Author’s Note : The term “First World” is a relic from the Cold War and has modernized to “post-industrialized nation/state” to reflect contemporary Western liberal democracies. Its use in the title is merely a play on the adage “First World Problems,” indicating the divergence between post-industrialized states’ challenges and those of developing nations.

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Social sciences and ideological standpoint are inseparable from research, as we have witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic and other significant events, especially climate change. These preconceptions are particularly evident in global security and the prism through which decision-makers view human security issues. Because of this, cognitive and perceptual biases will become more apparent and challenged. During my research and doctoral studies, specifically related to migration and gender security issues, my inclinations were challenged or reaffirmed where I stood on a topic and approached it from a different point of view.

For example, an academic discussion and an analytical paper I did revealed a dichotomy or even hypocritical perspective of mine related to climate change and humankind’s impact on the environment. However, I did not take the opportunity to discuss it in depth at the time and will delve a little deeper into it here.

I consider myself an animal conservationist and regularly donate to my local zoos and contribute to a nonprofit called VETPAW (Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife) to limit the human impact on wildlife. Conversely, I am a human-made climate change skeptic and believe there are still significant information gaps and incomplete data to draw accurate conclusions. Moreover, animal conservation and environmental protection regulations and policies significantly impact human security and vice versa, especially in developing nation-states.

Still, while I support the former, I believe the latter is often too restrictive or ineffectual, placing my biases in a conflicted state. Viewing these issues and how they relate to overall food, economic, and environmental security amplify the perceptual and cognitive biases found in post-industrialized “First-World” states. Many of the demands placed on developing countries by post-industrialized nations are not realistic and ignore some crucial factors that make them too expensive or unachievable without significant intervention and restructuring.

Food Security

Hungry people become desperate people, and they will do whatever it takes to feed themselves and their families with little regard for long-term consequences. In the developing world, people will knowingly or uncaringly destroy the environment to provide food for themselves and their communities, in addition to literally cultivating a source of income. People clear thousands of acres of rainforest to make room for farming and animal husbandry, displacing hundreds of species of fauna and destroying flora that make up the base of those ecosystems. Similarly, irrigation and agricultural development of savannas and other airable areas drastically change the landscape and how the natural elements interact with it and the people who alter it.

For example, sugarcane farmers in Africa now frequently come into contact and conflict with elephants who inadvertently destroy their crops. Likewise, leopard and tiger attacks on people and livestock in India have dramatically increased due to human villages and towns encroachment into their habitats. These conflicts invariably lead to the killing of animals that are already endangered or on the precipice of extinction. Similarly, the exotic animal trade, typically animal products like pelts and ivory, supplement an extremely impoverished population’s income, usually to feed their families. In these examples, the post-industrial states’ demands place near-impossible expectations on developing nations already struggling to sustain themselves in the face of already challenging natural environmental conditions and events.

Environmental Security

As discussed in the previous section, human development, particularly agriculturally, has a significant impact on the environment. A majority of the world’s post-industrialized nations have taken measures to mitigate some of that impact. However, some of the actions and expectations are unrealistic, prohibitively expensive, or require an entire overhaul of their infrastructure and societal norms. Unfortunately, the developing world does not have the option to implement wide-scale environmental reforms, primarily because of cost and applicability.

For example, a windmill may produce enough power to run a well pump or grain milling setup (the Dutch did it for hundreds of years). Still, it will not provide the same electricity for a small community as a small gas-powered generator. On a larger scale, converting and maintaining even more efficient and environmentally friendly industrial operations is often well beyond the capabilities of the majority of the developing world.

Farming and animal husbandry is similarly challenging to implement in eco-friendly ways in much of the developing world for numerous reasons. Terrain, weather, and infrastructure often limit communities, especially in rural areas, and they have to find more straightforward solutions to fit their needs. For example, raising cattle is a lucrative industry in South America but requires a large area for grazing. As a result, rural farmers clear and burn vast sections of the Amazonian rainforest to make the room needed for cattle ranching. As discussed in the previous section, this practice negatively affects the rainforest’s flora and fauna and impacts the Earth’s Oxygen Cycle (the conversion of Carbon dioxide into Oxygen and vice versa).

Finally, there is the issue of waste management and pollution. As discussed above, reducing emissions is a near-impossible task for both post-industrialized nations and the developing world. Soil and water pollution and waste disposal are more achievable goals to meet but are still significantly challenging for the developing world to implement effectively. Moreover, most impoverished states do not have the infrastructure or resources for recycling and eco-friendly waste disposal.

These communities’ easy solutions involve dumping, burying, or burning, leading to air, soil, and water contamination. The contamination exacerbates environmental, food, and health issues. Polluted water poisons crops, animals, and people. Contaminated soil becomes no longer airable, and whatever harvests they yield often pass toxins onto those consuming them. Unfortunately, water purification is expensive, and recycling programs are rarely cost-effective. However, both are more reasonable to implement with post-industrialized nation assistance; the only challenge will be maintaining the equipment and facilities long-term.

Economic Security

Economic security as it applies to the environment is a bit more complicated to address with many micro and macroeconomic factors to consider. A microeconomic example is that it is easier and cheaper for rural communities to dump their trash and waste in a nearby ravine or burn it than build a sewer system or even drive the garbage to an operational landfill or processing facility. Likewise, on a macroeconomic level, developing state governments are financially incentivized by unscrupulous developed states like China and Russia to allow them to overfish their territorial waters or use them for their waste disposal needs.

