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A second and quite different response (if one also being advanced by right-wing populists in Europe, America, and Australia, alongside science denial) accepts some threat to human welfare from ecological limits or anthropogenic environmental change unless some kind of action is taken, but seeks to insulate powerful states or groups against the biggest impacts – typically at the expense of the disadvantaged. In Hardin’s version, extending his opposition to famine aid on neo-Malthusian ecological grounds from his “The Tragedy of the Commons” (discussed in chapter 3), the international sharing of agricultural surplus from affluent countries in the form of emergency food aid for famine victims would “move food to the people, thus facilitating the exhaustion of the environment of the poor,” while allowing refugee status to those fleeing poverty and hunger “moves people to the food, thus speeding up the destruction of the environment in rich countries.”²⁰ As he casts the problem, which he views from the perspective of the affluent global North only, the populations of poor countries are already in overshoot of their carrying capacity and their ecosystems will inevitably be degraded, so the primary imperative for those in affluent countries ought to be containing the suffering and damage within those countries. Fortifying borders to guard against immigration and withdrawing from international humanitarian aid efforts are here justified in terms of protecting the environments and people that matter against those that do not.

John Dryzek identifies the environmental discourse of “survival” as often countenancing centralized and authoritarian systems of control in response to ecological limits, as with the kind of eco-authoritarian visions discussed in chapter 4. According to Dryzek, the “basic story line” of such responses “is that human demands on the life support capacity of ecosystems threaten to explode out of control, and drastic action needs to be taken in order to curb these demands.”²¹ In most cases, this “drastic action” and the state of emergency to which it responds is viewed by those embracing this discourse as justifying the suspension of humanitarian ideals, as well as of democratic processes, allowing the powerful to protect themselves at the expense of others. In describing a dystopic response to runaway climate change that he calls “Fortress Climate State” and characterizes as in a permanent state of emergency, Peter Christoff anticipates it “either seeking to protect the welfare of its citizens equally but with little capacity to deal humanely with the world beyond its borders, or by protecting only its political and economic ruling elite.”²² The conscious decision to disregard the welfare of others is justified by the reality and urgency of an environmental threat, coupled with the claim that it requires the abandonment of processes and ideals that would normally apply.

While the eco-fortress response does (unlike business as usual) take seriously the scientific basis for predicted ecological crises, it so prioritizes sustainability within one’s own territory above competing ideals like justice and democracy that it practically sets those aside, rather than seeking any kind of balance. Refusing entry to environmental migrants displaced from their home territories by climate change, or refusing to support famine relief where possible on grounds that “positive checks” on population are needed, would constitute serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, but follow from a fortress ethos.

As in eco-authoritarianism, which we shall consider in chapter 4, replacing democratic institutions with authoritarian ones would likewise respond to the emergence of the sustainability ideal by entirely displacing the democratic ideal, ignoring the dismal track records of existing authoritarian states in this regard. Perhaps most importantly, the response circumscribes the community ideal (discussed in chapter 8) to a particular people (or subset thereof) in order to forcefully defend that community’s privileges at the expense of other communities. The politics of fear and resentment used by right-wing populists to demonize immigrants and the disadvantaged often accompanies this response, and the discourse of emergency often accompanies its call for exclusion of the disadvantaged and the states of political and moral exception this requires. The result of any eco-fortress response would be – and, indeed, is intended to be – highly inequitable.

Milder versions of this response can be seen in efforts at, or proposals for, concentrations of environmental privilege in the midst of increasing scarcity. As discussed in chapter 9, the permanent sovereignty principle grants to states or peoples an entitlement to territorial natural resources, which, for resource-rich states, could be akin to an eco-fortress as the principle guards against competing claims. Proposals to grandfather high rates of per capita greenhouse gas emissions, as was embodied within the Kyoto Protocol, likewise grant legal entitlement to a form of environmental privilege to those states that had polluted more in the recent past, while denying development opportunities to smaller historical polluters. On a local scale, Pellow and Park’s The Slums of Aspen chronicles how residents of an affluent resort community sought to maintain their environmental privileges while scapegoating local Hispanic service workers, in an eco-fortress of gated communities and exclusionary local regulations.²³ All share in common the desire to maintain or extend environmental inequality for the benefit of the relatively privileged, often through narratives by which the disadvantaged are blamed for their misfortune rather than acknowledging complicity on the part of the privileged, which might give rise to calls for equity in burden-sharing or a corrective-justice response instead.