to the critique influence change edition
Vandana Shiva
When Maria Mies and I wrote Ecofeminism two decades ago, we were addressing the emerging challenges of our times. Every threat we identified has grown deeper. And with it has grown the relevance of an alternative to capitalist patriarchy if humanity and the diverse species with which we share the planet are to survive.
Ecofeminism was first published one year after the Earth Summit, where two important treaties were signed by the governments of the world: the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. There was no World Trade Organization. However, two years after Ecofeminism, the WTO was established, privileging corporate rights, commerce and profits, and further undermining the rights of the Earth, the rights of women and the rights of future generations. We wrote about what globalization implied for nature and women. Every crisis we mentioned is deeper; every expression of violence more brutal. Diverse Women for Diversity was created to respond to a corporate globalization that was reducing the world to monocultures controlled by global corporations. We were in Seattle, and collectively stopped the WTO Ministerial in 1999. Yet new ‘free trade’ arrangements, like the EU–India Free Trade Agreement, the US–India Agriculture Agreement, designed to put India’s food and agriculture in the hands of Monsanto, Cargill and Walmart, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the US–Europe Partnership, are being pushed undemocratically to expand corporate rule even as we see the ruins it has left: ravaged farms, displaced people, devastated ecosystems, disappearing diversity, climate chaos, divided societies, and an intensification of violence against women.
The intensification of violence against women
Violence against women is as old as patriarchy. Traditional patriarchy has structured our world-views and mindsets, our social and cultural worlds on the basis of domination over women, and the denial of their full humanity and right to equality. But it has intensified and become more pervasive in the recent past. It has taken on more brutal forms, like the murder of the Delhi gang-rape victim and the suicide of the 17-year-old rape victim in Chandigarh.
Rape cases and cases of violence against women have increased over the years. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reported 10,068 rape cases in 1990, which increased to 16,496 in 2000. With 24,206 cases in 2011, rape cases increased an incredible 873 per cent compared to 1971, when NCRB first started to record rape statistics. Delhi has emerged as the rape capital of India, accounting for 25 per cent of cases.
The movement to stop this violence must be sustained until justice is done for every one of our daughters and sisters who has been violated. And while we intensify our struggle for justice for women, we need to also ask why rape cases have increased 240 per cent since the 1990s when the new economic policies were introduced.
Could there be a connection between the growth of violent, undemocratically imposed, unjust and unfair economic policies and the intensification in brutality of crimes against women? I believe there is. I am not suggesting that violence against women begins with neoliberal economics. I am deeply aware of the gender biases in our traditional cultures and social organizations. I stand empowered today because people before me fought against the exclusions and prejudices against women and children – my grandfather sacrificed his life for women’s equality, and my mother was a feminist before the word existed.
Violence against women has taken on new and more vicious forms as traditional patriarchal structures have hybridized with the structures of capitalist patriarchy. We need to examine the connections between the violence of unjust, non-sustainable economic systems and the growing frequency and brutality of violence against women. We need to see how the structures of traditional patriarchy merge with the emerging structures of capitalist patriarchy to intensify violence against women.
Cyclones and hurricanes have always occurred. But as the Orissa supercyclone, Cyclone Nargis, Cyclone Aila, Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy show, the intensity and frequency of cyclones has increased with climate change.
Our society has traditionally had a bias against the girl child. But the epidemic of female feticide and the disappearance of 30 million unborn girls has taken that bias to new proportions and levels of violence. And it is to this context of the dynamics of more brutal and more vicious violence against women and multiple, interconnected forms of violence that the processes unleashed by neoliberalism are contributory factors.
First, the economic model focusing myopically on ‘growth’ begins with violence against women by discounting their contribution to the economy. The more the government talks ad nauseam about ‘inclusive growth’ and ‘financial inclusion’, the more it excludes the contributions of women to the economy and society. According to patriarchal economic models, production for sustenance is counted as ‘non-production’. The transformation of value into disvalue, labour into non-labour and knowledge into non-knowledge is achieved by the most powerful number that rules our lives: the patriarchal construct of GDP, gross domestic product, which commentators have started to call the ‘gross domestic problem’.
