Melting glaciers, collapsing insect populations, and torrential downpours dowsing towns in
unrecoverable floods.
Climate change is upon us whether we accept it or not, and the environmental, social,
and economic damage in its leaving in its wake is catastrophic.
I’ll admit, that’s a pretty gloomy opener for a video, but these are harsh truths that
we have to face.
Coastal regions along Mozambique and farmlands across Nebraska drown under storm waters while
the the Earth continues to heat up.
Globally, we’re well on our way to surpass a tipping point that will change our climate
for good.
It’s easy to lose hope when you see these glimpses of what's to come.
But often that doom and gloom makes me start searching for a better way to navigate our
relationship not only with the environment, but also with ourselves.
Recently, I’ve come across ecofeminism as a possible lens through which to view our
current environmental crisis, and I feel like it’s important to see what it has to offer
as a theoretical framework.
So today, I’m going to answer two questions: What is Ecofeminism?
And Is it a useful lens for understanding our current social and environmental circumstances?
So first, what is Ecofeminism?
Ecofeminism is a term coined by Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974.
That’s my fellow YouTuber Miriam.
She creates awesome, environmentally focused videos on her channel Zentouro.
Ecofeminism is so much more than just a term, however, it’s a framework that seeks to
combine, re-examine, and augment the environmental and feminist movements.
Much like other theoretical frameworks, especially in the feminist movement, ecofeminism has
grown and evolved in the last 45 years since it first was coined.
But at its core, ecofeminism seeks to reveal the connection between the oppression of women
and the destruction of the environment.
In essence, a primary claim within ecofeminism is that women’s liberation is intertwined
with the liberation of the environment from human destruction.
And there are two key ways that this intersection is explored in ecofeminist scholarship: value
hierarchical thinking and oppositional dualisms.
These sound pretty complicated so let’s quickly break them down.
Value hierarchical thinking is simply the notion that cultures establish certain groups
as inherently more valuable than other groups.
Oppositional dualisms are ways of understanding certain social and cultural binaries.
For example, in many cultures, men and women are seen not only as intrinsically different
from each other but actually being opposites.
We talk about “opposite genders” all the time.
But that idea is itself constructed, instead of being a binary, gender exists on a spectrum.
In U.S. culture, humans and nature are another oppositional dualism.
And in most cases, cultural attitudes place more value on one side of the binary than
the other.
Often, these value dualities express themselves in language.
For example, nature is characterized as feminine in the phrases Mother earth or fertile ground,
both to be plundered, extracted and sown.
While slang terms for women tend to be animals, like vixen or chick.
Ecofeminists seek to show that this oppositional and hierarchical thinking helps justify the
subjugation of both women and nature.
And we can see this in an ecofeminist text’s Rape of the Wild, which explores the masculinized
violence directed at women and animals, and to a larger extent the natural world through
language, hunting, domesticity, technology, and slavery.
But ecofeminism has experienced a sharp backlash since it rose to prominence in the 1990s,
and indeed, it seems to have lost its following as a result of this pushback and its lack
of use by activists and scholars.
One of the primary critiques of ecofeminism is that it lacks analysis about race, class,
disability, and more, or as University of Michigan professor Dorceta E. Taylor points
out in an essay on the subject, that
In contrast to movements like environmental justice, Taylor and other ecofeminist critics
point out that ecofeminism does not have an intersectional framework; because ecofeminists
tend to focus only on nature and women, they miss the differences that exist between women.
As a result, much of ecofeminist analysis tends to ignore most women.
Anecdotally, scholar-activist Gwyn Kirk corroborates this claim in her description of a weekend
workshop in 1987 in New York.
She writes that the first afternoon of the workshop was led by a group of activists of
color talking about environmental racism and community organizing in their neighborhoods,
and it was a very lively discussion, but Kirk notes that on the second day she was involved
in a workshop on ecofeminism.
She describes it as “a small, white group that focused on feminist spirituality.”
So, when compared to a framework like that of environmental justice, ecofeminism seems
irrelevant for many activists and thinkers.
Although environmental justice initiatives are admittedly often less focused on gender,
they seem to build stronger coalitions in frontline and marginalized communities because
they focus on issues like toxic waste, pollutants, and food issues affecting people in their
immediate surroundings.
Ecofeminism, as critics like Taylor and Kirk point out, has lost its relevance in part
because it only functions at this high theoretical level that groups women of all identities
into one category.
In short, critics of Ecofeminism write that it's not a useful lens because it only allows
us to look at how gender and nature are connected, and in doing so it, leaves out an analysis
of how racism, classism, ableism and other methods of domination are intertwined with
environmental destruction.
Ultimately, ecofeminism is a way through which to interpret and connect the subjugation of
the environment and women.
It can definitely be a useful lens to understand how misogyny and the destruction of the natural
world are connected, but it often leaves out other crucial avenues of subjugation, including
race and class.
But ecofeminism can be more than just a framework, there are very real instances where gender
and environment collide in the world.
So, for more on a real-world look at the connections between gender and climate change, I’d highly
recommend checking out part two of this video on Miriam’s channel.