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4.1 The founding fathers of the United States intentionally defined the purpose of the copyright law very narrowly as a policy tool to promote knowledge creation and learning. In this paper, we studied the impact of copyright term length on knowledge creation using agent based modeling. Needless to say, copyright law has a broad scope and applies to many subject matters from literary works to sound recording and architectural works. The scope of this research is limited to literary works and more specifically scientific publications. So the findings of this research should not be generalized to all types of copyrighted subject matters.

4.2 Generally speaking, the extension of copyright term hurts knowledge creation in most scenarios. The adverse effect of the extension is more prominent when scholars have to read and cite more articles before publishing new knowledge. Changes in short copyright terms, especially from open-access to limited copyright, have a large negative impact on knowledge creation. Additionally, the effect is more significant the more scholars there are in the field. When copyright does hinder knowledge creation, the extension of the copyright term hurts all scholars, including those that have access to copyrighted materials.

There is a widely held belief that a longer duration in copyrights ensures higher earnings for authors. In emphasizing the critical role of authors, this paper argues that a longer duration with private contracts hinders an increase in the revenues from works, hence the earnings of authors. This is because the very limited bargaining power of authors and the principal-agent dilemma induce publishers to be structurally under-performing – that is, not effective enough at optimizing (or maximizing) the full cultural potential of the works they are responsible for.

As a solution, this paper suggests that, if well designed, a shortened copyright duration will clearly bring benefits to the vast majority of authors as well as society. This shortened duration induces publishers to develop more impactful business activities coupled with effective strategies in order to maximize the utilization of contracted works. Furthermore, authors can benefit from the reputational earnings of their works that enter the public domain much earlier than under the current system. More activities under the public domain period will allow authors to be more at the center of the industrial chain. They will also be able to concentrate on their creation without any fear of copyright infringement. Another benefit is that due to the earlier public domain period, many works that are not too outdated will become more readily available. In such a case, this availability would inspire authors to produce better works. Through various measures such as internet platforms and media outlets, they can be diffused faster and wider than before. Therefore, this system can contribute toward enhancing cultural creativity and diversity.

Hodaie ‘22 [Sara Hodaie, undergraduate student at The University of Western Ontario making some very good arguments; “Naught is Fair in Love and War: Reframing the Partnership Between Marxism and Feminism”; 04-01-2022; Tulips: The Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Undergraduate Journal, ; accessed 07-19-2024] dliang

Nevertheless, these battles oppose distinct and individual forms of oppression. Though they converge, there is a danger in essentializing them as one. This has been the historical mode of Marxism, wherein classical theorists discounted the existence of patriarchy by assimilating it into explanations of class struggle.18 This approach, known as reductionism, reduces systems of oppression to one concern, discounting and minimising the multitude of other structural forces which lead to the increased marginalisation of certain groups.19 These two battles must rather develop an intersectional relationship, recognizing that the institutions which they aim to abolish converge to amplify the oppression of women, especially those of lower socioeconomic status and various marginalised groups. This equal appreciation which Marxism and feminism must develop is possible but impaired in an analysis of their relationship as a marriage. Hartmann’s analogy obscures the fundamental obligation of a strong relationship between Marxism and feminism for the fulfillment of their aims. It embarks on analysis from a framework of innate duality, which renders the parallels and junctions between the Marxist and feminist struggles ambiguous. This poses a risk of cyclical antagonism, wherein Marxism and feminism habitually contend upon which party holds sovereignty. Ironically, positing Marxism and feminism as a set of allied battles in a corresponding war transfers analysis from a schema of disunity and digresses focus towards the necessitation of a symbiotic relationship. It clearly demonstrates the prerequisite of a reciprocal relationship in achieving the aim of both Marxism and feminism and thereby makes compulsory the cooperation of the two. Further, it guides both parties to a common cause, which delineates the essence of their relationship.

Patterson developed a theory of Marxist feminist praxis that held that in the context of US capitalism, black women faced multiple oppressive relations that resulted in their greater exploitation under capitalism: of class, race and gender (Gore 2011; McDuffie 2011). In her essay, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” she wrote, “(o)ver the whole land, Negro women meet this triple exploitation – as workers, as women, as Negroes” (Patterson 1936). Claudia Jones, a communist party member who worked on the Scottsboro campaign, further elaborated Patterson’s invocation of historically specific relationships to exploitation (Davies 2007). Jones saw these complex relations as locations for greater strength among workers, rather than solely sites of division to be overcome by class solidarity. “The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressive seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is enhanced” (Guy-Shefthall 1995, 108). Jones argued that Marxist feminist struggles shaped by what Patterson called the “triple exploitation” faced by black women in the US could best lead the communist movement for liberation as a whole. As an early theory of intersectional praxis, Patterson and Jones proposed a Marxist feminist politics guided by the differential sites of oppression and exploitation faced by women of color, rather than simply by women workers. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective members theorized the liberatory possibilities for this praxis: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Guy Shefthall 1995).

The praxis of intersectional organizing on the left informed movements for reproductive justice and the movement for welfare rights, led by poor women of color in the United States in the 1960s (Ransby 2003). Both movements attacked ethics of women’s place in dominant regimes of heterosexuality, marriage and the family (Tillman 1970). The reproductive justice movement sought bodily autonomy for women’s reproductive decisions, and material state support to fully realize those choices (Ross and Solinger 2017). In addition, it linked reproductive justice to dismantling the carceral state that strictly policed (as it constituted) the class politics of gendered, raced and ethnicized embodiment within capitalism (Davis 1981). The welfare rights movement demanded a basic income from the US state that historically had excluded them from the postwar social wages for single mothers. These sites of praxis further pushed Marxist feminism to analyze different histories of oppression as co-constitutive in sites of reproduction and production.

