The paper summarizes the experience of managing biosphere resources from the late XIX to the beginning of the XXI centuries and related social and military conflicts, including in the Russian Empire, the USSR and the Russian Federation. The quality of the environment is considered to be a significant factor in politics and the idea of political ecology, as a kind of interdisciplinary and intersubject system analysis in the sense of V. I. Vernadsky’s concept of science, is introduced. Political ecology involves the analysis of political processes in connection with the experience of interaction of communities of people, as well as state and political systems with environmental problems, including the assessment of managerial decisions and their consequences, and a scientific analysis of the consequences of these decisions in the competition of communities of people and government systems for a limited biosphere resource during a historical period available for the study. A set of priority measures is determined to ensure the political and environmental security of Russia.