At present when we consider environmental threats to the collectivity of mankind, we have tended to concentrate our concerns on cumulative threats like global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer. When we think about environmental events that threaten a single state, we focus on oil spills, desertification, and deforestation. We have neglected events relating to the environment that bring about conflict among the members of the society of states. Crises like those provoked by the meltdown of a nuclear reactor, the incubation of an infectious disease, the migration of industrial pollutants or water-table contaminants, genetic interventions with unanticipated consequences all will put stress on an international system that is steadily divesting itself of legitimate universal legal institutions, even as it is creating new global economic ones. During much of the period in which the particulate ash and smoke from the fires in northern Mexico blanketed Texas in 1998, Mexico refused U.S. assistance in putting the fires out. When a Russian submarine with a nuclear reactor aboard was crippled in 2000, Russia similarly refused assistance until it was too late to rescue its crew. The president of South Africa once took the view that AIDS was not related to HIV and could have, had he persisted, greatly worsened a transnational epidemic. These incidents may be harbingers of the sorts of environmental problems that can easily lead to conflict.
Nation-states tend to treat epidemiological matters in nonsecurity terms. Air travelers, for example, are routinely screened for carrying weapons across national borders; they are seldom required to demonstrate that they are free of lethal communicable infections. By viewing such matters as international security issues, the market-state sets the stage for strategic conflict over their resolution.