Hodaie ‘22 [Sara Hodaie, undergraduate student at The University of Western Ontario making some very good arguments; “Naught is Fair in Love and War: Reframing the Partnership Between Marxism and Feminism”; 04-01-2022; Tulips: The Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Undergraduate Journal, ; accessed 07-19-2024] dliang

Women's exclusion from the public sphere extended to their omission from politics. Thus, they were rendered unable to participate in the crafting of the legislature which directly impacted them. All forms of domination may be abridged as a lack of rights for one segment of society. Under capitalist domination, this is characterised by the position of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, while within patriarchal domination it is personified as that of man over woman. Thus, when these forms intersect, the rights of these oppressed groups are miniaturised. Throughout the industrial revolution, proponents of the enlightenment disseminated notions of equal opportunity and political rights. These declarations, however, did not apply to women, as they were understood as relegated to an entirely different sphere of existence, that of the private.12 The continued perseverance of the separation of spheres throughout history is evidence of a collective false consciousness with regard to patriarchal inequalities. False consciousness is a central concept of Marxism, which identifies the process as one wherein society recognizes the inequality present in a system of oppression as intrinsic to social relations.13 By this mechanism, domination is able to continue. False consciousness presents itself in patriarchy through the naturalisation of gender and its affiliated echelon. In this regard, gender differences guide the behaviour of both the oppressed and the oppressor, encouraging them to perform in accordance with patriarchal power relations. The false consciousness of patriarchy has been historically circulated and advantaged by capitalism through the commodification of gender norms. Following World War Two, gendered advertisements targeted directly at women encouraged an increase in consumption and bolstered patriarchal norms.14 These trends persist today through the sale of gendered goods and services, further disseminating both the gender binary and its illusion of worldly differences. Thus, patriarchy formulates the division which capitalism sells, and capitalists discover a market in the promulgation of patriarchal norms which it reinforces. This historical analysis of the intersection between capitalism and patriarchy indicates that the battles within which Marxism and feminism are engaged do not simply intersect, but are fundamentally reliant upon one another. Throughout history, capitalism has benefited from the existence of patriarchy, utilising the disparaged category of “woman” and preexisting patriarchal norms as both a labour and goods market. Patriarchy tolerates the system's exploitation of women's labour and provides it with a market of predetermined norms. In considering the structure of capital accumulation, wherein profit is gained by the capitalist through minimal reimbursement of labour power and the sale of commodities, the dependent exchange of capitalism and patriarchy becomes increasingly clear.15 This signifies the obligation which Marxism and feminism hold to one another in their respective battles. If capitalism and patriarchy are reliant upon each other, no feminist explanation of patriarchal oppression can be construed without consideration of capitalism, the distinct purpose of Marxism, and its adverse effects upon the situation of women. Likewise, no valid conception of capitalism can be conducted without recognition of the economic structures that maintain women's oppression. This is the fundamental contribution of Marxism to feminism and feminism to Marxism. Just as in warfare, without the equal allyship and communication of one another, neither of their battles may be succeeded. It may be rationalized here by Marxist opponents that feminism does not necessitate a particular Marxist contribution, but merely an ally which commits an awareness of the economic nature of patriarchy. Such contenders may claim that the Marxist domain is insufficient in its contribution to feminism due chiefly to its historic subjugation of feminist questions. Yet regardless of one's personal sentiment, it cannot be forsaken that Marxism comprises what is perhaps the most encyclopaedic analysis of capitalism and its consequences. Its exhaustive evaluations alone warrant it a valid contributor to feminist thought.16 Further, the historically antagonistic relationship between the two domains may otherwise be accepted from a positive frame of reference. Classical Marxism’s dismissal of independent patriarchal evaluation has resulted in subsequent history of extensive feminist enlargements and revisions of its original doctrines.17 While these amended forms of feminist Marxism may be incomplete, the breadth of research substantiates the relationship between the two, providing for a powerful foundation from which contemporary feminists may draw contributions and progress the symbiotic exchange.

The analysis presented here challenges the discipline’s tendency to treat states as genderless persons by exploring the role of gender in the security performances of states. In doing so, it draws upon the concept of performativity – the idea that, in the words of Judith Butler, “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expression’ that are said to be its results.” It argues that performances within the field of security, much like performances within the daily lives of people, carry no intrinsic meaning, but must be made sense of through “a system of symbolic meaning” that cannot be but gendered. Through such performances, identities become salient, and masculine and feminine subjects are created. While this process is less palpable for states than it is for humans, it is nonetheless observable in broad patterns. States can be observed reifying themselves through performances of security, particularly through those which establish them as stable and masculine protectors. Recent work on the politics of protection, particularly that done by Didier Bigo, suggests the constitutive effects that protection has upon both providers and recipients. It stops short, however, of recognizing that these effects may be enabled by the gendered meaning that different forms of protection carry. When such meanings are considered, it becomes evident that by “being” masculine protectors, states can position themselves favorably in relation to other international actors and gain legitimacy from their domestic audiences. This means that states are gendered, and are gendered in much the same way as people are: through repeated performances. When state identity is viewed in this light, the anthropomorphic assumption, as it is commonly used, appears woefully inadequate. To be clear, it is not being suggested that drawing parallels between human subjects and state subjects is bad in-and-of-itself. Indeed, useful parallels can be drawn, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the notion that “both states and persons are fuzzy sets.” The trouble lies in assuming that states, or people, are constituted outside processes of interaction, and that either can be made sense of without considering the relational identities they take on through the systems of symbolic meaning through which they operate. Anthropomorphic assumptions tend to treat the state as a genderless, unitary actor – often, one that is ontologically primitive to its interactions – while neglecting the ways that the “actor-ness” and “unity” of the state are an effect of iterated, gendered performances, particularly in the realm of security. By viewing security performances with an eye toward their constitutive effects, and by moving gender to the center of that analysis, one gains not only a richer understanding of how states reproduce themselves (i.e. where their person-like “identities” come from), but a clearer picture of the hierarchical relations that exist among states and between states and domestic populations. This chapter begins with a consideration of how the state has been conceived of a person throughout the discipline, arguing that such practices almost always import an inadequate understanding of how people are constituted. In both cases, conceptualizing states and conceptualizing humans – this is a result, largely, of substance-oriented, as opposed to process-oriented, approaches. It argues that by making processes, rather than substances, the core of research, scholars will be able to more fully explain how states reproduce themselves as actors in world politics, how they garner power for themselves (in relation to other international actors, particularly states), and how they gain legitimacy from their subjects. Following that, the chapter argues that a theory of performativity can fill this need, especially in the realm of Security Studies. Moreover, such a theory would facilitate the study of gender within these processes and shed light on the incentives states have to behave as masculine actors. The final section of the chapter offers, tentatively, a way for empirical research to bear on the theoretical sketches presented here. It submits that “the rational protector model” may be examined as a type of dominant masculinity for states, one which allows them to “do” security ways that cast them as unitary, masculine actors.

