1. Introduction: Why We Wrote this Book Together
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva
A jointly-authored book usually suggests that the writers have long been involved in an on-going dialogue arising out of common reading and discussions. When the two of us began thinking about writing this book we had to face the fact that no such collaboration was possible. We live and work thousands of miles apart: one in the so-called South — India; the other in the North — Germany: divided yet also united by the world market system, that affords privileges to peoples in the North at the expense of those in the South, and, too, by history, language and culture. Our training and background also differ: Vandana a theoretical physicist, from the ecology movement; Maria, a social scientist, from the feminist movement. One had looked at the capitalist world system from the perspective of the exploited people and nature of the South, the other had studied the same processes as they affect women from the viewpoint of someone who lives ‘in the heart of the beast’. Could all these differences be overcome by good-will and effort? Moreover, was it appropriate at the present juncture even to try to write a book together, when all around people seem to be engaged in trying to discover their own particular identity, vis-a-vis sexual, ethnic, national, racial, cultural and religious difference as the basis for autonomy? Would we be accused of trying to create a new internationalism, under the banner of feminism and ecologism, when the old isms, particularly socialist internationalism, were collapsing? And too, in the South many women’s movements see feminism as a Western/Northern import and accuse white (European and North American) feminists of sharing in men’s privileges in their countries. Perhaps it was wiser to accept these differences, instead of trying to contain them within such a universalistic term as ‘ecofeminism’ — and instead, each of us should concentrate on our own work within our own countries and their cultural, ethnic, political and economic contexts and try to effect changes locally.
Nevertheless, these differences aside, we share common concerns that emerge from an invisible global politics in which women worldwide are enmeshed in their everyday life; and a convergence of thinking arising from our participation in the efforts of women to keep alive the processes that sustain us. These shared thoughts and concerns aim not to demonstrate uniformity and homogeneity but rather a creative transcendence of our differences. There are many reasons for our collaboration in this book. One is to make visible the ‘other’ global processes that are becoming increasingly invisible as a new world order emerges based on the control of people and resources worldwide for the sake of capital accumulation. Another is the optimistic belief that a search for identity and difference will become more significant as a platform for resistance against the dominant global forces of capitàlist patriarchy, which simultaneously homogenizes and fragments.
This capitalist-patriarchal perspective interprets difference as hierarchical and uniformity as a prerequisite for equality. Our aim is to go beyond this narrow perspective and to express our diversity and, in different ways, address the inherent inequalities in world structures which permit the North to dominate the South, men to dominate women, and the frenetic plunder of ever more resources for ever more unequally distributed economic gain to dominate nature.
Probably we arrived at these common concerns because our experiences and insights, and the analyses we have formulated, grew out of participation in the women’s and ecology movements rather than from within the cocoon of academic research institutions. In recent years we had increasingly been confronted by the same fundamental issues concerning survival and the preservation of life on this planet, not only of women, children and humanity in general, but also of the vast diversity of fauna and flora. In analysing the causes which have led to the destructive tendencies that threaten life on earth we became aware — quite independently — of what we call the capitalist patriarchal world system.
This system emerged, is built upon and maintains itself through the colonization of women, of ‘foreign’ peoples and their lands; and of nature, which it is gradually destroying. As feminists actively seeking women’s liberation from male domination, we could not, however, ignore the fact that ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ processes and ‘progress’ were responsible for the degradation of the natural world. We saw that the impact on women of ecological disasters and deterioration was harder than on men, and also, that everywhere, women were the first to protest against environmental destruction. As activists in the ecology movements, it became clear to us that science and technology were not gender neutral; and in common with many other women, we began to see that the relationship of exploitative dominance between man and nature, (shaped by reductionist modern science since the 16th century) and the exploitative and oppressive relationship between men and women that prevails in most patriarchal societies, even modern industrial ones, were closely connected.
We discovered that our own active involvement in the women’s and the ecology movements had coincidentally led us to a shared analysis and perspective. The search for answers had led us to similar theories, to similar authors for clarification and eventually to one another. Re-reading papers we had presented on various occasions and to different audiences revealed a spontaneous convergence of thought arising out of objective conditions to which we had each responded as women.
If the final outcome of the present world system is a general threat to life on planet earth, then it is crucial to resuscitate and nurture the impulse and determination to survive, inherent in all living things. A closer examination of the numerous local struggles against ecological destruction and deterioration, for example: against atomic power plants in Germany,1 against chalk mining and logging in the Himalayas;2 the activities of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya;3 and of Japanese women against food pollution by chemically-stimulated, commercial agriculture and for self-reliant producer-consumer networks;4 poor women’s efforts in Ecuador to save the mangrove forests as breeding-grounds for fish and shrimp;5 the battle of thousands of women in the South for better water management, soil conservation, land use, and maintenance of their survival base (forests, fuel, fodder) against the industrial interests, confirmed that many women, worldwide, felt the same anger and anxiety, and the same sense of responsibility to preserve the bases of life, and to end its destruction. Irrespective of different racial, ethnic, cultural or class backgrounds, this common concern brought women together to forge links in solidarity with other women, people and even nations. In these processes of action and reflection similar analyses, concepts and visions also sometimes emerged.