The national accounting systems which are used for calculating growth in terms of GDP are based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not in fact produce at all, because they fall outside the production boundary. The production boundary is a political creation that, in its workings, excludes regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence all women who produce for their families, children, community and society are treated as ‘non-productive’ and ‘economically inactive’. When economies are confined to the marketplace, economic self-sufficiency is perceived as economic deficiency. The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done in subsistence economies of the South, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy.
By restricting itself to the values of the market economy, as defined by capitalist patriarchy, the production boundary ignores economic value in the two vital economies which are necessary to ecological and human survival: nature’s economy and the sustenance economy. In these economies, economic value is a measure of how the Earth’s life and human life are protected. The currency is life-giving processes, not cash or the market price.
Second, a model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women’s work and wealth creation in the mind deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend – their land, their forests, their water, their seeds and biodiversity. Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world can only be maintained if the powerful grab the resources of the vulnerable. The resource-grab that is essential for ‘growth’ creates a culture of rape – rape of the Earth, of local self-reliant economies, of women. The only way in which this ‘growth’ is ‘inclusive’ is by its inclusion of ever larger numbers in its circle of violence.
I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked – both metaphorically, in shaping world-views, and materially, in shaping women’s everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence, including sexual assault, as we found out during a series of public hearings on the impact of economic reforms on women organized by the National Commission on Women and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.
Third, economic reforms lead to the subversion of democracy and privatization of government. Economic systems influence political systems; governments talk of economic reforms as if they have nothing to do with politics and power. They talk of keeping politics out of economics, even while they impose an economic model shaped by the politics of a particular gender and class. Neoliberal reforms work against democracy. We have seen this recently in the Indian government pushing through ‘reforms’ to bring in Walmart through FDI in retail. Corporate-driven reforms create a convergence of economic and political power, a deepening of inequalities, and a growing separation of the political class from the will of the people they are supposed to represent. This is at the root of the disconnect between politicians and the public, which we experienced during the protests that have grown since the Delhi gang rape.
Worse, an alienated political class is afraid of its own citizens. This explains the increasing use of police to crush nonviolent citizen protests, as we have witnessed in Delhi; the torture of Soni Sori in Bastar; the arrest of Dayamani Barla in Jharkhand; the thousands of cases against the communities struggling against the nuclear power plant in Kudankulam. A privatized corporate state must rapidly become a police state. This is why politicians surround themselves with ever-increasing security, diverting the police from their important duties to protect women and ordinary citizens.
Fourth, the economic model shaped by capitalist patriarchy is based on the commodification of everything, including women. When we stopped the WTO Ministerial in Seattle, our slogan was ‘Our World is Not for Sale’.
An economics of the deregulation of commerce and of the privatization and commodification of seeds and food, land and water, and women and children degrades social values, deepens patriarchy and intensifies violence against women. Economic systems influence culture and social values. An economics of commodification creates a culture of commodification, where everything has a price and nothing has value.
The growing culture of rape is a social externality of economic reforms. We need to institutionalize social audits of the neoliberal policies which are a central instrument of patriarchy in our times. If there was a social audit of corporatizing our seed sector, 28,400 farmers would not have been pushed to suicide in India since the new economic policies were introduced. If there was a social audit of the corporatization of our food and agriculture, we would not have every fourth Indian hungry, every third woman malnourished, and every second child wasted and stunted due to severe malnutrition. India today would not be the Republic of Hunger that Utsa Patnaik has written about.
We must see the continuum of different forms of violence against women: from female feticide to economic exclusion and sexual assault. We need to continue the movement for social reforms required to guarantee safety, security and equality for women, building on the foundations laid during our independence movement and continued by the feminist movement over the last half-century. The agenda for social reforms, social justice and equality has been derailed by the agenda of ‘economic reforms’ set by capitalist patriarchy.
