The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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FEMINIST INTERSECTIONS WITH ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Trish Glazebrook

Feminism has intersected with environmentalism and ecological thinking since the 1970s. Concerning method, both feminists and ecofeminists recognize the value of empirical data, and re-conceive epistemic authority in terms of narrative voice. Ecofeminism deploys feminist conclusions in environmental philosophy where justice-based analysis shows that women suffer disproportionate economic and other harms in consequence of environmental degradation. As a standpoint issue, women bring unique perspectives to environmental issues, and their women’s cultural location situates them well to critique prevailing norms. Ecofeminism draws insights from feminist policy analysis: functional policy cannot address environmental problems without challenging women’s marginalization and incorporating information on their daily living conditions. Ecofeminism brings novel research to growing bodies of literature that assess strategies for gender-sensitive policy and recognize women’s resilience, as well as the remedial potential of their approaches.

In the 1970s, the earth goddess was a focal symbol in women’s reclamation and celebration of the female creative principle. Feminist spirituality offered an alternative to the modernist, patriarchal ideology of science and technology that defines rationality in terms of objectivity. Because “objectivity” universalizes the Cartesian subject, it is androcentric. At the same time, the ideology of science and technology dismisses other knowledge systems as “old wives’ tales,” and women’s embodied knowledge as “intuition.” Because natural sciences aim to understand nature, ecofeminism is extremely amenable to such feminist critiques of science. It diagnoses science as a logic of domination that treats both women and nature as “object,” and seeks to validate alternative knowledge systems, e.g. traditional ecological knowledge. Such knowledge systems are built over generations as cultures develop expertise in survival and thriving in their particular ecological context. Globally speaking, ecofeminism is therefore not just a theory, but a praxical examination of women’s experience of their environment and the livelihoods it affords.

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Ecofeminism arose in the United States out of non-violent, direct action against nuclear weaponry. Ynestra King, Anna Gyorgy, Grace Paley, and other activists in anti-nuclear, lesbian feminist, and environmental movements organized a conference at Amherst College in 1980 that led to demonstrations and other actions. The Women’s Pentagon Actions of 1980 and 1981 connected sexism, racism and classism with militarism and environmental destruction. Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein organized a second conference in 1987 that connected these activists with a developing group of ecofeminist academics.

Throughout the last four decades, massive environmental catastrophes and threats have emerged from the practices of technoscientific-empowered global capital. At the intersection of feminism with environmentalism and ecological thinking, critiques of science, technology and global capital, coupled with articulation of ways of thinking and praxes of care that are alternate to modernity’s assault upon nature, have led to a productive thinking of gender difference that is at present emerging. Crucial to this genesis and development of ecofeminism has been the presence since the 1980s of voices from the global South that have led ecofeminists away from the “feminist” label and deep into world-changing, gender-conscious interventions into policy and practice. This chapter traces that story.

Nature, Culture, Feminism

Ecofeminism began conceptually with a deep entanglement of woman and nature. In 1952, Simone de Beauvoir argued that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” (Beauvoir 1952: 267) in a revolutionary move to free woman from biological reductionism. Yet she also aligned woman with nature by arguing that they both appear as other to man in the logic of patriarchy (1952: 144). She later criticized the merging of feminism with ecology because appeal to “traditional feminine values, such as woman and her rapport with nature, . . . [is a] renewed attempt to pin women down to their traditional role” (Beauvoir 1984: 103). Ecofeminism’s early theoretical challenge was accordingly how to critique the politics of patriarchy without re-inscribing biological essentialism.

Challenging assumptions at the heart of this question, Sherry Ortner asked in 1974, “Is woman to nature as man is to culture?” She answered that though woman is not closer to nature than man, she is culturally constructed to appear so; thus genuine change concerning women’s secondary societal status can only come about through simultaneous change to social institutions and cultural assumptions. Catherine Roach argued further that the phrases “Mother nature” and “Mother Earth,”

given the meaning and function traditionally assigned to “mother” and “motherhood” in patriarchal culture, will not achieve the desired aim of making our behavior more environmentally sound, but will instead help to maintain the mutually supportive, exploitative stances we take toward our mothers and our environment.