In South-West Germany, peasant women in the Whyl Movement were the most active in one of the first anti-nuclear power movements in that country. They established cross-border links with similar movements in Switzerland and France as well as with other movements in Germany, to intellectuals, students and to city-dwelling feminists. In this process they became conscious of the patriarchal men-women relationship; for many women this was the first step towards their own liberation.6 When, some years later, two of the movement’s leading women were interviewed they clearly articulated their vision of an alternative society, based not on the model of growth-oriented industrialism and consumerism but close to what we call the subsistence perspective.7 Other examples of women’s endeavours to overcome social fragmentation and create solidarity are Lois Gibbs’ opposition to the dumping of toxic waste and Medha Patkar’s to the construction of the Narmada dams. Women activists in the USA have led the campaign against toxic waste dumping, and Lois Gibbs’ strenuous and persistent efforts in opposing toxic waste dumping in the now notorious Love Canal outrage are well-known. As Murray Levine wrote,8 ‘If Love Canal has taught Lois Gibbs — and the rest of us — anything, it is that ordinary people become very smart, very quickly when their lives are threatened. They become adept at detecting absurdity, even when it is concealed in bureaucratic and scientific jargon.’
In the 1980s toxic dumps began to be sited in areas inhabited by poor and coloured people; today, the strongest resistance against this practice is to be found in these areas. For women fighting against toxic dumping, the issue is not just NIMBY (not in my backyard) but ‘everyone’s backyard’ (the title of a newsletter on citizen’s action). Joan Sharp, who worked at the Schlage Lock Company in North Carolina USA until the factory was closed to be set up as a maquiladora in Tecate, Mexico, exemplifies this solidarity. In March 1992, then unemployed, she went to Mexico as a representative of Black Workers for Justice in order to give the Mexican workers information on the Company and hazardous chemicals which she and others believe caused 30 of her co-workers to die of cancer. The 200 pages of documents she had brought described Schlage’s use of toxic chemicals, its contamination of the groundwater, and its failure to provide promised severance pay for production workers. None of the Tecate workers had been aware that Schlage had closed operations in San Francisco in order to take advantage of low wages in the Black Belt South, and then in Mexico.9 In Narmada Valley, Medha Patkar is leading India’s most vital environmental campaign against the construction of mega dams on the Narmada river. As she said in an interview: The concept of womanhood, of mata, [mother] has automatically got connected with this whole movement, although the concept of Narmada as mata is very much part of [it]. So if the feminine tone is given, both to the leadership and the participants — then [it all] comes together’.10
These examples show how the shared concern of countless women worldwide override their differences, and evokes a sense of solidarity that perceives such differences as enriching their experiences and struggles rather than as marking boundaries.
Why is it so difficult to see this common ground?
Some women, however, particularly urban, middle-class women, find it difficult to perceive commonality both between their own liberation and the liberation of nature, and between themselves and ‘different’ women in the world. This is because capitalist patriarchy or ‘modern’ civilization is based on a cosmology and anthropology that structurally dichotomizes reality, and hierarchically opposes the two parts to each other: the one always considered superior, always thriving, and progressing at the expense of the other. Thus, nature is subordinated to man; woman to man; consumption to production; and the local to the global, and so on. Feminists have long criticized this dichotomy, particularly the structural division of man and nature, which is seen as analogous to that of man and woman.11
Rather than attempting to overcome this hierarchical dichotomy many women have simply up-ended it, and thus women are seen as superior to men, nature to culture, and so on. But the basic structure of the world-view remains as also does the basically antagonistic relationship that, at the surface, exists between the two divided and hierarchically ordered parts. Because this world-view sees the ‘other’, the ‘object’, not just as different, but as the ‘enemy’; as Sartre put it in Huis Clos: Hell is other people! In the resultant struggle one part will eventually survive by subordinating, and appropriating the ‘other’. This is also the core of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, of their concept of history and progress. Evolutionary theory too, is based on the concept of a constant struggle for survival, on an antagonistic principle of life. These concepts are integral to what, since the Enlightenment, constitutes the European project of so-called modernity or progress.
Since Hobbes’ writings, society has been conceptualized as an assembly of social atoms, activated by antagonistic interests. Modern economic theory sees self-interest as the impulse of all economic activity. Later, Darwin ‘discovered’ a similar principle in nature. Accordingly, the symbioses, the interconnections that nurture and sustain life are ignored, and both natural evolution and social dynamics are perceived as impelled by a constant struggle of the stronger against the weaker, by constant warfare. Such a world-view militates against an appreciation of the enriching potential of the diversity of life and cultures, which instead are experienced as divisive and threatening. Attempts to rejoin the atomized parts lead only to standardization and to homogenization by eliminating diversity and qualitative differences.
An ecofeminist perspective propounds the need for a new cosmology and a new anthropology which recognizes that life in nature (which includes human beings) is maintained by means of co-operation, and mutual care and love. Only in this way can we be enabled to respect and preserve the diversity of all life forms, including their cultural expressions, as true sources of our well-being and happiness. To this end ecofeminists use metaphors like ‘reweaving the world’, ‘healing the wounds’, and re-connecting and interconnecting the ‘web’.12 This effort to create a holistic, all-life embracing cosmology and anthropology, must necessarily imply a concept of freedom different from that used since the Enlightenment.
