ECO-FEMINISM
Deep Ecology explores the reduction of human’s environmental connections and awareness. In order for our rogue species to survive and for Nature to survive us, we need increased intimacy, knowledge, and admiration for nature. This could lead us back to the realm of Kinship. Kinship—the awareness once again, of Oneness between our alienated selves and the rest of creation. Loren Eisley, an early pioneer of ecology and connection writes, “Do not forget your kin or the green world “from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster.”
Eco-feminism accepts this disaster as the truth of our modern world, and explores the reciprocal implications of ecological and gender crisis. Eco-Feminism contains both a theory of domination and a strategy for change. It sees that both women and nature are victims of men’s abuse. Both are ideological products of the culture of control that began in the witch-hunts and the-ironically-named operiod of the late middle ages called ‘The Enlightenment’. While fashionable post-modernism enjoys splitting factions in a safe world of ideas, life is hurting.
Feminist objectives fit “with movements for ecology, against capitalist accumulation, surveillance, military power, and industrialization, but the truth is that most women can only enter politics on a capitalist/patriarchal agenda, and everywhere, feminists and eco-activists are obliged to think, talk, dress like technocratic men.” (Ariel Saleh).How can we change patriarchy, train patriarchy to hear our voices, and the voices of voice-less nature? Here are a few of my most important teachers on these questions, who explore and explain the deeper yearnings of Eco-Feminism.
ECO-FEMINIST TEACHERS
Carolyn Raffensperger
We are the land. And the water and the trees and the soil microbes. This is not a New Age statement. It’s a medical statement; a scientific statement. The Precautionary Principle is a revolutionary idea that turns our culture’s use of science on its head. It states that when you have uncertainty, you should take precautionary action. That we prevent harm, rather than fix it or clean it up afterwards.
We think science (and business) can solve all our problems. We’ve separated emotions, values, and ethics from most all of our decision making. We pretend that decimal points are more real than morality, or than love. There’s nothing currently in how we do science or business that says we should prevent harm. It’s all about managing risk.
Really, the only precautionary principle that’s working is that we mustn’t harm profits and the processes of production. That’s what guides all decision making— imaginary sets of transactions we carry out with green paper. If there were a precautionary principle, we wouldn’t be using fossil fuels right now. We might have used human ingenuity and creativity to create a transportation system that would honor our place on earth. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have any technology, we just wouldn’t have one that is so fundamentally destructive.
Joanna Macy
Systems Crisis—We live in a time of enormous fragility, violence, and gradual collapse. Economic, political, biological, social, ecological collapse. Can you feel it? We need to be pioneers of the soul, to stand, with full attention, to the miracle of being embodied in this time. We are witnessing the ripping out of the social safety net, and the ripping out of Earth’s life support systems at once. We’re in perpetual war, permanent war, against other humans and against biological systems. This year alone, B.P. and Fukushima, and it seems our “leaders” learn nothing from the past.
This is suffering. We were born now in order to see it. Not to pave it over, not to bury our heads in the sand, but to witness these layers of unraveling.
There will never be another civilization like this one, because we’ve used it all up, as if there won’t be life after us. At most, there will be Bronze Ages, or even Iron Ages to come. Maybe the loss of biodiversity will mean no more complex life forms, nothing aerobic that requires oxygen. Maybe we are witnessing the unraveling of the basis for conscious life forms. What makes oxygen? Forests and phytoplankton. Try going to a dinner party and raising these concerns. People don’t want to think about it. But subconsciously, we all know it’s true that we are destroying life as we know it.
Because we’re bred in a hyper-individualistic society, we’re reductionist in nature. We believe our grief is personal, is a result of our own, private biography. We get sad about being sad and we shut it down, but we’re all in grief for the world. Dare to feel it—Dare to suffer WITH our world. I am not an isolated capsule of ego. Compassion means to suffer with. You of the boundless heart.
Systems Theory — Our shared life. Caring springs from radical inter-being. Inter-existence. We need this planet like we need our next breath. Wake up to your belonging to each other; wake up to your power together. What can you do together? (‘power’ isn’t oil or coal or nuclear. Power is what we can do together. Energy is what we have.) “Let this darkness be a bell tower, and you the bell, and as it batters you feel how your pain becomes your strength.” (Rilke)
How do we transform despair and apathy? I am inseparable from the living earth. I am it’s expression. My humanness, your humanness is merely the most recent stage of your existence. Get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as species only recently emerged from the rainforest. So that “I am protecting the rainforest” becomes “I am part of the rainforest, most recently emerged into thinking; I am protecting myself” (J.Seeds) we must stop thinking of environmentalism as based in sacrifice; it’s an enlarging of perspective. Through widening circles of self-identification, we vastly extend the boundaries of our self-interest to include all life. We are not separate! When the self is widened and deepened we see that the protection of nature is actually the protection and love for ourselves.
