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Ecofeminism
Abstract
This article summarizes the history of ecofeminism and its various strands of activism and intellectual inquiry. Through critiques made of ecofeminism, both from those allying themselves with the movement, and from those who wish to disassociate themselves from it, the argument is made that ecofeminism, particularly in its social constructivist form, has been influential in international policy making. As a parallel development alongside feminist political ecology and other environmental feminisms it has developed analytically, infused by renewed interest by a new generation of academics and activists, as well as a new generation of environmental concerns, dominated by climate change.
... One of the first approaches to connect gender and conservation was established by d' Eaubonne's (1974) ecofeminist theory. Ecofeminists suggest that there is a dualism inherent within gender-environment relations -focused on women's pro-environment attitudes in a destructive patriarchal world (Buckingham, 2015). Ecofeminist scholars strongly critique the masculinization of biodiversity that has led to violent technologies responsible for exploiting and destroying nature to benefit a dominant capitalist system (Shiva, 1989). ...
... Ecofeminism strongly advocated for and influenced the first approaches to including gender in international environmental politics (Buckingham, 2015;Morrow, 2013). Resulting global sustainable development programs targeted the 'Third World Woman' as a homogenous and undifferentiated category for overcoming ecosystem degradation and social injustices (Leach, 2007;Sturgeon, 1999). ...
Landscape restoration has evolved to recover large areas of degraded ecosystems through a globally coordinated governance system to connect economic development with local livelihood improvements. The Brazilian government set an ambitious target to restore 12 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. This thesis examines how stakeholders manage multi-scalar relations of governance and institutional systems for restoration in the Brazilian Amazon in order to explore how performance and outcomes are socially and geographically embedded in hybrid power dynamics. I demonstrate these processes across the diverse roles of state, market actors, communities, and individuals, through the application of global production networks, feminist political ecology, and forest landscape restoration frameworks to advance the environmental governance literature. As an empirical representation, the research focuses on case studies in the southeastern Amazon. The governance of the restoration network in Brazil is formed by a myriad of forces connecting disparate stakeholders, involving regulations, global funding, actor-specific decision-making, community participation, and technological developments. Formal institutions commonly take a highly technical approach, and excessive bureaucratization has decentralized responsibility, but not authority, from the governments. However, the dispersed nature of restoration networks across multiple stakeholders illustrates alternative levels of engagement, beyond the state’s power. Innovative seed supply and direct seeding have initiated approaches based on local knowledge in the Amazon. Diverse community groups are adapting local institutions for restoration with significant livelihood improvements, including indigenous and women's participation in seed collection. Community-based models are feasible for matching the plant material sources required to achieve Brazil's restoration pledge with considerable and positive socioeconomic outcomes.
... They are more likely than men to be tied to their living environment through a deep knowledge of plants animals and local ecology." [4] Women, and subsequently children, have become the most vulnerable to ecological destruction, but they are also seen as being the closest to nature, making their love and attention towards environmental issues the most plausible solution for a better future. Recognizing these intersections makes ecofeminism a valuable lens through which to view the important connections between struggling women and children and their environments, as well as an outlet for mutual support and advocacy. ...
Ecofeminism, like the social movements it has emerged from, is both political activism and intellectual critique. Bringing together feminism and environmentalism, ecofeminism argues that the domination of women and the degradation of the environment are consequences of patriarchy and capitalism. Any strategy to address one must take into account its impact on the other so that women's equality should not be achieved at the expense of worsening the environment, and neither should environmental improvements be gained at the expense of women. Indeed, ecofeminism proposes that only by reversing current values, thereby privileging care and cooperation over more aggressive and dominating behaviors, can both society and environment benefit. This article considers the heritage of ecofeminism as a multiply braided political praxis and an intellectual position. It examines key critiques of earlier perspectives, before exploring its more recent developments. It considers its relationship with, and potential to enhance other feminist and environmental approaches, particularly those concerned with feminist political ecology and environmental justice.