Freedom versus emancipation
This involves rejecting the notion that Man’s freedom and happiness depend on an ongoing process of emancipation from nature, on independence from, and dominance over natural processes by the power of reason and rationality. Socialist utopias were also informed by a concept of freedom that saw man’s destiny in his historic march from the ‘realm of necessity’ (the realm of nature), to the ‘realm of freedom’ — the ‘real’ human realm — which entailed transforming nature and natural forces into what was called a ‘second nature’, or culture. According to scientific socialism, the limits of both nature and society are dialectically transcended in this process.
Most feminists also shared this concept of freedom and emancipation, until the beginning of the ecology movement. But the more people began to reflect upon and question why the application of modern science and technology, which has been celebrated as humanity’s great liberators, had succeeded only in procuring increasing ecological degradation, the more acutely aware they became of the contradiction between the enlightenment logic of emancipation and the eco-logic of preserving and nurturing natural cycles of regeneration. In 1987, at the congress ‘Women and Ecology’ in Cologne (Germany), Angelika Birk and Irene Stoehr spelt out this contradiction, particularly as it applied to the women’s movement which, like many other movements inspired by the Enlightenment ideas, had fastened its hopes on the progress of science and technology, particularly in the area of reproduction, but also of house- and other work. Irene Stoehr pointed out that this concept of emancipation necessarily implied dominance over nature, including human, female nature; and, that ultimately, this dominance relationship was responsible for the ecological destruction we now face. How, then, could women hope to reach both their own and nature’s ‘emancipation’ by way of the same logic?13
To ‘catch-up’ with the men in their society, as many women still see as the main goal of the feminist movement, particularly those who promote a policy of equalization, implies a demand for a greater, or equal share of what, in the existing paradigm, men take from nature. This, indeed, has to a large extent happened in Western society: modern chemistry, household technology, and pharmacy were proclaimed as women’s saviours, because they would ‘emancipate’ them from household drudgery. Today we realize that much environmental pollution and destruction is causally linked to modern household technology. Therefore, can the concept of emancipation be compatible with a concept of preserving the earth as our life base?
This contradiction will be further explored in the following chapters, particularly those dealing with biotechnology. But our critique of the Enlightenment emancipation-logic was impelled not only by an insight into its consequences for women, but also a concern for those victims, who, since the White Man’s march towards ‘the realm of freedom’ had paid for this freedom by the denial of their own subjectivity, freedom and, often, their survival base. As well as women, these include nature and other peoples — the colonized and ‘naturized’ — ‘opened up’ for free exploitation and subordination, transformed into the ‘others’, the ‘objects’, in the process of European (male) ‘subject’s’ emancipation from the ‘realm of necessity’.
From the perspective of these victims, the illusory character of this project becomes clear. Because, for them, this means not only, as noted above, the destruction of their survival base and so on but also that ever to attain (through so-called catching-up development) the same material level as those who benefited from this process is impossible. Within a limited planet, there can be no escape from necessity. To find freedom does not involve subjugating or transcending the ‘realm of necessity’, but rather focusing on developing a vision of freedom, happiness, the ‘good life’ within the limits of necessity, of nature. We call this vision the subsistence perspective, because to ‘transcend’ nature can no longer be justified, instead, nature’s subsistence potential in all its dimensions and manifestations must be nurtured and conserved. Freedom within the realm of necessity can be universalized to all; freedom from necessity can be available to only a few.
False strategies
These dichotomies, which result in false perceptions of reality are criticized especially because they have led and lead to false strategies, mainly vis-a-vis the issue of equality, that is, of helping the oppressed and exploited to emerge from their parlous situation. So far the only remedy has been the strategy of ‘catching-up development’, at both macro and micro levels. This strategy, which has been tried out, and failed, in the colonized ‘Third World’, was also applied in the socialist, and now, by ex-socialist, countries. Large sections of the women’s movement pursued the same strategy—of ‘catching-up’ with the men—through a policy of equalization, positive discrimination and special quotas for women in work, politics and education; in short, emulating the male model and sharing the privileges of the ‘victors’. In the USA, this equalization policy goes so far as to hail women’s participation in the actual combat forces of the US Army or Navy as a step towards their emancipation; a step ‘achieved’ during the Gulf War. Many feminists have rejected this equalization policy, refusing to share men’s privileges in our capitalist-patriarchal society. By and large, however, this policy is still regarded by many as mainly one that will ultimately procure the liberation of women as well as of other oppressed groups.
The global versus the local
The ‘global’ versus the ‘local’ now figures widely in many ecological and development discourses. A closer examination of these reveals that the interest groups that seek free access to all natural resources as well as to human labour and markets, often present themselves as guardians of the ‘world community’, ‘global peace’, ‘global ecology’ or of universal human rights and the free world market. The implicit promise of this globalism is that a ‘free world market’ will lead to world peace and justice. In the name of common or global goals, which de facto acknowledge the fact that we all are dependent on the same planet, they nevertheless claim the right to exploit local ecology, communities, cultures and so on. The victims are always local, for example, as is manifest in the aftermath of the Gulf War — a war justified by the apparently universal or global principle of justice, in the name of the ‘world community’, represented by the United Nations. The world was called upon to feel responsibility for liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. But, it is clear that the victims of this ‘liberation’ are local: Iraqi and Kuwaiti women and children, the Kurds, and the Gulf region’s environment.