(Roach 1991: 46)

That is, the association of women with nature reciprocally reinforces the denigration of each. The initial encounter of feminism with environment and ecology is, on one hand, an attempt to retrieve women’s relationship to nature by re-appropriating the creative, reproductive function in women’s embodied experience, and on the other, a struggle not to “other” woman into an alterity shared with nature that reduces her to her body and universalizes women as mothers.

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While Ortner was writing in the United States, Francoise d’Eaubonne was coining the term ‘l’écofeminism’ in France. Her book Feminism or Death (Le féminisme ou la mort) aligned, as de Beauvoir had, the oppression of women with the exploitation of nature. Her title was not a battle cry so much as a warning. She argued that just as the exploitation of nature in an excess of production was creating resource scarcity, so exploitation of women’s bodies in an excess of reproduction was causing overpopulation. She warned that these factors in tandem were a threat to the human species. This was the first shot across the bow of not just patriarchy, but capitalist patriarchy. The history of ecofeminism is the history of its movement from metaphysics of gender to a critical, global, political critique of capital.

Ecofeminism in the Global North: The Goddess, Science, and Deep Ecology

Feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s were typically North American, white, married, college educated and middle class. They found themselves still entrenched in a public/private split that consigned them to labor in the home, while the public realm remained a “man’s world.” Post-1950s conceptions of the nuclear family measured middle-class success by a male “breadwinner’s” ability to support the family. Feminists accordingly focused on equal rights in the workplace, and thereby won more access to middle-class jobs. Yet traditional divisions of labor did not change substantially. The “supermom” emerged, working hard both at the office and at home. This woman is thoroughly vulnerable to internalizing feminist backlash—she has no spare time and is exhausted, while her “exceptional” status in exceeding gender expectations alienates her from traditional female gender identity. The stay-at-home mom can be just as alienated from feminism, perhaps projecting that her choices let feminism down. Women in the societal mainstream are accordingly not likely to identify as feminist. The “second wave” of feminism that began with de Beauvoir thus washed over North America, and dissipated from the mainstream.

Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, interest in gender difference remained among activist and academic feminists. Doulas and midwives re-appropriated women’s reproductive capacity from the male-dominated medical industry. A concurrent symbolic of the earth mother informed women’s self-conception and self-definition in contrast to patriarchal conceptions. A retrieval of goddess mythologies, whether or not historically or anthropologically accurate, reclaimed woman from patriarchy by exploring their connections to nature and the earth. In 1978, Mary Daly’s radical feminist Gyn/ecology was published, and Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. Each argued that philosophy and religion have bolstered patriarchal power over women and nature. The journal Heresies also published “The Great Goddess” that reclaimed religion from patriarchy through the “Goddess as symbol of life and death powers and waxing and waning energies in the universe and in themselves” (Christ 1978). Ecofeminists were developing a spiritual alternative of nourishing, love, and life in contrast to patriarchal religions, while critiquing modernity’s materialist, scientific worldview. Judith Plant (1989) writes of “healing the wounds.” Karen Warren (1993; 2000) assesses ecofeminsm’s healing power for women, men, and the planet. Rosemary Radford Reuther (1994) provides an ecofeminist theology of earth-healing, and Reuther (1996) recounts how environmental degradation exacerbates global poverty by increasing women’s labor and suffering. The goddess’s promise of healing became a liberation theology, i.e., more a prayer for a promised future than the Dionysian celebration of 1978 to reclaim the power of creation and life.

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Native American voices work in knowledge systems that do not separate science from religion. Starhawk (1979), Paula Gunn Allen (1990), and Winona LaDuke (2005) write fiction and non-fiction, and it makes little sense to speak of how their work is at the intersection of gender, indigenous rights and environment as if these things can be easily separated out. They have academic affiliations, but also are activists. Discourse in North America concerning indigenous knowledge systems has moved from the language of “spirituality” to “traditional ecological knowledge” in order in large part to avoid landing on the wrong side of the modernist distinction that identifies science with knowledge and religion with superstition and myth. This transition has made indigenous knowledge systems more compatible with academic practices of science, and easier to integrate into equally male-dominated science-driven environmental policy contexts; but it has also cut out gender. LaDuke, who has a strong voice in environmental policy critique, does not identify as an ecofeminist, Nonetheless, she wrote the introduction to Baumgardner and Richards’s field guide for feminist activists (2005). No one has to be an ecofeminist to be working toward ecofeminist goals. But anyone with gender consciousness and commitment can contribute to the ecofeminist struggle to overcome logics of domination.

