maneuvers designed to reformulate the political in relation to the ecological. Adaptation Maneuvers
 
In the Climate Change War Game, the players’ initial “moves” reflected an openness to a variety of potential scenarios for addressing environmental degradation. However, the military exercise quickly established a firm field imaginary that subsequently governed future approaches and solutions to ecological dilemmas. The rise to dominance of a single scenario became a turbulent force, subsuming like a mushroom cloud the activities of all concerned in its expansive but centripetal flow. The swiftly adopted problematic enforced an extremely narrow relation to the future: climate change was accepted as an unavoidable catastrophe, and any and all means to alleviate this threat to the planet’s ecosystem became a secondary and ultimately impractical concern. The designers of the game actually considered multiple approaches (such as third-world alternative ecological relations or first-world explorations of new, sustainable forms of technology) to be a worrisome distraction from the central issue of security: “A focus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions runs the risk of crowding out full consideration of adaptation challenges” (Burke and Parthemore 8). When game players did attempt (during the early stages of the game) to focus on methods for alleviating climate change, they each found it to be ultimately “insoluble.” “Adaptation challenges” were seen as “difficult but soluble,” whereas emissions reductions were not, especially for developing nations that might attempt to “act on their own” (8). Thus the focus on how to address a category 5 hurricane hitting Miami, or when and where mass migrations of “climate change refugees” would occur, gradually overtook any discussion of multiple solutions. Conflict overrules cooperation in the war game, and the ultimate conflict in this new theater of operations becomes the one between the world’s strongest nations (led by the US) and the environment now constituted as the radical enemy other.
 
Despite glaring evidence of capitalism’s direct complicity with climate change (Western overconsumption, the depletion of resources, the production of wastes and CO2s, etc.), the “iron law” of economic growth superseding issues of climate change held firm when it came to each nation’s concern for reproducing its sovereignty: “Throughout the game, both [India and China] never wavered in their drive to balance any agreement with economic growth” (Burke and Parthemore 8). The US and EU teams also acknowledged the primacy of the economy. This relentless passion for economic growth is indicative of the continuing, ruthless pursuit not only of financial gain on the economic register of being, but also of the control of resources (and the territories associated with resources) that defines military existence.³ This unholy alliance between the military and the economy is nothing new, but its insistent—practically zealous— repetition is indicative of a self-destructive, Accidental influence that even its advocates do not recognize (I develop the concept of the Accidental below). By 2050, current conceptions of the economic will no longer be applicable. The very concept of “economic growth” and the models generated by its demand are already becoming outdated. Such growth was based on the naïve view that resources would always be available, and on the view of the earth as a mere resource for the anthropological machine. (Might the radical liberatory potential of the citizen-subject also be seen as arising from this idealization of the earth as an always-already available resource for human expansion and transformation?) As we enter the age of resource wars, we shift into a mode of existence that will be underwritten by the knowledge that the resources we covet are coming to an end. If we accept this end-oriented narrative (which environmentalists have been iterating for some time), then the idea of a sustainable citizenry is threatened. Projection models indicate that by the end of the twenty-first century, the resources currently defining human survival will have been compromised. Crops will fail more often, even with agronomists’ efforts to design new varieties of staple crops like rice and wheat.⁴ The “economic,” therefore, will not be a movement tending toward growth. With this establishment of the supremacy of an economy-without-growth, an economy that must entirely redefine itself because it will no longer be able to postpone its own limit (the definition of capitalism according to Deleuze and Guattari), the politics of openness is replaced by the policing politics of environmentality. The movement of the economic will consequently be defined as the movement of exhaustion, of a mode of production oriented to the telos of depletion. Depletion, coupled with the ecological destruction it generates, will power the motor of (anti)development, and serve as the captivation mechanism that disinhibits any relation to an exterior. As each race for the next dwindling resource begins, the difference between the economic and military registers of being will become less distinguishable—to the point at which they will be one and the same.
 
Thus the premise of the game is clear: the United States, working specifically with China (with the other two national communities following behind like initiates), should expand its institutional security structures at a transnational level to prepare for planetary-wide clashes that will soon consume and redefine international geopolitics as we know it. A key rationale working against technological innovation stems from the way in which “security” and militariality in general focus almost exclusively on near-term narratives of insecurity. Concentrating on technological solutions to the problem (of liberation from the state of existence)—which are always long-term in their implementation—is understood to take away from the immediate threats to national security. If the immediate issues of security are not fully addressed, then all future security crumbles. This logic, presented as plain and disinterested, reflects the self-strangulating dynamic of the closed-loop structure of environmentality. It seeks to release the full potential of climate change—exploding nature as a great destructive force that may erupt at any moment, making it necessary for us to be constantly on our guard and to be “realistic” about what will happen not only to our loss of resources and shifting geographies of agricultural production, but to the threat to national borders when “un-Stated” climate change refugees begin their forced migrations. Throwing sustainability into oblivion (or even making it a secondary concern that, formalistically, never arrives since adaptation will always be a more pressing concern) manifests the martial logic of redirecting our attention towards the next impending ecological accident, taking our attention, at the same time, away from potentials for different forms of citizen-subject liberation.
 