The new ‘globalism’ which emerged after the Gulf War — the ‘New World Order’ — was propagated by US President George Bush. With the end of the old superpower confrontation this New World Order is projected as a harbinger of world peace and harmony. But it is simply the Old World Order in a different garb.
As many of our book’s subsequent chapters will emphasize, the ‘global’ in the global order means simply the global domination of local and particular interests, by means of subsuming the multiple diversities of economies, cultures and of nature under the control of a few multinational corporations (MNCs), and the superpowers that assist them in their global reach through ‘free’ trade, structural adjustment programmes and, increasingly, conflicts, military and otherwise. In unified Germany, there are now racist attacks on immigrants, there are civil wars in the erstwhile Soviet Union and Eastern European countries recently ‘integrated’ in the world market, and ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka, India and Africa — all of which point to new divisions and closed borders for the people, whereas for TNCs’ investments and markets all borders are erased, in order to facilitate the grand design of a ‘New World Order’, of ‘global integration’.
In the dominant discourse the ‘global’ is the political space in which the dominant local seeks global control, and frees itself of any local and national control. But, contrary to what it suggests, the global does not represent universal human interest but a particular local and parochial interest which has been globalized through its reach and control. The G-7, the group of the world’s seven most powerful countries, dictate global affairs, but the interests that guide them remain parochial. The World Bank does not really serve the interests of all the world’s communities, but is an institution in which decisions are based on voting, weighted by the economic and political power of the donors. In this decision-making, the communities who pay the real price, the real donors (such as the tribals of Narmada Valley), have no voice.
The independence movements against colonialism had revealed the poverty and deprivation caused by economic drain from the colonies to the centres of economic power. The post-war world order which saw the emergence of independent political states in the South, also saw the emergence of the Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and the IMF which, in the name of underdevelopment and poverty, created a new colonialism based on development financing and debt burdens. The environment movement revealed the environmental and social costs generated by maldevelopment, conceived of and financed by these institutions. Protection of the environment now figures in the rhetoric and is cited as the reason for strengthening ‘global’ institutions like the World Bank and extending their reach accordingly.
In addition to the legitimacy derived from co-opting the language of dissent is the legitimacy that derives from a false notion that the globalized ‘local’ is some form of hierarchy that represents geographical and democratic spread, and lower order (local) hierarchies should somehow be subservient to the higher (global). Operationalizing undemocratic development projects was based on a similar false notion of the ‘national interest’, and every local interest felt morally compelled to make sacrifices for what seemed the larger interest. This is the attitude with which each community made way for large dams in post-independent India. It was only during the 1980s when the different ‘local’ interests met each other nationwide, they realized that what was being projected as the ‘national interest’ were the electoral and economic interests of a handful of politicians financed by a handful of contractors and industrialists who benefit from the construction of all dams such as Tehri and the Narmada Valley project. Against the narrow and selfish interest that had been elevated to the status of the ‘national’ interest, the collective struggle of communities engaged in the resistance against large dams started to emerge as the real though subjugated common interest.
The breakdown of universalist (Western) ideologies and the emergence of cultural relativism
There are a number of people who interpret the end of the East-West confrontation as not only signalling the end of all socialist dreams and utopias but also of all universal ideologies based on a universal concept of human beings and their relation to nature and other human beings. These ideologies have been ‘deconstructed’ as being eurocentric, egocentric and — according to some feminists — androcentric, and materialist.
The end of these ideologies is being proclaimed by post-modernist thinkers, who hold that the universalization of modernization — the European project of the Enlightenment — has failed. And there are environmentalists and developmentalists who argue that the emphasis on material or economic development and on emulation of the West’s model of the industrial society has failed to appreciate that in most non-European societies culture plays a significant role. Moreover, they assert that the dualistic separation of economy and culture (or in Marxian terms of bases and superstructure) finds no resonance in most non-modern societies. They further criticize the Western development paradigm on the grounds that the modernization strategy has resulted in the destruction of cultural as well as biological diversity, to a homogenization of cultures on the US coca-cola and fast-food model, on the one hand and of life forms according to the demands of profit-oriented industries, on the other. We share much of the criticism directed to the West’s paradigm of development; we reject the homogenization processes resulting from the world market and of capitalist production processes. We also criticize the dualistic division between superstructure or culture and the economy or base. In our view, the preservation of the earth’s diversity of life forms and of human societies’ cultures is a precondition for the maintenance of life on this planet.
