Archive for the ‘gender’ Category
|Thoughts on addressing population and climate change in a just and ethical manner
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
That’s the title of a new article1 by Suzanne Petroni in the latest issue of Population and Environment (subscription required). She begins by acknowledging the complex history between these issues:
There is, in the field of population and reproductive health, a present debate around the merits and deficiencies of bringing the issue of global population growth back to the public agenda. Many see the current attention to the issue of climate change as an opening in which to make the case that global warming can not be alleviated or reversed without slowing population growth. They believe that linking population growth and climate change will help governments to see the exigency of the matter, and will place family planning back into the political realm as an urgent matter of national and environmental security….
But others worry that focusing on the environmental impacts of demographic change places at risk the hard-fought and long-developed global consensus that individual rights and empowerment are what matters most in fostering just and sustainable development. They fear that a renewed focus on the impacts of the growth of our global population poses a risk of drawing the international community back to numbers-driven policies and programs, which have not always prioritized individual interests…
- [D]oes the right of the community to live on a healthy planet trump the right of the individual to decide for him or herself, without external pressure, their own desired level of fertility?
- Does the United States, which emits a hugely disproportionate amount of greenhouse gases, have a right to suggest that other countries reduce their rates of population growth in order to somehow compensate for our profligate and consumptive lifestyles?
- How can we best balance a duty to future generations with the values of individual freedom and equality among the planet’s current occupants?
- And, while coercive means of population control have been widely condemned in most parts of the world, does making the ‘‘population-climate change connection’’ run the risk of countries seeing population control as an ‘‘easy fix’’ to the environmental challenges we face?
In light of these huge questions, what are her recommendations?
Posted in behavior, gender, health, population | No Comments »
Will women bear the brunt of climate change impacts?
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Lydia DePillis has an interesting article over at The New Republic based on a new report from the United Nations.
Is climate change gender-neutral? Not according to the U.N. Population Fund, which earlier today released a report arguing that women suffer disproportionately from the impacts of global warming. Especially in developing countries, they can’t flee changes like desertification and sea-level rise as easily as young men, who aren’t as tied to children and households. They’re often caught up in civil conflicts ignited by scarce resources. And they’re more likely to fall victim to diseases caused by wetter weather patterns.
But on the flipside, the report argues, women are also in the best position to help mitigate both the causes and effects of rising temperatures—which is why policies to empower women, like targeted microloans and reproductive healthcare, shouldn’t be treated as separate from climate policy.
…Think of it as Nick Kristof meets Tom Friedman: keeping “women’s issues” separate from “climate issues” is a huge missed opportunity.
I love this conclusion. It’s one of the things that environmental studies (ES) programs in higher education need to focus on—better connections to groups not traditionally affiliated with ES, such as Gender and Women’s Studies, Africana Studies, Psychology, Religion, visual and performing arts, etc. For major environmental challenges like climate warming, everyone needs to be part of this conversation.
_____
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxfam/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, climate adaptation, environmental justice, gender, higher education | No Comments »
How do women respond to household chemical exposure?
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
Every day, we are exposed to a cocktail of synthetic chemicals from consumer products. How harmful are these? In an earlier post, I described how risk analysis is an important scientific process for determining exposure, effects, and overall risk of these chemicals.
One thing missing from these analyses is how people respond to information about their chemical exposure. In a recent issue1 of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Rebecca Altman and colleagues addressed this by analyzing what they call the “exposure experience” of women in Cape Cod, MA—an area with elevated breast cancer rates.
What did they find?
Posted in gender, pollutants, risk analysis, toxics | No Comments »
Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 3: Personal perception, values, and behavior
Friday, November 6th, 2009
Prerequisite posts:
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Overview
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 2: Communication
In earlier posts, we examined climate change engagement as problems of environmental literacy and communication. There is no doubt we can do better with both of these. But as we will see, proponents of environmental literacy and communication make a mistake if they believe engagement is simply a matter of getting more information to people. Science, it is believed, will speak for itself.
Unfortunately, it often doesn’t.
A political scientist recently told me that before the age of 25, people use information to shape their value system and perceptions of the world. After 25, they start cherry picking information that simply reinforces these beliefs (hence the world of cable news).
Although this is is a rough generalization, it suggests that a person’s values development may have a shelf life. It also reveals why issues like climate change may not resonate with people cut from certain ideological cloths—no matter how much information they encounter.
The psychology, sociology, and ethics literature has a lot to say about this problem. For simplicity, I want to pull out four challenges I think are among the most common and important with respect to climate change…
Posted in behavior, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, communication and framing, environmentalism, gender, nature and culture, race and class, religion, social science, sustainability | 5 Comments »
Subscribe & Share
