Ecofeminism

Historical development

Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the word écoféminisme in Le Féminisme ou la mort (1974). Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980) traced how early modern Europe moved from seeing nature as an organism to seeing it as a machine, and what that meant for women and for the environment. In the 1970s and 1980s the Chipko movement in India and anti-nuclear and peace camps such as Greenham Common gave ecofeminism an activist face.

Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988) and Mies and Shiva’s Ecofeminism (1993) rooted it in the subsistence struggles of women in the global South. Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and Karen Warren’s Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000) gave it rigorous philosophical form. Later writers developed queer, materialist and decolonial ecofeminisms.

Principal claims

• The domination of nature and the domination of women are linked in history and in ideas, and have to be understood together.
• Western dualisms, such as reason and nature, mind and body, male and female, culture and nature, structure both oppressions and have to be unlearned.
• Subsistence, care and reproduction are the real economy. Production aimed at growth that ignores them does damage.
• What women know from their daily work with land, water and food is valid knowledge and belongs at the centre of politics.
• The remedy is a politics of care, relationship and sufficiency. Mastery, whether by technology or by management, is not.

Policy implications

Ecofeminists support women’s rights to land and to commons, agroecology and control of seed. They oppose extractive and nuclear projects. They want an economy built around care with public provision, sufficiency in rich countries along degrowth lines, and a voice for the women affected in environmental decisions. They distrust large technological fixes, including geoengineering and much biotechnology.

Internal disagreements

In the 1990s ecofeminists argued over whether the link between women and nature is natural or socially constructed. This “essentialism” dispute led some to prefer the names “ecological feminism” or “feminist environmentalism”. They also disagree about Marxism and about spirituality, and about whether ecofeminism is a form of deep ecology or a criticism of it. A further problem is how writers in the North can avoid speaking for women in the global South.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics charged early ecofeminism with essentialism and with a mystical spirituality of the goddess. Bina Agarwal argued in her “feminist environmentalism” (1992) that women’s environmental activism comes from their material relationship with the environment, not from some essential affinity. Some feminists feared that linking women with nature strengthened the very dualism ecofeminism opposed. Mainstream environmentalists have treated it as marginal.

Ecofeminists answer that the constructivist versions dealt with the charge of essentialism decades ago, and that the economy of care is now central to ecological economics.

Relationships to other traditions

Ecofeminism is a close ally of ecosocialism and degrowth and a source for decolonial ecology and food sovereignty. It is sometimes a critic and sometimes an ally of deep ecology. Its analysis of domination makes it a relative of social ecology.