The Link Between Environmentalism and Pacifism in Ethics

Environmental protection and pacifism may seem like two distinct concerns – one about the planet, the other about human conflict – but they are, in fact, deeply intertwined. The health of our ecosystems and the pursuit of peace are not parallel tracks; they are the same track. When wars are fought, forests burn. When nations compete for scarce resources, diplomacy fails. And when the natural world collapses, human societies feel the shockwave. Environmental ethics, the philosophical discipline that examines our moral relationship to the natural world, increasingly forces us to confront this connection: to protect the environment seriously, we must also take peace seriously – and vice versa.

What environmentalism and pacifism actually mean 🔗

Before examining how they relate, it’s worth being clear about what these two positions stand for. Environmentalism, in the ethical sense, is not merely about recycling or conserving energy. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, environmental ethics challenges the deeply human-centered assumptions of traditional Western moral thinking and asks us to consider the intrinsic value of non-human nature – the moral standing of ecosystems, species, and living communities beyond their usefulness to people.

Pacifism, on the other hand, is a normative commitment to peace. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, pacifism ranges from an absolute rejection of violence and war to more contingent forms that question whether violence can ever truly be justified in a given context. Importantly, pacifists increasingly frame peace not as the absence of conflict alone, but as a positive condition – one characterized by cooperation, nonviolence, and what philosopher Johan Galtung called “positive peace.” Within this framework, environmental pacifism has emerged as a specific strand that connects the rejection of militarism to the defense of ecological integrity.

War is one of the worst things that can happen to an ecosystem 🔗

The most direct link between pacifism and environmentalism is a stark one: war destroys nature. This is not a metaphor. It is a documented, measurable reality that philosophers, ethicists, and environmental scientists have increasingly brought to the center of moral debate.

According to the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), militaries are estimated to be responsible for approximately 5.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions – a figure that exceeds the combined emissions from aviation and international shipping. Military lands cover between 1% and 6% of the entire global land surface, often in ecologically sensitive areas. Beyond emissions, armed conflict causes deforestation, soil erosion, water contamination, habitat destruction, and biodiversity collapse.

The Vermont Journal of Environmental Law documents how military activities – from training exercises to active warfare – create air, soil, and noise pollution, disrupt marine habitats, and clear forests as a deliberate strategic tactic. The Vietnam War provides a particularly devastating case: the U.S. military’s use of chemical defoliants stripped over 5 million acres of forest. Studies conducted decades later found that intact forest areas contained 145-170 bird species, while chemically treated zones held only 24. The term ecocide – the deliberate, large-scale destruction of the natural environment – was coined precisely in response to this kind of warfare.

CEOBS further points out that high levels of military spending divert resources away from solving environmental problems, and that international tensions driven by militarism also reduce opportunities for global cooperation on shared threats like the climate emergency. In other words, war doesn’t just damage nature while it’s happening – it structurally undermines the international cooperation needed to protect it.

As the Cambridge University Press work on the environmental ethics of war notes, most conflicts since 1945 have occurred in areas containing the greatest biodiversity on Earth – making the environmental stakes of armed violence even higher. War is bad for nature, yet the philosophical literature on just war theory has been slow to integrate environmental harm as a central moral consideration.

Environmental degradation as a driver of conflict 🔗

The relationship runs in the other direction too. Environmental destruction doesn’t just follow war – it can cause it. Resource scarcity, ecosystem collapse, and climate disruption are increasingly recognized as conflict multipliers that destabilize societies and push populations toward violence.

A study published in ScienceDirect examining 42 countries from 1995 to 2021 found that nations with high vulnerability to climate change are significantly more likely to experience geopolitical conflicts. The study also found that strong governance and social readiness substantially reduce this risk – pointing toward the importance of institutions and cooperation as buffers against eco-driven violence.

At the United Nations Security Council, this relationship has become impossible to ignore. In a 2023 open debate, representatives from across Africa emphasized that droughts, desertification, and flooding are actively fraying the social and economic fabric of entire regions. The Minister for Foreign Affairs of Gabon noted that 17 of the 20 countries most affected by climate change are in Africa, where competition over water and land is fueling conflict. Ghana’s Environment Minister stated plainly: the link between climate change and international peace and security “can no longer be denied or ignored.”

This is the ethical core of the environmentalism-pacifism connection: ecological harm and human violence feed each other. A world committed to peace must be committed to environmental protection, not as a side concern, but as a foundational requirement.

Environmental ethics and the case for peaceful international order 🔗

If environmental degradation fuels conflict, and conflict destroys the environment, then the ethical imperative becomes clear: we need a peaceful international order not only for human reasons, but for ecological ones. Environmental ethics extends the moral circle beyond human beings – and once it does, the destruction wrought by war and militarism becomes not just politically costly but morally intolerable.

A World Bank analysis on international cooperation and climate ethics argues that effective and legitimate mechanisms for global cooperation are essential to balancing environmental protection with development needs – and raises the critical question of whether the current system of sovereign nation-states is capable of generating the level of cooperation that planetary challenges require. The analysis calls for a rethinking of human values and a stronger commitment to multilateral institutions.

