Contextualisation on Gender, Peace, Security and Environment (Chapter in "Earth at Risk in the 21st Century: Rethinking Peace, Environment, Gender, and Human, Water, Health, Food, Energy Security, and Migration")
Publisher: Springer
Author(s): Úrsula Oswald Spring
Date: 2020
Topics: Climate Change, Gender, Governance, Peace and Security Operations, Renewable Resources
These texts on gender, peace, security and environmental problems were written based on my concern about an unequal and unsustainable development process during the past six decades, when the history of the earth moved from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. The following chapters were influenced by theoretical reflections, my life experience and my scientific training on three continents, at the universities of Antananarivo (Madagascar), Paris (France), Zürich (Switzerland) and in Mexico (CISINAH, UAM and UNAM). The influence of these three cultures with very different historical backgrounds explains my progressively broadened understanding of the global development process. The post-colonial experiences in Africa in the 1960s, the violence left behind by the former colonial powers, and the outcome of civil wars, corruption and destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems and species forced me to understand not only the physical functioning of the human body (medicine), but also its psychological behaviour that supports or obstructs a healthy human life (psychology) and avoids environmental destruction (ecology). My understanding of the links between the human body, the mind and the environment (anthropology) resulted first in an intuitive and later an interdisciplinary approach to these four interrelated circles (body, mind, environment and human relations). Understanding the importance of these four study subjects triggered in me a commitment to responsible scientific and sustainable behaviour towards other human beings, but also to nature.