The New Military Political Mandate

 
The CNAS war-game exercise was not an isolated occurrence, but rather is part of a growing number of synecdochic events that signal a telling expansion in the military’s relationship not only to sites of human production (specifically geopolitical and ecopolitical), but also to the nonhuman continuum of being, namely the ecosystem as re-presented (that is, interpellated in the problematic of environmentality) in terms of “energy resource.” Various branches of the military have embarked on major initiatives to address climate change. In March 2007, the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College held a conference entitled “The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change” to inaugurate its transition to ecological awareness. (The Strategic Studies Institute is the Army’s collegiate arm that “serves to influence policy debate and bridge the gap between Military and Academia.”) The “Colloquium Brief” outcome of the conference stressed the need to ensure that “public awareness should follow a coordinated strategic communication plan” (Johnson 1). Though the “facts” of climate change and its long-term effects were disputed, it is clear that this intelligence propaganda arm of the Army War College was already thinking in the direction of manipulating public opinion. (By 2009, the Strategic Studies Institute will have adopted the position that climate change is indisputable and that it is the result of human activities.) Like the worst-case scenario of the Climate Change War Game, the Brief stresses the anticipation of catastrophic change: “The entire range of plausible threats needs to be delineated, then analyzed and early warning criteria established” (1). Unlike the War Game, the Strategic Studies Institute calls for global cooperation, but suggests that such cooperation is not yet available: “Climate change will require multinational, multi-agency cooperation on a scale heretofore unimaginable” (1). The specifics of such cooperation are not articulated (and the Brief also states that no conference participants made mention of the United Nations), with the emphasis falling instead on the mass displacement of people that will occur if “global cooperative measures fail” (1). Despite the suggestion of such multinational cooperation, the report makes it clear that the “catastrophic vision” of climate change can only reduce all other courses of action to “one of national survival” (2). Summaries of the presentations indicate that many found the then newly-published IPCC 2007 report to be too moderate in its predictions. The development of a terminology for establishing a clear discourse was foregrounded, and the final presentation emphasized the need to keep “the discourse at the national security level rather than the disaster relief level” (Johnson 4). It was suggested that this emphasis be extended to other state security structures, and to become a key focus of the National Security Act of 2010.⁵ Thus the radical liberatory pole of the citizen-subject was gradually and thoroughly erased from this hyper-pragmatic military narrative.
 
Less than two months later (July 2007), the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA)—the Navy and Marine Corps’s federally funded research center, which provides information for all US military organizations and the government—released its first major publication directly addressing the current and future status of the environment. Called “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” the report serves as a major indicator of a general military attitude towards the problem of climate change, and stands as perhaps one of the first official and extensive public responses from the military on a subject matter that it had found to be, for all intents and purposes, of little importance. (As I have argued elsewhere, previous articulations, such as those by R. James Woolsey and others, were tightly focused on such matters as the production of biofuels on domestic and “friendly” foreign soil so as to end US dependency on foreign oil.⁶ ) The report’s introductory statement makes it clear that CNA authorities have accepted the findings of climate scientists without question: “Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are greater now than at any time in the past 650,000 years, and average global temperature has continued a steady rise. . . . The trends are clear” (Sullivan et al. 1). The report ends with a series of “recommendations” calling for the event of climate change to be “fully integrated into national security and national defense strategies” (46). These recommendations suggest especially the need for the US war machine to expand its power globally if it is to successfully “stabilize climate change at levels that will avoid significant disruptions to global security and stability” (46). This expansion includes the construction of new military bases and command centers, such as the establishment of a new Africa Command—a proposal that originated in the offices of the Department of Defense.
 
The impact of climate change in Sub-Saharan Africa—already experiencing the effects of global warming—is of particular importance to the US military. The Department of the Army, in conjunction with the Department of Defense, began producing a series of reports in 2009 that articulated the need to establish new “Sino-American military-to-military cooperation” in the Sub-Saharan region (Parsons). One of the first reports, Rymn Parsons’s “Taking Up the Security Challenge of Climate Change,” frames its narrative with statements that unequivocally accept the scientific data about global warming produced by the IPCC and, when referring to global warming, it always adds the qualifier “manmade.” In its opening declarations (a section titled “The Science of Global Warming”), the report presents a genealogy that explains how global warming came to be fully accepted by the Army:
 

Even as recently as 2006, the year in which the Academy Award winning film An Inconvenient Truth . . . was released, climate change as a consequence of manmade global warming was hotly debated and deeply politicized in the United States and elsewhere. The following year, 2007, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its long-awaited Fourth Assessment. The IPCC report is of signal importance because it is well-balanced and moderate. It did not quell all controversy surrounding the subject; but because of it climate change is generally accepted, scientifically speaking, to be a product of manmade global warming, even though uncertainties remain as to where, when, and how much.

(Parsons 1)

The report also cites the work of Thomas Friedman to substantiate its claims. These narratives and their particular emphases and genealogies make it clear not only that climate change has been accepted, but that it has been adopted by the US military as its new primary enemy: “The idea that the environment has security implications is not new. . . . What is new is that climate change poses security threats unmatched among environmental phenomena” (2). Climate Change is even incorporated into new Army field manuals.

 
The CNA’s report characterizes climate change as a greater threat than any of the wars that America fought in the twentieth century, and as an event more volatile and difficult to handle than the ongoing war against terror: “During our decades of experience in the U.S. military, we have addressed many national security challenges, from containment and deterrence of the Soviet nuclear threat during the Cold War to terrorism and extremism in recent years. Global climate change presents a new and very different type of national security challenge” (Sullivan et al. 3). The being of climate change is definitively framed in terms of past US military conflicts. The report resituates environmental concerns, which were formerly tangential to military institutions, at the center of security matters: “Climate change, national security, and energy dependence are a related set of global challenges. . . . The national consequences of climate change should be fully integrated into national security and national defense strategies” (7). The environment consequently becomes part of the signifying chain of military history, further solidifying the perception that nature presences itself in the narration of the nation as fundamentally a concern of the war machine.
 