Taking gender seriously in global politics enables us to interrogate more fully the seductive power of adjectives such as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’, yet ‘gender’ remains one of global politics’ most ‘slippery’ concepts, persistently (if periodically) invisible and with ‘a sneaky capacity to evade theoretical discussion’ (Zalewski, 2013: 40). What it means to take gender seriously is not, generally, well understood (ibid.: 3). Taking gender seriously in relation to financial ‘crisis’ requires thinking carefully about how narratives of crisis have emerged and unfolded to affect women and men in particular and pernicious ways. The promised overhaul of financial practice and economic institutions that would allow for greater transparency, accountability and a care for the distributive impacts of proposed measures has not been enacted. Where reforms have been instituted, such as austerity measures and other forms of fiscal tightening, it is worth asking what such legislation changes and to what effect. It is not clear, as Enloe (2013: 52) notes, for example, whether sexist policy decisions and actions can be eradicated by members of any organisation who have permitted ‘an internal culture to take root that validates certain sorts of abusive or exclusivist masculinity, and that marginalizes most women and most forms of femininity’. This paper looks at the emergence of crisis discourses in recent years and how these might be gendered, but takes particular aim at narratives of governance that have emerged ‘after’ the crisis. It interrogates in particular two discourses of crisis governance, or discursive ‘sets’, that have emanated from sources of governance, including various actors, institutions, policies and ideas: the dismissal of feminist concerns, and the promotion of co-opted, governance-friendly ‘feminist’ knowledge. The effects of these discursive sets have been, the paper will argue, an ongoing failure to reform the foundations of the global financial system and a continuance of a ‘business as usual’ approach for neo-liberal actors and institutions with regard to financial reform, practice and mechanisms that serves to further entrench global finance as the preserve of a privileged, neo-liberal and masculine elite. The analysis below thus proceeds in three parts, beginning with a discussion of existing feminist approaches to crisis in order to begin to unravel the constitution of ‘crisis governance’ and how, then, ‘crisis’ can be understood as a mechanism of contemporary, everyday governance. A discussion of the first of the two crisis governance discursive sets then follows, with analysis concentrated on how crisis governance discourse has sought to dismiss important but awkward and uncontainable feminist critiques, particularly of the impacts of financial crises on women and the social costs of austerity. Consideration of the second discursive set focuses on how crisis governance discourse has co-opted and promoted the ‘feminist’ ideas that best fit prevailing neo-liberal logics. This is what this paper refers to as the promotion of ‘crisis governance feminism’, which is a form of feminist strategy friendly to existing neo-liberal governance and supportive of the resuscitation of neo-liberal global finance.

(Henry Giroux, currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University, “Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism,” 02 December 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20307-hope-in-the-age-of-looming-authoritarianism#_edn2)

We live at a time in which the crisis of politics is inextricably connected to the crisis of ideas, education and agency. What must be remembered is that any viable politics or political culture can emerge only out of a determined effort to provide the economic conditions, public spaces, pedagogical practices and social relations in which individuals have the time, motivation and knowledge to engage in acts of translation that reject the privatization of the public sphere, the lure of ethno-racial or religious purity, the emptying of democratic traditions, the crumbling of the language of commonality, and the decoupling of critical education from the unfinished demands of a global democracy.¶ Young people, artists, intellectuals, educators and workers in the United States and globally are increasingly addressing what it means politically and pedagogically to confront the impoverishment of public discourse, the collapse of democratic values and commitments, the erosion of its public spheres and the widely promoted modes of citizenship that have more to do with forgetting than with critical learning. Collectively, they provide varied suggestions for rescuing modes of critical agency and social grievances that have been abandoned or orphaned to the dictates of global neoliberalism, a punishing state and a systemic militarization of public life. In opposition to the attacks on democratic institutions, values and modes of governance, activists all over the globe are offering an incisive language of analysis, a renewed sense of political commitment, different democratic visions and a politics of possibility.¶ Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the widely popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values trump ethical considerations enabling the economically privileged and financial elite to retreat into the safe, privatized enclaves of family, religion and consumption. Those without the luxury of such choices pay a terrible price in the form of material suffering and the emotional hardship and political disempowerment that are its constant companions. Even those who live in the relative comfort of the middle classes must struggle with a poverty of time in an era in which the majority must work more than they ever have to make ends meet. Moreover, in the face of the 2008 economic crisis caused by gangster financial service institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Barclay and Merrill Lynch, among others, the middle class is dissolving into the jaws of a death-machine that has robbed them of their homes, health care, jobs and dignity.¶ The ruling elites have taken flight from any sense of social and ethical responsibility and their willing and active repression of conscience has opened the door to new forms of authoritarianism in which the arrogance of corporate power finds its underside in a hatred of all others that threaten its power. Some contemporary theorists suggest that politics as a site of contestation, critical exchange and engagement is in a state of terminal arrest or has simply come to an end. However, too little attention is paid to what it means to think through how the struggle over democracy is inextricably linked to creating and sustaining public spheres where individuals can be engaged as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need not only as autonomous political agents but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. The growth of cynicism in American society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace than about the bankruptcy of the old political languages and the need for a new language and vision for clarifying intellectual, ethical, economic and political projects, especially as they work to reframe questions of agency, ethics and meaning for a substantive democracy.¶ In opposition to the attacks on critical thought, engaged citizenship, the discourse of hope and the erosion of "the public character of spaces, relations, and institutions,"[xx] young people, workers, intellectuals, artists and environmentalists are once again taking seriously Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's insistence "to hang on to intellectual and real freedom" and to ensure that thinking does not become "immune to the suggestion of the status quo,"[xxi] thus losing its "secure hold on possibility."[xxii] Increasingly, young people and others concerned about a substantive democracy are taking political stands; they are becoming more willing to cross boundaries, join questions of understanding and power, and bring into being with passion and conscience new ways of engaging with the world. In doing so, this diverse group of activists, intellectuals and concerned global citizens is intervening in the world on several registers.¶ Such groups, while in their infancy, are determined to unmask society's most pernicious myths, restage power in productive ways, rescue the promise of social agency from those places where it has been denied, and further the ethical and political imperative to provide an accurate historical account of the racial state and racial power. More and more, youths and others marginalized by race and class are refusing the dominant scripts of official authority and the limitations they impose upon individual and social agency. Progressives and oppositional groups are rethinking what it would mean to engage spaces of neglect and human suffering such as schools, shelters, food banks, union halls and other sites of potential resistance as starting points from which to build unfamiliar, potential worlds of hope, learning and struggle. In the process of thinking seriously about structures of power, state formation, race, sexuality, technology, class and pedagogy, these new modes of resistance never substitute moral indignation for the hard work of contributing to critical education and enabling people to expand the horizons of their own sense of agency and collectively challenge structures of power.¶ From Québec and Athens to Paris and New York City, these emerging collective movements bristle with a deeply rooted refusal to serve up well-worn and obvious truths, reinforce existing relations of power or bid retreat to an official rendering of common sense that promotes "a corrosive and demoralizing silence."[xxiii] What emerges in these distinct but politically allied voices is a pedagogy of disruption, critique, recovery and possibility, one that recognizes that viable politics cannot exist without will and awareness, and that critical education motivates and provides a crucial foundation for understanding and intervening in the world. Freedom in this discourse means learning how to think critically and act courageously - refusing to substitute empowering forms of education for mind-deadening training and numbing methods of memorizing data and test taking.¶ Collectively these emerging movements of resistance are developing an understanding of politics that demands not only a new language but also necessitates a broader vision, sense of organization and robust strategies that are critical and visionary. This commitment translates into a pedagogy and politics capable of illuminating the anti-democratic forces and sites that threaten human life; at the same time, its visionary nature cracks open the present to reveal new horizons, different futures and the promise of a global democracy. And yet, under the reign of casino capitalism, racist xenophobic nationalisms and other anti-democratic forces, notions of citizenship are increasingly privatized, commodified or subject to various religious and ideological fundamentalisms that feed a sense of powerlessness and disengagement from democratic struggles, if not politics itself. The culture of cruelty is alive and well as casino capitalism presents misfortune as a weakness and the logic of the market instructs individuals to rely on their own wits if they fall on hard times, especially because the state has washed its hands of any responsibility for the fate of its citizens. Hope is in the air, but it is crucial to recognize that the creeping authoritarianism descending upon the United States will not give up power easily, if at all. Consequently, an impatient patience proceeds slowly and persistently offers the formative culture necessary for feeding a radical imagination waiting to manifest itself concretely in a new vision, social movement and fierce urgency of struggle.

