It has been thought that security exclusively focuses on protecting states and citizens from foreign military threats, however there are more challenges that humans face today. Not only are they military threats, but also there are ethnic conflicts, terror acts, natural disasters, the demand for energy, and food shortages from economic collapses. In the 70’s, the security paradigm was to be rethought. The three realms of economic, environmental, and ecological matters in the ever-changing dangerous world were becoming more of a threat to humans. Although, security is a multidimensional concept, it needs to be known that ecological threats are rapidly affecting the human race. Other flora, fauna and parts of the biosphere are affected by theses human posed threats. This issue of security, as stated before is multidimensional concept, having all dimensions related to one another.
In the Tropics of Chaos, there is security when there are cattle present. For many reasons, such as raids, abandonments, weather and more, cattle haven’t been present. Also, regarding ecological security, many populations of species have been in decline or have been wiped out completely by some environmental security threats. The lack of security roots to scarcity. The underlying issue with environmental scarcity is that society’s demands on the state increase while the state ability to meet the demands decrease causing conflict and danger. (Parenti, 63)
After reading Chapter 8 in Environmental Security, I learned that there are significant gaps in the gender discourse. As a woman, I felt somewhat strongly about this chapter. There are many inequalities in the world but one that is mentioned in the reading was that the impacts of climate change are in fact gendered. Women experience it more acutely. If more companies privatize water, then more women will be affected by it. The men are not collecting water each day in other countries, because it is always the women. There is an idea where women need to save the planet, and this is fascinating because men have generated many, if not all of the environmental issues that are present today. The linkages between the androcentrism and anthropocentrism are high. I am also boggled by the fact gender is a discourse in human nature, although it plays a small role in debates. I think going further with this debate, we need more female leaders and better protection of the ecological systems (which includes all of the biosphere, humans too). With these factors in place, there will be more security.