As mentioned above, a key concern of the military is the tension that will erupt from the displacement of millions of people in the wake of sea-level rise. The CNA report emphasizes the insecurity that will arise from floods and droughts, declines in agricultural productivity due to lack of water resources, the erasures of coastlines in the Pacific, and the potential spread of infectious disease. It emphasizes the need to establish a different rhetoric in US relations with China, specifically to rethink US recommendations to “enhance environmental progress,” which are understood to come at the cost of economic growth. It repeats the argument made in a number of military circles concerning the threat of “Islamification” to Europe, stating that the primary concern for Europeans will be massive migrations: “The greater threat to Europe lies in migration of people from across the Mediterranean, from the Maghreb, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa” (Sullivan et al. 29). It also emphasizes the threat to security in the homeland, especially to the aquifer that underlies the west-central United States, which supplies water for twenty-seven percent of the country’s irrigated land. Concern also exists for the US military’s bases, weapons systems, and platforms in the Middle East and the Pacific. The Arctic is highlighted as an area of particular concern. Once the ice canopy no longer exists, the region will “require an ‘increased scope of naval operations,'” which will in turn require new considerations for “weapon system effectiveness” (38). The report also stresses the weakness of the Department of Defense’s reliance on the national grid for daily operations, tacitly urging the construction of an alternative (presumably ecologically innovative, therefore more defendable) source of energy.
 
The volatile nature of climate change (scientific uncertainty about specific sea level rises, world temperature increases, when polar ice caps will disappear, the precise timing and location of the next category 5 hurricane…) puts pressure on national defense structures. The logic of Security and its nationalized systems must incorporate a certain form of insecurity in order to justify its existence and function properly: “As military leaders, we know we cannot wait for certainty” (Sullivan et al. 7). In the ontology of environmentality, the act of decision functions by banking on an artificial future deployment of a perverse absolute certainty (ecological catastrophe, failed crops, massive displacement, political unrest …), or, what amounts to the same thing, a constant deployment in the present of uncertainty. The certainty of catastrophic collapse in the future exists side by side with the uncertainty of that knowledge in the present. This enables the security specialist to annex disagreement (in both the traditional conception of that word and in Rancière’s philosophical sense) from the domain of the political. The military authority employs the policing idea of “risk” at the expense of the political transformation of the field of possibility, so as to justify “action now”:
 

This approach [ending the discussion and acting now] shows how a military leader’s perspective often differs from the perspectives of scientists, policymakers, or the media. Military leaders see a range of estimates and tend not to see it as a stark disagreement, but as evidence of varying degrees of risk. They don’t see the range of possibilities as justification for inaction. Risk is at the heart of their job: They assess and manage the many risks to America’s security. Climate change, from a Military Advisory Board’s perspective, presents significant risks to America’s national security.

(9, 11)

We thus find the most conservative, policing organization standing on the side of environmentalists who for years have been trying to convince the public to take climate change and other ecological problems seriously. Time to stop debating whether or not climate change is real: “Debate must stop,” says former US Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan, “and action must begin” (12). Do we not see in the supreme military authority an earnest advocation of exactly the kind of commitment long sought by environmentalists, one that breaks through the endless liberal democratic debate surrounding the issue of climate change that we see, for example, in the (ongoing) fiasco of “Climategate”?⁷ Sullivan takes a stand, and speaks in such a way as to move beyond the fundamental deadlock of civilized debate:

We seem to be standing by, and, frankly, asking for perfectness in science. . . . People are saying they want to be convinced, perfectly. They want to know the climate science projections with 100 percent certainty. . . . We never have 100 percent certainty. . . . If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.

(10)

 
Unlike the endless and innocuous deliberation about the “reality” of climate change that thoroughly engulfs the registers of the mediatized public, environmental efforts, the government, and the paralyzed political state of all three, we see here, in the military commander’s “no-nonsense rhetoric,” the core of today’s neomilitary power—the adoption of a (policing) State-constituted citizenry denuded of its open-relation to a radical liberatory potential. Or, to put this foreclosure of “openness” in traditional poststructuralist terms, this large-scale enfolding of environmental concerns into the military machine—a new and hyperactive discursive incitement—has the ability to cut straight through the endless postmodern, “tolerant” chain of signification (the constant but empty engagement with differential points of view). As such, this rhetoric is able to co-opt the Real of liberal democracy—that is, the ability of a subject or group to assume an overtly political mandate and a larger (populist) cause without being demonized as fanatical. This ability of the military to touch upon the Real of democratic American and global neoliberalism has the potential to galvanize the population without being turned into what such movements normally appear to be to the democratic capitalist system: the external Enemy that must always be avoided (the Enemy that “guarantees Society’s consistency,” as Žižek says [121])—the socialist, the tree hugger, etc. This military engagement with the Real therefore brings about a perversion of the authentic ethico-political act. This reinsertion of the environment within the realm of debate (including public opinion, government policy, and even private corporate development now that the various branches of the military are seeking new, eco-friendly corporate contracts) cuts through the endless procrastination of action to speak directly to society’s destructive ecological habits. In more than one sense, Phyllis Cuttino of the Pew Charitable Trust is spot on: the military are at the forefront of the environmental fight, working on all levels to achieve what scientists and activists have sought for decades. Indeed, as the sudden and increasing production of these and many similar military reports suggests, the military is genuinely performing the authentic, radical act of directly assuming responsibility and taking action on behalf of the environment—thereby breaking through the overload of ideological representations that act as a congestion to a concrete Act that would change the entire playing field controlling all ideological points of view. For an act to be truly genuine—for the citizen-subject to be an “actor” in relation to freedom—it must be more than a movement that resolves a series of problems given or existing within a determined field of action; it must enact the “more radical gesture of subverting the very structuring principle of this field” (Žižek 121). As Rancière puts it, the genuine act must name a wrong and put into play—against the naturalized play of accepted parts/identities/activities/representations—the “part of no part” (30). And the part of no part shared by environmental activists, ecocritics, and the military alike is a commitment to break through the mystifying cloud of debate to represent the truth of climate change, name it as a wrong that has been committed, and take action to confront the event fully. Within the liberal humanist political constitutions of democracy, the military is indeed currently winning the battle for environmental justice, and laying the groundwork for new forms of environmental activism and new formations of the environmental citizen-subject. These developments suggest that the twenty-first century is on the verge of an inauguration or a new, genuine “event” of history, as Heidegger would say—a history in which environmentalists will need to subjectivize themselves in accordance with the new practices of military ecologies.
 

