ecofeminism: a primer

ecofeminism - a primer lauren lancaster, usyd enviro convenor 2021, explains...

Climate change is a human issue, so it necessarily intersects with human inequalities.

Ecofeminism is a movement and school of thought that conceives of environmental degradation and gender inequality as interconnected. Arising from of the synapse between ecological and feminist movements in the seventies and eighties, it emphasises the common root of domination in human society — a patriarchal-capitalist power structure.

Patriarchy manifests itself as a hierarchical social order whereby men claim superiority and power over women. This establishes binary power divisions that extend to the way man exerts power and domination over the environment and land.

Capitalism establishes a system whereby the creation and accumulation of wealth at the lowest possible cost to the bourgeois class is the key marker of societal success and progress.

There is a similar binary to be found here to that which is established by patriarchy — a community or individual’s success is measured by how well they can achieve capitalist domination through exploitation of workers and resources, just as a man’s success is reliant on the existence of gender inequalities and, inevitably, the exploitation and oppression of women.

Ecofeminist theory clarifies that a patriarchalcapitalist society ultimately results in a hierarchical structure that promotes the superiority of the white, male, “human” subject, forcing all things that constitute the “other” (including women, nature, and animals) to exist in binary opposition to such a subject and therefore be considered inferior. Women and nature are thus used by the white male in order to progress and prosper under capitalism.

Ecofeminism is an intersectional approach that should necessarily include queer, First Nations, disabled and spiritual approaches, visions and experiences.

It focuses on ways of thinking and being that consciously detach from Western binary structures that perpetuate “othering” and the dominance of a cis-male, oppressive hegemon.

Ecofeminism also allows us to consider real world environmental challenges through a gendered lens.

collage by Lauren Lancaster

For example, not only do women comprise 70% of the world’s poor (IUCN, 2015), poor women in rural areas are the most vulnerable to the material impacts of climate change. This is due to their dependence on natural resources and primary industry for their living and concurrent isolation from decisionmaking and leadership, which augments climate-driven threats to their food security and job stability (e.g. natural disasters, droughts, poor crop yields due to extreme weather, and insect plagues) (CDP, 2017).

Women are often the last to eat in traditionalist families, and the first to be removed from school or paid work in the event of financial insecurity (PLAN International, 2018). Climate change exacerbates stressors in unstable societies, and women are the first to experience the consequences. Close to home, we can look to the Djab Wurrung directions trees and protest actions. At the end of last year, the trees of the Djab Wurrung people in Northern Victoria (Grampian National Park), believed to be up to 800 years old, fell victim to the Victorian Labor government’s highway expansion plan and were cut down to make way for an inexplicable concrete bypass.

The trees were a deeply intimate cultural site for the Djab Wurrung people — Indigenous women have given birth beneath them for centuries, their blood mixing with the soil, and many Dreaming stories are connected to their trunks and branches.

As Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe lamented, ‘with the destruction of these sites, the spiritual tapestry that connects our culture and language with our natural environment is further severed and cannot be retrieved, except in the memories and stories of our old people.’ This spirituality is bound up both in gendered worship of motherhood and the physical importance of protecting the environment (particularly First Nations’ significant sites). There is thus a complex intersection of feminist and environmentalist justice here, that should be used to mobilise and anger us all.

Only once we realise the deep interconnectedness of gendered, First Nations and environmental struggles will our activism truly succeed. We achieve this by listening, educating and fighting together for a world that does away with old power and envisions a new, radical future.