And while we do all this we need to change the ruling paradigm that reduces society to the economy, reduces the economy to the market, and is imposed on us in the name of ‘growth’, fuelling the intensity of crimes against women while deepening social and economic inequality. Society and economy are not insulated from each other; the processes of social reforms and economic reforms can no longer be separated. We need economic reforms based on the foundation of social reforms that correct the gender inequality in society, rather than aggravating all forms of injustice, inequality and violence. Ending violence against women needs to also include moving beyond the violent economy shaped by capitalist patriarchy to nonviolent, sustainable, peaceful economies that give respect to women and the Earth.
The Anthropocene age: humanity’s choice to be destructive or creative
When we wrote Ecofeminism we raised the issue of reductionist, mechanistic science and the attitude of mastery over and conquest of nature as an expression of capitalist patriarchy. Today the contest between an ecological and feminist world-view and a worldview shaped by capitalist patriarchy is more intense than ever.
This contest is particularly intense in the area of food. GMOs embody the vision of capitalist patriarchy. They perpetuate the idea of ‘master molecules’ and mechanistic reductionism long after the life sciences have gone beyond reductionism, and patents on life reflect the capitalist patriarchal illusion of creation. There is no science in viewing DNA as a ‘master molecule’ and genetic engineering as a game of Lego, in which genes are moved around without any impact on the organism or the environment. This is a new pseudo-science that has taken on the status of a religion.
Science cannot justify patents on life and seed. Shuffling genes is not making life; living organisms make themselves. Patents on seed mean denying the contributions of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of farmers’ breeding. One could say that a new religion, a new cosmology, a new creation myth is being put in place, where biotechnology corporations like Monsanto replace Creation as ‘creators’. GMO means ‘God move over’. Stewart Brand has actually said ‘We are as gods and we had better get used to it.’
Scientists are now saying we have entered a new age, the Anthropocene age, the age in which our species, the human, is becoming the most significant force on the planet. Current climate change and species extinction are driven by human activities and the very large ecological footprint of our species.
Climate catastrophes and extreme climate events are already taking lives – the floods in Thailand in 2011 and in Pakistan and Ladakh in 2010, the forest fires in Russia, more frequent and intense cyclones and hurricanes, and severe droughts are examples of how humans have destabilized the climate system of our self-regulated planet, which has given us a stable climate for the past 10,000 years. Humans have pushed 75 per cent of agricultural biodiversity to extinction because of industrial farming. Between 3 and 300 species are being pushed to extinction every day.
How the planet and human beings evolve into the future will depend on how we understand the human impact on the planet. If we continue to understand our role as rooted in the old paradigm of capitalist patriarchy – based on a mechanistic world-view, an industrial, capital-centred competitive economy, and a culture of dominance, violence, war and ecological and human irresponsibility – we will witness the rapid unfolding of increasing climate catastrophe, species extinction, economic collapse, and human injustice and inequality.
This is the destructive Anthropocene of human arrogance and hubris. It is displayed in the attempt of scientists to do geo-engineering, genetic engineering and synthetic biology as technological fixes to climate crisis, the food crisis and the energy crisis. However, they will only aggravate old problems and create new ones. We have already seen this with genetic engineering: it was supposed to increase food production but has failed to increase crop yields; it was supposed to reduce chemical use but has increased the use of pesticides and herbicides; it was supposed to control weeds and pests but has instead created superweeds and superpests.
We are in the midst of an epic contest – the contest between the rights of Mother Earth and the rights of corporations and militarized states using obsolete world-views and paradigms to accelerate the war against the planet and people. This contest is between the laws of Gaia and the laws of the market and warfare. It is a contest between war against Planet Earth and peace with it. Planetary war is taking place with geo-engineering – creating artificial volcanoes, fertilizing the oceans with iron filings, putting reflectors in the sky to stop the sun from shining on the Earth, displacing the real problem of man’s violence against the Earth, and the arrogant ignorance in dealing with it.
In 1997, Edward Teller co-authored a white paper ‘Prospects for Physics-based Modulation of Global Change’, where he advocated the large-scale introduction of metal particulates into the upper atmosphere to apply an effective ‘sunscreen’.
