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2019 | Book

Introduction: Key Texts of the Author on Methodology, Development, Regions, Gender and Environment and the Book Structure Read chapter Read first chapter

Úrsula Oswald Spring: Pioneer on Gender, Peace, Development, Environment, Food and Water

With a Foreword by Birgit Dechmann

Author: Prof. Dr. Úrsula Oswald Spring

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book aims to initiate among students and other readers critical and interdisciplinary reflections on key problems concerning development, gender relations, peace and environment, with a special emphasis on North-South relations. This volume offers a selection of the author's research in different parts of the world during 50 years of contributing to an interdisciplinary scientific debate and addressing social answers to urgent global problems. After the author's biography and bibliography, the second part analyses the development processes of several countries in the South that resulted in a dynamic of underdevelopment. The deep-rooted gender discrimination is also reflected in the destructive exploitation of natural resources and the pollution of soils, water and air. Since the beginning of the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century, the management of human society and global resources has been unsustainable and has created global environmental change and multiple conflicts over scarce and polluted resources. Peace and development policies aiming at gender equity and sustainable environmental management, where water and food are crucial for the survival of humankind, focus on systemic alternatives embedded in a path of sustainability transition.
• This book reviews multiple influences from Europe, Africa and Latin America on a leading social scientist and activist on gender, development and environment aiming at a world with equity, sustainability, peace and harmony between nature and humans.• This pioneer volume analyses social and environmental conflicts and peace processes in Latin America, with a special focus on Mexico, by addressing the development of under-development, global environmental change, poverty, nutrition and the North-South gap.• This volume focuses on environmental deterioration with a special emphasis on food and water and proposes systemic changes towards a sustainability transition with peace, regional development and gender equity.• This pioneering work offers alternative approaches to regional development, food sovereignty and holistic development processes from a gender perspective.


Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction: Key Texts of the Author on Methodology, Development, Regions, Gender and Environment and the Book Structure
Abstract
These chapters offer reflections on my scientific work and my life experience, first in post-colonial Africa in the 1960s, later the critical psychological re-elaboration of several traumatic experiences in Africa during the student revolt in Europe in 1968 and finally my field research, political activities and social involvement with bottom-up women and peasant movements in Mexico, Latin America, India, Thailand and North Africa. This chapter links the social and natural sciences, climate studies and humanities from a gender perspective. Later, based on my involvement and experience with bottom-up social movements, I address the environmental care for and restoration of ecosystem services for socially vulnerable people in particular.
Úrsula Oswald Spring

On the Author: My Life, Work and Publications

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. A Lifelong Learning Process in Gender, Peace, Environment and Development: Autobiographic Reminiscences and Reflections
Abstract
This biography is a subjective account of my memories about my life experiences and scientific training that have shaped my intellectual development. They have influenced my commitment to fight for a more just and equitable society for women and men and for a more peaceful world. Three continents forged my intellectual experiences, and I have received very contrasting impacts that have left deep footprints on my scientific and social commitments and on my life as a mother, a social activist, policymaker and as a socio-environmental scientist who has aimed for a more just and peaceful world.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 3. The Author’s Selective Bibliography
Abstract
Oswald Spring, Úrsula (1978). “La Monopolización del Mercado Interno en México: el Caso de la Papa” [The Monopolization of the Internal Market in Mexico: The Case of the Potatoes], Comercio Exterior, Vol. 28, No. 11, pp. 1349–1358.
Úrsula Oswald Spring

