Ecofeminist Natures

Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action

Noel Sturgeon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317959007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Examining the development of ecofeminism from the 1980s antimilitarist movement to an internationalist ecofeminism in the 1990s, Sturgeon explores the ecofeminist notions of gender, race, and nature. She moves from detailed historical investigations of important manifestations of US ecofeminism to a broad analysis of international environmental politics.

1 Movements of Ecofeminism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-2

Ynestra King, one of the founders of U.S. ecofeminism, has called it the “third wave of the women’s movement,” indicating her sense, at one time, that this most recent manifestation of feminist activity was large and vital enough to parallel the first-wave nineteenth-century women’s movement and the second-wave women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. ¹ I agree with this assessment, understood as describing a potentiality rather than an actuality, and this book is an attempt to analyze what prevents the closing of the gap between the vision and the practice. The task here is to seek out guides for radical political action from ecofeminism while at the same time fully recognizing its limitations. But first, I want to attempt some descriptions and definitions of ecofeminism as a movement ² and as a set of theories.

Most simply put, ecofeminism is a movement that makes connections between environmentalisms and feminisms; more precisely, it articulates the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race, and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment. ³ In one version of its origins, the one I will privilege throughout the book, ecofeminism in the United States arises from the antimilitarist direct action movement of the late seventies and eighties, and develops its multivalent politics from that movement’s analysis of the connections between militarism, racism, classism, sexism, speciesism, and environmental destruction. But, as I will also show, ecofeminism has multiple origins and is reproduced in different inflections and deployed in many different contexts. In particular, in this book I will argue that ecofeminism has roots in both feminism and environmentalism.

Given both its attempt to bridge different radical political positions and its historical location as at least one of many third-wave women’s movements, U.S. ecofeminism aims to be a multi-issue, globally oriented movement with a more diverse constituency than either of its environmentalist or feminist predecessors. Ecofeminism is thus a movement with large ambitions and with a significant, if at the moment largely unorganized, constituency. Many people are interested in the scope of ecofeminism, its drawing together of environmentalism and feminism. Environmentalism is one of the most popular and significant locations for radical politics today; it attracts people because of the seemingly apocalyptic nature of our ecological crises and the many ways in which environmental problems affect people’s daily lives, as well as the sense of its global relevance. As a feminist movement, ecofeminism reworks a longstanding feminist critique of the naturalization of an inferior social and political status for women so as to include the effects on the environment of feminizing nature. Coupled with environmentalism, this version of feminism gains a political cachet not easily matched by other radical political locations, particularly for young U. S. feminists who already think of themselves as environmentalists, having been more or less socialized as such. Ecofeminism is a significant and complex political phenomenon, a contemporary political movement that has far-reaching goals, a popular following, and a poor reputation among many academic feminists, mainstream environmentalists, and some environmental activists of color. Part of what I want to do in this book is to understand the sources of that poor reputation and to explore the reasons for the failure of ecofeminism to live up to its potential.

Ecofeminist Genealogies

A name that can usefully if partially describe the work of Donna Haraway and Mary Daly, Alice Walker and Rachel Carson, Starhawk and Vandana Shiva, ⁴ ecofeminism is a shifting theoretical and political location that can be defined to serve various intentions. The present chaotic context of the relatively new and diverse political positionings that go under the name of “ecofeminism” allows me to construct within this book a series of definitions and historical trajectories of the movement, ones I recognize as always interested and certainly contestable. ⁵ In this chapter, I will piece together stories about ecofeminist beginnings and evolution by tracing the use of the word “ecofeminism” as it appears in political actions, organizations, conferences, publications, and university courses. Not a history so much as a genealogy, imbedded in this tracing is an effort to tease out the label’s shifting meanings and political investments in order to delineate the construction of ecofeminism as an object of knowledge, as a political identity, and as a set of political strategies within the convergence of local and global environmentalisms, academic and activist feminisms, and anticolonialist and antiracist movements. ⁶ In this chapter, I will focus on ecofeminism as a manifestation of feminism within environmentalisms; in the last chapter, I will focus on ecofeminism within feminist movement and theory.

Both an activist and an academic movement, ecofeminism has grown rapidly since the early eighties and continues to do so in the nineties. As activists, ecofeminists have been involved in environmental and feminist lobbying efforts, in demonstrations and direct actions, in forming a political platform for a U.S. Green party, and in building various kinds of ecofeminist cultural projects (such as ecofeminist art, literature, and spirituality). They have taken up a wide variety of issues, such as toxic waste, deforestation, military and nuclear weapons policies, reproductive rights and technologies, animal liberation, and domestic and international agricultural development. In academic arenas, scholars who are either identified with or interested in ecofeminism have been active in creating and critiquing ecofeminist theories. A wave of publications in the area, including several special issues of journals, indicates research activity on ecofeminism in religious studies, philosophy, political science, art, geography, women’s studies, and many other disciplines. ⁷

In this chapter, I concentrate on the way in which ecofeminism can be seen primarily as a feminist rebellion within male-dominated radical environmentalisms, where I have found it popping up in almost every arena, often without communication between these slightly or greatly different versions of ecofeminism. Thus, one can find ecofeminists appearing within the anti-nuclear movement, social ecology, bioregionalism, Earth First!, the U.S. Greens, animal liberation, sustainable development, and, to a lesser extent, the environmental justice movement. In chapter 4, I take up the issue of why the last, which is an environmental movement primarily of people of color and working-class people, should be a place where ecofeminism has had difficulty making a sustained appearance.