The Pentagon is looking to breed immortal synthetic organisms with the goal of eliminating ‘the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement’. What is being done with the climate is being done with the evolutionary code of the universe, with total indifference to the consequences.
Synthetic biology is an industry that creates ‘designer organisms to act as living factories’. ‘With synthetic biology, hopes are that by building biological systems from the ground up, they can create biological systems that will function like computers or factories.’ The goal is to make biology easier to engineer using ‘bio bricks’:
Use of standardized parts, following a formalized design process, the engineers approach to biology makes biology an engineering discipline, requiring the reduction of biological complexity. An engineering approach to biology based on the principles of standardization, decompiling and abstraction and heavy reliance on information technologies.
However, ‘engineering’ plants and ecosystems has undesired and unpredictable ecological impacts. For example, the Green Revolution destroyed biodiversity, water resources, soil fertility and even the atmosphere, with 40 per cent of greenhouse gases coming from industrialized, globalized agriculture. The second Green Revolution has led to the emergence of superpests and superweeds and to the increased use of herbicides and pesticides.
Synthetic biology, as the third Green Revolution, will appropriate the biomass of the poor, even while selling ‘artificial life’. There is an intense scramble for the Earth’s resources and ownership of nature. Big oil, pharmaceutical, food and seed companies are joining hands to appropriate biodiversity and biomass – the living carbon – to extend the age of fossil fuel and dead carbon. Corporations view the 75 per cent biomass used by nature and local communities as ‘wasted’. They would like to appropriate the living wealth of the planet for making biofuels, chemicals and plastics. This will dispossess the poor of the very sources of their lives and livelihoods. The instruments for the new dispossession are technological tools of genetic engineering and synthetic biology and intellectual property rights.
Turning the living wealth of the planet into the property of corporations through patents is a recipe for deepening poverty and ecological crisis. Biodiversity is our living commons – the basis of life. We are part of nature, not her masters and owners. Bestowing intellectual property rights on life forms, living resources and living processes is an ethical, ecological and economic perversion. We need to recognize the rights of Mother Earth and therefore the intrinsic value of all her species and living processes.
The destructive Anthropocene is not the only future. We can undergo a paradigm shift. A change in consciousness is already taking place across the world. We can look at the destructive impact our species has had on the planet’s biodiversity, ecosystems and climate systems and prevent it. The ecological shift involves not seeing ourselves as outside the ecological web of life, as masters, conquerors and owners of the Earth’s resources. It means seeing ourselves as members of the Earth family, with responsibility to care for other species and life on Earth in all its diversity, from the tiniest microbe to the largest mammal. It creates the imperative to live, produce and consume within ecological limits and within our share of ecological space, without encroaching on the rights of other species and other people. It is a shift that recognizes that science has already made a change in paradigm from separation to non-separability and interconnectedness, from the mechanistic and reductionist to the relational and holistic.
At the economic level it involves going beyond the artificial and even false categories of perpetual economic growth, so-called free trade, consumerism and competitiveness. It means shifting to a focus on planetary and human well-being, to living economies, to living well, to not having more, to valuing cooperation rather than competitiveness. These are the shifts being made by indigenous communities, peasants, women and young people in new movements such as the Indignants in Europe and Occupy Wall Street in the USA.
This involves working as co-creators and co-producers with the Earth. This demands using our intelligence to conserve and heal, not conquer and wound. This is the creative and constructive Anthropocene of Earth Democracy, based on ecological humility in place of arrogance, and ecological responsibility in place of careless and blind exercise of power, control and violence. For humans to protect life on Earth and their own future we need to become deeply conscious of the rights of Mother Earth, our duties towards her and our compassion for all her beings. Our world has been structured by capitalist patriarchy around fictions and abstractions like ‘capital’, ‘corporations’ and ‘growth’, which have allowed the unleashing of the negative forces of the destructive Anthropocene. We need to get grounded again – in the Earth, her diversity, and her living processes – and unleash the positive forces of a creative Anthropocene.
We will either make peace with the Earth or face extinction as humans, even as we push millions of other species to extinction. Continuing the war against the Earth is not an intelligent option.