Decision and Necessity

 
Nonetheless, this military activation of the act is, as we shall see, not in the service of the truth-event of ecological vulnerability, but something very different. One way to sharpen the difference between the military’s and the environmentalists’ triggering of the act is to consider their close but very different relations to uncertainty, to think “uncertainty” specifically in terms of Derrida’s important theorization of “undecidability.” Sullivan’s argument—that there is no absolute certainty upon which we can base our decisions—shares a dangerous affinity with the traditional poststructuralist argument that we live in a decentered universe and inhabit a world that can never offer the certainty of an absolute ground. Or, as Derrida says, the lack of an absolute order of stability presents us with an irreducible undecidability—the liberatory pole that the citizen-subject enacts (298). This philosophical concept of undecidability is often grossly misunderstood to be a form of liberal relativism, as if Derrida were arguing that in the final analysis we cannot make a decision. Nothing could be further from the mark. For Derrida, undecidability is a name for the moment when a subject—in the act of deciding—unchains itself from constrictions of an existing program of already determined relations. If there were one-hundred percent certainty, there would be nothing to decide: the field of existing relations would then be nothing more than a force making the decision for the subject. The subject would only have to follow the plan of action given over by the ruling situation. If a genuine decision is to occur, if a subject is to make a decision without everything already having been decided for her, then the subject must decide without knowing; she must make a choice without full knowledge of the situation. Otherwise the subject gives over the power of deciding to a set of knowns that control the totality of choices. To sharpen this one step further, undecidability refers to that which has not already been decided, and the leap away from the already decided—the encounter with undecidability that has not be reduced to something decided—makes an authentic, not an imitative, act possible.
 
Where, then, lies the difference between the Derridian encountering the freedom given by undecidability and the military commander fully facing the lack of absolute certainty? The difference lies in the relation to necessity. In a state of existence in which everything is governed by environmentality, the freedom to choose that arises out of a relation to uncertainty or an unknown is turned around so as to affirm all the more the empiricism of necessity. The military commander, the scientist, and the ecocritic all share a relation to a fundamental “lack of perfection,” to quote Sullivan. But for the military commander, this lack of perfection is not a source for a groundless act of decision-making; it is incorporated into so as to strengthen the power of an instituted program of action. Uncertainty and the lack of perfect knowledge is reterritorialized so as to generate a state of anxiety, which is then used to justify the institution of a state of necessity that positions itself beyond any form of debate—whether that debate is political, legal, or critical-ontological. Nor can this necessity be understood according to any known form of reasoning, conservative or otherwise. It turns the openness given by the event of uncertainty into an unquestionable and insurmountable absolutism. Again, the line between this state of necessity (which, it must be kept in mind, should not be equated too easily with classical Reason, since necessity trumps any form of reason in this structure, even a deconstructed reason) and the space of uncertainty that offers the potential for un-cementing oneself from the ruling order (which also poses fundamental challenges to forms of reasoning) is thin and difficult to trace. But the difference could not be more substantial, and it is this difficult difference that will come to define our ecological future with greater decisive force.
 
From within the ideological position of the de facto state of necessity, the leap from environmental action to national security is swift: “While the developed world will be far better equipped to deal with the effects of climate change, some of the poorest regions may be affected most. This gap can potentially provide an avenue for extremist ideologies and create the conditions for terrorism” (Sullivan et al. 13). From this position, the leap from environmental activism to postcolonial nation-state warfare is even quicker: “Many governments, even some that look stable today, may be unable to deal with these new stresses. When governments are ineffective, extremism can gain a foothold” (13). In these lightening moves, the complexity and diversity of the current environmental occasion is reduced to a single concern: national and global security. Issues such as biodiversity, animal rights, sustainability, bioengineering, threatened habitats, and so on no longer appear as part of the arena of human political and existential concerns. These calculative moves, which work by preying on the fears of geopolitical insecurity (“extremism”), are designed to camouflage the violence of a reductive logic that shrinks all environmental concerns to the world of “security policy.”
 
Thus the military demand for action—a mode of action that presents itself as an unconstructed, matter-of-fact empiricism that puts an end to debate—is precisely the line of reasoning we should reject. Its relation to an empiricism based on a state of necessity makes it differ in a secondary fashion from the forms of ecocriticism performed in the humanities. One of the primary concerns of such ecocriticism is the exploration of possible forms of cutting open limiting forms of institutionalized decision-making. In doing so, it foregrounds the ideological nature of any ecological concern, as opposed to the military demand for action, which conceals its complicity with ideology, in part through the use of narratives of neutrality. Consider the argument presented by Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly, former NASA administrator and the first Commander of the Naval Space Command. (The Naval Space Command was established in 1983 during the Reagan Administration; it is the Navy’s institution of global surveillance and uses extensive satellite observation to support naval action around the planet. It also includes a “space watch” that operates around the clock, tracking satellites in orbit with a “fence” of electromagnetic energy that “can detect objects in order around the Earth out to an effective range of 15,000 nautical miles.” The Command operates “surveillance, navigation, communication, environmental, and information systems” in order to “advocate naval warfighting.”⁸ ) In articulating his particular stance on the environment, Truly deploys a particular form of representative transparency:
 

I had spent most of my life in the space and aeronautics world, and hadn’t really wrestled with [environmental issues]. . . . Over the course of [a] few years I started really paying attention to the data. When I looked at what energy we had used over the past couple of centuries and what was in the atmosphere today, I knew there had to be a connection. I wasn’t convinced by a person or any interest group—it was the data that got me. As I looked at it on my own, I couldn’t come to any other conclusion. Once I got past that point, I was utterly convinced of this connection between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change. And I was convinced that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be in deep trouble.

