Ecofeminist Thought & Practice
Ecofeminist Thought & Practice
Ecofeminist Thought & Practice
Bruna Bianchi
* This paper is an abridged and modified version of the introductory essay in number 20 of
‘DEP’, devoted to ecofeminism and entitled Ecofemminismo: Il pensiero, i dibattiti, le
prospettive (Ecofeminism: The Ideas, the Debates, the Perspectives),
http://www.unive.it/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=139250. Translator: Rosanna Bonicelli.
In recent years, the degrowth movement has forcefully brought attention to the
need to escape market tyranny and the destructive spiral of the capitalist economic
system. Can the critique against the paradigm of unlimited growth, the drive to-
wards an economy not based on money and respectful of nature, find common
ground with the perspectives offered by feminism, particularly ecofeminism, of a
moral economy based on the preservation of life and on subsistence, freed from
dominion over women and over nature?1
Reproducing and protecting human life in collaboration and harmony with nature is
what women have been doing since time immemorial, an unacknowledged task,
naturalised, made invisible, slavish and servile. Recovering the values wherein
women have always recognised themselves and initiating a process of economic
and cultural change means, primarily, deconstructing the system of thought that has
justified and justifies the oppression of women and the exploitation of animals and
nature. Given, in fact, that economic growth is not a neutral process with regard to
gender, the degrowth project cannot avoid investigating in depth the relationship
between patriarchy and capitalism.
Stemming from the origins of the ecofeminist movement, this paper briefly traces
the theoretical elaborations of ecofeminism regarding the origins of patriarchal
dominion and the task of reproduction, focussing on contemporary movements – in
which women unquestionably play a key role – in defence of the environment, of
the subsistence and dignity of all living beings, and finally examining how politics
and democracy are perceived.
So wrote Susan Griffin, in 1978, in her work Women and Nature: The Roaring
Inside Her, a seminal text of ecofeminist thought. In this “poem that includes histo-
ry” (Cantrell 1996, p. 198), alternating scenarios of the oppression of women and
of nature, the author traces the history of Western civilisation. The bond which that
tradition had established between women and nature, in Griffin’s opinion, had to
be overturned positively and take on a liberating significance. Acquiring a deep
awareness of our origins, of our present and of our aim – the author also suggests –
means acquiring a full awareness of the interconnection with every single plant,
animal and human life, forming a single body with the planet. Women and Nature
touched upon themes which would be taken up anew over the following years: the
1
I am using the term subsistence according to the meaning recently attributed to it by Maria
Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, namely that whence one’s own existence derives.
The idea of subsistence is in contrast to the notion of ‘welfare’ as it is commonly under-
stood in Western countries, based on growth in the production of goods and on money,
since this implies the destruction of nature, of life and “of all that we call humanity” (V.
Bennholdt-Thomsen-M. Mies 2005, p. 11).
relationship between human beings and animals and the liability of science and
technology in the destruction of the environment. In those years, nature became a
feminist issue. This was forcefully stated by Rosemary Ruether in 1975:
Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological cri-
sis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domina-
tion. They must unite the demands of the women’s movement with those of the ecological
movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the under-
lying values of this [modern industrial] society (Ruether 1975, p. 204).
In 1962, it was the work of another woman, Silent Spring by Rachael Carson,
that sowed the seeds of the modern ecology movement. Denouncing the conse-
quences for human and animal life of insecticides and other “elixirs of death”, the
American biologist provided a reminder of the greater vulnerability of women and
children as regards pollution (Carson 1999, p. 204). In a piece of poetic prose that
echoed her love of nature, Carson offered a radical critique of science which antic-
ipated that advanced by contemporary ecofeminism: the desire for dominion over
nature, perceived purely as a resource, was destroying life on the planet.