Concerning science, feminists have strongly critiqued gender bias in the ideology and practice of science (Harding 1986; 1991; Tuana 1989). Merchant (1980) offers a much stronger critique, and moreover connects gender issues with ecology. She identifies misogyny at the roots of modern science in Bacon’s writings. He used language from witch trials to describe how nature’s secrets could be extracted “out of the very bowels of nature” (Bacon 1980 [1620]: 23) when “she” is “under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded” (Bacon 1980 [1620]: 27). Merchant argues moreover that the mechanistic model of the universe, epitomized in Cartesian metaphysics that reduce nature to inert matter standing by for appropriation to man’s needs, sanctions the domination of both women and nature. As nature is a machine at man’s disposal, so woman can likewise be reduced to a body that can be used instrumentally for reproduction and pleasure. Val Plumwood lays out the Western intellectual history of domination over women and nature from the Greeks to its culmination in modern science. She assesses also how “dominant trends in environmental philosophy . . . embed themselves within rationalist philosophical frameworks which are not only biased from a gender perspective, but . . . inimical to nature as well” (Plumwood 1993: 165). Deep ecology in particular remains sexist because it fails to acknowledge gender difference, and retains dualisms that support logics of mastery (Plumwood 1993: 174).

The ecofeminism/deep ecology debate is significant not just as a debate about environmental issues, but about gender bias and exclusion in environmental philosophy. It began when Ariel Salleh argued that from the ecofeminist standpoint, deep ecology is just another self-congratulatory, reformist move that “fails to face up to the uncomfortable psychosexual origins of our culture and its crisis” in motives of control (Salleh 1984: 344). In 1987, Jim Cheney (1987) accused deep ecology of being androcentric, and Janet Biehl (1987) argued that deep ecologists implicate women in the male project of domination over nature. Salleh returned to the debate to argue that deep ecologists underestimate both the ecofeminist challenge to epistemology, and how much work is necessary to bring about social change (Salleh 1992: 195). Deep ecology is incapable of social critique because its political attitudes are meaningful only to “white-male, middle-class professionals whose thought is not grounded in the labor of daily maintenance and survival” (Salleh 1993: 225). Slicer argued that unless deep ecologists read feminist analyses, genuine debate would not be possible (Slicer 1995: 151). In continuing failure to engage ecofeminism, deep ecologists reproduce the very logic of domination they want to overcome.

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Ecofeminism: Discipline and Praxis

One of the first times the word “ecofeminism” appeared in print in North America was in Diamond and Orenstein’s edited volume Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (1990) from the 1987 conference noted in the introduction above. Contributions from poets, artists, novelists, scholars, scientists, ecological activists, and spiritual teachers captured how ecofeminism began as a social movement and philosophy, initiated a critique of science and technology, and sought healing in the face of contemporary destructive, life-denying practices. The diversity of genres and perspectives show that ecofeminism in the 1980s was much more than an academic enterprise. Karen Warren nonetheless planted a solid ecofeminist foot in the Academy over the next few years.

Warren’s influential 1990 essay argued that the power of ecological feminism is its promise to re-conceive feminism and develop an environmental ethic founded in the idea that the domination of women and the domination of nature, in fact, all the “-isms” of domination, are connected insofar as they arise from the oppressive conceptual framework of patriarchy. Oppressive frameworks generate a logic of domination based on dualisms, e.g., man/nature, man/woman, reason/emotion, that privilege one term over the other, and thereby justify domination of the latter by the former. She also described and defended narrative voice as a research method, in contrast to the dismissal of experience-based arguments as anecdotal and unscientific. In 1991, she edited a special issue of Hypatia that was the first philosophical collection on ecological feminism, later revising and expanding it into a book (Warren 1991, 1996). These essays assess what is unique about ecofeminist ethics and philosophy, but they also address the grassroots origins of ecofeminism, revisit the debate with deep ecology, and present ecofeminist perspectives on concrete issues of animal rights, abortion, and nuclear deterrence.