(qtd. Sullivan et al. 14)

Truly’s argument attempts to ground itself in an empirical verifiability that arises outside of human fabrication and ideological influence. “Data” as an object in existence appears without human generation, and as if outside of any narrative construction. No human speaks to the military commander about climate change; the data “speaks for itself.” This fantastic ex nihilo argument undermines itself, however, in the symptomatic pressure put upon Truly to deny twice the existence of any author or organization that might have a relationship to the collected knowledge of climate change: the Admiral “was not convinced by any person or interest group.” Nor did the Admiral encounter any human other than himself during the process of coming to understand the data. Like Robinson Crusoe, who learned how to see the bounty of “Providence” hidden underneath the wildness of his island without the help of others, and was thus able to become the self-reliant and meaningful Cartesian Self he always yearned to be, the Admiral “looked at [the data] on [his] own.” This dynamic of data “speaking for itself” conceals a design meant to trigger specific behaviors and results—key among them is the construction and preservation of an irrefutable state of necessary military action.

Environmentality and the Accidental

 
Ecological catastrophe becomes the basis, in this neomilitarism, for reterritorializing the earth as essentially an abyssal milieu—an “unforgiving environment,” to use the language of the CNA’s national security climate change report—incapable of supporting human existence without the aid of the US war machine. In this maneuver, the war machine takes over the former role of the ecosystem as supporter and sustainer of human life. Such a re-presenting of the earth erases the entire history of enclosure and the West’s colonial, politico-economic relations to nature that have ruled the human-nature nexus from the seventeenth century to the present. The history of US Military presence in the Pacific, for instance (which became of paramount importance during the ecological catastrophe of the tsunami in 2005),⁹ is steeped in American imperialism and colonial expansion. The US Pacific military structure is the world’s largest naval command, with close to three hundred bases and facilities and active personnel from the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and the Army in addition to the Navy. Walden Bello’s recent description of the Pacific military is revealing: “Perhaps the best way to comprehend the U.S. presence in the Pacific is to describe it as a transnational garrison state that spans seven sovereign states and the vast expanse of Micronesia” (312). Typical historical periodizations of US colonial expansion tend to focus on the “errand in the wilderness” activities that engulfed the lives of Native Americans and Mexicans. But the entrance of the United States into the Asian “theater”—with the successful wresting of Guam and the Philippines from Spain in 1898—was also a key part of US colonial history, extending US sovereignty to a global register. The new bolstering of military presence stems from a different type of ideological imperative, an eco-imperial ontology that grounds its entire rationale in the troubling, anarchic essence of nature, which it transforms into an exploitative logical economy that matches the never-ending and centerless essence of the previous military transcendental-signified, “terrorism.”
 
The United States’ prosperity and technological advancement was made possible by inflicting catastrophes elsewhere, outside its borders, in the form of low-wage factories, the support of dictatorships, internecine warfare, the unequal distribution of resources, uneven development, and a mystification process that kept US soil metaphysically separated from the rest of the planet in the mythology of American exceptionalism. Throughout all of this it turned a blind eye to the effects of this destructive development in and upon ecosystems across the planet. Its sense of a different historical development from all others conceals its imperial genealogy and ontology. This exceptionalism involves the constitution of a national biopolitical settlement and an autonomous consciousness that lives and sustains its existence far from any connection to nature. If nature exists at all in this paradigm, it comes to presence as the enemy/other that poses a threat to economic development and the security of all people. Today—in the form of global warming—that decision to annex nature to profit machines and colonial apparatuses of power have returned to haunt the imperial logic of exceptionalism.
 
This peculiar deployment of catastrophe brings me to my ultimate point concerning the essence of environmentality—that is, its relation to the formation of a closed system that I call the Accidental. The Accidental names a combination of Kant’s conception of the Transcendental and Paul Virilio’s “accidental thesis.” The basic point of Virilio’s thesis is that in the current historical occasion, worldly accidents, oddly, are not accidental. From inside the ruling ideological world picture (in Heidegger’s sense) that uncritically presents a certain mode of technology as the highest achievement of human production, the accident is re-presented (vorgestellt) as a mere or unwanted side effect, as an error in human judgment or design, or as a limitation in the reliability of materials. As such, the accident is comprehended as an event that can be overcome through an increase in the security of procedures (the explicit military rationale for its environmental concern). The concept of the Accidental directly opposes this view. The accident, as Virilio argues, “is becoming a clearly identifiable historical phenomenon” (6). But I want to argue more emphatically that, given the events I have laid out, late modernity’s techno-scientific mode of production releases the accident into existence as a major, primary component of reality. No longer an occasional offshoot of worldly manufacturing, the accident arises out of a fundamental change in the essence of modern human production: “the invention of [a] substance [in techno-modernity] is also the invention of the ‘accident'” (6). The substance of existence has internalized the accident as part of its very composition: “The shipwreck is indeed the ‘futuristic’ invention of the ship, the air crash the invention of the supersonic plane, and the Chernobyl meltdown, the invention of the nuclear power station” (6). In the example of the Climate Change War Game and these other military engagements with ecology, we discover that modernity’s techno-military-scientific mode of production replaces transcendence with Accidence. In other words, it replaces the functioning metaphysical transcendental signified (and non-metaphysical forms of quasi-transcendence) with the (a)transcendental accident, which I am calling the Accidental. It approaches the accident of climate change so as to release its “full potential,” and to establish the future as the necessity for the narrative of security policy. But the current connection of military matters to environmental matters—what I have been calling environmentality—flips this equation: thus, the accident of ecological climate change becomes the motor of military production and reproduction.
 