Belittled and derided in government and industrial circles, Carson’s work great-
ly influenced movements which emerged in the USA a decade later. In fact, these
movements – feminist, pacifist, antinuclear, animal welfarist and environmentalist
– increasingly professed an awareness that the ideology justifying oppression on
the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality or species is the same as that which sanc-
tions dominion over nature. Such an awareness went hand in hand with a new way
of perceiving and experiencing our bond with nature, with a need for new symbols
and languages; terms like ‘mother earth’ or ‘healing the earth’ became common, as
did references to ancient religions and myths.
In literature, too, the subject of the relationship between the oppression of
women and dominion over nature came sharply to prominence, particularly in the
context of women and feminists’ ideal vision. Returning to the central image of
Carson’s work, nature is often described as silent; humans are no longer able to
listen to its language. Only when they begin to tune in to nature will they be able to
work towards its preservation. Through the literary devices of fantastic literature,
novels and utopian tales see women living in synch with nature in a dynamic, spir-
itual and communicative network, and freely developing those feminine qualities
of theirs that patriarchal power has always stifled.
Notwithstanding the variety of the themes treated and of its plots, feminist uto-
pian literature has contributed to the deconstruction of patriarchal culture, uncov-
ered the incongruities of the thought on which it is based, undermined it through
the subtle art of irony, contributed to the spreading of an ecological sensibility and
anticipated or developed the themes of ecofeminist thinking (Moylan 1986).
As it is known, the term ecofeminism first appeared in 1974, in a piece of writ-
ing by Françoise d’Eaubonne, Le féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death), in
which the French feminist examined the environmental costs of ‘development’ and
identified women as the subjects of the change. In 1978, she founded the Écologie
et Féminisme movement which, although it made little impact in France, attracted
considerable interest in Australia and the USA. 1974 also saw the appearance of a
brief article by the American anthropologist Sherry Ortner, which was to become a
key point of reference in ecofeminist thought. In Is Female to Male as Nature Is to
Culture? Ortner, taking her lead from the universality of women’s subordination in
all cultures, suggested a deep investigation into the origins of violence and, in order
to trace the history, proposed a return to the differences inscribed on the body.
Men, who lack any natural creative functions, must (or have the chance to) assert
their own creativity artificially, by way of technics. “In so doing, they create ob-
jects that are relatively long-lasting, eternal, transcendent, in contrast to women,
who simply create human beings, ephemeral mortal creatures” (Ortner 1974, p.
75). This would explain, in the author’s view, why activities aimed at suppressing
life (weapons were the first artefacts) have always enjoyed great prestige, while
feminine ones aimed at creating and preserving life have been belittled.
“What are the historical and theoretical relationships between women and na-
ture and men and culture? How should the questions put by Sherry Ortner be an-
swered?” It was these questions that, back in 1984, opened the monographic edi-
tion of the Environmental Review, devoted to women and the environment2, but as
early as 1974 ecofeminism, particularly cultural and spiritual themes, became the
subject of academic study, university courses and conferences. In 1974 a confer-
ence was held at Berkeley entitled Woman and Environment, organised by two ge-
ographers, Sandra Marburg and Lisa Watkins. In March 1980, at Amherst, Massa-
chusetts, a conference was held entitled Women and Life on Earth, which saw the
participation of representatives from movements in defence of the environment
which had spread all over the world.
In the USA, particularly, in the years which between the two conferences, the
protests against the production of nuclear energy and war had reached their peak
and numerous women’s associations were founded in defence of the environment
and health; 1977 saw the emergence of Women of All Red Nations (WARN) – a
movement wherein women presented themselves as spiritual guides for the com-
munity – to protest against the compulsory sterilisation of native women, the re-
moval of land from reserves and the localisation of dangerous factories on Indian
territory. In 1980, the association raised the alarm over the increase in the births of
deformed babies and miscarriages due to radioactive waste. In 1978, Lois Gibbs, at
Love Canal, New York State, began the fight against the toxic waste dump respon-
sible for very serious health problems affecting inhabitants and, in 1981, she
founded the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW), which promot-
ed four thousand campaigns against toxic waste in various centres around the coun-
try (Mellor 1997, p. 22). In the protests against toxic waste and pesticides, women
unquestionably played the leading role. The body, the home and the community
became the loci of women’s experience and protest in the USA, Canada, Australia
and Sweden (Merchant 1995, pp. 139-145) and also, later, in Europe and in Italy.
