ISC Distinguished Lecture Series: “Firepower, Geopolitics and the Future: Rethinking Environmental Security”

As climate change accelerates and causes ever more calamities to human societies, scholars need to think much more carefully about how the world is changing and why. One key to this is the role of combustion in modern societies and the need to constrain its use in both civilian and military uses to make us all more secure in future. Discover more in the “ISC Distinguished Lecture Series: Basic Sciences For Sustainable Development” webinar featuring Simon Dalby from the Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Canada.

Lecture Abstract

The interconnected crises of energy, security and climate change require rethinking many aspects of modernity. The great power rivalries, accelerating climate-related calamities and technological innovations reprise many of the themes first clearly articulated at the 1972 Stockholm United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Half a century later, the urgency of grappling with our predicament, of only having one earth, requires redoubled efforts to link across disciplines, and in particular across the divide between natural and social sciences. Innovative formulations such as the Anthropocene are obviously needed because perpetuating the modern social order based on firepower can no longer provide security. Instead, strategies to facilitate adaptation and remove institutional blockages to rapid energy innovation are a key theme for policy makers, and likewise for researchers in numerous geosciences.

Speaker biography

Simon Dalby

Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Victoria Centre for Global Studies.