When I read the Introduction to the 1993 edition of Ecofeminism again, I find that today – twenty years later – hardly anything needs to change. All our concerns about the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature, all our anger and critique of the ruthless killing of our common Mother Earth are still the same.
Yet, I ask myself: Is everything just still the same? Or have things changed in a way that makes a new edition of Ecofeminism necessary? What are these new issues? Or is there a continuity between then and now? And is there an answer to the burning question: What is the alternative? In this preface, I’ll try to answer these questions.
What is still the same today?
Violence against nature and women
One of the problems that remains the same is the further construction of nuclear power plants all over the world. Around 1993 there were broad movements against atomic industries in the United States as well as in Europe. Thousands of people from all strata of society took to the streets. People in Germany understood immediately that nuclear power plants were not constructed primarily to produce energy for peaceful purposes but clearly to fight the Great Enemy in the East, the Soviet Union, whose realm began behind the Berlin Wall. People were afraid that a new world war would be fought from Germany.
Feminists joined this movement right from the beginning. We not only joined the demonstrations, the protest camps and sit-ins, but organized our own anti-atomic actions. During the demonstrations we organized special ‘feminist blocs’. One of our slogans was: ‘In Peace War against Women Continues’. The men did not like this slogan. It was clear that the damage done by nuclear fallout could not practically be removed from the Earth. We therefore saw a connection between violence against women and children and violence against nature. We also understood that the invention of nuclear power was not just the same as any other modern technology. The men who worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos did not just want to understand nature. They knew what they were doing. Brian Easley found out that they understood themselves as ‘fathers’. The bomb was their ‘baby’, their son. Before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, these men had codewords for the success of their invention. If there was a big explosion, the codeword was ‘Fat Man’. If there was only a small explosion, the codeword was ‘Little Boy’. After the ‘success’ of the bomb over Hiroshima they congratulated each other about the birth of their ‘Little Boy’. After Nagasaki, it was a ‘Fat Man’. Congratulations! Easley therefore called the inventors of the atom bomb the ‘fathers of destruction’.1
We understood for the first time that modern science was indeed a ‘brainchild’ of such modern ‘fathers of destruction’. To construct new machines they do not need human women as mothers. This insight led us to a fundamental critique of modern science, a science which knows neither feelings, nor morals, nor responsibility: in order to produce this technology, in all its avatars, they need violence. We also understood that women all over the world, since the beginning of patriarchy, were also treated like ‘nature’, devoid of rationality, their bodies functioning in the same instinctive way as other mammals. Like nature they could be oppressed, exploited and dominated by man. The tools for this are science, technology and violence.
The destruction of nature, the new weapons, genetic engineering, modern agriculture and other modern inventions are all ‘brainchildren’ of this supposedly value-free, reductionist science. We did not gain these insights sitting in the British Library, where Marx had studied capitalism. We learned our lesson in the ‘University of the Streets’, as I call it. We were activist scholars. We did not rely on book knowledge in the first place, but on experience, struggle and practice. Through a worldwide network of like-minded women we learned about their methods of protest, their successes and their failures. Like the women of Greenham Common in England we blockaded American missile bases in Germany. We joined hands with our American sisters to encircle the Pentagon with a chain of women. After this Pentagon Action a new global network was created: Women and Life On Earth. WLOE still exists today.
But the ‘fathers of destruction’ are incapable of learning, and they have short memories. They have not learned anything after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have not learned anything after the explosion of the nuclear plant in Chernobyl – an accident which according to them could never have happened. They continued to construct more nuclear plants in more countries and they promised these were absolutely safe and more efficient. Even Japan did not learn from Hiroshima and Nagasaki – or Chernobyl. The nuclear plant in Fukushima was also supposed to have the safest technology. When it exploded in 2011 the damage done to the people and to the environment was unbelievable and cannot be ‘repaired’. Yet, the new government in Japan promises again that it will build more and safer nuclear plants. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Fukushima are just names for a system which promises a better life for all but ends in killing life itself.