Similarly, in several African states, safari hunt tourism is a significant component of their economy, as are the illegal markets like ivory and exotic animal trades. However, in recent years, the nations hosting exotic animal hunts have been much better about animal conservation efforts and using more conscientious methods for approving and chartering these hunts. Unfortunately, poaching is still a massive problem in Africa, and corruption within the cognizant agencies is rampant. Again, we see Western liberal democracies and other industrial nations place unreasonable burdens on the developing world to fix that they propagate themselves.

On the Other Hand, How Much Impact Do Humans Really Have?

In this final segment, I would like to switch gears and present a rebuttal to my above arguments; I need to discuss the sources of my climate change skepticism. Social science can give a pretty good explanation of why humans impact the environment and some of the consequences of those actions. However, does physical science support the claims of an extinction-level event if we continue down this path? Do we have enough data to support these assertions, and have we considered enough variables?

For the entirety of my four decades on this Earth, I have heard numerous climate alarmist claims. They run the gamut ranging from a new ice age, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, global warming, climate change, and extreme weather. But how many of these were the result of humankind’s actions, and how much was just Earth’s natural lifecycle? Similarly, how much could we possibly attribute to external influences such as the Sun or other interstellar bodies? Unfortunately, we know less about the natural world than we think we know. I do not believe we have enough data or knowledge to say definitively to “trust the science” (I have another entire article devoted to that topic for another day). Allow me to explain.

My father was an aerospace engineer, so I stared through a telescope on too many nights to count growing up. One of the projects he worked on with the European Space Agency and several European aerospace companies was measuring and studying the ozone hole in the Antarctic. His opinions of the instruments he was designing and building could and would show, primarily related to his knowledge of interstellar forces, instigated my skepticism.

For example, his previous work on the Gamma Ray Observatory studied X-ray and gamma radiation discharged from distant pulsars, quasars, supernovas, black holes, and other interstellar gamma bursts. These GRBs (gamma-ray bursts) have the potential to do great harm to the Earth’s atmosphere, and scientists believe that GRBs have struck the Earth at least twice, one purportedly resulting in an extinction-level event. Cosmic radiation constantly bombards the Earth, it is how the Sun provides its heat, and we have no way of fully knowing its effect on our climate.

Then there is gravity. We know gravitational forces impact the Earth, specifically from the Moon. For example, the Moon causes changes in the tides and even influences the Earth’s orbit and rotation. Similarly, solar tides derive from gravitational forces imposed by the Sun. Expanding on these ideas, one of the primary ways astronomers discover new planets orbiting distant stars is by observing a stellar “wobble.” This wobble is gravitational forces from an orbiting world, causing a slight positional shift of the star that can be measured accurately enough to speculate the general size and composition of the orbiting satellite. Our solar system has eight planets and dozens of planetoids and satellites that all have a gravitational effect on one another and the Sun. So who are we to say that our climate changes are unrelated to interstellar gravity fields?

Finally, there is the Earth’s lifecycle. The Earth is roughly four and a half billion years old, and humans comprise an evolutionary blink of that time. Similarly, scientists have only tracked global weather temperatures and climate for a couple of hundred years. Nevertheless, scientists can theorize past temperature and climate conditions based on fossils and soil sampling, like radiation markers in trees, indicating a GRB in the eighth century. Still, there is minimal reliable data to say definitively one way or another.

Likewise, the Earth’s magnetic fields are constantly in flux, arguably impacting weather and the environment. However, many scientists do not believe past poles shifting has dramatically affected climate. Still, their theories are dependent on their understanding of the known world and might be lacking sufficient data to be accurate, valid, or reliable. Moreover, we have a limited knowledge of what influence shifting tectonic plates, magma flows, and undersea phenomena have on the ocean currents that help influence weather conditions and temperature. Again, we have many theories, but with roughly eighty percent of the oceans, which cover seventy percent of the surface of the Earth, left unexplored, there is less we know than do not.

Conclusion

There is no denying that human development and expansion for housing and agriculture impacts the natural world and disrupt ecosystems. But, unfortunately, many of the solutions are prohibitively expensive or not cost-effective for widespread implementation, especially in the developing world. Post-industrialized states are typically the drafters of international regimes, agreements, and accords, on everything from financial systems and crime to human rights and the environment. They often do not fully consider how the decisions and policies will impact developing nations’ food, economic, or environmental security elements or what accommodations would be necessary to apply them effectively. Likewise, Western liberal democracies’ blind altruism can be just as hypocritical and contributory to the problems in impoverished nations as the exploitative states like China and Russia.

However, are the actions of humankind to the scale where the Earth will be irreparably damaged or cause a planetary extinction? Short of a large-scale nuclear war, it should be the topic of continued discussion, debate, and exploration. There is almost unanimous consensus among the scientific community that we could cause enough of an environmental change that we could end all life on Earth. Still, whenever there is unanimous agreement, we should become skeptical of confirmation bias and remember the lessons of Galileo, Copernicus, and other similarly martyred scientists who balked at the status quo. We should undoubtedly take measures to limit our impact on the environment, taking social science considerations into account, but not arbitrarily reject alternative hypotheses based on our still limited understanding of the natural world and interstellar forces.

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Ben Varlese is a former U.S. Army Mountain Infantry Platoon Sergeant and served in domestic and overseas roles from 2001-2018, including, from 2003-2005, as a sniper section leader. Besides his military service, Ben worked on the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq’s protective security detail in various roles, and since 2018, he has also provided security consulting services for public and private sectors, including tactical training, physical and information security, executive protection, protective intelligence, risk management, insider threat mitigation, and anti-terrorism. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies from American Military University, a graduate certificate in Cyber Security from Colorado State University and is currently in his second year of AMU’s Doctorate of Global Security program.