Towards a feminist environmental security perspective: The above discussion has demonstrated that there remains a high degree of debate over the best way to conceptualize the link between the environment and security, and that all three perspectives securitizing the environment have uneasy relationships with feminist approaches to security. The addition of gender to the environmental conflict perspective would be a transformative force. The environmental security perspective is more compatible with feminist scholars' understandings of the referents of and threats to security, but still neglects gender. While the ecological security approach has an overlap with various feminisms, it is ecocentric where feminists are fundamentally concerned with gender subordination. This chapter argues that a feminist approach is an appropriate alternative discourse. Based on the analysis of the intersections between the current approaches to security and the environment and various feminisms, I assert that environmental security perspectives that incorporate gender analysis and build on elements of the existing debate will be a fruitful addition to international environmental politics and International Relations in general. Perspectives securitizing the environment might be the right entry vehicle for feminist approaches, and feminist approaches might clarify debates between perspectives about the environment and security. As there are multiple approaches to the environment and security, there are also multiple feminisms, each of which would have different contributions to perspectives of the environment and security.26 Here, rather than setting up a debate between different feminisms, I offer some suggestions about how some of the various feminist traditions can be used to inform the environmental security debate and what a gender-focused environmental security perspective might look like. The gender-focused environmental security approach that I envision will in some respects look similar to current approaches to security and the environment, particularly the environmental security approach and the ecological security approach, however, there will be important differences between the approaches as well . A gender-focused environmental security perspective will begin with a multi-level analysis of security and the environment, paying particular attention to individuals and groups in society who face insecurities. These insecurities can take various forms and are best conceptualized as incidents that increase one's likelihood of experiencing danger, injury, or a decline in personal well-being. Examining these insecurities will involve valuing the contributions of local knowledge as well as other forms of knowledge such as scientific ones. Likewise, the notion of the environment that this approach uses is one that includes human and non-human nature as well as attention to the places where people live. To think of the environment as some distant external entity masks the close relationships that exist between humans and non-human nature as well as the severity that many environmental issues have for the livelihoods of much of the world's population, including both women and men. Conflict stemming from environmental change must be examined from a gender-focused environmental security perspective, but with specific attention paid to contextual and historic factors that contribute to violence and the impacts that violence has for members of the population in question. Rather than assume that scarcity is an unproblematic notion, it must be examined in order to determine how assessments of scarcity and plenty are arrived at, and for the benefit of whom. Power dynamics must be assessed if one is to fully understand the potential for conflict as well as all of the implications involved. Additionally, scarcity must not be thought of only in terms of a lack of access to a resource for human consumption. The needs of the environment to function productively must also be taken into account in order to determine scarcity in a given case. This reflects the fact that humans and nonhuman nature are inextricably linked and the insecurity of one has implications for the insecurity of the other. A detailed examination of scarcity will also bring to light the dominant relationship that humans most often claim over nature, which has links to other dominant relationships in society: North/South, elite/non-elite, and most importantly for this analysis. men/women. This can provoke the questioning of the "normalcy" of these relationships and hopefully invite alternative understandings of the relationships. This brings us to the issue of the potential causes of environmental insecurity. It must be acknowledged that by pointing to a factor as causing environmental insecurity, that factor also becomes the subject of proposed solutions. These factors must therefore be examined with specific attention being given to the gender differences embedded within them. Issues of increased consumption often associated with accelerating globalization, growing population, and migrating populations are all cited as phenomena contributing to environmental degradation by scholars concerned with the environment. What must be realized is that while these factors might in fact produce environmental insecurities, they must not be taken as straightforward targets for solutions if these solutions do not examine any potential imbalanced impacts that they may have for segments of the population-women in particular. Thus far, none of the perspectives on security and the environment have engaged in determining the particular impacts that solutions targeting the above-mentioned issues may have on women. This is a necessary task for gender-focused environmental security perspectives. An environmental security perspective that includes gender will also be amenable to solutions that reject the dominant institutional or societal structures. While sustainable development and environmental peacemaking may provide increased security for both the environment and some individuals in society, they do nothing to challenge the patriarchal structures that allow for the continuation of valuing male-ness over female-ness, thus they cannot be the final solution to insecurity. Through the analysis of environmental issues that directly impact people's lives, feminist environmental security scholars can both determine particular gender-differentiated impacts, responses and contributions to environmental degradation as well as call attention to the gendered assumptions in society through which these issues are typically understood. In sum, some of the issues that are brought to light when gender is included as a fundamental aspect of environmental security are as follows: • Multilevel analysis of security and the environment are essential. • Broad and critical conceptualizations or' security, environment, and scarcity are necessary. • Particular attention must be paid to the unique security situations of women. • A close relationship between humans and non-human nature must be acknowledged. • What happens during times of conflict as well as their causes must be examined. • The impacts of militarization on both the environment and human beings must be examined. • The causes of environmental insecurity must be critically assessed as well as their potential impacts for segments of the population. • Attention must be given to multiple sources of knowledge. • Potential solutions that reject the dominant institutional or societal structures must be entertained. An environmental security perspective with a gender focus can use these issues to build on the existing debate over security and the environment and to revise some aspects and add gender analysis.

