During the Gezi Park protests last month in Istanbul, Turks and Kurds dismissed historical mistrust and banded together against Prime Minister Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism. Some have suggested the newly unifying cause has strengthened momentum for a long-standing solution to Kurdish autonomy and rights in Turkey. Still it may be water that the fate of Kurdish ambitions is most tied to, rather than officials in Ankara or protestors in Istanbul.

Fire needs oxygen to burn. When a fire starts inside a building, the floors, ceilings, walls, doors, and windows can constrict the flow of air. Breaking in to fight the fire thus carries the risk of opening a new airway. If that happens, a smoldering fire can expand explosively, bursting into roaring flames as it sucks air in through the new passageway. This sudden inrush of air to fuel a burst of fire has a name: backdraft.

I remember the first moment when my interest in national security came crashing into ecological reality. I was on a U.S. government trip to Central Asia to inspect uranium mines in the newly-independent states of the former Soviet Union. The Cold War security imperative to achieve nuclear superiority had done a number on the environment there: Uranium was leached from the ground with sulfuric acid, transformed into a uranium oxide powder called yellowcake, and shipped off to be enriched for nuclear reactor fuel or weapons. The generals in Moscow who issued these orders did not see the collateral damage that their idea of security wreaked on the environment in Central Asia. In their attempt to out-weaponize the United States, they laid waste to the groundwater, agriculture, and public health of their own citizens.

Arrayed along India’s southwest coast is a 1,600-kilometer-long mountain chain with forests older than the Himalayas: the Western Ghats. The mountains are one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the world, and UNESCO recently recognized the region as a World Heritage site. They’re also one of the tensest of India’s emerging battlegrounds between development and conservation and a potential recruiting ground for its Maoist insurgency, called the country’s “greatest threat to internal security.”

Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of healing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. Oak and palm trees are resilient to the power of strong winds, before which they bend and then straighten again. Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down, draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away. Resilient economies bounce back, and resilient ecosystems restore themselves after the fire or the flood has passed.

The 2011-12 West African food crisis led to riots in Senegal and Burkina Faso as well as food insecurity for millions of rural and urban poor across the region. The crisis emerged from a number of factors, including instability in northern Mali, increases in global food prices, and low rainfall in the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 growing seasons. Many countries in the region are now reassessing and expanding domestic agricultural capabilities. At the top of the agenda for Senegal, a democratic republic on track to reach many Millennium Development Goals, is reducing youth unemployment and increasing domestic agricultural capacity.

A staggering amount of development dollars – one in three, in fact – are lost due to natural disasters and crises. Certain communities are less affected than others by such disasters; they are more resilient. Knowing where vulnerability and strength exist and how to bolster them could help avoid these losses. Yet, today, very little data exists to help development practitioners understand which adaptive capacities are lagging in a given community.

A little over a decade ago when I first became interested in the subject of environmental security, it took me ages to understand what I have since been eager to stress: environmental security is not a concept but rather a debate.