Situating the Accidental as the First Cause, or Principle, deploys a form of coherence in contradiction. The demand for and installment of increasing security structures as a reaction to impending climate catastrophe privileges closed systems (because too much openness means too little control). More tightly controlled systems in turn generate more accidents, thus generating a self-perpetuating, closed loop. The accident of climate change marks the shift from the local to the global, and the apparatuses of security follow suit to establish global enclosed systems. This means that the military and various forms of security systems are increasingly ecological in nature—a sign of the indissoluble interlocking of military, techno-scientific instrumentality with our atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere: from nineteenth-century coal-mining and the industrial revolution to the more recent events of Chernobyl, Japan, and the unexpected outcomes of the genetic manipulation of crops in Europe and elsewhere. The increased pressure to overcome obstacles to the production of high-yields through technological manipulation— defined in terms of either commodity production or efficiency production (faster means of transportation)—creates an increased potential for accidents to occur.
 
Considering the actions of the military described above, it would help to sharpen the particular way in which exceptionalism relates to environmental matters. Documents such as the national security report and events such as the Climate Change War Game are symptomatic of attempts to fully activate the Western metaphysical addiction to a defensive totalizing world view that, in its refusal to admit the potential for any other ecological narrative, essentially puts an end to any form of democracy that might be connected to significant and various environmental concerns (namely, to the complexity that surrounds ecological degradation— deforestation, flooding, droughts, soil erosion, excess salinization of land from sea-level rise, species extinction, biopiracy, plant gene manipulation, etc.). This enclosed world picture— grounded in the deployment of catastrophe as the ultimate threat and in the rationale for global military control—generates a state of existence that can only turn the citizen-subject against itself, i.e., against its liberatory potential. The strengthening of the Pacific Command reflects this environmentality-economy, which was further expanded when the idea of “anticipatory action”—the preventative defense-strategy policy favored by the George H.W. Bush Administration—was institutionalized by the National Security Strategy Paper issued in September 2002. This new defensive policy redirected US military strategy to center specifically on an “anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. In the new world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.”
 
This “anticipatory action” is a symptom of what Giorgio Agamben identifies as “the State of Exception”—the key paradigm of government in the twentieth century, a form of executive action mystified by the liberal humanist argument that the declaration of the exceptional state in a time of crisis reflects a benign government’s logical, pragmatic response in order to maintain the institution of democracy. What Agamben does not theorize, however, is the transformation of the State of Exception as it shifts from the exploitation of terror to the exploitation of the being of nature as the new, fundamental threat to human existence. In military documents, Nature is made out to be more terrifying than terrorism itself. Nature poses far greater problems for humanity, since the very system that supports human life itself has begun to turn against humanity. As nature replaces terrorism as the ultimate anti-liberal humanist peril, anticipatory action multiplies beyond its previous ties to human entities (terrorists and their cells) and human institutional structures (nations that “harbor” terrorists) to engulf the planet itself. Agamben’s astute and important analysis of the State of Exception puts great weight on the power of the sovereign to suspend a nation’s normal state of political and civil existence (through suspension of civil liberties, the law, the constitution, personal liberties, privacy, etc.). The central node within the establishment of this exceptional state is the sovereign, the executive branch of a State. The extension of executive powers introduces a new “threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism” (3). To “protect” democracy, democracy must be suspended absolutely by the Sovereign, the figure who stands above the law, and who claims the right to revoke the law for any citizen. What Agamben alludes to in his analysis, but does not fully consider, is the connection of this State of Exception to a pivotal and ontologically defining Western concept of a Natural State of Existence (and here again we brush up against the apolitical idea of a pragmatic empiricism). The State of Exception is supposedly a State’s natural response to “extreme internal conflicts” (2).
 
The move to environmentality involves a shift of the institutionalization of a State of Exception by the Sovereign to the condition of existence itself. In this sense it is not the nation-State, or a Sovereign identified with any particular nation-state, but a more difficult to identity relation of entities that act, not necessarily in clear, homogenous unison, by putting into motion a cohesion of concerns that share a certain, directed course of action. In the age of climate change, in which nature itself is the ultimate threat, it is no longer the sovereign that suspends the law and extends executive powers; it is a coalition of forces that extend the Absolute, that extend a form of power that suspends forms of rationality, the law, democracy, and various possibilities for freedom. Instead of the Sovereign suspending the law it is the military industrial complex that spearheads the move towards a State of Exception. This shift of “full powers” from the executive branch of the nation-State to the more complex confederacy signifies the rise of the Accidental State (a structure composed of military complexes, corporate allegiances, university-industrial centers, private interests, and so on). As Foucault would say, this shift cuts off the head of the king who presumably stood behind and controlled the workings of power (89). More specifically, it makes visible the structure of the Accidental that was the true ontological essence lurking behind the more “ontically visible” State of Exception.
 