Given the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his main-tenance he requires a given quantity of the means of subsistence.... Labour-power sets itself in action only by working. But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle, brain, nerve, etc., is wasted, and these require to be restored.... (Ibid.:171) The amount of the difference between the reproduction of labor power and its products depends, therefore, on the de-termination of what it takes to reproduce that labor power. Marx tends to make that determination on the basis of the quantity of commodities—food, clothing, housing, fuel—which would be necessary to maintain the health, life, and strength of a worker. But these commodities must be con-sumed before they can be sustenance, and they are not imme-diately in consumable form when they are purchased by the wage. Additional labor must be performed upon these things before they can be turned into people. Food must be cooked, clothes cleaned, beds made, wood chopped, etc. Housework is therefore a key element in the process of the reproduction of the laborer from whom surplus value is taken. Since it is usually women who do housework, it has been observed that it is through the reproduction of labor power that women are articulated into the surplus value nexus which is the sine qua non of capitalism. But to explain women's usefulness to capi-talism is one thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quite another. It is precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very much about women and the oppression of women. Women are oppressed in societies which can by no stretch of the imagination be described as capitalist. In the Amazon valley and the New Guinea highlands, women are frequently kept in their place by gang rape when the ordinary mecha-nisms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient. "We tame our women with the banana," said one Mundurucu man (Murphy, 1959:195). The ethnographic record is littered with practices whose effect is to keep women "in their place" —men's cults, secret initiations, arcane male knowledge, etc. And pre-capitalist, feudal Europe was hardly a society in which there was no sexism. Capitalism has taken over, and rewired, notions of male and female which predate it by centuries. No analysis of the reproduction of labor power under capitalism can explain foot-binding, chastity belts, or any of the incredible array of Byzantine, fetishized indignities, let alone the more ordinary ones, which have been inflicted upon women in various times and places. The analysis of the reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home, rather than men.

For key critical masculinity scholars it is globalization—specifically a multinational-led neoliberal globalization—that is recognised as ‘the most obviously important’ issue in the future of the field researching masculinity. Specifically, this is understood in terms of ‘the relation of masculinities to those emerging dominant powers in the global capitalist economy, the transnational corporations’ (Connell et al., 2005, p. 9). Connell’s particular contribution to this field is that globalization, in creating what has been termed a ‘world’ or ‘global gender order’, involves the re-articulation of national hegemonic masculinities into the global arena. Specifically he refers here to ‘transnational business masculinity’, which he describes as definitively taking the leading role as the emergent gendered world order, an order associated with the dominant institutions of the world economy and the globalization of the neo-liberal market agenda. The leading role of transnational business masculinity re-articulates older and more locally based bourgeois managerial hegemonic masculinities (Connell, 2005b, pp. 84, 76-7; Connell, 2005a, p. 263; Connell and Wood, 2005). In this account transnational business masculinity is seen to occupy the position of hegemonic masculinity on a world scale—that is to say, a dominant form of masculinity that embodies, organizes, and legitimates men’s domination in the world gender order as a whole (Connell, 2000, p. 46). This notion of hegemonic masculinity is, however, understood as embodying more that just a Gramscian-style mechanism for gaining consent. Rather, the political legitimating meaning of hegemonic masculinity quickly slides towards its meaning as the ‘dominant’ masculinity and how an actual group of men ‘embodies’ this dominant positioning, including how this group exhibits particular personality traits. Connell asserts that ‘world politics is now more and more organized around the needs of transnational capital’, placing ‘strategic power in the hands of particular groups of men—managers and entrepreneurs’—who self-consciously manage their bodies and emotions as well as money, and are increasingly detached from older loyalties to nation, business organisation, family and marital partners (Connell, 2005a, p. xxiii; Connell and Wood, 2005, p. 359). Drawing upon Connell’s work the sociologist Joan Acker endorses this view that hegemonic masculinities are embodied in the specific characteristics of multinational business-men suggesting that we think of ‘Rupert Murdoch, Phil Knight or Bill Gates’. Adding ‘[t]his masculinity is supported and reinforced by the ethos of the free-market, competition and a “win or die” environment. This is the masculine image of those who organize and lead the drive to global control and the opening of markets to international competition’ (Acker 2004, p. 29). These men are, in Connell’s account, dispositionally highly atomistic—competitive and largely distanced from social or personal commitments. They embody a neo-liberal version of an emphasized traditional masculinity, without any requirement to direct bodily strength (Connell, 2005a, pp. xxiii, 255-6; Connell, 2005b, p. 77).

