ABSTRACT
Civil society advocacy and government learning have gradually led to more long-termist policies being developed mitigating threats to both human and non-human state residents. Environmental policies in Western Europe and North America have, since the 1960s, seen economic interests compromised to limit uncertain threats posed to human health and to wildlife. Towards the end of the Cold War such environmental security thinking began to permeate the political mainstream and even find the ear of a superpower. The 1960s saw a significant rise in prominence of environmental issues in North America and Western Europe, and the emergence of environmental politics, beyond purely economic concerns, on the international political agenda. Prior to the securitization of environmental change in the 1990s United Nations Environment Programme, civil society and epistemic communities acted to globalize the issue area after the upsurge in interest in resource depletion in the 1970s had subsided.