Ecological impacts and consequences are experienced through human bodies, in ill health,
early death, congenital damage and impeded childhood development. Women disproportion-
ately bear the consequences of those impacts within their own bodies (dioxin residues in
breast milk, failed pregnancies) and in their work as nurturers and carers. Some ecofeminists
have gone further and argued that women that women have a greater appreciation of humani-
2
The monographic edition, entitled Women and Environment, was edited by Carolyn Merchant.
ty's relationship to the natural world, its embeddedness and embodiedness, through their own
embodiment as female (Mellor 1997, p. 2)
In the 1970s, women’s movements that spontaneously grew all around the
world revealed the link between the health and the lives of women and the destruc-
tion of nature. An awareness of women’s vulnerability in the face of environmental
degradation and a desire to have a voice in decision-making processes were com-
mon to all these campaigns, which had been cropping up spontaneously.
In 1973, the chipko movement began, in defence of the Himalayan forests and
of the subsistence-based economy pursued by women, in harmony with nature. In
1977, Wangari Maathai set up the reforestation project in Kenya, the main aims of
which were to promote a positive image of women and their independence (Weber
1988; Michaelson 1994; Shiva 2002; Maathai 2006; Maathai 2010).
Between 1980 and 1981, two very important events made the movement visible
on an international level: in 1980, in Washington, two-thousand women surround-
ed the Pentagon to protest against nuclear power, and in 1981 a protest was held at
the Greenham Common missile base in England. The possible annihilation of the
planet by destructive technology was among the main concerns in these protests.
The subject of the relationship between science, women and nature was among the
first towards which ecofeminist attention was drawn.
Beginning with the dilemma of the environment and its links with science and
technology, Carolyn Merchant reconstructed the process of forming a vision of the
world and of a science which, re-conceptualising nature as a machine rather than as
a living organism, sanctioned men’s dominion over nature and over women. The
‘death of nature’, its perception as inert material, was necessary in order to elimi-
nate all moral scruples regarding the accelerated and indiscriminate exploitation of
natural and human resources. Reducing living beings to the status of machines to
be studied and experimented upon, separating reason from emotion and asserting
the superiority of abstract rationalism, scientific thought dissociates men from
women, animals and nature, feminises nature and naturalises women. Nature and
women exist for men’s needs.
In the following years, particularly from 1985 to 1989, ecofeminist thinking on
science, women and nature was enriched by important contributions from three
physicists. In 1985, a volume appeared by Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gen-
der and Science, translated in Italian and published by Garzanti in 1987 under the
title Sul genere e la scienza.
“How much of science is bound up with the idea of masculinity and what would
it mean for science if this were not the case?” The American biophysicist had al-
ready been asking this question in the 1970s, and she attempted to answer it in the
collection of essays in the book. Her analysis stems from a critique of two basic
stereotypes present in the relationship between women and science: firstly, that
linking objectivity with masculinity and subjectivity with femininity, secondly that
identifying science as a human activity devoid of values or emotional connotations.
In 1989, the book by the Indian physicist Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive, trans-
lated into Italian the following year, revealed the consequences of what she called
“maledevelopment” for the lives of women and for nature on the Indian subconti-
nent. Taking as her starting point Gandhi’s observations on knowledge being re-
duced to power, Shiva criticised the modern concept of science as a system which
purports to be universal, independent of any ethical values and which stifles plural-
istic expressions of knowledge. Scientific reductionism, based upon violent frac-
ture, generates inequality, dominion and poverty. With ‘maledevelopment’, forests
are separated from rivers, the fields from the forests and animals from culture, gen-
erating and spreading death.