Violence against women and biotechnology
Before we understood the deep connection between women and nature we began to fight against the violence of men against women in our own house, our city, our country and the world. In this sphere we also started with action from which we gained our theoretical insights. Violence against women was indeed the first issue which mobilized women in the whole world.
In the 1970s we wanted to stop this violence in its various forms: rape, wife beating, mobbing, laws against abortion, the discrimination of women and sexist behaviour in all its manifestations. In Cologne, where I live, my students and I started a campaign for a shelter for women who were beaten by their husbands. We started it in spring 1976, and by the end of the year we had our Frauenhaus. In Part I of our book the reader finds an extensive description of this struggle. For me, the lessons learned during this struggle were fundamental. I first learned how widespread and how inhumane violence against women was in Germany, a so-called civilized country. But the most important lesson was: you cannot understand an unbearable social situation unless you try to change it. We did not use the usual methodological tools to ‘study’ the issue of domestic violence, namely to collect statistics to quantify that there was a ‘need’ for social intervention. We did not first read books about domestic violence in Germany. We started with street action and we demanded a house for battered women. The response to our action for a Frauenhaus was enormous, and we got it within seven months. This struggle taught me the most important lesson for my further life: experience and struggle come before theoretical study.
When I look back at this learning by social action, I often think about the famous Thesis 11 in Marx and Engels’ Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have interpreted the world in different ways. The point, however, is to change it.’ We tried to change the world before we began to philosophize on it. Yet we were not always successful in our efforts.
In spite of many feminist struggles against male violence, it has not disappeared. On the contrary, it has increased. It is still part and parcel of all institutions in our patriarchal societies. It is part of the economy, the family, religion, politics, the media, culture. It exists in so-called ‘civilized’ countries as well as in ‘backward’ countries. The forms of this violence may differ but the core is the same.
In the new wars which began as a consequence of 9/11, violence against women and children is a ‘normal’ side-effect, ‘collateral damage’. What is different today is the training young boys get through violent computer games. These games teach ‘boys’ of all ages how to fix on a target and kill an enemy. Boys grow up with this computer technology to fight against virtual enemies in virtual wars. No wonder they then practice this violence in real life. The computer games industry is one of the fastest growing in the world. The promoters argue that children can differentiate between ‘virtual’ reality and ‘real’ reality. Today, the new wars are largely fought by such ‘boys’ who sit behind a computer, click a button and send a rocket or a drone to kill ‘terrorists’ in Afghanistan or Pakistan. They attack and kill without feeling anything and without being attacked themselves. These new wars are as virtual for them as their computer games. But they are part of the military training which produces men who do not know what a loving relationship to real women and real nature is.
Therefore the ‘real’ violence against real women and minorities, such as migrants of racialized backgrounds, has increased and is more brutal than before. Yet more people consider male violence against women as genetically programmed.
Internet violence and Internet wars are new developments by the ‘fathers of destruction’. A further one is genetic and reproductive technology. Both have totally changed our world-view and anthropology. According to this development, most geneticists view human behaviour as mainly determined by our genes. Hence male violence is seen as consequence of their genetic make-up. The same is true for wars. Men are considered to be ‘warriors’ by nature. If they are not warriors, they are not true men. But violence of men against women and other ‘enemies’ is not determined by our genes. Men are not rapists by nature, nor are they genetically programmed to be killers of our Mother Nature, the origin of all life. This violence is a consequence of a social paradigm which began some 8,000 years ago. Its name is patriarchy. Although we did deal with patriarchy in our book of 1993, we did not talk about it specifically. It only emerged when the question came up why patriarchy did not disappear with the arrival of capitalism, or when we had to find a name for the paradigm that destroyed women and nature. Following Claudia von Werlhof we called this paradigm capitalist patriarchy.2
Patriarchal civilization is the effort to solve one problem of the male gender, namely the fact that men cannot produce human life on their own. They are not the beginning. They cannot produce children, particularly sons, without women. Mothers are the beginning. This was still evident to the old Greeks. Mothers are arche, the beginning of human life. Therefore men invented a technology for which mothers are not necessary. Technologies like the atom bomb or reproductive and genetic technology or the Internet are such ‘motherless children’.