This society contracts our experience of Time. We grab and we run. We’re always busy. Technology moves so fast! All of capitalism is based on short term thinking and technologies that speed everything up. Our true age is not our human age in this life; it’s cumulative. We are life on earth’s age: 4 billion years old. We are the universe’s age :14 billion years old. We need to begin to act our age! We need to speak and work and act from the authority of our billions of years.
Ecofeminism argues that the war against nature waged by The Industrial Growth Society arises from more ancient patterns of domination. Patriarchy, and millennia of male rule, divorces mind from body, man from nature and women, emotion from reason. The western world has virtually ignored our relationship to the natural world.
Power over vs. power with. Domination and dualism makes for delusions of separateness and invulnerability. We believe we need to be guarded behind gates, fortresses of weapons protect us. But, we need to become more sensitive. (Did anyone ever tell you you were too sensitive? Not possible!) Living systems evolve, not by erecting walls to their environment, but by opening more widely to the currents of energy and information. They require constant interaction and the most intricate possible connections and flexible strategies and responsiveness. As life forms evolve in complexity and intelligence, they shed their armor, grow sensitive, vulnerable protuberances (lips, tongues, ears, fingertips) to better sense and respond, to better connect to the web of life and weave it further. Our power-over mentality, our need to be In Control, is dysfunctional, as is our economy which depends on infinite growth in a finite world. Male domination and patriarchy just narrow our awareness and cut us off from participation in life; our responses are far fewer than we need in these times. Women know how to respond. Women are more flexible and sensitive and connected. Relationships is what we DO. (discuss)
This world is ALIVE. The Gaia Hypothesis shows that the earth is a single, living entity. We are all like fetuses in her body. The photo of earth from outer space, in 1968 created the environmental movement. Rachel Carson’s book, silent spring, that same decade warned of pesticide poisoning, mobilizing both love for the earth and an awareness that life on earth is being destroyed.
Joanna’s questions for students— 1. What do you love about being alive. Be specific. 2. How is it for you to be sensitive and aware of the crises on earth? 3. What are the gifts you feel you bring, what energizes you about being alive in this time of crisis?
Ariel Salleh—
The most urgent and fundamental political task is to dismantle ideological attitudes that have severed our human belonging to nature. We mut learn to acknowledge our libidinal grounding in the cycles of nature, and connect our relational selves, both in psychology and in politics.
Women’s unpaid work is resourced by transnational capitalism just like the natural commons. Gender is the lowest common denominator of all dominations, the unique status of womyn as a source of countercultural values is so often ignored. But, one particular social group is better placed than any other to save the earth from human excess. Since the interest of womyn as a global majority lies in challenging existing structures, we are astonishingly well-place to constitute a political force.
It’s plain that the concerns of men in an industrial production system are quite different from those of women in the daily round of domestic and reproductive labors, our work which remains unpaid in most every society on earth, to this day. What we need to save the natural world are values of care, modesty, connectedness—53% of the world is already educated into these behaviors.
Our inscribed gender difference has left us historically outside of the institutions of our society, and our skills provide a means of resistance to this irrational excess of a capitalist patriarchy that we have little egoic need to preserve. Like the political status quo, post-modernisms’ practice of deconstruction is limited and cannot GO anywhere—it is ahistorical. The making of an earth democracy must take into account subsistence farmers and indigenous hunter-gatherers and WOMEN as participating citizens.
But, often the terrain of ecofeminism is reduced to the feminist controversy over whether women’s politics should be guided by the principle of “equality”, modelled by men’s institutions, or the principle of gender difference, which puts us down there with nature. Many Equality Feminists are wary of discussing women in connection with nature because this is loaded by centuries of using this argument to keep women in their place as closer to nature. And Nature is so disregarded in any of patriarchy’s terms besides pure exploitation, these women fear that drawing any attention to biological differences will play into men’s hands. It’s a double bind, that women either side with nature and tighten their own subordination, or seek liberation by disconnecting from nature and abandoning the natural world that supports all life to its fate as a resource.
Both ecology and feminism are split internally between old and new thinking—liberal environmentalists lobby for licenses to pollute and trade carbon taxes, and liberal feminists lobby for anti-discrimination legislation. Radical enviros and feminists envision appropriate technology, collaboration with indigenous movements, and want communal governance.
