Introduction

This chapter moves from the rhetoric of environmental security to what was done in the name of environmental security, or in other words security practice. As such the chapter is informed by two research questions. First, was the case of United States environmental security under the Clinton administrations a securitisation as opposed to a politicisation? And, if yes, second, why did they securitise? With these questions in mind the chapter analyses the nature of all the policy-making programmes and initiatives that followed the incorporation of environmental security into the NSS, or rather (since the first NSS was only released in 1994) all those that followed the inauguration of the first Clinton administration in January 1993, within all of the relevant government agencies. The relevant government agencies were: the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of State (DOS) and, on the margins, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Out of all of these agencies, it was the US Department of Defense (made up of the four components Army, Navy, Air Force and the Marine Corps) that had the biggest profile with regard to environmental security. With the specially created Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Environmental Security (ODUSD-ES), the DOD was the only government agency that had a dedicated office for environmental security.