This paper draws upon, and seeks to extend, existing feminist analyses of the causes, constitution and effects of financial crisis to argue that crisis, governance and austerity are best understood by interpreting the discursive reproduction of crisis governance discourses and their feminist Frankenstein creation, what this paper refers to as ‘crisis governance feminism’. Existing feminist scholarship has, at length, detailed how capitalism, in all its forms and at macro, micro, local, regional and global levels, is gendered. Feminists have contested the seductively clean and unified agenda of ‘one world’ future prosperity lovingly perpetuated by neo-liberalism and its advocates and have highlighted instead ‘the messy, contradictory and disjointed processes of global restructuring that have monopolised the politics of development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ (Griffin, 2010a: 91). Feminists have analysed and campaigned on economic crises extensively, interrogating the gendered impacts of the 1980s debt crisis (see, e.g., Sen and Grown, 1987; Benería, 2003), the East Asian crisis (Truong, 1999; Ling, 2004; Floro et al., 2009; Seguino, 2009) and the Argentine crisis (Chrabolowsky, 2003; De Cicco, 2011). Feminist discussions of global finance and crisis have displayed in stark relief the gendered injustices and inequalities created and sustained by various crises, the ‘retrogression of individual capabilities’ (Fukuda- Parr et al., 2013: 24), particularly those of women, created by financial crises, the social costs to women of austerity and the organisational manipulations of gender rhetoric that reaffirm existent and unequal economic policies and power relations (see, e.g., Montgomerie and Young, 2010; Roberts and Soederberg, 2012; Fukuda- Parr et al., 2013). As feminist analyses have so convincingly argued, ignorance of the local and social constitution of global processes leads only to flawed scholarship and ignorant policy-making that further exacerbate, or even create, hierarchies and inequalities of labour, class, gender and sexual relations. For feminists, regimes of capitalist production and consumption are always gendered. The reproduction of assumptions of individualism, market economics and democracy, perpetuated by neo-liberal governance mechanisms as pre-given and beyond question, mean, in particular, that neo-liberalism and its advocates have often failed to recognise that ‘the commercialisation of everyday life and of all sectors of the economy generates social dynamics that many individuals and cultures across the globe might find repulsive’ (Benería, 2003: 73).

Conceptions of gender that are concerned with symbolic structure of gender, rather than the appropriate roles of men and women, argue that ‘offense’ has been gendered masculine, while ''defense" has been gendered feminine. This is due to the associations of "the offensive" with activity, aggression, strength, and boldness (concepts considered masculine in Western culture) as well as the association of "defensive" with passivity, weakness, and victimhood (considered feminine). "Offensive" strategies are preferred because of the association with positive, masculine attributes, while defensive strategies are considered "wimpy" and unmanly. Carol Cohn describes the importance of "the wimp factor" in her experiences at working with defense intellectuals in the 1980s. When certain strategic actions such as withdrawal from territory, are interpreted as "wimpy," no matter how' "rational," they are delegitimized. Playing a simulated war game with a group of defense intellectuals, Cohn's team "lost" by withdrawing troops from some areas and refusing to retaliate from a nuclear strike, even though her "homeland" and its civilian population had remained safe. Such actions become "unthinkable" in the discourse of international security even though they may be strategically beneficial and consistent with other value systems. In this way, aggression and "offense" in the international arena are legitimized through gendered discourses. Gender as a discourse defines the boundaries of acceptable options and serves as a "preemptive deterrent" to certain strategic options. Gender thus constitutes offense/defense by assigning values more value to the offensive posture than the defensive posture. This is one way in which feminists would attempt to explain the puzzle of why decision-makers have the propensity to overestimate the strategic advantages of the offensive; there is a heavy "gender deterrent" against the passive, weak, "defensive" position, even if, as military balance theorists allow, the defense usually has the objective advantage in war, and disasters like World War I can occur if the balance is misinterpreted. The militarization that is linked to offensive policies is closely connected to nationalism. The literature on offense-defense balance indicates that nationalism can affect the balance by making people more willing to fight. Nationalism is also a source of militarism and offensive strategies, as it usually entails perception by elites and military planners that conquest will be easier because of the superiority of their own soldiers. Van Evera lists nationalism as a mechanism through which the cult of the offensive can be developed, but does not explore how it is possible for nationalistic sentiment to be shaped in the direction of favoring the offensive. Though offense-defense theorists note that belligerents tend to attribute a more coherent, grand and evil scheme to their enemies than is often the case, to believe that their adversaries are more unified than is the case, and to assume that opponents' policy inconsistency is a result of duplicity or treachery rather than confusion, they do not provide a way for scholars to understand these consistent misperceptions as a matter of the gendered practices of identity and nationalism. Feminist analyses would argue that nationalism and militarism are constituted by gender discourses in both the processes of "othering" other nations as well as in the presentation of national identity and chauvinism that exist by promoting particular ideologies about gender roles.

One of the conclusions of the offense-defense literature is that states perceive themselves to be much more insecure than they really are. Van Evera writes, "The prime threat to the security of modem great powers is ... themselves. Their greatest menace lies in their own tendency to exaggerate the dangers they face, and to respond with counterproductive belligerence.” While states have been more or less been secure, these feelings of insecurity have led to great insecurity for people worldwide. Tens to hundreds of millions of people were killed in wars in the twentieth century alone, to say nothing of those who were injured, lost loved ones, or had their lives disrupted by war. Van Evera goes on to write, "The causes of this syndrome pose a large question for students of international relations." Feminists have much to offer in regard to this question. Focusing on how gender discourses and gender identities provide a necessary condition under which many of the factors of the offense-defense balance can thrive, feminists offer a way to think about many of the issues related to the causes of war that have been neglected by most scholars of Security Studies. For scholars interested in the offense-defense balance as a way of explaining why wars occur, feminist analysis can contribute to both defensive realists who consider wars to begin because of the perceptions of the offense-defense balance, as well as scholars who support the offensive realist position that states start wars regardless of their calculations of the offense-defense balance. Thus, despite the recent debate between Lieber and Snyder about whether or not a cult of the offensive was the key factor in Germany's offensive war plans, feminist analysis of nationalism and the protection racket provides insights into the underlying conditions that make preventative or pre-emptive wars possible in terms of anxieties over gender and racial identities and gendered discourses of military strength and the benefits of war. Feminists argue that offensive wars are based on similar concerns over gender relations and the nation, making offensive wars appear to be legitimately "defensive." As Snyder argues, "The belief in the feasibility and necessity of offensive strategy entices both fearful and greedy aggressors to attack [and] erases the distinction between security and expansion," the gendered constitution of the cult of the offensive applies to states acting out of fear or expansion. The feminist analyses of the role gender plays in constituting the perception of technology, the gendered ideologies of nationalism, and the gendered "defensive" logic of the protection racket support this view of the erasure of the distinction between security and expansion. A feminist analysis would understand gendered ideologies and identities to be at the root of both strategies, with their particular historical manifestations leading to variation in the specific forms that militarism takes. Far from being only concerned with the status of women, feminists use the concept of gender to analyze the workings of power through gendered discourses and identities. Gender matters in the ways in which technologies are perceived and used, as well as in formulating offensive military strategies. Gendered perceptions of technology, gendered discourses of nationalism, and the "protection racket" are three related ways in which offensive wars are legitimated, and thus enabled. By explaining the impact gender has on issues related to the perception of offense-defense balance, feminist analysis shows how gender discourses and the production of gender identities are not confined to individuals and the private realm, but rather are a pervasive fact of social life on an international scale. International Relations theorists concerned with determining the causes of war would do well to consider the ways in which gender can shape the conditions under which wars occur.

