Blog: Ecofeminism

The Road to Feminist Ecological Economics:

Alternative academic disciplines which can help minimise climate disaster: Ecofeminism and Environmentalism of the Poor.

Ecofeminism and Environmentalism of the Poor are two disciplines which attempt to have a more intersectional approach than mainstream environmentalism and feminism. Both attempts to explore our connection with nature and understand what underlying structures are at work in shaping the society we live in. Ecofeminism explains our ecological relationship with nature from a feminist point of view. Environmentalism of the Poor is a discipline, which looks directly at the environmental work being done by poor people, predominantly in the Global South, as a means of survival and not to save future generations.

Ecofeminism 

Ecofeminism has its roots in the environmental movements of the 1970s and initially started as a grassroots movement of, predominantly, women doing environmental work in their local communities to ensure an inhabitable planet for future generations. As the discipline has evolved and grown, many strands of ecofeminism have developed. Some strands favour a more academic approach to the topic, but the critics of this approach argue it often favours whiteness and fails to recognise the contributions done by Women of Colour. 


Ecofeminist scholars such as Donna Haraway and Vandana Shiva are prominent examples of some of the early writing in the discipline and their contributions have aided the understanding of our relationship with nature. 

Vandana Shiva, co-author of Ecofeminism with Maria Mies, is a trained physicist, who gains a lot of her material from her background of growing up and living in India. She is anti-GMO, anti-globalisation, and anti-capitalist-patriarchy (Shiva, 1993). Her main focus is on food subsistence and how to ensure food security in an increasingly unequal world. The introduction of capitalist development in agriculture has exacerbated poverty, especially for women who feel the effects of poverty more acutely than men. Shiva is an activist and advocate for the preservation of local knowledge, which the structures of globalisation easily overlook (Shiva, 1993, p. 65). The systematic erosion of diversity in the crops produced in local communities is preventing them from being self-sufficient. Additionally, the seeds used may be genetically modified to have a better yield, however, due to the monoculture in the crops, if there is a disease in the crops, it is likely the entire harvest will be infected (Ibid., p. 65).  

Donna Haraway a trained biologist turned socialist feminist writer, is a key figure in ecofeminist writing in rejecting the anthropocentric, or human-centred, understanding of the environment, favouring instead to see us as a part of a bigger picture. This understanding of the world is also helping us deconstruct the binaries, in which we understand the world and explore why we are conditioned to think that our human existence on earth is somehow separated by an invisible line from the existence of animals and nature. These binaries have been systematically built up to arrange society in a certain hierarchy, where humans and culture are ultimately more sophisticated than animals and nature (Haraway, 1991; Quijano, 2007). As we saw in the previous article of this series, this is very similar to the hierarchical structure, which the study of economics relies upon to ensure continued social reproduction. Haraway’s focus was around the idea of humans being as cyborgs, meaning the technology we use in our daily lives becomes a part of our human experience as we grow to depend on it. Again, blurring the imaginary lines between human and technology, nature, and culture (Haraway, 1991). 


Ecofeminism is a useful framework to help recognise the work done by women and carers across the globe, and it invites us to expand our horizons to what we consider valid knowledge. Ecofeminism is concerned with the link between the domination of women and the capitalist domination of nature (Archambault, 1993). This link can be found in the systematic devaluation of women’s labour and bodies and the systematic devaluation of natural resources. Also due to the unpaid reproductive labour many women do, they are most often the ones who feel the effects of environmental degradation first and most acutely (Nelson & Power, 2018, p. 81). The oppression felt by both women and nature is a useful frame of reference to understand the types of exploitation and appropriation that both undergo in a capitalist-oriented production regime. As we examined in an earlier blog post, the lived experiences of women are systematically erased from the visible sector of the economy, when they are relegated to the private sphere of care work. Conversely, when women enter the labour market, they are expected to perform to the same level as men, while still performing the unpaid work required to ensure social reproduction (Ibid., p. 83). Nature is similarly treated as a free commodity, to be exploited by the market and to provide free resources to ensure production, with little attention on how to sustain this model of production. 


The major issue with equating the experiences of women with that of nature is that it is highly gender essentialist, and it implies that women are inherently closer to nature than men. Additionally, this interpretation also supports heteronormative gender paradigms, without space for understanding gender on a wider spectrum independent from the traditional understanding of biological sex. Excluding men, trans- and nonbinary people, from the relationship with nature that women allegedly have due to our abilities to menstruate and give birth, is invalidating men of their experiences of nature and their opportunity to be included in the solution in creating a sustainable world (Archambault, 1993). 

Another major point of contestation in ecofeminism is how it has developed into an academic discipline rather than an activist practice, which has alienated many from taking part in the production of knowledge on the subject.  As the notion that all women are somehow fundamentally closer to nature, enforces a certain gender essentialism, the development of ecofeminism being practised in middle-class, predominantly white, academic environments has left a mark on the discipline, which unfortunately has discouraged the participation of people of colour and working-class people. It has also meant that some ecofeminist writing is compatible with capitalist notions of green growth and a green economy, which does not challenge the structures of a capitalist status quo.