All double binds are merely problems that need re-framing. Seen as distinct from men’s lot, women’s activities are designed to protect life. We’re not closer to nature than men in any ontological sense, but attaining the prize of masculine identity depends on men distancing themselves from that fact. They leave all alliance with the earth, but they leave behind a hostage—women.
Women do life maintenance work, like nature does. While men maintain distance and separation, negotiating for their interests as they dominate, conquer, compete, extract, and accumulate, our voices are largely silenced. The maintaining of comfortable habitats and cohesive communities is the most highly productive work of society, but in patriarchy, these tasks are ignored and unpaid. Holding means to minimize risk and reconcile differences rather than to fight about them.
Though our holding labors to protect and nurture life, Mother—as Other—becomes unconsciously associated with food and excrement (dirt), marking out the boundaries of the body–– me vs. not me, and human vs. nature. Women’s holding labors are imperative as a solution to unfettered masculinity. For example, the social position of women, the sexual division of labor that subjugates women, the exclusion of women from waged work, the mechanization of the world (which legitimized the exploitation of women and nature), and women as the machine for the production of new workers.
M/Other is the other side of ego, and jokes armor men from the fear and fascination with oral, anal, genital excretions—all the transitional swarming that threatens to include Him. Death becomes as problematic as birth, the other end of lived time where humanity recedes back into nature. But, against the spills and smells of birthing and dying which frame women’s lives, the church, the state, and science fail to orient men in enduring time. Men have aggressive sports, property ownership, control of self and all others, and the preoccupation with personal potency to assuage the emptiness of the ungrounded self.
At childbirth, it is the man who lacks. Why else should the act be so shrouded by secrecy, hushed voices, and medical mystification? Nevertheless, paternity—basically a property relation, soon reinstates the correct order of things. The sense of dislocation in masculine reproductive consciousness is very pervasive in the western tradition, and it goes hand in hand with the suppression of women’s actual contribution. If men cannot produce life, they can certainly appropriate it, and thus fatherhood becomes a right, and fatherless children are damned as bastards and illegitimate.
Patriarchy is the power to transcend natural realities with historical, man-made realities. For men, the compulsion to produce has brought the rest of life on earth to the brink of annihilation. Possessing the ability to create culture and all its accountments, men mine, drill, build cities, make war. In an attempt to bridge this experiential fracture from the life process and ‘natural time’, the alienative consciousness of men has invented compensatory entities, such as god, the state, laws, history, science, and technology.
Patriarchal relations rest on the shocking reversal of material (maternal) reality. The unresolved violence that hovers around the memory of the original break with nature must constantly affirm itself by consuming the energy of the Other—women and nature.
So much of theory and status quo suppositions beg gendered scrutiny. We must look outside the personal horizon of shared masculine significances. But, the profound split between masculinity and femininity is rarely a political concern beyond the rubric of Feminism. Men’s commercial ideas of progress and fascination with mechanical models ignores the agonies of industrialization. Women’s holding labors are imperative as a solution to unfettered masculinity.
For ex: the social position of women, the sexual division of labor that subjugates women, the exclusion of women from waged work, the mechanization of the world (which legitimized the exploitation of women and nature), and women as the machine for the production of new workers need to be included in any discussion of solutions.
The feminist concept of the body is key to understanding the roots of male dominance and the construction of female social identity, as well as the consolidation of patriarchal power and the male exploitation of female labor. We are the power by which the body is produced. And so men in power must insist that god is male, and that minds rise above bodies. For women, the body is what the factory was for male workers—the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance. Masculine agency produces knowledge by splitting subject and object, and then dividing the object into separate, discrete units in order to re-make it. This is “the frightened dualism of transcendent subjectivity”.
For a future world to be healing for women, nature, and men, men must strive to share these holding labors. This will be emancipatory all around. Holding means to minimize risk and reconcile differences rather than to fight about them. Holding is a way of seeing with an eye towards maintaining the harmony, resources, and skills necessary for sustaining life in safety. It’s the attitude of world protection, world repair. It’s also the ultimate expression of adaptability and reflexivity. Holding is exemplified by The Precautionary Principle. Holding opposes the scientific method of separation, which is the work of resisting entropy.
Unlike the scientist , the mother cannot invent categories to deny what’s natural and messy. Men in power seem to be possessed of an obsessional drive for artificial principles vs. a sense of place, which negates separation and duality with enfoldment and resonance. The most urgent and fundamental political task is to dismantle ideological attitudes that have severed our human belonging to nature. If womyns’ lived experiences of conservation were given legitimacy, it could provide an immediate and living social basis for the alternative consciousness that radical men are trying to formulate as an abstract ethical construct.