In an article entitled “Naming the Cultural Forces That Push Us toward War” (1983), Charlene Spretnak focused on some of the fundamental cultural factors that deeply influence ways of thinking about security. She argues that patriarchy encourages militarist tendencies. Since a major war now could easily bring on massive annihilation of almost unthinkable proportions, why are discussions in our national forums addressing the madness of the nuclear arms race limited to matters of hardware and statistics? A more comprehensive analysis is badly needed . . . A clearly visible element in the escalating tensions among militarized nations is the macho posturing and the patriarchal ideal of dominance, not parity, which motivates defense ministers and government leaders to “strut their stuff” as we watch with increasing horror. Most men in our patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns that are radically inappropriate for the nuclear age. To prove dominance and control, to distance one’s character from that of women, to survive the toughest violent initiation, to shed the sacred blood of the hero, to collaborate with death in order to hold it at bay—all of these patriarchal pressures on men have traditionally reached resolution in ritual fashion on the battlefield. But there is no longer any battlefield. Does anyone seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a crucial, large-scale conventional war it would refrain from using its multiple-warhead nuclear missiles because of some diplomatic agreement? The military theater of a nuclear exchange today would extend, instantly or eventually, to all living things, all the air, all the soil, all the water. If we believe that war is a “necessary evil,” that patriarchal assumptions are simply “human nature,” then we are locked into a lie, paralyzed. The ultimate result of unchecked terminal patriarchy will be nuclear holocaust. The causes of recurrent warfare are not biological. Neither are they solely economic. They are also a result of patriarchal ways of thinking, which historically have generated considerable pressure for standing armies to be used. (Spretnak 1983) These cultural tendencies have produced our current crisis of a highly militarized, violent world that in spite of the decline of the cold war and the slowing of the military race between the superpowers is still staring into the abyss of nuclear disaster, as described by a leading feminist in an address to the Community Aid Abroad State Convention, Melbourne, Australia: These then are the outward signs of militarism across the world today: weapons-building and trading in them; spheres of influence derived from their supply; intervention—both overt and covert; torture; training of military personnel, and supply of hardware to, and training of police; the positioning of military bases on foreign soil; the despoilation of the planet; ‘intelligence’ networks; the rise in the number of national security states; more and more countries coming under direct military rule; 13 the militarization of diplomacy, and the interlocking and the international nature of the military order which even defines the major rifts in world politics. (Shelly 1983)

Technology can be used to dominate societies or to enhance them. Thus both science and technology could have developed in a different direction. But due to patriarchal values infiltrated in science the type of technology developed is meant to dominate, oppress, exploit and kill. One reason is that patriarchal societies identify masculinity with conquest. Thus any technical innovation will continue to be a tool for more effective oppression and exploitation. The highest priority seems to be given to technology that destroys life. Modern societies are dominated by masculine institutions and patriarchal ideologies. Their technologies prevailed in Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and in many other parts of the world. Patriarchal power has brought us acid rain, global warming, military states, poverty and countless cases of suffering. We have seen men whose power has caused them to lose all sense of reality, decency and imagination, and we must fear such power. The ultimate result of unchecked patriarchy will be ecological catastrophe and nuclear holocaust. Such actions are denial of wisdom. It is working against natural harmony and destroying the basis of existence. But as long as ordinary people leave questions of technology to the "experts" we will continue the forward stampede. As long as economics focus on technology and both are the focus of politics, we can leave none of them to experts. Ordinary people are often more capable of taking a wider and more humanistic view than these experts.

First, feminists have provided powerful critiques of dominant Western conceptions of reason, rationality, and rational behavior (Cohn 1989: 129, n. 5; Warren 1989). These critiques need to be extended to show how so-called 'rational behavior' towards women, nature, and nuclear issues, as well as the dominant discourse language associated with each, is patriarchalist. Consider, for instance, the way in which Vance Cope-Kasten unpacks the domination metaphors, sexist language, and sexual rhetoric of standard philosophical descriptions of arguments, good reasoning, and rational decision-making (Cope-Kasten 1989). Good reasoners knock down arguments; they tear, rip, chew, cut them up; attack them, try to beat, destroy, or annihilate them, preferably by nailing them to the wall. Good arguers are sharp, incisive, cutting, relentless, intimidating, brutal; those not good at giving arguments are wimpy, touchy, quarrelsome, irritable, nagging. Good arguments have a thrust to them: they are compelling, binding, air-tight, steel-trap, knock-down, dynamite, smashing, and devastating bits of reasoning which lay things out and pin them down, overcoming any resistance. 'Bad' arguments are described in metaphors of the dominated and powerless: they 'fall flat on their face,' are limp, lame, soft, fuzzy, silly, and 'full of holes." Similar critiques have been provided, especially be ecofeminists, of the language used to describe women, nature, and nuclear weaponry (see, for example, Adams 1990; Cohn 1989; Strange 1989). Women are often described in animal terms (e.g. as cows, foxes, chicks, serpents, bitches, beavers, old bats, pussycats, cats, birdbrains, hare-brains), sexual terms (e.g. as lays, fucks, screws, cunts) and plaything terms (e.g. as babes, dolls, girls, pets) terms which contribute to viewing women as inferior, not fully rational, and child-like. Just as women are naturalized in the dominant discourse, so, too, is nature feminized. 'Mother Nature' is raped, mastered, conquered, mined; her secrets are 'penetrated" and her 'womb" is to be put into service of the 'man of science." Virgin timber is felled, cut down; fertile soil is tilled and land that lies fallow is 'barren,' useless. Language fuses women's and animal's or nature's inferior status in a patriarchal culture. We exploit nature and animals by associating them with women's lesser status, and, conversely, dominate women by associating women with nature's and animals' inferior status. As Carol Adams argues so persuasively in The Sexual Politics of Meat, language which feminizes nature and naturalizes women describes, reflects, and perpetuates oppression by failing to see the extent to which the twin dominations of women and nature, especially of animals, are, in fact, culturally analogous and not simply metaphorically analogous (Adams 1990: 61). Stereotyping through "power dualisms of domination'14 occurs with both women and nature in language that is both sexist and naturist.