Mahasweta Devi is a literary stalwart who has written vehemently for a social cause. As an activist writer, she has explored, studied and presented an authentic portrait of the tumults of the lives of tribal community in India. Her texts present a rare critique of our socio-political-economic structure that is blind towards its own discrepancies. Douloti, the bountiful is yet another piece of work by the writer that seems to explain ‘all about tribal life’− the cycle of exploitation, chronic poverty, hunger, deprivation, bonded slavery, prostitution, marginalisation, the pernicious nexus amongst the rich, powerful and power-mongering elites and so on. The present paper is an attempt to make a deep study of the work and to trace the modus operandi of exploitation, as shown by the writer, with special emphasis on how women are made to suffer differently.
Anti-feminists, anti-environmentalists, and ableists use memes of activist Greta Thunberg, especially representations of her face, to angrily depict her as irrational and a monster. Participants in these interlinked groups create straw versions of feminist activists and distinguish men’s purported rational development of civilisation from emotional girls, women, and nature. Individuals perform such contemptuous operations, as I argue throughout this article, by misrepresenting Thunberg’s climate and feminist platform and shifting the debate from her environmental advocacy to her embodiment and emotions. I closely read these texts and employ academic literature on anti-feminisms, straw arguments, and straw feminisms to suggest how anti-feminists render simplified figurations. Given my consideration of how anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, and ableist positions are enmeshed in dismissing Thunberg’s activism and physiognomy, I also outline environmental scholarship that addresses gender and disability studies literature on Asperger syndrome and enfreakment. These are complicated critical gestures, but they are necessary since the over 3,000 memes that I studied, and the associated politics, function by simultaneously dismissing girls, women, feminism, the environment, and people with disabilities. Such an analysis of online texts is pressing since anti-feminisms are designed to disqualify feminist thinking about oppression and the vitality of feminist dialogues with related political movements.
Dress or clothing normally represents or reflects the belief system, tradition, and identity of a society. India being a multicultural nation is befitting example especially when it comes to its northeastern states. It is a true emblem of multiculturalism and diversity perfectly reflected through its dresses. The northeastern states depict an integrated picture of rich bio and socio-cultural diversity. And this is true about Meghalaya. The tribes of Meghalaya, namely Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo follow the matrilineal societal structure and maintain a close relationship with nature. Pradip Kurbah’s Khasi film Onaatah: Of the Earth (2016) illustrates how social views around women are formed in the different spaces of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ and its repercussions. The film revolves around the life of a rape survivor and her journey towards healing from the consequences of the grotesque act upon her body and depicting society’s reaction to such an incident. This paper draws on ecofeminist ideology to understand the director’s use of dress as a narrative tool in the film to show the association between the protagonist, Onaatah, and nature, and also trace upon the impact of nature in giving Onaatah a new perspective and healing in the process. The ecofeminist perspective is instrumental to the analysis of the film in relation to the society being matrilineal in its practice of kinship but patriarchal in authority and thus in its treatment of the marginalised – women and nature.
This article explores a collaboration between Virago Press and the Body Shop (TBS) to shine a light on feminist and women’s business, what they have shared historically and how they could work together in late twentieth-century Britain. It uses as a lens the 1991 sale of a Body Shop book, Mamatoto: A Celebration of Birth, to Virago Press. The processes and outcome raise thorny questions: how can political commitments lead to business innovation? How can business support political aims? What kinds of deals can be done between divergent ‘activist’ businesses, and what kind of identification between feminist entrepreneurs supports such deals? Mamatoto, sold alongside a range of mother and baby toiletries of the same name, was important to Virago commercially at a time of economic precarity and expressed TBS’s growing interest in combining marketing with social justice campaigns. Yet the book’s representation of women in developing countries points to neo-colonial elements in the white, middle-class ‘mama market’ of the 1990s, a market which TBS especially cultivated but which contradicted the principles of the women’s movements Virago aimed to serve. The Mamatoto deal thus arguably involved political compromise, even if it was good business. Yet, the partnership also reflects the strategy and strengths of both Virago (established 1974) and TBS (1976) as enduring and iconic women-centred businesses. TBS simultaneously pioneered fair-trade initiatives and a ground-breaking practice of ‘social’ audit, while Virago was developing more inclusive, multi-cultural and transnational approaches to its work, including in a contemporaneous production of a cookbook with the development charity Oxfam. Understanding their struggles to align value chains and combine purpose and profit remains positive and instructive for would-be feminist entrepreneurs today.