Selected Texts of the Author on Methodology, Gender and Peace

Frontmatter
Chapter 4. Methodology and Methods in Interdisciplinary Research
Abstract
All the different theoretical and disciplinary imputes I got in my life tried to overcome the prevailing constraints of science in theoretical, conceptual and empirical respects and to collectively experiment with research to understand better the complex socio-environmental reality. There was also increasing concern about the discrimination of women in science and the increasing number of poor and marginalised women on earth. Why did this occur all over the world in industrialised, developing and communist countries? What are the deep-rooted causes for this discrimination and subordination? Therefore, my interest in gender studies emerged in conjunction with an integrated epistemological approach to interdisciplinary research.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 5. Study on Personality Aspects and Drug Abuse
Abstract
Personality was assessed with the Freiburger Persönlichkeits Inventar (FPI) [Freiburg Personality Inventory] in a representative sample of 6,315 19-year-old conscripts in the Canton of Zürich (Switzerland). Furthermore, the kind of drugs used, the frequency of drug consumption and drug combinations were investigated in this age group. First, subjects who had taken only cannabis were compared for personality aspects with those who had taken only hallucinogens. Secondly, a comparison was made between those consuming only cannabis and those taking cannabis as well as other drugs. No significant differences were found in the personality variables assessed in either of these comparisons.
On the other hand, personality differences were found when the subjects were grouped into non-consumers, light, moderate and heavy cannabis consumers. The values obtained for non-consumers (N = 4,745) are used as the baseline; the light consumers are more nervous, more impulsive (more reactively aggressive), more sociable, more sincere, and less inhibited. The heavy consumers suffer more often from autonomic disturbances, are more ill-humoured, more irritated, less dominant, and less sociable than non-consumers and light consumers.
The marked differences between light consumers and non-consumers suggest the hypothesis that subjects with some characteristics (extroversion, emotional lability) are more likely to be persuaded to take drugs. In cases of heavy consumption there seems to be a complex relationship between the personality pattem before drug- taking and personality changes due to drug abuse.
Úrsula Müller-Oswald, R. Ruppen, U. Baumann, J. Angst
Chapter 6. Engendered Peace with Sustainability
Abstract
Engendered-sustainable peace has rarely been discussed from a critical perspective and has been even less analysed by peace researchers (Oswald Spring 2016). The question is why has this been the case? To understand the lack of visibility of gender and feminist studies in peace research, we must go back to the socially developed system of power, dominance, violence and control exercised by patriarchy (Wallerstein 1994). This system originated thousands of years ago in societies that have developed irrigated agriculture and were able to produce a food surplus. These surpluses allowed a primitive accumulation of capital, an incipient social stratification and an emerging division of labour within these societies. Greater productive achievements in the Fertile Crescent, in India, China, Mesoamerica and South America improved living conditions and enabled these societies to promote trade and interchange with neighbours.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 7. Peace and Sustainability in a Globalised World
Abstract
On the eve of a new millennium we were facing a globalisation process which embraced, for the first time in human history, what could be termed all of life’s phenomena. This process continues to go beyond those aspects which are strictly productive: the economy, technology, scientific progress and the relations of a predetermined productive process (Hunter 1995). It interrelates personal and local processes with regional, national and international ones, penetrating the most intimate spaces of human feeling and social representations (Serrano 2010). The question as to which direction the development of the planet (or indeed a continent, country, social or ethnic group, or a human being and his individuality) is going is expressed with increasing rigour and urgency (Oswald Spring 2001a, b).
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 8. Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development Goals
Abstract
Climate change is severely affecting Mexico and Central America (IPCC 2014a) and has caused different impacts on men and women, regions and social classes. Several studies have shown that during disasters more women die than men. Why do the Red Cross, the World Bank and insurance companies only report the global number of deaths and damage, while other international agencies address the vulnerability of women and ignore the vulnerability of men? This approach has reinforced a woman-victim vision to justify their exclusion from decision-making processes and sharpen their post-disaster trauma. These behaviours also deprive society of efficient female support in the post-disaster period, when women have the capacity to organise refugee camps and collaborate in reconstruction processes. This lack of equity not only occurs in disaster management, but is imbued in all social processes of the present global patriarchal system.
Úrsula Oswald Spring