Feminist philosophy had been coming to terms with its own logic of domination since bell hooks’s 1984 critique that it marginalized black voices. Drawing on “emergent Afrocentric eco-womanism” Riley (1992) argues, however, against thinking of environmentalism as a “white issue.” She connects ecofeminism to African activism—not just its direct-action protests but its remedial activity, e.g., Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt program in Kenya, and other women’s work in Kenya and Niger. Riley argues against dualism; in these African women’s perspectives, people are part of nature, nature and humans are interdependent, and the life force that permeates all nature is sacred. This Africanist account shares what Salleh (1984) also noted distinguishes ecofeminism from other environmental philosophies. Women’s experience of embodiment does not readily generate a dualism against nature that must be overcome. Environmental ethicists have been at great pains to argue that human being is part of the natural order rather than superior to it. The feminist problem has been, rather that woman is relegated to the nature side of the man/nature dichotomy. Ecofeminism turns this feminist problem into a solution, and can get on addressing actual issues in the world rather than remaining caught up in providing theoretical argument for what is already the case.

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The turn to real-world issues, to “taking empirical data seriously,” as Warren (1997; 2000) puts it, immediately uncovers urgent global issues in women’s daily lived experience as food providers and primary caregivers tasked with meeting the daily living needs of their family. Marilyn Waring’s groundbreaking work exposed the global invisibility of women’s livelihoods (1988; 1999). The invisibility of women’s agricultural labor in developing countries has in particular been documented (Dixon-Mueller 1991), despite the fact that their traditional agricultural expertise has been successful in feeding populations over long historical periods (Curtin 1999). In 1991, Cheryl Johnson-Odim argued that feminists in the global North need to do more than include women from the global South on their conference agenda. The Third World feminist agenda is different because feminists in the global South are “connected as much to the struggle of their communities for liberation and autonomy as to the work against gender discrimination” (Johnson-Odim 1991: 317). They cannot depoliticize feminism to issues of equality and women’s rights because the men of their community also suffer from and share their struggle against racism, imperialism and economic exploitation. Rather than just including women from the global South in discussion, Northern feminists should include them in agenda-setting.

From an ecofeminist perspective, “letting” anyone set the agenda re-inscribes a logic of domination—as if the agenda belonged to ecofeminists anywhere who might magnanimously share it. In its earliest beginnings, ecofeminism connected sexism with exploitation and destruction of the environment. When Warren (1990) made explicit that all the “-isms” of domination (including but not limited to colonialism, imperialism, racism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, classism) are connected by logics of domination, it was clear that the agenda was already shared. The ecofeminist agenda connects women everywhere, not because of biology, but through shared (which does not mean undifferentiated) oppression.

Ecofeminism is accordingly far too of-this-world to be only theoretical. When feminism meets environmentalism and ecological thinking, not only are connections between the South and North shown already to exist, but also connections between theory and practice are revealed as always already in play. Ecofeminism arose out of women’s lived experience in a world of gender discrimination, heterosexism, environmental devastation and threat, increasing militarism, and nuclear proliferation. Changing this world means understanding it through historical and other analyses that uncover the role of science and technology in supporting and enabling the degradation of ecosystems, labor conditions, and lived experience. It means uncovering alternative logics—ways of thinking—in gynocentric practices of livelihood, labor and care. That is, it means praxis—the inseparability of thoughtful, intentional activity and experience-generated reflection.

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Changing the World: Food, Care, and Climate

Contemporary ecofeminism takes environmental philosophy beyond traditional debates in deep ecology, anthropocentrism, and the land ethic to real-world impacts in daily, lived experience. In the United States, ecofeminism has moved into political ecology. Chaone Mallory (2009; 2010) argues, for example, that ecofeminist activism opens spaces for subaltern others. She includes non-humans in these others, and argues that non-human species have sufficient agency and subjectivity to warrant ethico-political consideration. Her 2013 analysis of locavorism, i.e., eating only locally produced foods, assesses how gender, race, and class affect food access and food choices. Is such discussion of privileged food choices appropriate or irresponsible in a world where others face pressing issues of food insecurity? As Salleh notes, “we in the North are the biggest problem for the South” (2006: 56–57). The question of responsibility serves as a reminder that everybody’s choices are much more connected with people’s experiences elsewhere than it may seem. Food transport generates greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change that is already causing droughts and subsequent starvation in Ethiopia (Lott, Christidis, and Stott 2013). Everyone is deeply entangled in the web of global capital and its impacts.