The most radical activist politics develop when one comes to understand the dynamics of how one is oppressed and how one oppresses others. We need connections and coalitions. Enlightened rationalism makes interconnections invisible or unlikely. There is no language to oppose “rationalism” or “Cartesian dualism” that doesn’t sound kooky. This is the last domino that must fall in order for equality and our survival to be realized. Our over-socialized version of dualism/ “reality” deletes objective nature or turns her into a human construct. Where is that voice to protect hollowed-out life on earth?
Economic transnationals (corporations) need nation states the way men need wives. To service industry, pacify the underlings, and repair the territorial body. Business now milks the state to provide free infrastructure and cultural legitimization. The cost of economic justice for a masculine proletariat means increased sexual abuse, racism, and environmental assault. Today’s conquistadors are the officers of the WTO and The World Bank. The feminization of poverty was the first effect of the development of capitalism. capitalism is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. Waged labor today = enslavement, for which women have paid the highest cost—with their bodies, their resources, and their lives.
A corporation is just a legal entity designed to absolve men from liability for their decisions based on greed. It’s dissociated from consequence and totally unnatural. It will never see the web of ecological relations as real. We need an international Eco-Feminism Security Council to fight the monoculture of savage corporate capitalism
Here’s (another male genius)— Karl Marx on historical agency and radical chains—
“A class must be formed which has radical chains; a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society. A class which is the dissolution of all classes; a sphere of society which does not claim a specific redress because the wrong done to it is not a particular wrong, but wrong in general…a sphere which cannot finally emancipate itself without therefore emancipating all other spheres.”
Marx never saw us out there. He couldn’t ever have assumed that socialist progress paves the way to human liberation if he had looked at history from the viewpoint of women. So much of theory and status quo suppositions beg gendered scrutiny. We have to look outside the personal horizon of shared masculine significances. But, the profound split between masculinity and femininity is rarely a political concern beyond the rubric of feminism..
The witch-hunts were as important as colonialism and the theft of the land from European peasants for the development of capitalism. We are the power by which the body is produced. And so they must insist that god is male, and that minds rise above bodies.
The most radical activist politics develop when one comes to understand the dynamics of how one is oppressed and how one oppresses others. We need connections and coalitions. Enlightened rationalism makes interconnections invisible or unlikely. Can the rampant misogyny, sexual violence, economic poverty and cultural marginalization fracture a woman’s identity? Or can these conditions serve to wake us up? Dissociation, annihilation, decomposition can lead to a collision with the contradictions and break through our consciousness to create new possibilities.
How does historic change happen? We need an international Eco-Feminism Security Council to fight the monoculture of savage corporate capitalism, and the ubiquitous Western idea of Progress. This is our hope for the terrible future.
Sylvia Federici — It is said that “The witch was created by the land to speak for it.”
The witch hunts—the campaign of terror against women, which killed 10 million people, almost all of them women, over the course of 300 years during The Black Plague and Renaissance in medieval Europe, is unmatched by any other persecution in history. It is mostly unstudied. The witch-hunts destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and existences, redefining the main elements of social reproduction. The witch hunts occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of populations in the New World (native, indigenous), and the slave trade, the end of feudalism, and the start of capitalism. None of this is a coincidence.
They came at the time when the peasantry in Europe had reached its full power and was defeated, at a time of land-privatization, increased taxation, and the extension of state control over all life. The persecution of witches was class war, at a time when the price of food skyrocketed, land was denied to peasants, and they were taxed and worked to death. It was also a time of the rise of the male medical profession, and “the Enlightenment”— the rise of reason over passion. The witch hunts were a major political initiative to end idleness, sharing, and magic.
Magic permeated daily life, as did the human relationship to Nature. Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, alive, unpredictable, and that there is force in all things— water, trees, stones, substances, and words. Capitalism aimed to control nature—it must be ordered and exploited, enslaved, as women must. Worst of all to the sensibilities of Christian religion and capitalism, Magic seemed a refusal to work.
The incompatibility of magic with the capitalist work discipline and the requirement of social control are important reasons why a campaign of terror was launched by the state against the population. The subjugation of women went along with the subjugation of nature. There were, in the 15-17th centuries, Enclosures of land, of knowledge, and of social relations. Women were reduced to a standing resource for the reproduction of labor—to supply a population for work, and for war.
Why Women?
1. By virtue of their sexuality, which was the target of men’s lust, which we were blamed for. The church saw women as leading men astray from spiritual concerns.
