Aff’s attempt to secure the environment through Marxism fails – only approaches that consider gender can solve

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.