Such a shift away from executive sovereignty, from a subject who always acts and speaks in public on behalf of the nation-State (but who secretly works always for necessity: necessitas legem non habet [necessity has no law]), can be seen lurking behind statements such as those made by the military leaders supporting environmentality. Parsons’s report makes this shift explicit, and even provides a military transliteration of the postcolonial genealogy of empire. In a section entitled “The Future Security Environment,” he lays out the Accidental narrative of a “post-American” State:
 

A time is coming, measured in decades, not centuries, in which American military superpower status may remain, but its relative economic power may be less and its resulting political prerogatives may be fewer, that is, a “post-American” world of increasing multipolarity. For nearly 300 years, world order has been shaped by the hegemony of Western liberalism, first in the form of Pax Britannica, and then Pax Americana. But a post-American world, though globalized, may also be more non-Western. It will be a world of evolving modernity to which the United States must adapt, not a world the United States will dictate. It will be a world in which China, already the second-most-important country in nearly every respect, will take a decidedly American tack, though not by employing American methods, to expand its influence in hopes of molding the international system to suit its interests. Further, it will be a world in which a healthy international community will still be a vital U.S. interest.
 
The most important bilateral relationships China and the United States have today are with each other. Strenuous efforts must be made to keep the U.S.-China relationship nonconfrontational and to encourage China to broaden its responsibility for promoting and maintaining peace and stability. American grand strategy and military strategy must include ways and means to achieve these ends. Because the effects of global warming-related climate change are of as great, if not greater, concern to China than the United States, the two countries will find much common ground in this arena. China, like America, will perceive the security implications of climate change, but it remains to be seen whether it will play a constructive or discomfiting role. The United States must focus intently on this issue.

(5)

In Parsons’s exceptionalist, somewhat anxious and quasi-apocalyptic narrative we begin to see the full force and meaning of the signifier “adapt,” which before this appeared as the military-empirical necessity of succumbing to the inevitability of climate change on the grounds of protecting national security. Here, however, “adapt” names the end of American national supremacy in favor of a “multipolarity” of powers—an indication of the expansion of the structure of the Accidental beyond the “control” of a single nation-State. This suggests an extension of “full powers” (and here we should keep in mind Foucault’s theorization of “power”) from the central node of the sovereign to the complex network of the Accidental itself. The futural characterization of the post-American world equally reveals that this discursive military constitution of an ecological imperative is not really about the environment at all, but about the effect that climate change will have on the future of global geopolitics.¹⁰ In February 2009, the CNA and the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) produced a “Panel Discussion Report” on China’s sixth defense white paper, issued a month earlier. Though this report is not available to the public, Parsons indicates that the CNA and the INSS are concerned about the waning of US supremacy in the wake of China’s declaration that it will be an “active and constructive” “key player” in the post-climate change world (16). Environmental policy therefore becomes the vehicle for constituting new military flows of power in key locations around the globe.

 
We are thus in the midst of experiencing a folding of the accident into the substance of existence. “Substance” here names two elements: a co-constitution 1) of accidents and 2) of a technology inherently connected to the production of what should properly be called “accidental thought.” As every child knows, technology is constantly advancing from within its own closed system—that is, outpacing human understanding of the precise working of technological inventions. This authorizes, however, a curious activity of accepting products without understanding how they work, and this becomes a naturalized state for the human user. (The average consumer can use and understand the function of material instruments, but cannot fix these instruments since the specific knowledge of how they operate is not part of consumer consciousness.) Instrumentality disappears from the field of the visible. For instance, with the slippage of instruments into the automatism of habit—the acceptance of greater sophistication with greater incomprehension—the only substance and the only awareness of substance that enters consciousness is the breakdown of the instrument. It is the accident and the accident alone that fills out the field of the visible: “‘Consciousness now exists only for accidents'” (Valéry, qtd. Virilio 6). The substance of existence is consequently transformed into a recipe for producing and maintaining a constant state of anxiety, which in turn produces the feedback loop of a need for increased security—the problematic solution produced by a system that can never get outside of itself. We thus find ourselves in the absurd, precisely opposite position of the kind of instrumental breakdown thematized by Heidegger (in his example of the broken hammer that suddenly opens the subject to a cessation in the normal state of human production). The breakdown of the instrument does not open us to an encounter with the ontological essence of existence, with the “being of being”; as instrumentality disappears from consciousness, its breakdown can only confront us with the terror of the accident. To put this more emphatically, in today’s world broken devices no longer have the power to enable us to realize the ideological underpinnings of existence. Breakdowns are not the cessation of the specific substance of existence that colonizes our lives; breakdowns are the primary substance of existence itself—the confirmation of and justification for more technological advancement, “states of exception,” jingoistic patriotism, surveillance, and global security. In this closed-loop system, the only action left is to increasingly overexpose and develop that which is. This drive to “overexpose” for purposes of total (final) explanation and control, technological manipulation, and economic development (the high-yield logic of the discourse of enclosure) creates a world of increasingly dangerous and globally-consequential accidents.
 
In philosophizing ecology, we can draw a firm connection between the accident, the environment, and what I have referred to elsewhere as the war on inhabitancy. The event of the Love Canal disaster in the United States, which galvanized a specific environmental awareness and movement, is one example of an accident that damaged an environment and its inhabitants. But the accident is more firmly connected, even embedded now, in the planet’s ecosystems in this late, enclosing age of postmodernity, as made evident in the overproduction and subsequent destruction of ecosystems for today’s profit-oriented system. The technological manipulation of land that defined the Green Revolution in the Punjab is symptomatic of an “overexposing” of land that leads to the “accident” of excess salinity and water logging. This in turn leads to the “accident” of mass hunger and a global decrease in calorie intake. The push to monocrop by transnational corporations turns food into a commodity for sale on the international market. Monocropping eliminates the chances of a community to fall back on locally produced food and forces the community to pay for food produced elsewhere. When an “accidental” dip occurs in the market, agricultural workers’ pay drops and communities already underpaid find themselves in the position of having no money to buy food. The struggle to survive produces the “threat” of encroachment by these communities looking for new sources of food in forests and privatized farmland. This in turn requires the transformation of nature into “threatened” nature, which in turn produces legislation that represents nature as a being in need of “environmental protection.”
 