On Development and Regions

Frontmatter
Chapter 9. UnderdevelopmentUnderdevelopment as a Consequence of DependencyDependency
Abstract
In Mexico during the 1960s, population growth, rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation, and the stagnation of agricultural production with an increase of imported basic food, resulted in a severe crisis in the agricultural sector. Furthermore, land reform had come to an end. There was no land available for distribution, and political unrest had further limited regional redistributions of land. Landlords and small plots of land forced young people to leave the rural area. The land under cultivation was parceled into such small plots that it had become unproductive. Smallholdings had been highly dependent on governmental support, which further reduced the yields, and 30 to 40 per cent was lost in storage. To change this situation, the Government decided to reinforce the agricultural sector by supporting intensive production, concentrating loans, and stressing technical innovation (extensionismo), especially in irrigation and storage infrastructure, so from 1970 to 1976 it promoted a collective ejido. The Government aimed to change the subsistence production into a market-orientated system. With this support, the Government also tried to neutralise political tensions, criminality and violence, especially in the region of Guerrero, where a guerrilla movement called “The Army of the Poor” [El Ejército de los Pobres] existed.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 10. Development of Underdevelopment
Abstract
In the early 1990s more than three billion humans had lived in poverty, often in absolute poverty in a world characterised by a planned, extravagant and destructive consumerism. According to the so-called illusion of development, which would bring the world to prosperity and well-being, poverty has increased during the past three decades. This “myth of development” has fuelled the arms race and imposed a peace relying on a balance of deadly and terrifying arms that, within a few seconds, are capable of destroying the entire planet several times, without neglecting traditional weapons used in the proxy wars in all regions of the Third World. Moreover, given the justification of the same myth, the economy rose to a high rank and it seems that ‘money’ is the new god.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 11. Regions and Their Evolution
Abstract
The process of globalisation, which has been characterised by growing socio-economic imbalances among continents, nations and areas within any country, triggered new theoretical impulses for regionalism. During the bipolar world system during the Cold War, from a traditional approach a new regionalism emerged with an ideological background, whereby political interests were subordinated to the needs of hegemonic countries to better control their hinterlands. As part of this approach, regional cooperation supported strategic areas to increase the influence of one super power or to weaken the influence of the other. This thinking facilitated an understanding of regions in formal and institutional terms that coincided with a growing inspiration of structuralism in the social sciences (Parson 1939; Mauss 1951; Levy-Strauss 1958; Radcliffe-Brown 1964).
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 12. Sustainable Development and Peace
Abstract
Sustainable development requires a deep understanding of peace and security that is centred on human beings. It includes a gender perspective of equality and equity, embedded in environmental concerns. This human, gender and environmental peace and security (Oswald Spring 2009; see book PAHSEP 18) – ‘HUGE’ – effort should be undertaken by millions of organised citizens, who seek a balance among humans and the natural environment for the benefit of future generations. A significant contribution to this goal of building a sustainable culture of peace is the Earth Charter (2000), which integrates concerns for a peaceful and sustainable future world. Such actions are orientated towards mitigation of the present environmental destruction by creating synergies for an engendered and sustainable peace-building (Chap. 6) that might be able to strengthen the long-standing and former more harmonious relationship between humankind and nature.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 13. Bridging the Global Divides: The Links Between Latin America and Europe
Abstract
This text offers suggestions on how to overcome the divide between Europe and Latin America. On the one hand, it deals with the link between Europe and other globalised countries, and it particularly proposes several economic reflections in terms of competitiveness of production, pricing and quality vis á vis North America and Europe. On the other hand, it addresses the second challenge: how to bridge the divide between rich and poor countries? This part focuses on the multilateral policies and how to promote a globalisation process with less violence that allows different poor or threshold countries to form part of the global concert. What forms of global governance are required to establish mechanisms to convene, set a common agenda, and engage in a process of democratic decision-making with benefits for both hemispheres?
Úrsula Oswald Spring

On Food and Society

Frontmatter
Chapter 14. On Food and Nutrition
Abstract
Food serves three basic functions for most living beings. Firstly, food creates energy. Firstly, food creates energy required in the absorption and translocation of nutrients necessary for growth, sustenance, and biological and physical activities of the organism. Secondly, food supplies reducing agents indispensable in synthetic processes inside cells. Thirdly, food purveys the materials – structural and catalytic chemical components of living cells – that are built through anabolism. When one of these functions is absent, living organisms substitute the deficiency with the other functions. Nutrition is the process through which food substances are absorbed and used by living organisms. Commencing with the act of feeding, the process continues with digestion, where proteins are broken down into amino acids. Subsequently, intestines absorb nutrients, which, once integrated, are then distributed throughout the body for assimilation and metabolic transformation within each cell. The last stage is excretion of waste and toxins.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 15. Food System and Society: The Mexican Case
Abstract
The research project Food System and Society The Mexican Case studied were the following questions: 1. Why are many millions of peasants and urban workers hungry or malnourished in a world of plenty? Why do periodic famines exist in different parts of the world despite the fact that elsewhere half of the food is thrown away? 2. What are the mechanisms that contribute to the deterioration of the peasant economy and push millions of people to abandon their land and migrate into miserable slums in large cities? 3. What are the crucial national policies to ensure sufficient, adequate and permanent access to basic foodstuffs for all social groups and prevent seasonal and cyclical variations that may affect the supply? 4. How could a maximum degree of autonomy and self-determination be achieved on basic foods, in order to reduce the vulnerability to price fluctuations in the international market? How are political pressures (food power) counterbalanced without falling into an autarchy but instead promoting a model that optimizes the advantages of specialisation to a prudent degree? Which processes and techniques to produce staple foods preserve and even improve the physical environment in the medium and long term and reinforce a more harmonious relationship between nature and society?
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 16. Monopolisation of the Food Market in Mexico: The Case of Potatoes
Abstract
Mexico’s domestic market in the late 1970s was characterised by a struggle between private commercial capital and state capital in which transnational investments and technology were also involved. On the one hand, merchants requested price liberalisation; on the other, consumers wanted food prices to be controlled to protect the consumption of the majority of people in the country. This contradictory struggle requires a deeper analysis that takes into account the mechanisms and processes involved therein. This chapter explores the commercial development and concentration of the potato trade, the interrelationships of production and trade cycles, the marketing system, and the organisation of merchants. It studies the effects produced on costs and profits by this commercial activity, which was stabilised due to socio-political relations. Finally, the chapter considers the future of trade organisations and their development in domestic and foreign markets.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 17. Open Dissipative System of Popular Markets in Tabasco
Abstract
The Mexican food system was dramatically affected by the periodic crises with high inflation and dangerous devaluations of the peso against the dollar. The Mexican Government promoted a popular system of basic products in rural and urban areas, to make at least the most basic goods available even in the most remote areas. They also regularly published the official prices of basic foods to reduce speculation and regional and local hoarding. The South East is a region far from Mexico City and, with the oil boom in the early 1980s, Tabasco in particular required an increasing, safe supply of both basic and luxury goods. The decentralisation of food collection to rural storage and the concession of affiliated shops with controlled prices reduced the transportation time and costs of food supply. These processes guaranteed fresh vegetables and fruit at local prices. The governmental actions reduced also the number of intermediaries, food speculation and the hoarding of basic food and improved food security of the marginal people, whenever local interests boycotted the official efforts.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 18. Food Sovereignty and Green Agriculture
Abstract
The hypothesis of this chapter is that organic green agriculture is granting food sovereignty to countries, to urban dwellers and small-scale producers, while the productivity life sciences paradigm and green revolution have increased malnutrition (obesity) and required artificial components (vitamins, proteins, minerals) to control the deterioration of human health by chronic diseases.
Úrsula Oswald Spring