I take that phrase "power and promise," an unusually optimistic measure for anything in the contemporary discipline of philosophy, from the title of Karen Warren's widely-read and often reprinted 1991 essay, "The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism." That essay includes an argument that is basic to Warren's Ecofeminist Philosophy, and that is commonly characterized as the fundamental insight of ecofeminism. The view argued for is that a "logic of domination" that divides the world into bifurcated hierarchies is basic to all forms of oppression and domination. This logic (which Warren also calls a "conceptual framework") is a way of thinking that encourages separating from and mistreating nature and members of subordinated groups, for no good reason. In addition, the conceptual frameworks that are used to justify racism, sexism, and the mistreatment of nature (efe.), are interwoven and mutually reinforcing. Some ecofeminists find that the very aspects of identity and otherness (gender, race, class, species, efe.) are created through conceptual frameworks that encourage domination rather than connection, but Warren remains agnostic about such ontological issues. Her emphasis instead is on a more basic point - that the morally loaded concepts through which we understand ourselves and reality (and through which "we" humans have historically constructed knowledge) are at the core of the terrible ecological and social messes we currently face.

Donald Trump, in a relationship of predation with everything around him, has affirmed his will to dominate others as well as the planet. The destructive capitalism that he has promoted is based on the modern Western ideology of science as the omnipotence of man over his environment, following Descartes' famous formula “to make oneself as master and possessor of nature” . This one values reason, 28 objectivity, spirit, knowledge and progress (considered as masculine) and devalues irrationality, affectivity, emotivity, body and nature (considered as feminine). The valorization of a production-driven economy is therefore achieved through a disregard for the environment, but also for indigenous populations, as evidenced by the giant Keystone XL oil pipeline project with Canada that Trump has revived after Obama vetoed it in 2015. According to Naves, “the overuse of natural resources is the mark of a combative, dominating nation, proud of the physical strength of its men, able and willing to tame the great outdoors.” . The limitless appropriation of fauna 29 and flora is thus linked to hegemonic masculinity, and stems from a short-termist and selfish vision of production and consumption. Besides, the defence of the environment or animal welfare are associated with feminine passivity, gentleness and attentiveness, which are opposed to values presupposed to be masculine such as strength, action or work. The economy (masculine) is thus opposed to ecology (feminine). Ecological activism is indeed mostly carried by women, and thus the protection of the environment is considered by the climatoskeptics as a weakness or a mothering. The destruction of nature follows the same logic as the antifeminism of leaders such as Donald Trump or the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro: to preserve a certain social order, which is felt to be threatened by the rise of feminist and ecological demands, their media coverage and therefore the entrance of these issues into the public arena. Donald Trump denies the reality of climate change, although it is now scientifically supported. Unlike in the past, contemporary climatoskepticism is therefore a denial and even a disregard for science and research. Not only is Trump attempting to roll back national environmental protections, but his 2017 withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement also indicates a real desire to impose a climatoskeptic narrative into the public arena and onto the international stage. The defence of environmental and animal exploitation seems to follow the same logic as that of carrying weapons: as a mark of virility, to question it would also be to question a certain masculine identity. In this regard, we can highlight Trump's cancellation of a measure taken by Michelle Obama to fight against junk food in school cafeterias. As demonstrated by the researcher Hank Rothgerber , hegemonic 30 masculinity is also constructed by the refusal to take care of one's health, notably by a mode of eating that is very much centred around meat consumption. Vegetarianism is in fact easily associated with women, and endangering oneself or others is considered a mark of virility, from which stems men's unconditional of hunting and the carrying of weapons.

The environmental security approach is concerned with the negative impacts of environmental degradation for human beings. While environmental conflict can still directly be linked to military security, environmental security is much more closely linked to notions of “human security.” In other words, environmental security is a broader notion than environmental conflict, because it is concerned not only with those directly susceptible to environmental conflict, but instead with all of humanity. In environmental security, the security referent is people and threat is located in negative consequences of environmental damage. Some of the main themes in this body of work include the environmental impact of accelerating globalization, concerns over population increases, the spread of disease, and the potentials for sustainable development. There is much more conceptual affinity between feminist approaches to security and the environmental security approach. Like feminist approaches, it argues for a much broader definition of security. Still, while the environmental security approach takes account of many of the complexities of the relationship between humans and their environment, it omits both the gendered nature of making that dichotomy to begin with and many of the gendered impacts of its key constitutive factors. First, the environmental security approach fails to take note of gendered content of human/nature dichotomy. A caution from ecofeminists would be the potential to de-link humans and the nonhuman environment in this approach. Merchant recognizes that humans have a degree of control over nature through human behaviors; however, nature also has the power to destroy and evolve with or without humans in many cases. She therefore calls for "an earthcare ethic, which is premised on this dynamic relationship, [and] is generated by humans, but is enacted by listening to, hearing, and responding to the voice of nature." Second, environmental security authors typically fail to recognize the gender dynamics that would transform their analyses. For example, environmental security scholars pay substantial attention to sustainable development as a way to combat environmental degradation and human insecurity simultaneously. Feminists have pointed out that many sustainable development programs have not been gender-sensitive. Since different paths to development often have survival implications for its population, a gender-sensitive approach to sustainable development that takes into account the needs of women, the ecosystem, and future generations within a particular setting appears necessary to ensure security. This means that if sustainable development or sustainability are advocated as providing security, then the specific needs of women also need to be addressed within that framework. Feminist have also expressed concern that advocates of sustainable development remain entrenched in current (gender-subordinating) social and political structures. Feminists have expressed concern that a sustainable development approach to environmental security maintains the state-centric and top-down foci of the environmental conflict approach, masking it under a broader definition of who merits security.