Ariel Salleh
The word ‘ecofeminism’ might be new, but the pulse behind it has always driven women’s efforts to save their livelihood and make their communities safe. From the Chipko forest dwellers of North India some 300 years ago to the mothers of coalmining Appalachia right now, the struggle to create life-affirming societies goes on. It intensifies today as corporate globalization expands and contracts, leaving no stone unturned, no body unused. The partnership of Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva symbolizes this common ground among women; it speaks of a grassroots energy that is found in a movement across all continents. Ecological feminists are both street-fighters and philosophers.
‘Only connect’ – this sums up what the perspective is about. Ecofeminism is the only political framework I know of that can spell out the historical links between neoliberal capital, militarism, corporate science, worker alienation, domestic violence, reproductive technologies, sex tourism, child molestation, neocolonialism, Islamophobia, extractivism, nuclear weapons, industrial toxics, land and water grabs, deforestation, genetic engineering, climate change and the myth of modern progress. Ecofeminist solutions are also synergistic; the organization of daily life around subsistence fosters food sovereignty, participatory democracy and reciprocity with natural ecosystems.
It was inevitable that Mies and Shiva would join together – with their strong postcolonial insights, exposé of the twentieth century ideology of ‘catch-up’ development and emphasis on women’s skills in protecting sustainable local economies.
Maria trained as a sociologist. Her doctoral thesis, published in English in 1980 as Indian Women and Patriarchy: Conflicts and Dilemmas of Students and Working Women, focused on the role conflicts of women in India, where she also investigated the capitalist exploitation of lacemaker housewives. At home she joined the feminist movement and was active in a number of social movements, including the anti-nuclear power and ecology movements. Experiences such as these shaped her teaching of women’s studies at the Institute of Social Sciences in the Hague. She mapped out a feminist research methodology, and went on to apply this in a critique of Marxism, with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Claudia von Werlhof. The book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale was brought out by Zed Books in 1986; in 1999 she co-authored The Subsistence Perspective; an autobiography, The Village and the World, was published in 2010.
Vandana gained a Canadian Ph.D. in theoretical physics. But as a young mother concerned by the nuclear threat to life on Earth, she left her job and set up a Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in her hometown, Dehradun. Her first book, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development, was published by Zed Books in 1989. It is an empirical account of India’s so-called Green Revolution, and its ultimate devastation of food crops, soils and farmers’ lives. Ecofeminism, co-authored with Mies, appeared in 1993. Others include Biopiracy, a co-edited reader on biotech in 1995; Water Wars in 2002; and Earth Democracy in 2005. A recipient of many awards, Shiva lectures widely, and has been cited as one of the world’s most influential women.
Mies and Shiva are the leading ecofeminist thinkers; however, from the 1970s, women everywhere were formulating ecological feminist responses to the health and environmental impacts of ‘modernization’ – a euphemism for the conversion of World War II technologies into profitable consumer items like nuclear energy or garden pesticides. An international literature of ecological feminism today runs to many books and articles, and it is taught as a university major, as well as in courses on ecological ethics, social and political thought, gender studies, human geography, environmental humanities and, most recently, political ecology.
That said, the public is not always clear on the relation between ecofeminism and feminism per se. The mainstream of ‘feminism’ has many tributaries, with different objectives and strategies. The most fundamental form of feminism is expressed when radical feminists highlight the contradictions of women’s everyday experience under masculine domination. On the other hand, cultural/spiritual feminists celebrate the liberatory potential of ‘feminine values’, even as they acknowledge that many such attitudes are historically imposed upon women. Socialist feminists examine the unique form of women’s economic exploitation as unpaid domestic labour in the global market. Liberal feminists simply seek equal opportunities for women, leaving this same capitalist society intact. Poststructural feminists look at how women are socially constructed and positioned by language in the popular media, literature, religion, law, and so on.
With ecofeminism, the political focus turns outwards. Its first premiss is that the ‘material’ resourcing of women and of nature are structurally interconnected in the capitalist patriarchal system. Ecofeminists may draw on other strands of feminism at times, but liberal and postmodern approaches are generally unhelpful for building global political alliances with workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, and other victims of the Western drive to accumulation. A critically important facet of ecofeminism is that it offers an alternative to the relativism that takes over as capitalist commodification homogenizes cultures. Mies and Shiva paint a sharp contrast between the social decay of passive consumerism and the social vitality of skilful, self-sufficient and autonomous livelihood economies: subsistence.
In the twenty years since Ecofeminism was first published, every key socio-economic and cultural–psychological problem discussed is still current – and many situations have even worsened under the stranglehold of global neoliberalism. The methodology of power is ‘divide and rule’. So, as Mies points out, affluent countries promote a public fear of terrorism in order to justify self-interested foreign interventions. Shiva observes that, in her own country, the imposition of free-trade-related structural adjustments lead to so much disorganization and stress that some communities report an 800 per cent increase in attacks on women. But the authors’ most powerful deconstructive lens is applied to the ‘reductionism’ of contemporary science, a dogma that is deeply informed by old patriarchal motivations.
Had the message of this book been assimilated twenty years ago, it might well have forestalled many unhappy outcomes. For example, Ecofeminism explains how both financial and environmental crises are sex-gendered. Moreover, the book anticipates why each crisis has now energized new kinds of political resistance – youth, precarious workers, refugees from the geographical periphery. Today, labour is joined, if not led, by alter-globalization activists from the World Social Forum, Via Campesina, the Indigenous Environmental Network, World March of Women, Occupy and Animal Liberation. The call is for degrowth, commoning and buen vivir. And I can think of no better primer than this book, for people wanting an inclusive diagnosis of our troubled times.
‘Only connect’. No other political perspective – liberalism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism – can integrate what ecofeminism does: why the Roma people are still treated like animals; why women do 65 per cent of the world’s work for 10 per cent of its wages; why internet images of sexually abused children generate millions of dollars; why chickens are bred only for livers and wings; or why the Earth itself is manipulated as a weapon of war. Species loss is endemic; peak water is on the way; soils are losing organic integrity; the atmosphere is riven by angry storms. As Vandana says: ‘We are in the midst of an epic contest … between the rights of Mother Earth and the rights of corporations and militarized states using obsolete world-views.’ This is the challenge of our generation.
Ariel Salleh,
The University of Sydney,
November 2013