ABSTRACT
The advent of the Anthropocene unsettles one of the key organising logics of modernity on which much traditional security thinking is built: the separation between human and nature. This chapter outlines some key features of ecological security approaches and associated accounts of resilience. Ecological security then looks promising as a route to reframing security for the Anthropocene. However, there is a tension in attempting to bring the ‘deep ecological’ suspicion of the human/nature dualism into security discourse. Approaches to security that draw on ecological thought then seem appealing in response to the Anthropocene reframing of the human/nature relationship. Ecological security then becomes entangled in a tension relating to its treatment of singularity and plurality. The inability of ecological security approaches to break free from dualism is telling. It points to the enduring power of a particular way of ordering the world in terms of problems and solutions, with those solutions framed in terms of escape to an outside.
