eco-feminism: who is she?

Ava Kofman writes that “an attention to chemistry requires an attention to complicity.” Who and what is complicit in climate change and environmental annihilation? Who and what is changing the ‘chemistry’ of our atmospheres? In theory and in practice, ‘ecofeminism’ understands that the colonial and patriarchal structures and institutions that destroy and exploit the natural environment and non-human, and oppress and exploit marginalised communities, are one and the same — mutually enforcing and mutually beneficial. These structures and institutions rely on the denial of body autonomy, self-determination and basic human rights in order to justify profit and power-driven environmental destruction. Ecofeminism is an intersectional feminist lens that should necessarily include queer, Indigenous, disabled and ecological approaches, visions and experiences.

For example, in the state of Victoria, the Djap Wurrung Heritage Protection Embassy is currently fighting to protect sacred birthing trees on Djap Wurrung country that have been marked to be destroyed by Labor’s plans to build a highway. The survival of First Nations sovereign land is inseparable from First Nations culture and identity such as these sacred trees. Their protection must be considered inseparable from feminist reproductive justice.

The water in Flint, Michigan USA has not been clean for more than four years. The majority of the city’s population is African-American and about forty-one percent of Flint’s residents live in poverty. Access to clean water is not formally recognised as a fundamental human right but it is a fundamental human need that is unmatched in its necessity for health and survival. (It is worth remembering that we, too, are bodies of water). Flint’s water crisis is a further example of we can see how paradigms of environmental justice and reproductive justice emerge as they bear on the issues of environmental racism, reproductive health, and the neoliberal notions of ‘choice’ and ‘liberty’. Hazardous waste dumping, the pollution of urban water channels, de-funding health services and infrastructure are ways in which governments compartmentalise communities of color and poor communities globally.

Nancy Tuana, an American feminist philosopher, writes that the “boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world we are of and in is porous.” We should work to think similarly of the relationship between nature and culture. As ideologies, objects and practices the two can no longer be separated. Ecofeminism attempts to focus on ways of thinking than do not necessarily entail Western binary (or dual) structures that homogenise and normalise (such as heternormativity, disability as ‘unnatural’, and cisgender as the only gender), often times violently and lawfully. According to Australian ecofeminist philosopher, Val Plumwood, some other binaries we must interrogate and dissolve include mind/body, self/ other, private/public and production/reproduction. The survival of white supremacy and patriarchy need such binarisms to persist. Thus, we resist and repair.

How we protect and nurture the environments we live within is part of the demands that other grassroots movements for justice and equity ask us to visualise and strategise. In our lifetime we are likely not to see these utopias realised, but if, after Donna Haraway, we stay “with the trouble” and unsettle the norm, we’re probably heading in the right direction.