In the same year, Elisabetta Donini’s work, La nube e il limite. Donne, scienza,
percorsi nel tempo (The Cloud and the Limit: Women and Science over the Course
of Time) appeared in Italy. In Italy too, in fact, the women/science nexus had been
dealt with by women’s movements since 1976, after the Seveso disaster, and then
in 1986 after Chernobyl, which gave rise to a new sense of environmental respon-
sibility and a new awareness of limits. A decisive event, Donini recalls, was the
seminar organised on 4 July 1986 by women members of the PCI (Italian Com-
munist Party), entitled: Scienza, potere, coscienza del limite. Dopo Cernobyl: oltre
l’estraneità (Science, Power, Awareness of the Limit. After Chernobyl: Beyond
Extraneousness). Women, the Italian physicist writes, collectively re-elaborate
“their gaze on science and technics, in a way consistent with the notion of “begin-
ning by oneself”.
After Chernobyl, the women who took to the streets spoke a language that was almost impu-
dent in its banality: milk, lettuce, the washing, the children’s shoes... But it was precisely by
way of that uprising in contemporary life against the great techno-scientific strategies that the
ability to create a radical split among the traditional structures of knowledge and power was
wedged into place (Donini 1990, p. 9).
The basic premise of science, namely that individual experience can be reas-
sembled in an abstract representation of reality with universal relevance, has thus
been challenged by movements and by women’s thinking on the basis of the con-
crete experience of those years. The norms concerning universality and objectivity
had to be re-examined, as they were contradicted “profoundly, by their intrinsic
gender bias” (Donini 1990, p. 19). This reversal of perspective brought about by
women’s movements has had very significant results in every discipline.
Just what makes the environment (ecology) a feminist issue? What are some of the alleged connec-
tions between the domination of women and the domination of nature? How and why is recognition
of these connections important to feminism, environmentalism, and environmental philosophy? An-
swering these questions is largely what ecofeminism is about (Warren 1996, p. 137).
What the various male and female writers have in common is the conviction
that life on earth is a network of interconnections and that no natural hierarchy ex-
ists; hierarchy is a creation by humans which is projected onto nature and used to
justify oppression: sexual, social, racial, and so on. Therefore, on a theoretical lev-
el, ecofeminism attempts to show all the connections between the various forms of
dominion, and its practice is non-hierarchical; among the various schools of
thought, it is the most inclusive. In fact, in their analysis of oppression, socialists,
feminists, animal welfarists, etc., make distinctions between groups of oppressors
and subjugated parties. These are exclusive theories which, not profoundly grasp-
ing the complexity of dominion, in turn create new categories of otherness, allow-
ing the perpetuation of an oppositional way of thinking. Sexism, racism, classism,
speciesism and androcentrism are systems of oppression which reciprocally rein-
force each other and lead to the degradation of life and the destruction of nature
(Warren 1996). What oppressed groups have in common – women, colonised peo-
ples, the poor – is the fact that each has been put on an equal level to nature, each is
considered part of nature, outside the sphere of reason and history. The category of
‘nature’ is above all a political category. Aligning oneself with the feminist view-
point, therefore, does not reflect any desire for contrast, but rather to observe and
interpret the world from another perspective, from the bottom, and it is gender per-
spective that best allows us to lay bare the network of relationships that constitute
dominion.
Among white populations, coloured populations, the poor, children, the elderly, the colonised
and other human groups threatened by the destruction of the environment, there are those who
belong to the female sex, who face the greatest risks and suffer immeasurably greater damage
compared with those who belong to the male sex (Warren 2000, p. 2).
