In defence of ecological security

There’s always a sense of relief as an author when written work years in the making has been read by anyone. This extends to something closer to joy when colleagues whose work you respect and have drawn on engage seriously with that work, and I am so grateful to contributors to this forum for doing just that. I almost certainly won’t do justice to the many important points they raise in the below response. I’ve organized my response to their analysis of Ecological Security along the line of what I see to be key themes of engagement and points necessitating some degree of clarification and response. These concern clarification of the aims of the book, a discussion of the important role of agency, and the application of the themes of the book to particular empirical contexts.