The intersection of feminism with environmentalism and ecological thought increasingly engages global issues of environmental justice that are socio-political and economic. For example, industry generates profits; but the environmental costs of toxins also generated are “externalities” typically not borne by the polluter. Though sperm can also be damaged by environmental toxins, women’s reproductive systems are uniquely vulnerable. Carcinogens collect in fatty tissue, e.g., the breasts. The womb is every person’s first environment; developing organisms are drastically impacted by exposure to toxins in utero, with results that often have lifelong consequences. Sperm survive for a few days, so risk of exposure to toxins is short-lived in comparison with the nine months of human gestation. Women’s role in housing the fetus accordingly entails relational duties of care that environmental toxins deny her the capacity to meet. Ecofeminists connect this gendered health issue to the environmental issue. Gender disparity in corporate ownership and reproductive health impacts means that principles of distributive justice are doubly breached by the costs and benefits of environmental toxins.

Women also bear a significant disproportion of harms when environmental degradation affects their labor and livelihood. Since women in developing countries work closely with nature to reproduce the material conditions of daily living through agriculture, foraging, and water and fuel collection, environmental degradation can have an immediate, potentially catastrophic impact on their livelihoods and food security. In response to challenges women face everywhere in bearing the costs of environmental degradation, ecofeminism aims at world-changing praxis. As d’Eaubonne knew when she coined the word l’écoféminisme, it’s a question of survival.

From 1986 to 1989, physicist turned ecofeminist turned environmental, gender, and development policy critic Vandana Shiva led a major project on resource conflicts over forests and water in the Punjab region of India. This project led to three books. Shiva (1988) made a plea for recovery of the feminine principle as the living force of nature, in contrast to modern science that drives economies from the goal of sustenance toward profit. This happened in India through intensive Green Revolution agricultural practices that deforested much of India and left the land either waterlogged or desertified. Shiva thus argued that ecology is a politics of survival (1991a) and showed the extent of what science-based agriculture threatens through analysis of the violence of the Green Revolution toward nature, soil, seeds, biodiversity and farmers (1991b).

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Given her background in physics and philosophy of science, Shiva is well placed to critique science. Her 1988 analysis characterizes the “destruction of ecologies and knowledge systems . . . as the violence of reductionism.” Reductionist ecology is at the root of growing ecological crisis, she argues, because reductionism transforms nature into passive, inert, manipulable matter—“its organic processes and regularities and regenerative capacities are destroyed” (1988: 24). By denying the validity of other knowledge systems, contemporary science reduces knowledge in three ways: (i) ontologically (other properties, e.g., regenerative capacity, are excluded from the account); (ii) epistemologically (alternative ways of perceiving and knowing can no longer be recognized); and (iii) sociologically (the non-expert is deprived of the right to access knowledge and judge its claims) (Shiva 1988: 30). In contradiction of its own epistemological standards, contemporary scientific knowledge “declares organic systems of knowledge irrational, and rejects the belief systems of others . . . without full rational evaluation” (Shiva 1988: 26). Violence is thus done not just to nature and to people, but to knowledge itself.

In 1993, Maria Mies and Shiva published Ecofeminism as a North-South collaboration in which they argued that women bear the burden of responding to life-threatening industrial disasters and ecological devastation. Drawing on analyses of women’s experience of poverty globally, the impact of GATT on women in the global South, reproductive technologies in the global North, and the Chipko movement in India, Mies and Shiva condemn the destructive, homogenizing and fragmenting ideology and practices of science-enabled global capital. They offer instead women’s subsistence practices as functional, liberating alternatives that meet human needs by working within the limits of nature. By denying nature’s reproductive function, the modern scientific worldview instead privileges production. The logic of industrial science accordingly enables the patriarchal, capital economy to feminize global poverty and exploit the labor and resources of the global South while profiting from environmental destruction.