The origins of this varied activity called “ecofeminism” have been described in different ways. ⁸ Certainly, an ecological critique was an important part of women’s movements worldwide from the mid-1970s, particularly those concerned with nuclear technology, neocolonialist development practices, and women’s health and reproductive rights. In my reading of these developments, ecofeminism in the U.S. arose in close connection with the non-violent direct action movement against nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Until the Women’s Pentagon Actions in 1980, however, there were numerous events and groups connected with ecofeminism that were concerned with a number of issues, militarism being only one of many.

The earliest event I’ve seen described as making the connection between women and the environment was in 1974, at the Women and the Environment conference at UC Berkeley organized by Sandra Maburg and Lisa Watson. An ecofeminist newsletter, W.E.B.: Wimmin of the Earth Bonding, published four issues from 1981 to 1983, concerned with feminist and lesbian back-to-the-land communities, health, appropriate technology, and political action. ⁹

Most influentially, however, U.S. ecofeminism’s initiating event was the Women and Life on Earth: Ecofeminism in the 1980s conference at Amherst in 1980, organized by Ynestra King (then of the Institute for Social Ecology), Anna Gyorgy (an organizer in the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance), Grace Paley (a feminist writer and pacifist activist), and other women from the anti-nuclear, environmental, and lesbian-feminist movements. ¹⁰

The Women and Life on Earth conference organized panels and workshops on the alternative technology movement (staffed by the group Women in Solar Energy, or WISE), organizing, feminist theory, art, health, militarism, racism, urban ecology, theater, as well as other topics: eighty workshops in all. Over 650 women attended, far beyond the expected hundred or so. ¹¹ Speakers included Patricia Hynes of WISE; Lois Gibbs, then of the Love Canal Homeowners Association and later of the Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW); ¹² and Amy Swerdlow, feminist activist and historian. ¹³ The conference generated an ongoing Women and Life on Earth (WLOE) group in Northampton, Massachusetts, which published a newsletter entitled Tidings, as well as several other WLOE groups in New York, Cape Cod, and other areas in the Northeastern United States. ¹⁴

Several other ecofeminism conferences and organizations were either inspired by Women and Life on Earth or assisted by WLOE organizers. A conference already in the planning stages in 1980, Women and the Environment: The First West Coast Eco-Feminist Conference drew 500 women, who listened to talks by Angela Davis, Anna Gyorgy, China Galland, and Peggy Taylor. Workshops were offered on “alternative energy, global view, planning, health, organizing media, no nukes, and peace.” ¹⁵ In London, a Women For Life on Earth (WFLOE) group formed, inspired by the Amherst conference, and organized a conference in 1981. Energy from that conference spawned numerous WFLOE groups, twenty-six in the United Kingdom and nine in other countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Japan, and West Germany. ¹⁶ WFLOE put out a newsletter at least until Winter 1984, organized a number of gatherings, and supported the Greenham Common peace camp. Organizers of WFLOE, Stephanie Leland and Leonie Caldecott, edited the first ecofeminist anthology, Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, in 1983.

From the Women and Life on Earth conference at Amherst also grew the organizing efforts for the Women’s Pentagon Actions (WPA) of 1980 and 1981, in which large numbers of women demonstrated and engaged in civil disobedience. As defined by the Unity Statement of the WPA, ¹⁷ the politics behind these early ecofeminist actions were based on making connections between militarism, sexism, racism, classism, and environmental destruction (however unevenly the action may have addressed these issues). ¹⁸ Influenced by the writings of Susan Griffin, ¹⁹ Charlene Spretnak, ²⁰ Ynestra King, ²¹ and Starhawk, a set of political positions that began to be called ecofeminism developed among women sympathetic to the politics of the WPA and other antimilitarist and environmental actions. Many women involved in later antimilitarist direct actions thus began to call themselves ecofeminists in the middle eighties as a way of describing their interlocking political concerns. ²² In fact, an article in the 1981 issue of Tidings, the newsletter of WLOE and the WPA, states that organizers decided not to get involved with a Mother’s Day Coalition for Disarmament March in Washington, DC, because “The Mother’s Day action is a single issue action and not explicitly feminist.” Furthermore, the march was not organized using a “participatory feminist process.” ²³ Thus, even after the WPA, “ecofeminism” referred not to antimiliarism alone but to a particular kind of feminist, radically democratic antimilitarism that made connections to other political issues. Rather than arising from “the peace movement,” ecofeminists deeply influenced the nature of feminist peace politics in the 1980s.

As the label became more common among feminist antimilitarist activists, a concomitant interest in ecofeminism was emerging in the academy. The two arenas were intertwined at the Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature, Theory conference in March 1987 at the University of Southern California (USC), organized by Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein. This well attended conference was the beginning of a rapid flowering of ecofeminist art, political action, and theory that continues today. ²⁴ This conference also marked the point where the word ecofeminism began to be used outside the antimilitarist movement to describe a politics that attempted to combine feminism, environmentalism, antiracism, animal liberation, anticolonialism, antimilitarism, and nontraditional spiritualities.

During the years following the USC conference, U.S. ecofeminists became active in the international arena, intervening in the process of the globalization of environmentalism. In 1991, a World Women’s Conference for a Healthy Planet in Miami, Florida, was organized by the Women’s Environmental Development Organization, or WEDO. For political reasons, which I will discuss later, WEDO did not explicitly identify as “ecofeminist,” but its rhetoric and vision were clearly in the ecofeminist tradition. This conference brought together women from all over the world to discuss environmental issues in the context of women’s knowledge, women’s needs, and women’s activism. It served as a springboard for an ecofeminist presence at the UN Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which had some influence on the international deliberations about solutions to worldwide environmental problems. Besides this activity in an international arena, there ha...