3
On anti-speciesism and ecofeminism, see A. Zabonati, Ecofemminismo e questione animale: una
introduzione e una rassegna, in DEP, n. 20, 2012.
sents: giving, caring, embracing the other as unique and unrepeatable. Thereby, the
whole Western tradition has been brought into question. In fact, as Adriana
Cavarero writes,
Philosophy’s primary task lies in ignoring birth, and thus ignoring the locus of the Appear-
ance of the uniqueness and the oneness embodied, where the reality of the new baby and its
relationship are intrinsic [...]. So he or she who is born constitutes a relational subjectivity,
and prevents the theorisation of a uniqueness that is individualism (Cavarero 2007, p. 73).
History
Feminist thinking has constantly questioned history, particularly ancient history,
with the aim of understanding the origins and causes of the asymmetry between the
genders and of sexual division in the workplace. Examining the historical process
from the viewpoint of the oppressed, allowing them a place in history, hearing their
voices, reconstructing their fight for emancipation, is essential for anyone whose
perspective is focussed upon change. Availing themselves of the very numerous
studies on the origins of patriarchy carried out since the 19th Century, women his-
torians have wished to go back to the original violence, have deeply examined the
connection between dominion over women and the exploitation of nature, between
the exploitation of women and the unlimited accumulation and growth paradigm,
revealing the network of injustice and oppression wherein patriarchy and capital-
ism are firmly united.
The works of Jakob Bachofen, Lewis Morgan, Friedrich Engels and Otis Tufton
Mason had shown that the oppression of women was a product of history; the
widespread notion that the patriarchal family was unchangeable and eternal, based
on a law of nature, was nothing but a myth (Taylor Allen 1999). Patriarchy, in fact,
had asserted itself in a recent era following economic and social change. The de-
velopment of agricultural activity and above all of livestock farming – traditionally
performed by men – together with their consequent accumulation of wealth, gave
rise to the concept of private property, shook the old aristocratic societies and de-
stroyed the collectivism that was typical of matrifocal societies, led to the subjuga-
tion of women, to the advent of war and slavery, and to the male monopoly over
culture. Conquest over other groups came to entail killing the men and enslaving
the women and children to work in the home, on the land and for sexual services.
This non-productive, predatory mode of appropriation became the paradigm of all historical
exploitative relations between human beings, Its main mechanism is to transform autonomous
human producers into conditions of production for others (Mies 1986, p. 66).
One of the criticisms against ecofeminist thought has been that it has empha-
sised cultural aspects and themes and neglected those of a social nature. Although
often based on misunderstandings, these criticisms have provided the stimulus to
broaden the field of research and refine theoretical reflection. As far back as the
early 1980s, numerous studies foregrounded the relationship between patriarchy
and capitalism4. Patriarchy is not an idea or an interpretative category, but a system
of power relationships which view women and coloured peoples as resources, the
same ideology that ransacks nature. This interpretative trend is central to the work
of the ‘Bielefeld School’, which includes Maria Mies, Claudia von Werlhof and
4
Apart from the works by Mary Mellor and Ariel Salleh cited in the bibliography, on this subject see
also Werholf, 2007.
Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen. In particular, Maria Mies’ work Patriarchy and
Accumulation on a World Scale has had a notable impact. The writer says in her
introduction:
The confusions in the feminist movement worldwide will continue unless we understand the
'woman question' in the context of all social relations that constitute our reality today, that
means in the context of a global division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation.
The subordination and exploitation of women, nature, and colonies are the precondition for
the continuation of this model (Mies 1986, p. 2).