Another form of violence against women is still the same as in 1993; the invention of reproductive and genetic technology. With the artificial fabrication of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, it was clear women had lost their age-old monopoly on birth. From then onwards, male reproductive engineers could produce a baby without women. Now genetic engineering could control all the genetic and biological processes by which human and animal life could be produced, reproduced and manipulated. It seems that man has at last become the creator of life. A human relation between a man and a woman is no longer necessary to create new human life.
We understood the far-reaching consequences of these inventions. At that time ecofeminists from all over the world started an international campaign against these new technologies. In 1985 we founded the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE). It was clear to us that the invention of reproductive and genetic engineering was not just the result of man’s innocent curiosity to understand nature, but, as with nuclear energy, biotechnology was invented to overcome the limits which nature had set to humans. And through the liberalization of the laws on patents, privatization and commercialization became a new market. These new patented commodities had been common property; now they could be bought and sold. Without gene technology Monsanto could not have become the giant which today controls agriculture and the global food industry.
But violence against women is not only a ‘side effect of modern science and war’ (which are interconnected); it is still a normal feature of modern, civilized society. Many people were shocked by the latest brutal gang rapes in India, but they were not shocked when test-tube babies were produced, from technology invented by men. They were not shocked when genetically manipulated rice was introduced in the course of the Green Revolution in India and other poor countries. Vandana Shiva was the first to show that the Green Revolution in India was not only destroying the vast diversity of varieties of rice preserved over centuries by women; it led also to a new wave of direct violence against women.
Another example of violence against nature, people and future generations is the restructuring of the whole world economy according to the principles of neoliberalism: globalization, liberalization, privatization and universal competition. Since the opening up of all countries to free trade, transnational corporations (TNCs) have shifted part of their production to ‘cheap labour countries’. Bangladesh is one of these countries. As we know, the cheapest of cheap labourers everywhere are young women. About 90 per cent of the workers in the textile factories in Bangladesh are young women. Their wages are the lowest in the world. The work conditions are inhuman: fires break out regularly and hundreds of women have died. There are no labour contracts, there is no work security. The factory buildings are not safe and the women often have to work more than twelve hours a day. The recent collapse of the Rana Plaza in Dhaka, in which more than 1,100 people were killed and many more wounded, most of them women, is an example of the brutal violence against women which this New Economy has caused. Without such violence capitalism could not continue its growth mania.
These are only some of the most dramatic cases of why we wrote Ecofeminism twenty years ago and which are still the same today. In fact they are even worse and have reached more threatening and gigantic dimensions. Therefore we have now to see what has changed since 1993.
What is different today?
The first thing that comes to mind when I ask this question is the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, the event which has since been referred to only as 9/11. For the first time in its history, the United States realized it was vulnerable. President George W. Bush immediately coined a name for these criminals who destroyed the WTC, the symbol of global capitalism. They were terrorists. And terrorism became the new enemy of the entire ‘free world’. Bush also named the ideological background which had inspired those terrorists, namely Islam. After 9/11 all Islamic countries became suspect as possible breeding grounds for terrorists and terrorism. Thus, the old enemy of the free world, Communism, was replaced by a new one: Terrorism and Islam. It is breathtaking to see how fast this new enemy changed public and private life in the USA and later in the whole world. Immediately a new law was passed, the Homeland Security Act, through which citizens and the country would be protected from the threat of terrorism. NATO states in Europe followed the USA and adopted similar security laws immediately and without great opposition from their parliaments. They introduced the same airport security checks as those in the USA. In the course of time this system of control became more refined and generalized, until eventually the security systems of the United States as well as those of other NATO states could spy on each citizen. At the same time new wars were started against countries with a Muslim majority. The first of these was the invasion of Afghanistan by American troops. Iraq was the next target.
