Envisioning ecological security through local direct action: community resistance with global resonance

Abstract

ABSTRACT As climate change becomes a pressing concern for policymakers and citizens around the world, a variety of security discourses have emerged framing the environment as a security issue. While dominant frameworks focus on securing national interests, the international order, or individuals, the ecological security framework presents an alternative discourse. Ecological security requires a refocusing of the security discourse onto the environment itself, vulnerable communities, and future generations, and requires the exploration of alternative, relational forms of social and economic organisation. This framework has often been discounted as an impractical and radical alternative to dominant discourses, however, I argue that ecological security can, and is, being enacted by local communities around the world through radically relational activist methodologies. I suggest that direct action methodology employed by environmental activists can enable the enactment of ecological security by local communities. By investigating the connections and overlaps between blockade-style activism, direct action methodology, and Indigenous resurgence, it is possible to envision a locally-based, radically relational, bottom-up model of ecological security. Through an investigation of the conflict between Wet’suwet’en land defenders and the Coastal GasLink pipeline, this community-activist-ecological security nexus is drawn out and examined as a possible path forward for climate security.