This is where environmental ethics and pacifism converge most powerfully. As the pacifist philosopher Michael Fox argues, a peaceful way of life incorporates nonviolence toward both oneself and others, guided by cooperation, mutual respect, and caring concern – values that align directly with the demands of ecological responsibility. You cannot genuinely care for the natural world while endorsing systems of organized violence that devastate it.

Environmental peacebuilding: cooperation as an ethical strategy 🔗

Beyond philosophy, a practical field has emerged that embodies the environmentalism-pacifism link: environmental peacebuilding. This approach treats environmental cooperation not merely as a practical necessity, but as a pathway to peace itself.

The UN Environment Programme’s Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding programme works to transform conflicts over natural resources into opportunities for trust-building and cooperation. The programme’s premise is that shared environmental challenges – access to water, arable land, fisheries – can bring adversaries together around common needs, creating conditions for dialogue that more politically charged issues cannot.

Peace Insight explains the logic clearly: environmental issues can transcend regional, political, and ethnic differences because everyone shares the same ecosystems. In regions where communities depend on shared resources like rivers or forests, cooperative management of those resources builds mutual trust and can even become a foundation for broader conflict resolution. The Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan – signed in 1960 to resolve fears about river access – stands as a historical example of how environmental concerns can produce durable diplomatic agreements even between adversarial nations.

Writing for the United Nations University, Professor Saleem Ali describes the concept of peace parks – transboundary protected areas jointly managed by neighboring states – as a mechanism for achieving both conservation and conflict reduction simultaneously. As he explains, once adversarial parties recognize that environmental degradation harms them all equally, it becomes easier to cooperate. Territorial sovereignty, which is notoriously difficult to negotiate, can be indirectly addressed through the shared management of ecological spaces based on science rather than politics.

Nonviolence, sustainability, and the ethics of demilitarization 🔗

Some thinkers go further still, arguing that nonviolence is not just one path toward ecological sustainability – it is a structural prerequisite for it. A peer-reviewed study in the journal Sustainability argues that reducing militarism is essential for global sustainability, and that a more fundamental long-term solution lies not in making militaries “greener” but in replacing militarism with nonviolent methods of conflict resolution. The study draws on Galtung’s notion of positive peace – a condition not merely of ceasefire, but of active cooperation, justice, and ecological care.

This perspective raises hard ethical questions about the military-industrial complex itself. The International Union of Scientists notes that when the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, military emissions were specifically excluded from reduction commitments – an exclusion maintained through the Paris Agreement. From an environmental ethics standpoint, this is not a technicality; it is a profound moral failure. Protecting the atmosphere from carbon emissions while exempting the largest institutional emitter reflects precisely the kind of incoherence that environmental ethics is designed to expose and challenge.

The World Peace Foundation adds an important critical dimension: we must be wary of “green militarism” – the trend of framing ecological crises as security threats that justify military responses. This framing allows defense institutions to position themselves as necessary actors in addressing climate change, while actually expanding militarization. Genuine environmental ethics demands the opposite: it calls for demilitarization, international cooperation, and nonviolent approaches to ecological security – not more weapons dressed in green language.

Environmental ethics as a foundation for global peace 🔗

The relationship between environmentalism and pacifism is, at its core, an ethical one. Environmental ethics asks us to recognize that the natural world has moral standing beyond its usefulness to us – and once we accept that, we must also accept that war, with its ecocidal consequences, cannot simply be weighed in human terms alone. The destruction of forests, rivers, and species is not collateral damage. It is moral harm.

Equally, pacifism – understood not as passive withdrawal but as an active commitment to cooperation, justice, and nonviolence – provides the political and ethical framework within which genuine environmental protection becomes possible. Research published in International Affairs finds moderate but meaningful evidence that environmental cooperation contributes to peace, and identifies shared environmental challenges as entry points for building cooperation even between hostile groups. The environment, in this sense, is not just a victim of human conflict – it can also be a bridge across it.

The call is for a peaceful international order – one where nations cooperate on climate, share resources equitably, negotiate rather than fight, and recognize that the stability of ecosystems is inseparable from the stability of human societies. This is not idealism. It is the logical conclusion of taking both environmental ethics and pacifism seriously at the same time.

What do you think? If environmental destruction is both a cause and a consequence of war, does that make peacebuilding a moral obligation for anyone who cares about the planet? And given that military emissions remain largely exempt from international climate agreements, how should environmental ethics inform our judgment of the global security system?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pacifism/
3. https://ceobs.org/how-does-war-damage-the-environment/
4. https://vjel.vermontlaw.edu/news/2025/04/war-fuels-ecocide-how-militarism-drives-environmental-destruction/
5. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/environmental-ethics-of-war/B4B52003A162BB8C801A32F037675D28
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479724002706
7. https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15318.doc.htm
8. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/international-cooperation-ethics-and-climate-change
9. https://www.unep.org/topics/disasters-and-conflicts/environment-security/environmental-cooperation-and-peacebuilding
10. https://www.peaceinsight.org/en/articles/environment-peace/
11. https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/building-peace-through-environmental-conservation
12. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/11/6426
13. https://www.iuscientists.org/militarism-and-climate-crises/
14. https://worldpeacefoundation.org/blog/resisting-green-militarism-refusing-sustainable-war-collective-action-for-peace-and-ecological-justice-2/
15. https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/97/1/1/6041492