At first I thought the true goal of these new wars was to gain control of the oil reserves in these countries. But what struck me immediately, particularly with regard to Afghanistan, was that part of the legitimation of this war, apart from eliminating Al Qaeda, was to liberate women from their backward, Islamic traditions, such as wearing a headscarf or the hijab. Not only the USA, but also its European NATO partners, Germany, France, the Netherlands and others, appeared on the new war scene as the great liberators of women! Whenever and wherever have wars been fought to ‘emancipate’ the women of the enemy? Everybody knows that the women of the enemy are the first victims of the victors. They are raped, brutalized and humiliated. Now foreign men are supposed to emancipate them by ‘deveiling’ them? This is the most ridiculous justification of modern war ever heard.
What is also different today is the new crisis in the rich countries of the West, first in the USA and now in Europe. Nobody knows when and how it will end. Politicians are at their wits’ end, as are economists and managers of the big corporations. All of a sudden poverty has returned to the West. Countries in southern Europe are more affected by the crisis than those in the north. In fact, the new crisis has split the eurozone into two parts: the richer North and the poorer South. Greece, Spain, Italy and Cyprus are so indebted to mighty banks like the Deutsche Bank that they have virtually become beggars, dependent on loans from Germany and the other richer countries.
What makes today’s crisis different from earlier ones is the exhaustion of the resources which could earlier be used for the recovery of the economy. Oil, gas and raw materials such as coal, iron and other metals have become scarce. But what is more dangerous is the exhaustion, poisoning or destruction of the vital elements on which all life on Earth depends: water, soil, air, forests and, last but not least, the climate. When these vital elements are no longer there or when they are substantially damaged, life on our planet Earth is no longer possible.
What is the alternative?
More and more people, particularly young people, feel that they have no future in this scenario. They begin to rebel against this murderous system, against the dominance of money over all life, and they demand a fundamental change. Occupy Wall Street inspired a similar ‘Blockupy’ protest in front of the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. Large demonstrations against austerity politics in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy show that people want a change. In North Africa people are also demanding change. When their rebellion started it was first called the Arab Spring by the Western media. People’s anger was directed against corrupt and dictatorial regimes. They demanded democracy and jobs. But what change do they mean? Do they just want to remove a dictator and corruption or do they want a totally new system based on a new vision of the world?
When we wrote Ecofeminism we asked the same questions from a woman’s point of view. What could be an alternative? What would a new paradigm, a new vision be? We called this new vision the ‘subsistence perspective’. Even today I do not know how better to conceptualize what a new world could be. Yet one thing is clear to me: this ‘new world’ will not come about with a Big Bang, or a Great Revolution. It will come when people begin to sow new seeds of this ‘new world’ while we are still living in the old one. It will take time for these seeds to grow and bear fruit; but many people have already started sowing such seeds. Farida Akhter from Bangladesh talks about this process in her book, Seeds of Movements: Women’s Issues in Bangladesh.3 She shows that mainly women will be the sowers of these seeds because they and their children have suffered most in the old world of the ‘Fathers of Destruction.’
Several years ago I was invited by the Association of Catholic Rural Women to a conference in Trier. I was supposed to give a talk about subsistence. I was at a bit of a loss. What should I say? How should I explain subsistence to rural women in the town where Marx was born? But when I entered the hall I saw a big banner, fixed to the platform, with the inscription,‘ The World is Our Household’. It was October and the women had brought the fruits of their work during spring, summer and autumn: cabbages, beans, carrots, potatoes, apples, pears, plums, beetroots, and flowers too. They had put everything on the platform before me. What else could I say about subsistence than: The World is Our Household! Let’s Take Care of It.
We consider the new edition of this book also as a contribution to this care-taking. And we thank Zed Books for including it in its new series.
July 2013
Notes
1. Brian Easley, Fathering the Unthinkable. Masculinity, Scientists and the New Arms Race, Pluto Press, London, 1986.
2. Claudia von Werlhof, ‘The Failure of Modern Civilization and the Struggle for a “Deep” Alternative: A Critical Theory of Patriarchy as a New Paradigm’, in Beiträge zur Dissidenz 26, Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt, 2011.
3. Farida Akhter, Seeds of Movements: On Womens’s Issues in Bangladesh, Narigrantha Prabartana, Dhaka, 2007.