Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism Definition

Ecofeminism refers to theories and political practices that make connections between feminisms and environmentalisms. Its basic claim is that the oppression, inequality, and exploitation of certain groups — people of color, women, poor people, LGBT people, third-world people, animals — are theoretically and structurally related to the degradation and overexploitation of the environment. Ecofeminism thus involves a double intervention: feminist issues must become part of environmentalist agendas and analyses, and environmental issues must become part of feminist agendas and analyses. Beyond this basic insight, there is little agreement over the specific character or mechanism connecting social inequality and environmental harm.

The Woman/Nature Question

Both an activist and an academic phenomenon, ecofeminism appears across most parts of the world and many disciplines — women’s studies, philosophy, literary criticism, religious studies, history, sociology, geography, cultural studies, and ethnic studies. A central area of dispute is how to conceptualize the “woman/nature” connection. Are women the majority of grassroots environmental activists because the gender division of labor assigns them domestic responsibilities — familial health, food purity, community viability, and, especially in the global South, access to potable water, fuel, and small-scale agricultural sustainability? Or are women drawn to environmental concern because Western cultures ideologically associate them with nature, the body, and animals? These positions are not necessarily opposed, and each can be framed in constructivist or essentialist terms; but the apparent biological essentialism of some early ecofeminist arguments — that women have a special role to play in environmentalism — has been one of the movement’s major internal and external criticisms (Sturgeon 1997).

Origins and Activism

The cluster of ideas called ecofeminism — that nature and women are similarly exploited by a patriarchal system’s disregard for life, health, and equality; that access to clean water, air, and food belongs to a broader feminist conception of human rights — has inspired activists since the late 1970s. Versions of ecofeminism emerged in anti-nuclear, anti-militarist, anti-colonialist, and anti-corporate-globalization movements, and in environmental campaigns around species extinction, wilderness preservation, animal liberation, environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, and GMO foods. Ecofeminism cannot be characterized as a single social movement; it appeared more or less simultaneously in several political arenas in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially feminist anti-nuclear activism in the US (Starhawk 1982), England, Australia, and the South Pacific. The label is often attributed to Françoise d’Eaubonne, the French activist who used the term in 1974, though it was more likely a neologism produced independently by feminist activists across different environmental movements (King 1990). Questions of racism within white feminism, and ethnocentrism within Northern/Western hegemonic feminism, were contentious from the start.

Internationally, beginning at the 1980 World Women’s Conference in Nairobi, feminist activists from the global South insisted that deforestation, desertification, and water purity were central to women’s struggles against poverty and colonialism, pressing for more materialist analyses than the strongly spiritualist and ideological strand of 1980s Western ecofeminism provided (Agarwal 1992). Critics charged that “ecofeminism” stood for universalistic, essentialist conceptions of the woman/nature connection that ignored unequal exposure to environmental harm. This critique accompanied growing environmental-feminist activity in NGO and UN arenas — often under the banner of “gender and development” (Braidotti et al. 1994) — through organizations such as DAWN, WEDO, and WEED, and movements such as Kenya’s Green Belt movement (led by Wangari Maathai, awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize) and India’s Chipko movement (Sturgeon 1997). Policy effects followed: Agenda 21, from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, contained a chapter on women’s stake in environmental issues, and the environment figured prominently at the 1995 Beijing Conference for Women. Nor is ecofeminism only Western: Vandana Shiva’s activism and writing raised corporate ownership of genetic materials as simultaneously a feminist and environmental concern, though some critics find her vision of women subsistence farmers essentialist and ahistorical. Since the 1970s the Toronto-based journal Women and Environments International has chronicled environmental feminist activism worldwide.

Theoretical Development

Academic ecofeminism spans so many disciplines that its literature is difficult to survey, and the label itself has become controversial — much contemporary scholarship prefers “environmental feminism,” “ecological feminism,” “feminist environmentalism,” or variants such as ecowomanism and materialist ecofeminism. Founding texts displayed the field’s disciplinary variety and its theoretical difficulties: Sherry Ortner’s “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” (1974), Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land (1975), Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature (1978), and Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980) — the last also foundational for feminist science studies, whose relationship with ecofeminism has been intertwined but sometimes antagonistic. These works showed the power of analyzing sexism and environmental overexploitation together, but also the danger of lumping all women together without cultural, racial, class, and historical distinctions. Merchant’s later histories — Ecological Revolutions (1989), Earthcare (1996), Reinventing Eden (2004) — carefully account for race and class.

Early scholarship located the twin problems of women’s oppression and environmental exploitation in a Western dualism that separates and unequally values men/women, culture/nature, reason/emotion, mind/body, white/black, human/animal. The philosophers Karen Warren (2000) and Val Plumwood (1994) developed detailed critiques of this dualist framework, implicating it in racism, colonialism, and speciesism as well; Greta Gaard (1997) and Catriona Sandilands (1999) showed how heterosexism too is upheld by dualist structures; Carol Adams (1990) analyzed the relation between animal exploitation and sexist/heterosexist ideologies. Shiva (Staying Alive, 1988), Maria Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation, 1986), and Mary Mellor (Breaking the Boundaries, 1992) traced the dangers of capitalist and colonialist economies for both women and environment, while Joni Seager (Earth Follies, 1993) implicated the patriarchal structures of corporations, governments, and militaries — the three major causes of environmental problems. As correctives, Warren and Merchant propose a “partnership ethic” that treats nature not as other or resource but as an active co-constructor of reality with human beings; Donna Haraway’s non-essentialist notion of “naturecultures” similarly unsettles binary difference, and Chris Cuomo (1998) offers “flourishing” as a guide to just, flexible, and sustainable social and environmental relationships.

Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice

Sociological work has analyzed particular movements, explored the overlap of feminist and environmental values, and surveyed ecofeminist theory (Norgaard 1996), though social movement historians have often ignored ecofeminism — perhaps because of its dispersal across so many political contexts (Sturgeon 1997). Robert Gottlieb (Forcing the Spring, 1993) and Dorceta Taylor (1996) challenged standard environmental histories centered on wilderness preservation and white male founders such as John Muir, recovering working-class, female, and African American movements as antecedents of feminist environmentalism and environmental justice. Ecofeminism and environmental justice share similar concerns from related frameworks — the one stressing gender, the other race — and both end by emphasizing the interconnection of race, class, gender, and environmental inequality. The relationship remains fraught, since the ecofeminist label was associated early on with white feminists not necessarily allied to environmental justice concerns (Kirk 1997); yet the many women activists in grassroots environmental justice organizations, and their struggles with sexism within them (Di Chiro 1992), make the interrelation worth exploring, as work by Laura Pulido and Devon Peña recognizes. Rachel Stein’s collection Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality and Activism (2004) attempts to bridge the divide.

Future Directions

The future of activist ecofeminism may well lie in directions that make the label disappear entirely. Ironically, as the term fades, its cornerstone — the interconnection of social inequality and environment — has been widely accepted by the global justice movement, and combined environmentalist-feminist analysis has become an increasingly critical scholarly tool. Seager (2003) identifies four areas where the best recent feminist environmental scholarship engages transnational, postcolonial, and poststructuralist challenges: animal rights, public health, global political economy, and population. Newer work extends the critique of dualism into a general analysis of how ideas of nature and the natural legitimate power in a global political economy (Sturgeon, The Politics of the Natural, 2006) — a broadened agenda centered on the interrelated crises of growing inequality and planetary environmental degradation.