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Empowerment and the Environment – How Sustainable Living is Feminist Living Achintha Liyanage During my lunch hour at work, I get weird looks. Sometimes, someone leans over to me and asks, “What is that you’re eating with?”. I simply say, “It’s a wooden spork – a spoon cross fork. I carry around with me everywhere I go and it’s made of bamboo. If I toss this over my shoulder, I know it won’t be harming the planet”. They stare as I continue to use my bamboo spork, then I pull out my metal straw and beeswax wraps. Sustainability and feminism are rarely conceptualised as related, but I am finding that the two are becoming increasingly intertwined as climate change and sustainability are being brought to the forefront of personal and political discourse. I think Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said it best when she stated, “a feminist is a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” Hence, feminism and sustainable living go hand in hand. The United Nations Bruntland Report in 1987 defined sustainable development as that which “ensures that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. If you are practicing
sustainable ideals, you are practicing feminism. The connection between climate change and feminism is more obvious in developing nations where the impacts of climate change affect women significantly more than men. Big nations, such as the United States, Australia and China, are responsible for most of the damage caused to the global environment, but it is developing countries that suffer the negative impacts of climate change in the most detrimental manner. Agriculture and food security, as well as water resources, energy, and human health are some of the many areas of society that are suffering due to our environmental irresponsibility. Climate change interacts with the social and political barriers faced by women in developing nations. Girls are notably less likely to get an education due to gender norms and therefore have less job opportunities as women, which leads them to engage in lower paid, agricultural-based labor to support themselves and their families. Unfortunately, these are the very careers that are threatened by extreme climate events and random changes to seasonal cycles. Further, it is most often the role of women to secure water, food and
fuel for basic necessities such as cooking and heating, for their communities. These women, mostly from rural areas, face the greatest disadvantages of climate change. Women in developed nations also face barriers to equal opportunity and resources b a s e d on our gender – the gen-