Drawing on the debate within the feminist movement on the tasks of production
and reproduction that had developed over the previous decade, and on Rosa Lux-
emburg’s thought analysis, Maria Mies focused on the significance in capitalist
accumulation of unpaid working relationships, such as domestic work in industrial-
ised societies and the subsistence economies of the global south. Recalling the in-
fluence of the 1972 writings by Maria Rosa Dalla Costa (The Power of Women and
the Subversion of the Community) and Selma James (A Woman’s Place), who first
interpreted domestic work as a source for capitalist accumulation, she writes:
The discovery, however, that housework under capitalism had also been excluded per defini-
tion from the analysis of the capitalism proper, and that this was the mechanism by which it
became a 'colony' and a source for unregulated exploitation, opened our eyes to the analysis
of other such colonies of non-wage-labour exploitation, particularly the work of small peas-
ants and women in Third World countries [...]. What [Rosa Luxemburg's writings] opened up
for our feminist analysis of women's labour worldwide was a perspective which went beyond
the limited horizon of industrialized societies and the housewives in these countries. It further
helped to transcend theoretically the various artificial divisions of labor crated by capital, par-
ticularly the sexual division of labour and the international division of labour by which pre-
cisely those areas are made invisible which are to be exploited in non-wage labour relations
(Mies 1986, pp. 33-34).
In order to sustain the unlimited growth model, capitalism needs different cate-
gories of colonies, women, other peoples and nature. In feminist analysis over re-
cent decades, economics has been interpreted as a clearly-defined system which
has excluded or marginalized many aspects of human existence and of non-human
nature. The capitalist market, in fact, is nothing more than a small part of all that
sustains it, the tip of an iceberg beneath which lies an economy that is invisible,
which includes the tasks of reproducing and conserving life and which makes all
other activities possible (Forman 1989; Nelson 1997; Pietilä 1997; Barke-Kuiper
2003; Picchio 2003; Mellor 2006; Perkins 2007).
By denying dependence upon the sphere of reproduction and subsistence, wom-
en and nature have come to be viewed as unlimited resources. The heart of the en-
vironmental crisis lies in denying dependence on the sphere of nature, on the body,
on women’s work and on reproduction, in line with the false notion of male inde-
pendence that is inherent to anthropocentrism.
From a theoretical viewpoint, the concept does not concern women in them-
selves, but that set of human activities which have traditionally been entrusted to
women, and associated with them. In this sense, the market economy represents a
public world that has been defined by men (but in which many women also take
part), modelled on their experience disconnected from the basic necessities of life.
Modern economic systems are disembodied and separated from nature.
In the ‘economics of male experience’, as Mary Mellor calls it, the economic
human is adult, physically efficient, mobile, free from domestic responsibilities and
and from the production procedure relating to the goods and services he consumes,
and detached from the ecosystem. In contrast, the work of women, since it reflects
the needs of the body, is rooted in local ecosystems and cannot detach itself from
its own responsibilities. It represents the basic reality of human existence (Mellor
2006). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in Women and Economics, had in fact defined
domestic work as “immediate altruism” (Gilman 1902), the kind of activity that
satisfies immediate needs without expecting any financial reward. Maternal senti-
ment in all cultures symbolises the sustaining of life and many feminists have re-
ferred to the symbolic order of the mother in their critique of the unlimited growth
paradigm.
If we take as our model of a 'worker' not the white male industrial wage-worker, but a mother,
we can immediately see that her work does not fit into the Marxian concept. For her work is
always both: a burden as well as a source of enjoyment, self-fulfilment and happiness. Chil-
dren may give her a lot of work and trouble, but this work is never totally alienated or dead
[...] is still more human than the cold indifference of the industrial worker or engineer vis à
vis his products, the commodities he produces and consumes (Mies 1986, p. 216)
The motherly act of giving and nourishing, already a point of reference in the Gan-
dhian economy, becomes the symbol and model for another economy, another so-
ciety in harmony with nature, in which sexual division in the workplace can be
overcome. The concept of reproduction in the broadest sense is, as Carolyn Mer-
chant observes, what unites the various features of ecofeminism:
What draws together the various components of the ecofemminist movement is the concept of
reproduction in its widest interpretation that includes biological reproduction and social re-
production of life, with the common aim of restoring the natural environment and improving
life in the planet (Merchant 2008, p. 58).
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