Here Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s exemplary work on the origin of “ecology” as a university discipline within the war effort of the Cold War is of paramount importance. DeLoughrey has productively revealed the years from 1952 to 1954 to be the specific moment when the US military successfully manipulated the earth’s ecosystem so as to achieve full global enclosure and overexposure:
 

The hundreds of nuclear tests conducted in the Pacific Islands . . . have largely been erased from global memory, and yet we all carry their radioactive traces in our bodies. With the shift from atomic (fission) to thermonuclear (fusion) weapons, global radioactive fallout increased exponentially. . . . The first detonated thermonuclear weapon—the H-bomb Mike—unleashed in the “Pacific Proving Grounds” in 1952, blew the island of Eugelab out of existence. At ten megatons, Mike was seven hundred times the explosive force of the atomic weapon dropped on Hiroshima, which had killed over 200,000 people. Radioactive fallout from Mike was measured in rain over Japan, in Indian aircraft, and in the atmosphere over the US and Europe.

(475)

One scientist working for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) declared in 1954 that after just two years of testing, all humans on the planet now had “hot” strontium in their bones and teeth and “hot” iodine in their thyroid glands: “Nobody believed you could contaminate the world from one spot. It was like Columbus when no one believed the world was round” (qtd. DeLoughrey 475). In fact, it was because of these post-WWII Cold War nuclear experiments conducted by the US military industrial complex that ecology became a field of study in the university system. To study the effects of this militarized radioactive contamination on the environment, the AEC created the discipline of “radiation ecology.” As DeLoughrey so powerfully documents, the establishment of this field began with the hundreds of nuclear tests conducted in what was known as the “Pacific Proving Grounds.” By 1958, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the USSR had exploded nearly one hundred nuclear weapons, leading to record levels of strontium-90 in American soil, wheat, and milk. This Cold War arms race was, more than anything else, a race for the total control of the planet through targeting, and this race for total control has led to the accident of total planetary ecosystem exposure and the impossibility for any human to transcend this contamination.

 
As a theoretical term, “accident” defines the environment at the level of its being in our current historical occasion and plays a role in the way our minds constitute the environment as an object of investigation and use. Current connections to the environment consequently have their basis in what we should more properly call “the Accidental”—a term that names the colonization of transcendence by breakdowns that occur as the prime mover of the system, not by breakdowns that radically open a free space for the potential to restructure the system. In the ontology of the Accidental, productive and successful citizen-subjects are constituted in terms of their ability, and consent, to “protect” the environment (in other words, to secure the highest yield of energy). Unproductive subjects and the poorest of humans—especially those working in the worst possible conditions in agricultural communities in the third world, the shadow humans that make the north and the west possible—are increasingly seen as a threat to the environment and to this new, enclosed environmentality. The Accidental thus names a world in which constituents and their environments can only appear in the form of accidents.
 
In this erasure of the transcendental in favor of the Accidental, our access to ecology changes fundamentally. “Environmentality” is the term I have been using to mark that change, and it is meant to invoke, in part, Foucault’s conception of governmentality—that is, as a political constitution and administration of planetary ecosystems on the basis of their ability to be technologically “improved” so as to produce “high yields.” To this we can now add the force of the Accidental, which chokes out the possibility of alternative ecological relations for purposes of total control and total security. Manipulation can thus be addressed more critically (i.e., outside dominant theories of sovereignty) in terms of the lines being drawn between corporate/State flows of power and ecosystemic developments—namely the corporate, judicial, and legislative alliances being formed around the struggle for diminishing resources, and the impending shift to non-petroleum sources for global mass transportation and global mass consumption. Though the State is part of this shift, it and the cultural socius lag behind the direct activity of what should be understood properly as the developing Accidental State—a structure composed of environmental organizations, State and corporate officials, security institutes, centers for foreign and domestic policy, private companies, and the military. In the constitution of the Accidental State (that functions through acts of “speaking for,” not “speaking before”) inhabitants and the environment are manifested so as to face one another as antagonisms.
 
This self-destructive pattern of existence restages the Cold War scenario of nuclear testing. Unlike the Cold War experiment, however, this new attempt to transfer our environmental and economic future to the military (culture does not even have a place in this arena) manifests the full-scale structure of environmentality. Before, humans only achieved their realization of the Accidental by accident, so to speak (though this accident was firmly organized according to an Accidental economy—the targeting logistical control and command theater of geopolitical concern); now, humans have learned how to harness the full potential of the Accidental by organizing its structures wholly in accord with its rigid and closed-loop structural dictates. In the discourse of this neomilitarialism, environmental breakdown replaces humanity’s concern for the environment. The environment as essentially a being-breaking-down becomes the new universal truth of humanity’s existence in the world—humanity’s mandate—essentially hard-wiring conflict and adaptation to the civilian brain, and erasing the pole of the citizen-subject that potentializes liberation. From this position it is a small step for the military to install in the minds of a civilian population the idea that the environment is humanity’s ultimate enemy. In this fantasmatic imaginary, the preservation of the planet—namely, the conception of the antagonistic paradox of the citizen-subject—is so far from the problematic field view that it starts to disappear from human consciousness in favor of walled and viciously defended spaces, all in the name of a pragmatics totally alienated from its own assumptions, a pragmatics that unrelentingly extinguishes any other economic, political, or cultural conceptions of existence. If these developments continue as they are currently beginning, the figure of the citizen-subject will most definitely become “like a face of sand at the edge of the sea,” “effaced [in] the next great sea change” (Balibar 55).