Refuting Security Demographics: In Dialogue with Betsy Hartmann
- PDF / 85,710 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 539 x 703 pts Page_size
- 96 Downloads / 177 Views
Dialogue
Refuting Security Demographics: In Dialogue with Betsy Hartmann
BETSY HARTMANN
Betsy Hartmann is the Director of the Hampshire College Population and Development Program and a member of the advisory committee of the Committee onWomen, Population and the Environment. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control (South End Press,1995),TheTruth about Fire, a political thriller about the Far Right (Carroll and Graf, 2002), and co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a BangladeshVillage (Food First and Zed Books,1983). Her current work focuses on population and the construction of security threats, and she is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (Rowman and Littlefield, November 2005). She is a longstanding activist in the international women’s health movement and writes and speaks frequently on population, environment and development issues. Here, she discusses with the Editor of Development some of her work on national and environmental conflict in light of the current debates on reproductive health and rights. WH: Your book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs has had an important impact on the population debate, particularly in the pre Cairo days, and continues to be read as part of the international policy and activist debate on reproductive rights and health. As you are based at the university where would you position your work ^ as academic or policy? BH: Essentially I straddle the two ^ I see myself as a women’s health activist at the international level which is more about changing policy, but at the same time I am working hard to impact on curricula at the national level as a writer and teacher, who is encouraging a new generation of women’s health and reproductive rights advocates. WH: You suggest that much of the population debate, and indeed what was part of the Cairo consensus, emerges from the northern environmental movement that pushed degradation narratives about the relationship between population and environment. Indeed, this theory underlies most of the Brundtland Commission Our Common Future and the UNCED Earth Summit held in 1992. Can you explain more about degradation narratives? BH: Degradation narratives link population pressure to poverty and degradation of the environment. They are based on the simplistic neo-Malthusian assumption that as Development (2005) 48(4), 16–20. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100178
Hartmann: In Dialogue with Betsy Hartmann poor people grow in numbers they start to destroy their environment in an effort to survive and then as the environment fails to sustain them, they move on to even more marginal environments, and destroy them as well. This leads to a vicious cycle of poverty, environmental degradation, migration and rising violence and conflict over natural resources. Degradation narratives ignore the great social and ecological diversities of the Global South. The focus on poor peasants does not take into account other powerful social, economic a
Data Loading...