On Environment, Climate and Water

Frontmatter
Chapter 19. On Ecology and Global Environmental Change
Abstract
The world faces social and environmental crises together with an increasing risk of extreme events (IPCC 2012). These include economic crises, population growth, climate change, water scarcity and pollution, food crises (FAO 2000, 2016), soil depletion, erosion and desertification, urbanisation with slum development, rural-urban and international migration, physical and structural violence, gender, race and ethnic discrimination, youth unemployment, social and gender inequality, and an increasing loss of ecosystem services. The interaction of these multiple crises may result in extreme outcomes, especially for vulnerable people living in risky places, and may reduce their human, gender and environmental security.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 20. Climate Change and Its Impact on Vulnerable People
Abstract
Climate change is the greatest threat to people, their survival, the conservation of ecosystems and their ecosystem services. New scientific evidence reviewed in the fifth assessment report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2013a, 2014a, b) confirmed that the average global temperature rise is unequivocal and thus supports the assessment of its Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC 2007). Furthermore, its Working Group I (IPCC 2013a) highlighted that the atmosphere and the ocean have warmed up, the layers of snow and ice have decreased, sea level has risen and greenhouse gas concentrations (GHG) in the atmosphere have substantially increased due to anthropogenic GHG emissions. The study also confirmed that each of the last three decades has successively become warmer than any preceding period since 1850 and that the years from 1983 to 2012 have probably been the period of the 30 warmest years during the past 1,400 years.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 21. Interdisciplinarity in Water Research and Water Models
Abstract
Water covers 41 per cent of the Earth’s surface. However, only 3 per cent is freshwater and 68.7 per cent of this is frozen in polar ice caps and glaciers; 30.1 per cent is located in deep aquifers and 0.9 per cent in other conditions. Thus, only 0.3 per cent is surface water, of which 87 per cent is in lakes and dams, 11 per cent in wetlands and 2 per cent in rivers (UN Water 2015). This freshwater is shared among a growing population, where the number of people tripled during the last century, but water use increased six fold. Further, 41 per cent of the Earth’s surface belongs to drylands, where 30 per cent of the population lives. These water-scarce regions produce half of the livestock worldwide and grow 44 per cent of the global food supply.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Chapter 22. A Dissipative, Self-organizing and Open Water System: The Case of Tlaxcala
Abstract
The complex task of studying the processes of extraction, supply, distribution, use, pollution and water sanitation in a central and the smallest state in Mexico, called Tlaxcala, included an interdisciplinary approach which analysed the natural, social and political factors in a specific time and space. An appropriate methodological approach for analysing a dynamic totality was offered by an open, dissipative and self-regulating system analysis (see Chap. 15). This method addressed links among social relations of production, where unequal access to natural resources had generated multiple conflicts and effects on welfare, health and the quality of life among disadvantaged social groups. This study focused on the material interactions of natural resources with processes of over-extraction of groundwater, pollution and environmental deterioration with negative impacts on life quality, sustainable access to resources and the future production in the region.
Úrsula Oswald Spring
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Úrsula Oswald Spring: Pioneer on Gender, Peace, Development, Environment, Food and Water
Author
Prof. Dr. Úrsula Oswald Spring
Copyright Year
2019
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-94712-9
Print ISBN
978-3-319-94711-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94712-9