Ecofeminism

DEFINITION: Philosophy that bridges the issues of feminism and environmentalism with the understanding that gender discrimination and environmental degradation are related manifestations of systematic oppression

Ecofeminism is an important movement within environmental philosophy, environmental activism, and environmental justice that addresses harm against nature and the patriarchal oppression of women, the feminization of nature and the naturalization of women, and the logic that connects all hierarchical relationships.

A theoretical philosophy and an activist stance, ecofeminism understands that all oppression is linked by a shared logic and that historical, theoretical, and practical relationships exist between gender discrimination and environmental degradation. Ecofeminists assert that in order to address environmental harm, human beings need to attend to power-laden gender relationships; in order to address gender inequity, humans need to understand the logic that enacts hierarchical relationships. Ecofeminists argue that the feminine has long been associated with the natural, the body, and emotion, symbolized in metaphors such as the nurturing image of Mother Nature. Alternately, the masculine has been tied to traits such as rationality and civilized (non-natural) progress. Shared logic perpetuates these dualisms—female/male, nature/culture, body/mind—which are overlaid with corresponding value judgments: Rationality, male traits, and culture are good; expressions of the body, female traits, and nature are bad. Ecofeminism seeks to understand and address these dualisms.

Activist ecofeminism emerged during the 1970s with women-led groups who performed acts of civil disobedience to protest harms against nature such as nuclear proliferation, widespread pollution, and deforestation. These gatherings provoked a reaction from academic feminists, who explored the theoretical relationships among multiple forms of degradation. Early ecofeminism was tied closely to the spirituality of nature- and female-centered religions, including paganism and Native American mythologies. Essentialist arguments for the “special” relationship between women and nature also permeated early scholarship.

One essentialist argument asserts that some female qualities—the ability to bear children and nurture life—imbues women with an innate sensitivity for and connection to environmental issues, locating female identity in biology. A second essentialist argument suggests that metaphysical gender-specific essences exist separate from biology and social constructions of gender. Another essentialism posits female identity ahistorically and thus assumes the oppressed “female” experience across time is a universal experience, regardless of class, race, ethnicity, or sexuality, which can serve to privilege the dominant female voice. Other essentialisms claim that particular ethnic and racial groups have an innate closeness with nature, often associated with a cultural worldview, or imagine nature itself as fixed and unchanging.

While some ecofeminists argue that generalizations bring groups together in unity for a cause and thus value essentialism’s activist purpose, the more common rhetoric is antiessentialist: gender differences are shaped by culture and result from lived experience, not biology. Many scholars worry that collapsing the differences among women enacts the same dichotomies that ecofeminists strive to overcome, though with reversed value associations. Some believe that female identities are far more flexible and fluid than essentialist arguments describe; limited descriptions, in turn, limit the available prescriptions for social change. Scholars such as Donna Haraway believe that essentialist rhetoric wrongly focuses on mystical connections with nature and an oversimplified understanding of women rather than on the experiences of actual women. Ecofeminism has evolved to address these essentialist concerns. The discussion has come to center on material issues of justice related to the conditions that cause women to bear more severely the burdens of environmental harm, on the promise—based on women’s social roles—of empowering women to address ecological disaster, on the logic that enables all forms of discrimination, and on the historical roots of hierarchical relationships.

Karen Warren has written about this “logic of domination” that founds hierarchical relationships. She argues for a critical ecofeminism that understands the impacts of anthropocentric rationality in the context of history, culture, and social structure. Other ecofeminists, including Carolyn Merchant, also trace the connected exploitations of women and nature to the impacts of reductionism—adopted by early scientific and religious institutions—on Western thought. In order to address the dichotomies perpetuated by this worldview, they explain, human beings need to address the logic that supports divisive relationships.

Ecofeminism in the twenty-first century was more academic than activist, though it did drive small movements across the globe. Intellectually, it had splintered into several branches, including spiritual, essentialist, critical, transformative, radical, and materialist ecofeminism. Although ecofeminism had not launched the grand social change originally imagined by early thinkers, the shared concerns of ecological destruction and gender oppression continued to permeate environmental discourse and action.

Bibliography

Cummins, Eleanor. "Is Ecofeminism Due for a Comeback?" The New Republic, 31 Mar. 2022, newrepublic.com/article/165926/ecofeminism-climate-crisis. Accessed 17 July 2024.

Kheel, Marti. Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Rodriguez, Leah. "The Faces of Ecofeminism: Women Promoting Gender Equality and Climate Justice Worldwide." Global Citizen, 28 Apr. 2022, www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/ecofeminist-issues-activists-examples/. Accessed 16 July 2024.

Sturgeon, Noël. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Action. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.