Salleh, noted above for her part in the ecofeminism/deep ecology debate, is long familiar with critiques of global capital and wrote a Preface for Shiva and Mies (1993). Salleh’s “embodied materialism” accepts neither that woman is closer to nature, nor that gender is a purely cultural phenomenon (1997). She negotiates the nature/nurture dichotomy as I do by accepting neither that nature reduces women to her body, nor that her social construction as female has no grounding in the material conditions of her lived reality (Glazebrook 2010b). She envisions ecofeminism that can ground, unify and empower socialism, ecology, feminism and postcolonial struggle. Salleh (1997: 190) argues that women’s work, their “mothering or organic cultivation,” for example, demonstrates that “mastery is not the only model for agency.” Women’s daily chores “are not just ‘running around in circles’ . . . but exercises in balancing internal relations with decentered foresight.” This work generates “an estrangement of consciousness that provides reflexivity and the possibility of new insights” (Salleh 1997: 190). This labor-based analysis of embodied materialism provides Salleh with a conceptual framework that can be brought to bear on a variety of cross-disciplinary topics. Over the next two decades, her work focuses on the problematic impacts of the global North on the South while ranging across climate change, global justice and political economy, ecological economics, and the politics of reproduction. What ties her work together is a critique of global capital, and attention to the economic realities of women’s everyday life as they bear the costs of ecodegradation and the exploitation of their labor.

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Shiva’s work subsequent to the 1993 volume is also materialist and economic, and focused on the everyday realities of women’s experience. She provides gendered analysis of ecological issues in health and development and argues against the destructive force of globalization on women’s agriculture-based livelihoods and food security (Shiva 1994a; 1996, 2000). Further work—for example, on hijacking of the global food supply, water privatization, justice and sustainability, the impacts of globalization on seeds, water and life, and climate justice—engages women’s experiences and needs, but aims more generally at critique of the politics that submit both men and women to food insecurity, livelihood threat and loss, increased poverty, and deteriorating ecosystem and labor conditions. Her point is to work in the complex constellation of globalization, patriarchy, capitalism, and technoscience-enabled environmental devastation where struggles affect not only women. Shiva goes beyond ecofeminist theory to expose policies and practices that cause suffering by destroying environments and damaging human health, food security, and well-being.

When theorizing solutions, Shiva proposes women’s agricultural practices as sustainable knowledge systems that work within the cyclical limits of nature. When assessing the violence of the Green Revolution, Shiva argued for organic-based agricultural strategies aimed at “preserving and building on nature’s process and nature’s patterns” (Shiva 1991b: 26), and traditional practices “built up over generations on the basis of knowledge generated over centuries” (Shiva 1991b: 44–45). She quotes Dr. John Augustus Voelker reporting on Indian agriculture to the Royal Agricultural Society of England: “I, at least, have never seen a more perfect picture of careful cultivation” (Shiva 1991b: 26). The “cultivation” he is describing is subsistence agriculture, which is overwhelmingly practiced by women. Shiva is soon arguing that women’s “experience of interdependence and integrity is the basis for creating a science and knowledge that nurtures, rather than violates, nature’s sustainable systems” (Mies and Shiva 1993: 34). She promotes reinstatement of “organic metaphors, in which concepts of order and power were based on interdependence and reciprocity” (Mies and Shiva 1993: 23).

Shiva’s 1994 article, “Empowering Women,” is a heart-wrenching reflection written on a train after working all day with rural Punjabi women, but also an argument for a return to women’s knowledge systems and technologies. The Punjab was the “home of the green revolution,” so heavily criticized by Shiva while working in the Punjab several years earlier. Now its consequences are fully evident. Rather than deliver on the promise to eliminate a threat of a mass starvation, the Green Revolution put farmers in debt in order to commercialize their farming. When these debts could not be paid because practices of commercialization, e.g., eucalyptus plantation, sucked down the water table and caused widespread drought that created poverty and starvation, farmers resorted to suicide. Their debts grew alongside an ecological burden that the earth also could no longer carry—traditional biodiversity was displaced by monoculture, disease and pest explosions led to large-scale pesticide use, and overuse of water caused desertification. Shiva argues that women pay the highest price for this so-called development: while adult women are displaced from their traditional agriculture, disempowered, and faced with food insecurity as mothers, girls are murdered in prenatal femicide through sex-selective abortion as gender discrimination and dowry practices make women disposable in “‘development’ which excludes and devalues women” (Shiva 1994b). In the face of these realities, Shiva argues against the “patriarchal logic of exclusion” informing industrial agriculture on the grounds that women’s traditional agriculture is more productive. Women’s “knowledge systems and technologies produce more while using less.” But also, in women’s value system, “it is unacceptable that in 2015, 500 million should continue to go hungry,” she wrote, anticipating the Millennium Development Goals target date for hunger alleviation (Shiva 1994b).