But it is essential to beware of simply up-ending the dualistic structure by discounting the economy altogether and considering only culture or cultures. Furthermore, not all cultural traditions can be seen as of equal value; such a stance would simply replace eurocentric and androcentric and dogmatic ideological and ethical universalism with cultural relativism. This cultural relativism implies that we must accept even violence, and such patriarchal and exploitative institutions and customs as dowry, female genital mutilation, India’s caste system and so on, because they are the cultural expressions and creations of particular people. For cultural relativists, traditions, expressed in language, religion, custom, food habits, man-woman relations are always considered as particular, and beyond criticism. Taken to extremes the emphasis on ‘difference’ could lead to losing sight of all commonalities, making even communication impossible. Obviously, cultural relativism, amounting to a suspension of value judgement, can be neither the solution nor the alternative to totalitarian and dogmatic ideological universalism. It is, in fact, the old coin reversed. It takes a liberal stance, but it should be remembered that European liberalism and individualism are rooted in colonialism, destruction of the commons, on wholesale privatization and on commodity production for profit. What must also be realized is that this new emphasis on the cultural, the local, and the difference, this cultural relativism, accords with MNCs’ interests.
While intellectuals may concentrate on culture and on differences, international capital continues with its expansion of production and markets, insisting on free access to all natural resources and life forms and to localized cultures and traditions and their commodification. Local cultures are deemed to have ‘value’ only when they have been fragmented and these fragments transformed into saleable goods for a world market. Only when food becomes ‘ethnic food’, music ‘ethnic music’, and traditional tales ‘folklore’ and when skills are harnessed to the production of ‘ethnic’ objects for the tourist industry, can the capital accumulation process benefit from these local cultures.
While local cultures are thus dissected and their fragments commodified, these atomized parts are then ‘re-unified’ in the global supermarket, thereby procuring a standardization and homogenization of all cultural diversity. Cultural relativism is not only unaware of these processes but rather legitimizes them; and the feminist theory of difference ignores the working of the capitalist world system and its power to transform life into saleable commodities and cash.
To find a way out of cultural relativism, it is necessary to look not only for differences but for diversities and interconnectedness among women, among men and women, among human beings and other life forms, worldwide. The common ground for women’s liberation and the preservation of life on earth is to be found in the activities of those women who have become the victims of the development process and who struggle to conserve their subsistence base: for example, the Chipko women in India, women and men who actively oppose mega dam construction, women who fight against nuclear power plants and against the irresponsible dumping of toxic wastes around the world, and many more worldwide.
In the dialogues with such grassroots women activists cultural relativism does not enter. These women spell out clearly what unites women worldwide, and what unites men and women with the multiplicity of life forms in nature. The universalism that stems from their efforts to preserve their subsistence — their life base — is different from the eurocentric universalism developed via the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalist patriarchy.
This universalism does not deal in abstract universal human ‘rights’ but rather in common human needs which can be satisfied only if the life-sustaining networks and processes are kept intact and alive. These ‘symbioses or living interconnectedness’ both in nature and in human society are the only guarantee that life in its fullest sense can continue on this planet. These fundamental needs: for food, shelter, clothing; for affection, care and love; for dignity and identity, for knowledge and freedom, leisure and joy, are common to all people, irrespective of culture, ideology, race, political and economic system and class.
In the usual development discourse these needs are divided into so-called ‘basic needs’ (food, shelter, clothing et al) and so-called ‘higher needs’ such as freedom and knowledge and so on. The ecofeminist perspective, as expressed by women activists recognizes no such division. Culture is very much part of their struggle for subsistence and life. They identify freedom with their loving interaction and productive work in co-operation with Mother Earth;14 knowledge is the subsistence knowledge essential for their survival. For women in the affluent North or in the affluent classes of the South, such a concept of universalism or commonality is not easy to grasp. Survival is seen not as the ultimate goal of life but a banality — a fact that can be taken for granted. It is precisely the value of the everyday work for survival, for life, which has been eroded in the name of the so-called ‘higher’ values.
Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism, ‘a new term for an ancient wisdom’15 grew out of various social movements — the feminist, peace and the ecology movements — in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though the term was first used by Francoise D’Eaubonne16 it became popular only in the context of numerous protests and activities against environmental destruction, sparked-off initially by recurring ecological disasters. The meltdown at Three Mile Island prompted large numbers of women in the USA to come together in the first ecofeminist conference — ‘Women and Life on Earth: A Conference on Eco-Feminism in the Eighties’ — in March 1980, at Amherst. At this conference the connections between feminism, militarization, healing and ecology were explored. As Ynestra King, one of the Conference organizers, wrote:
Ecofeminism is about connectedness and wholeness of theory and practice. It asserts the special strength and integrity of every living thing. For us the snail darter is to be considered side by side with a community’s need for water, the porpoise side by side with appetite for tuna, and the creatures it may fall on with Skylab. We are a woman-identified movement and we believe we have a special work to do in these imperilled times. We see the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors, and the threat of nuclear annihilation by the military warriors, as feminist concerns. It is the same masculinist mentality which would deny us our right to our own bodies and our own sexuality, and which depends on multiple systems of dominance and state power to have its way.17
Wherever women acted against ecological destruction or/and the threat of atomic annihilation, they immediately became aware of the connection between patriarchal violence against women, other people and nature, and that: In defying this patriarchy we are loyal to future generations and to life and this planet itself. We have a deep and particular understanding of this both through our natures and our experience as women.18
The ‘corporate and military warriors’ aggression against the environment was perceived almost physically as an aggression against our female body. This is expressed by many women who participated in these movements. Thus, women in Switzerland who demonstrated against the Seveso poisoning wrote: We should think of controlling our bodies in a more global way, as it is not only men and doctors who behave aggressively towards our bodies, but also the multinationals! What more aggression against the body of women, against the children than that of La Roche-Givaudan at Seveso? From 10 July 1976, their entire lives have been taken over by the ‘accident’ and the effects are going to last for a long time.19
On the night of 2-3 December 1984, 40 tons of toxic gas were released from a Union Carbide pesticides plant in Bhopal, India; 3,000 people died during the disaster and of the 400,000 others who were exposed, many have since died, and the suffering continues. Women have been those most severely affected but also the most persistent in their demand for justice. The Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan, has continued to remind the Government of India, Union Carbide and the world that they still suffer, and that no amount of money can restore the lives and health of the victims. As Hamidabi, a Muslim woman from one of the poor bastis which were worst hit in the disaster said, ‘We will not stop our fight till the fire in our hearts goes quiet — this fire started with 3,000 funeral pyres — and it will not die till we have justice.’ Or, as the women of Sicily who protested against the stationing of nuclear missiles in their country stated:
Our “no” to war coincides with our struggle for liberation. Never have we seen so clearly the connection between nuclear escalation and the culture of the musclemen; between the violence of war and the violence of rape. Such in fact is the historical memory that women have of war … But it is also our daily experience in “peacetime” and in this respect women are perpetually at war… It is no coincidence that the gruesome game of war — in which the greater part of the male sex seems to delight — passes through the same stages as the traditional sexual relationship: aggression, conquest, possession, control. Of a woman or a land, it makes little difference.’20
The women who were a driving force in movements against the construction of nuclear power plants in Germany, were not all committed feminists, but to them also the connection between technology, war against nature, against women and future generations was clear. The peasant women who actively protested against the proposed construction of the nuclear power plant at Whyl in South-West Germany also saw the connection between technology, the profit-oriented growth mania of the industrial system and the exploitation of the ‘Third World’.21 This connection was also most clearly spelt out by a Russian woman after the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986: ‘Men never think of life. They only want to conquer nature and the enemy.’
The Chernobyl disaster in particular provoked a spontaneous expression of women’s outrage and resistance against this war technology and the general industrial warrior system. The illusion that atomic technology was malevolent when used in bombs but benevolent when used to generate electricity for the North’s domestic appliances was dispelled. Many women too, also understood that their consumerist lifestyle was also very much part of this system of war against nature, women, foreign peoples and future generations.
The new developments in biotechnology, genetic engineering and reproductive technology have made women acutely conscious of the gender bias of science and technology and that science’s whole paradigm is characteristically patriarchal, anti-nature and colonial and aims to dispossess women of their generative capacity as it does the productive capacities of nature. The founding of the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Genetic and Reproductive Engineering (fiNRRAGE) in 1984, was followed by a number of important congresses: 1985 in Sweden and in Bonn, 1988 in Bangladesh, and 1991 in Brazil. This movement reached far beyond the narrowly defined women’s or feminist movement. In Germany women from trade unions, churches and universities, rural and urban women, workers and housewives mobilized against these technologies; their ethical, economic, and health implications continue to be hotly debated issues. This movement was instrumental in preventing the establishment of a ‘surrogate motherhood’ agency in Frankfurt. The ecofeminist principle of looking for connections where capitalist patriarchy and its warrior science are engaged in disconnecting and dissecting what forms a living whole also informs this movement. Thus those involved look not only at the implications of these technologies for women, but also for animals, plants, for agriculture in the Third World as well as in the industrialized North. They understand that the liberation of women cannot be achieved in isolation, but only as part of a larger struggle for the preservation of life on this planet.
This movement also facilitates the creation of new connections and networks. An African woman at the Bangladesh congress, on hearing of these technologies exclaimed: ‘If that is progress, we do not want it. Keep it!’
‘Spiritual’ or ‘political’ ecofeminism?
As women in various movements — ecology, peace, feminist and especially health — rediscovered the interdependence and connectedness of everything, they also rediscovered what was called the spiritual dimension of life — the realization of this interconnectedness was itself sometimes called spirituality. Capitalist and Marxist materialism, both of which saw the achievement of human happiness as basically conditional on the expansion of material goods’ production, denied or denigrated this dimension. Feminists also began to realize the significance of the ‘witch hunts’ at the beginning of our modern era in so far as patriachal science and technology was developed only after these women (the witches) had been murdered and, concomitantly, their knowledge, wisdom and close relationship with nature had been destroyed.22 The desire to recover, to regenerate this wisdom as a means to liberate women and nature from patriarchal destruction also motivated this turning towards spirituality. The term ‘spiritual’ is ambiguous, it means different things to different people. For some it means a kind of religion, but not one based upon the continuation of the patriarchal, monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism or Islam, all of which are arguably hostile to women and to nature vis-a-vis their basic warrior traditions. Hence, some tried to revive or recreate a goddess-based religion; spirituality was defined as the Goddess.