2. Because of their control over reproduction, which was now demanded for war and capitalism’s need for labor.
3. For their ability to heal, (healers, midwives and witches)
The witch hunts were an attempt to criminalize birth control, and place the uterus at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor/money/power. A steady indoctrination of fear took place after 1550, with laws in Scotland, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and England.
In this “Century of Geniuses”, all of them male, of course—Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Shakespeare, Descarte—witchcraft became a favorite subject of debate for European intellectual elites. All these guys wrote pamphlets, plays, and papers that called for its punishment.
We know that the church hated women, blaming us for Eve’s sin. Also, holy men in all religions still blame women for tempting men away from holiness, and despise the vagina and all things physical and mysterious. Women were seen as “A temple built over a sewer”. Without centuries of the church’s misogynous campaigns against women, the witch hunts wouldn’t have been possible. Both Catholic and Protestant nations, at war with each other and agreeing on nothing, joined arms to persecute witches.
A bit of earlier history—between the 5th and 7th centuries, serfs got land and the ability to pass it on down- this created self-reliance and the means of their production/reproduction. In those days, they also had The Commons, which provided crucial resources and community. This supported cooperation and solidarity. Cooperation and solidarity was the substance of their social relations.
Female serfs in the Middle Ages were much less subservient, less differentiated from the men, both socially and psychologically. They were way more free than women were in later capitalist society. The only oppressive institution was the lord of the land’s authority over them—he controlled all aspects of persons and property, and he even got to take the virginity of female serfs on their wedding night.
But, in exchange for their labor, the land was given to the family, and women didn’t have to depend on their husbands for support. It was a true partnership. Women’s work wasn’t devalued as it would be later in a money economy, when housework ceased to be considered ‘real work’.
Most of the tasks of women serfs were done collectively, in cooperation with other women, and so what division of labor there was wasn’t a source of isolation, but of power and protection for women. It enabled women to stand up to men. But at all times, the power of women and their relations with men were determined by the struggles they fought, as communities, against the lords over master/servant relations.
By the end of the 14th century, the peasants’ revolts grew huge, massed, and armed. This conflict had run through the Middle Ages as a relentless class struggle, a theater of daily warfare. Eventually, peasants were in chronic debt and had to borrow against their future harvests, and thereby lost their lands, becoming landless peasants and homeless beggars.
The Heretic Movement was a movement of communal sharing and equality. It was mainly led by women. It was a conscious attempt to create a new society. Women formed their own communities and were present in the history of this movement as in no other aspect of medieval life.
And then, the Black Plague killed more than 1/3 of Europe’s population. This was a demographic disaster, a labor crisis. Women’s control over reproduction, which was acceptable and even necessary in medieval society because of limited land and the poverty of peasants, changed. The scene shifted from the persecution of heresy to witch hunting. Peasants began to refuse to work, more and more, and their resistance was powerful. Entire regions revolted, forming assemblies and recruiting armies to end the power of the lords.
After the Black Plague, idleness was condemned—vagabonds, beggars, and those refusing to work were persecuted. The European ruling class launched a global offensive that would change the history of the world in just three centuries, laying the foundation for capitalism. They planted deep divisions into the body of the proletariat that intensified and concealed exploitation. Men vs. women. Whites vs. Blacks and Natives in the colonies. Otherness feared and hated.
The destructive divisiveness of the monetization of economic life split the peasantry into classes. Women and Jew both became easy targets over time. Many women moved to the cities so they could live without men and form new communities. They became teachers and doctors and surgeons. In response we see a new misogynist backlash.
During the scenes of starvation, proletariat men weren’t allowed to marry. It was an attempt at population control, and rape was illegal, so they were frustrated and very angry at the masters. At last, efforts began to co-opt the youngest and most rebellious of the male workers by means of a vicious sexual politics that gave them access to free sex and decriminalized rape, provided the women were from a lower class. This worked to turn class antagonisms into antagonism against poor women. Poor girls were targeted for gang rape, and the proletariat men got to take revenge against the rich— their masters, by raping their property. Again, rape as a weapon of war, this time, class war. This de-sensitized the population to violence against women, and prepared the ground for the witch hunts.
“The half of humanity in charge of the whole world’s agenda is led by men addicted to power, control, and maintaining their dominance. It’s time to gather the women and save the world.” (Jean Bolen, Jungian psychologist and author)
Caroline Casey, great eco-feminist who speaks of “making humanity better citizens”, through the concept of “reciprocal altruism”, offers this prayer, for the world and for our survival— “May humans emerge (from this alienation) with ingenious altruism and participatory animism, as though everything is alive, as a form of manners.”
back to list