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That date has now past. A multi-agency, international report (FAO, IFAD, and WFP 2015) indicates that “hunger remains an everyday challenge” for almost 795 million people worldwide in 2014–2016 (FAO et al. 2015: 4). Over 98 percent of the hungry are in the global South, almost a quarter in India, and some 220 million in sub-Saharan Africa (FAO et al. 2015: 46, 12). This is the current, pressing challenge in ecofeminism: a humanitarian crisis in hunger in which women are globally responsible for meeting their family’s daily needs, but are unable to do so.

But if women’s knowledge systems and activities—farming to feed their family, cooking, cleaning, provision of primary medical care, and all the other things a woman might do in a day to met the needs of others—are care practices rather than logics of domination, why do women care? I argue that woman’s body is a political site that situates her in society, culture, and the family by establishing her labor role (Glazebrook 2010b). In this neo-Marxist, materialist perspective, women are not inherently or inevitably caring. Yet they exercise (more or less) a capacity to care in their work that provides new logics contrary to the destructive logic of capitalist patriarchy that is incapable of ethical decision-making even when corporate leaders want to do the right thing (Glazebrook and Story 2012).

Looking at Ogoni women’s resistance to oil development in the Niger Delta, women’s labor can be seen not as actualization of a biological essence or destiny, but as care that arises relationally in their work (Glazebrook and Olusanya 2009; 2011). Ten years of field data collected in Ghana working with women subsistence farmers has shown how vulnerable these women are to impacts of climate change, but also how resilient they are in adapting, and what potential their knowledge systems have to contribute to adaptation in similarly changing ecosystems elsewhere, including the global North (Glazebrook 2010b; 2011; Glazebrook and Tiessen 2011; Glazebrook 2016a; 2016b). Women’s care practices promote cooperation because many women are already so over-worked that sharing responsibilities is a benefit, while valuing well-being above profit safeguards precious, limited resources (Glazebrook 2016c). Women’s agriculture and knowledge systems offer a new beginning for understanding nature and human possibilities of dwelling. These possibilities are alternative economics aimed not at the individual accumulation of private wealth. Rather, capital can appears in an alternative economics as a sociocultural system aimed at opening the public space to promote the thriving of people, non-human others, ecosystems and future generations (Glazebrook and Story 2015).

Patriarchal logics of domination, environmental degradation and its impacts on women’s lives, global South–North relations, and the role of technoscience in enabling global conquest of the earth by capital come together in the perfect storm of climate change. Buckingham (2004) outlined impacts of ecofeminism-influenced groups on European environmental and equalities policy, and national forestry policy impacts of Chipko women’s interventions in India have been well documented. The women’s caucus of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change hoped that the stalled process for an international climate agreement would be pushed forward by the increasing intervention of women’s voices and growing awareness of women’s situations. As early as 1987, Michael Zimmerman was arguing for “the global awakening of the quest for the feminine voice” to counter-balance the one-sidedness of the masculine voice (1987: 44). The Paris Agreement indeed achieved more than seemed possible, though still not enough, and possibly nothing if the Agreement remains unsigned by UN member states. It is impossible to know if ecofeminism influenced the discussions to break the deadlock. The most recent UNFCCC Gender Decision was taken in 2012 under the executive leadership of Christiana Figueres and with the strong and extremely active support of Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland. The presence of women’s leadership with deep gender consciousness and strong commitment to women’s needs advanced ecofeminist goals while making the explicit discourse of ecofeminism redundant.

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Before we all hang up our ecofeminist hats and call it a day, however, it is important to remember how fragile gender gains can be. Gender difference is easily forgotten in patriarchy’s logic that totalizes the human experience in the absence of explicitly gendered discourse. A post-ecofeminist world in which real change is being made toward the ecofeminist vision of alternative logics of human practice, policy and experience risks loss of momentum if academic, activist, spiritual and other ecofeminists do not keep theorizing, poetizing, acting, and intervening in policy. Insofar as feminism intersects with environmental and ecological thinking, it is clear that when it comes to logics of domination and the struggle to end oppression, we are all in it together. None of us are free, if one of us is chained.