Some call it the female principle, inhabiting and permeating all things — this spirituality is understood in a less ‘spiritual’, that is, less idealistic way. Although the spirit was female, it was not apart from the material world, but seen as the life-force in everything and in every human being: it was indeed the connecting principle. Spirituality in these more material terms was akin to magic rather than to religion as it is commonly understood.23 This interpretation of spirituality is also spelt out in the writings of Starhawk,24 for whom spirituality is largely identical to women’s sensuality, their sexual energy, their most precious life force, which links them to each other, to other life forms and the elements. It is the energy that enables women to love and to celebrate life. This sensual or sexual spirituality, rather than ‘other-worldly’ is centred on and thus abolishes the opposition between spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence. There is only immanence, but this immanence is not inert, passive matter devoid of subjectivity, life and spirit. The spirit is inherent in everything and particularly our sensuous experience, because we ourselves with our bodies cannot separate the material from the spiritual. The spiritual is the love without which no life can blossom, it is this magic which is contained within everything. The rediscovered ancient wisdom consisted of the old magic insight into the existence of these all-embracing connections and that through these, powerless women could therefore influence powerful men. This at least informed the thinking of the women who, in 1980, surrounded the Pentagon with their rituals and who formulated the first ecofeminist manifesto.25
The ecological relevance of this emphasis on ‘spirituality’ lies in the rediscovery of the sacredness of life, according to which life on earth can be preserved only if people again begin to perceive all life forms as sacred and respect them as such. This quality is not located in an other-worldly deity in a transcendence, but in everyday life, in our work, the things that surround us, in our immanence. And from time to time there should be celebrations of this sacredness in rituals, in dance and song.
This celebration of our dependence to Mother Earth is quite contrary to the attitude promoted by Francis Bacon and his followers, the fathers of modern science and technology. For them this dependence was an outrage, a mockery of man’s right to freedom on his own terms and therefore had forcefully and violently to be abolished. Western rationality, the West’s paradigm of science and concept of freedom are all based on overcoming and transcending this dependence, on the subordination of nature to the (male) will, and the disenchantment of all her forces. Spirituality in this context endeavours to ‘heal Mother Earth’ and to re-enchant the world. This means to undo the process of disenchantment, which Max Weber saw as the inevitable outcome of the European rationalization process.
Ecofeminists in the USA seemingly put greater emphasis on the ‘spiritual’ than do those in Europe. For example, in Germany, particularly since the early 1980s this tendency has often been criticized as escapism, as signifying a withdrawal from the political sphere into some kind of dream world, divorced from reality and thus leaving power in the hands of men. But the ‘spiritual’ feminists argue that theirs is the politics of everyday life, the transformation of fundamental relationships, even if that takes place only in small communities. They consider that this politics is much more effective than countering the power games of men with similar games. In Germany, too this debate has to be seen against the background of the emergence of the Greens, who participated in parliamentary politics since 1978. Many feminists joined the Green Party, less out of ecological, than feminist concerns. The Greens, however, were keen to integrate these concerns too into their progammes and politics. The critique of the ‘spiritual’ stand within the ecofeminist movement is voiced mainly by men and women from the left. Many women, particularly those who combine their critique of capitalism with a critique of patriarchy and still cling to some kind of ‘materialist’ concept of history, do not easily accept spiritual ecofeminism, because it is obvious that capitalism can also co-opt the ‘spiritual’ feminists’ critique of ‘materialism’.
This, indeed, is already happening. The New Age and esoteric movement have created a new market for esoterica, meditation, yoga, magic, alternative health practices, most of which are fragments taken out of the context of oriental, particularly Chinese and Indian, cultures. Now, after the material resources of the colonies have been looted, their spiritual and cultural resources are being transformed into commodities for the world market.
This interest in things spiritual is a manifestation of Western patriarchal capitalist civilization’s deep crisis. While in the West the spiritual aspects of life (always segregated from the ‘material’ world), have more and more been eroded, people now look towards the ‘East’, towards pre-industrial traditions in the search for what has been destroyed in their own culture.
This search obviously stems from a deep human need for wholeness, but the fragmented and commodified way in which it takes place is to be criticized. Those interested in oriental spiritualism rarely know, or care to know, how people in, for example India, live or even the socio-economic and political contexts from these which fragments — such as yoga or tai-chi — have been taken. It is a kind of luxury spirituality. It is as Saral Sarkar put it,26 the idealist icing on top of the material cake of the West’s standard of living. Such luxury spiritualism cannot overcome the dichotomies between spirit and matter, economics and culture, because as long as it fails to integrate this search for wholeness into a critique of the existing exploitative world system and a search for a better society it can easily be co-opted and neutralized.
For Third World women who fight for the conservation of their survival base this spiritual icing-on-the-cake, the divorce of the spiritual from the material is incomprehensible for them, the term Mother Earth does not need to be qualified by inverted commas, because they regard the earth as a living being which guarantees their own and all their fellow creatures survival. They respect and celebrate Earth’s sacredness and resist its transformation into dead, raw material for industrialism and commodity production. It follows, therefore, that they also respect both the diversity and the limits of nature which cannot be violated if they want to survive. It is this kind of materialism, this kind of immanence rooted in the everyday subsistence production of most of the world’s women which is the basis of our ecofeminist position. This materialism is neither commodified capitalist nor mechanical Marxist materialism, both of which are based on the same concept of humanity’s relationship to nature. But the ecofeminist spirituality as we understand it is not to be confused with a kind of other-worldly spirituality, that simply wants ‘food without sweat’, not caring where it comes from or whose sweat it involves.