Environmentalism of the Poor 

Environmentalism of the Poor was introduced by Joan Martinez-Alier in 2002, as a new framework for understanding the environmental work done by poor people, predominantly in the Global South (Martinez-Alier, 2002). The field of study is the environmentalist works of poor people, as the name suggests, who have no choice but to perform the work to ensure their survival. Significantly, the people in question, will often not define themselves as environmentalists, as they are working to ensure their basic needs for survival. Examples of this type of environmental work are of rural populations living close to big factories, where their water sources have been contaminated by the spilt water or the land has become too polluted to be able to farm on it (Barca, 2012). The way Environmentalism of the Poor distinguishes itself from more traditional Environmentalism is by its focus on environmental justice and emphasis on rejecting anthropocentric ideologies as fundamental truth.


There are other types of environmentalism such as the Cult of Wilderness, which will argue for eliminating human contact with the otherwise pristine wilderness (Anguelovski & Martinez-Alier, 2014, p. 168). While there are merits to this approach, it falls short in that it fails to consider the lives and livelihoods of those people who live in close proximity to nature and live off the land. It is also well documented, that land under indigenous stewardship thrives to a larger extent than untouched nature. The creation of national parks and other protected nature reserves in the United States has even been used as a means of displacing Native Americans from their ancestral lands (Kantor, 2007). The understanding of the Cult of Wilderness has a very anthropocentric understanding of nature, as something separate from the human experience, which creates a false dichotomy between the human experience and nature. As such the preservation of nature through conservation is to allow nature to be able to produce the materials we need to sustain production. As we examined in the first blog post, nature has become commodified to support the production of goods but has not been valued in terms of the resources we extract from it. This means that one of the few arguments which are compatible with a capitalist system to protect nature is to ensure nature’s ability to replenish itself, and of course charging an entry fee to companies wishing to use the protected area for extraction (Anguelovski & Martinez-Alier, 2014).


A second prominent group are those who favour a regulated efficient growth strategy. The argument is that it is possible to sustain the current capitalist infrastructure, but at a more responsible pace than the large-scale extraction and appropriation of resources we have seen thus far (Anguelovski & Martinez-Alier, 2014; Balmford et al., 2002). The reliance on the commodification of nature in a capitalist society to ensure its continued value to society is key to understanding the motivation for this type of environmental work. The work can vary from ensuring private companies have access to extract resources from national parks to clearing areas of land to plant more equitable plants and trees. In short, eroding natural habitat for short-term private gain (Balmford et al., 2002, P. 952).


Comparison

What the two types of environmentalism explored above fail to address is the social justice aspect of environmental movements. Both adopt anthropocentric, “we-are-all-in-the-same-boat-type” narratives, which fail to address the disproportionate effect planetary degradation has on the poor, farmers, and poor farmers, who are among the first to feel the effect of the climate crisis. Environmental Justice is a movement concerned with the redistribution of land rights and even granting land similar rights and protections on par with human rights. Latin America has had many conflicts regarding Environmental Justice. In countries like Colombia and Ecuador, it has often centred around resource extraction and appropriation by multinational corporations (Chomsky & Striffler, 2014). Due to the unequal distribution of wealth and the power held by private multinational corporations, there is a very clear global hierarchy, which consistently favours the side of capital over nature. Countries in the Global North, also sometimes referred to as the “core” countries, are sustained by importing primary goods from the “peripheral” countries in the Global South. The Global North then produces consumer goods and exports the goods back to the Global South (Svampa, 2015). This means that the economies of many countries in the Global South are directly dependent on being able to export their primary resources, to generate revenue and increase aggregate income enough that their workers can afford to buy the commodities (Bernhardt, 2016, p. 98). This unequal global trade hierarchy sets some clear boundaries for the level of redistribution of wealth that can be done within countries in the Global South, as it is further entrenched by existing class structures within the country.


Another thing that differentiates Environmentalism of the Poor from ecofeminism or environmentalism can be found in its subjects. People who would probably not class themselves as environmentalists but are forced to act to survive, such as people living in the Amazon Rainforest (Chomsky & Striffler, 2014). While it may not seem radical to research and try to understand the livelihoods of people living in poor and rural areas, in academia, these are the segments of the population, who are often completely left out of serious consideration. Within an academic context, it is still rather controversial to consider knowledge produced outside of academia as valid, which leaves many people's lived experiences out of the production of discourse. For this reason, Environmentalism of the Poor is doing important work by validating and recognising the lived experiences of poor communities in the Global South.

The study importantly diverts from what Sunita Narain (2016) calls the Environmentalism of the Rich, who can afford sporadic and surface-level solutions to climate degradation. In the Global North, according to Narain, we can afford to only attempt to treat the symptoms of the climate crisis. Whereas poor people living in the Global South must address the underlying cause, as it is a matter of survival. 


Conclusion

To conclude this post, Ecofeminism and Environmentalism of the Poor combined can help us create a more holistic understanding of the dynamics of tackling the climate crisis. From the academic perspective ecofeminist scholars such as Haraway and Shiva, give us different tools to comprehend the oppression of women and nature, and the intersectionality of the structures that exploit nature. From Environmentalism of the Poor, we learn to understand the asymmetry of the human experience in a globalised society. A globalised world, where a disproportionate amount of the consequences of the climate crisis worst affect those who had the least impact in creating it and those most responsible can carry on without any major changes in their lives.

Bibliography

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Nanna Holmstrup