Social work theory has had an inconsistent record in regard to
adequately addressing the “environment” in all of its aspects. In the past, social work theory has focused overwhelmingly on the social environment of those whom the profession serves, and has ignored or minimized aspects of clients’ physical and natural environment. In recent decades, however, social work has more adequately theorized the importance of all aspects of environment. The “idealist” and the “structural” approaches to connecting social work and the environment have brought us closer to adequately theorizing the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice. Social work’s theoretical perspectives on the environment can now extend their scope and usefulness if they draw insights from political economy, and deploy a range of public policy ideas to shape improved social programs and new tax and transfer mechanisms. In these ways, the discipline and profession of social work can make substantial contributions to attaining the linked goals of environmental sustainability and social justice.
As environmental justice concerns become more widely embedded in environmental organizations and policymaking, and increasingly the focus of academic study, the gender dimension dissolves into an exclusive focus on race/ethnicity and class/income. While grassroots campaigning activities were often dominated by women, in the more institutionalized activities of organizations dominated by salaried professionals, gender inequality is neglected as a vector of environmental injustice, and addressing this inequality is not considered a strategy for redress. This paper explores some of the reasons why this may be so, which include a lack of visibility of gendered environmental injustice; professional campaigning organizations which are themselves gender blind; institutions at a range of scales which are still structured by gender (as well as class and race) inequalities; and an intellectual academy which continues to marginalize the study of gender—and women's—inequality. The authors draw on experience of environmental activism, participant observation, and other qualitative research into the gendering of environmental activity, to first explore the constructions of scale to see how this might limit a gender-fair approach to environmental justice. Following this, the practice of “gender mainstreaming” in environmental organizations and institutions will be examined, demonstrating how this is limited in scope and fails to impact on the gendering of environmental injustice.
This contribution offers a response to Melissa Leach's paper ‘Earth Mothers and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell’, published in an earlier issue of Development and Change. Leach's article examined the rise and fall of the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’ in environment and development discourses. Specifically, it appeared concerned with the role of ‘the northern ecofeminist’ in popularizing this figure, and the notion that women have a special relationship with the environment. This response points to the reliance on the figure of the ‘northern ecofeminist’ as a foil to gender and development (GAD) discourses, and situates this anxiety over the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’ in the context of some key feminist debates of the 1990s. Conflicts between GAD scholars and ecofeminists can be understood as one manifestation of tensions over essentialism in feminism. Attending to how conflicts over essentialism have been worked through in feminism could productively inform efforts to think through the nexus of gender, environment and development.
The notion that women are ‘closer to nature’, naturally caring for land, water, forests and other aspects of the environment, has held powerful sway in certain development circles since the 1980s. Along with the rise in global environmental concern, ‘women, environment and development’ (WED) perspectives gained ground among many donor agencies and NGOs, complementing and sharing core assumptions with earlier-established ‘women in development’ (WID) discourses. The materialist dimensions of WED were bolstered by fables about women's natural, cultural or ideological closeness to nature grounded in varieties of ecofeminist analysis. This proved a seductive mix for agencies wishing simultaneously to promote environmental protection and WID, as well as for certain forms of feminist activism and sisterhood-construction, such as those around the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. This contribution revisits these narratives and the politics of this strategic fix in the development of international environmentalism and explores the sustained critiques of these ecofeminist fables by feminist scholars and activists from the early 1990s onwards. It provides a critical review of the approach to gender and the environment in some current donor, NGO and other policy documents, which draw little from the feminist critiques of the 1990s. The author reflects on how, and for whom, women–nature links might have practical or strategic value today.