Environment, Security and Human Suffering: What Should America Do?

　

Paul G. Harris

　

Abstract

　

        In the Chapter 11, Paul G. Harris argues that the United States can more effectively achieve its foreign policy goals in the environmental issue area, and thereby protect and promote its national interests, by treating other countries, particularly the developing countries, more equitably. Such policies would also promote ethical aims, such as acceptance of American responsibility for the United States' disproportionate adverse impact on the global environment. While there has been some movement in its stated policy and behavior toward recognition of this idea, the United States has yet to fully comprehend the extent to which equity may be a fungible power resource in the context of contemporary international affairs. U.S. foreign policy is critical because the United States has the financial, technological and diplomatic resources that can be brought to bear on problems of environment and development. The United States is also the world's greatest polluter. It therefore has the greatest ethical obligation to redress the wrongs of historical and ongoing global pollution. With regard to environmentally sustainable development, the United States can further its national interests, and, coincidentally, promote ethical goals, by meeting many of the demands from developing countries for greater international equity. With the foregoing in mind, Harris's chapter examines some of the practical and normative implications of adopting and embracing equity as an objective of U.S. global environmental policy—and particularly policy on global climate change—for the United States itself and for the world, as well as the implications that such a policy would have for American global power in this new century.