The following chapters are informed by our basic understanding of ecofeminism as a perspective which starts from the fundamental necessities of life; we call this the subsistence perspective. Our opinion is that women are nearer to this perspective than men — women in the South working and living, fighting for their immediate survival are nearer to it than urban, middle-class women and men in the North. Yet all women and all men have a body which is directly affected by the destructions of the industrial system. Therefore, all women and finally also all men have a ‘material base’ from which to analyse and change these processes. In the following chapters we discuss several questions which cropped up in the course of our struggles and reflections. Although these questions were not planned before, they nevertheless cover a large part of the issues and problems we are faced with if we want to preserve life on this planet: the issue of our concept of knowledge, the issue of poverty and development, the issue of industrialization of all life forms, the search for cultural identity and rootedness, the search for freedom and self-determination within a limited globe. And finally we attempt to spell out our vision of a society benevolent towards nature, women, children and men. We have not tried to iron out all differences of opinion and analysis in our respective contributions. At the present juncture and under the prevailing conditions as they actually exist, such differences are inevitable and we feel they should not be avoided, as they present a realistic picture of what an ecofeminist discourse at the global level can be.
Notes
1. Gladitz. N.,Lieber heute aktiv als morgen radioaktiv, Wagenbach, Berlin 1976.
2. Shiva, V. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival, Kali for Women, New Delhi and Zed Books, London 1988. Shiva, V., Fight for Survival (Interview with Chamun Devi and Itwari Devi) in: Illustrated Weekly of India, November 15 1987.
3. Dankelman, I. & J. Davidson, Women and Environment in the Third World: Alliance for the Future. Earthscan Publications Ltd., London 1988.
4. Ekins, Paul A New World Order: Grassroots Movements for Global Change. Routledge, London & New York 1992.
5. Bravo, E. Accion Ecologica, Un Ecosistema en peligro: Los bosques de maglar en la costa ecuatoriana. Quito, n.d.
6. This is based on an interview with Annemarie Sacher and Lore Haag, two of the women leaders of the anti-atomic movement, at Whyl, Kaiserstuhl, S.W. Germany. This was the first of these movements in Germany; it lasted from 1974 to about 1976 when the construction of the nuclear reactor was stopped. For more details see: Saral Sarkar: Green Alternative Politics in West Germany, Vol. I, The New Social Movements, Promilla Publishers, New Delhi 1992.
7. Dankelman & Davidson, op. cit.
8. Levine, Murray, Love Canal: My Story, SUNY, Albany NY 1982, p. xv.
9. Voices Unidas, Vol. I, No. 2,1992.
10. interview with Medha Patkar in: Indigenous Vision, Peoples of India, Attitudes to the Environment, India International Centre Quarterly, Spring-Summer 1992, p. 294.
11. Ortner, S., ‘Is Female to Male as Nature to Culture?’ In: Rosaldo, M. Z. & L. Lamphere, Women, Culture and Society, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1974.
12. Diamond, I. & G. F. Orenstein, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1990. Plant, J. Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, Pa., Santa Cruz, Ca 1989. King, Y. ‘The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology,’ in: Plant, op. cit. pp. 18-28.
13. Birk, A. & I. Stoehr, Der Fortschritt entläßt seine Tochter, in: Frauen und Ökologie. Gegen den Machbarkeitswahn, Volksblattverlag, Köln 1987.
14. This is based on an interview by Vandana Shiva, see Shiva 1987, op. cit.
15. Diamond and Orenstein, 1990, op. cit.
16. D’Eaubonne, F., ‘Feminism or Death,’ in: Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms, an Anthology, Amherst University Press, Amherst 1980.
17. King, Y., ‘The Eco-Feminist Perspective,’ in: Caldecott, L. & S. Leland (eds), Reclaiming the Earth: Women Speak out for Life on Earth. The Women’s Press, London 1983, p. 10.
18. Ibid, p. 11.
19. Howard-Gorden, F., ‘Seveso is Everywhere,’ in: Caldecott & Leland, op. cit., pp. 36-45.
20. Statement of Sicilian Women, quoted in Caldecott & Leland, op. cit., p. 126.
21. See Gladitz, op. cit. This was also stated in the interview Maria Mies took in 1990 (see note 6).
22. Merchant, C., The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Harper & Row, San Francisco 1983.
23. Mies, M., TANTRA, Magie oder Spiritualität? in: beitraege zur.
24. Starhawk, 1982.
25. Caldecott & Leland, op. cit., p. 15.
26. Sarkar, S., Die Bewegung und ihre Strategie. Ein Beitrag zum notwendigen Klärungsprozeß, in: Kommune, Nr. Frankfurt 1987.
27. Diamond, I., ‘Resisting the Logic of Control: Feminism, Fertility and the Living Earth,’ paper (unpublished) 1990.