1. Feminism And Environmentalism

Feminism’s link with environmental issues and concerns embraces both social and ecological theory and political activism that is rooted in the rise of environmental and feminist activism and intellectual activity of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ecofeminism, environmental feminism(s), and feminist political ecology all refer to the linkages of people-gender-culture-environment-nature with varying emphases and frameworks (Merchant 1980, Plumwood 1993, Rocheleau et al. 1996).

Since the 1980s, activists’ concerns focused upon nuclear warfare and militarism, toxic waste pollution, and deforestation among others. Ecofeminist work, which spanned academic, popular, and literary texts, emphasized that women were both biologically and socially linked to nature. Women’s status and subordination was thus linked to environmental degradation and change so that the oppression and degradation of nature and the environment paralleled the oppression and degradation of women (Merchant 1980). However, when viewed from an international perspective, gendered human perceptions of nature as well as gendered material and sociocultural links to the environment varied over place and time and among cultures. In numerous societies around the world, social scientists have documented and explained how changing cosmologies and geographic histories construct and reproduce key binaries: man woman; culture nature; self-other. Structuralism and semiotics influenced much of this initial work. Women are commonly, but not necessarily, associated with nature, and landscape, the fertility of the earth, the waxing and waning of the moon, with passivity, and the hearth (Merchant 1980, Kolodny 1984). These cultural metaphors shaped individual lives as well as public discourse through images of Mother Nature Mother Earth as contrasted with Spaceship Earth, for example. Early ecofeminist work provided insight as to the ways in which nature and the environment are gendered, and then employed this insight to analyze environmental transformation or celebrate the connection in its spiritual dimension. Ecofeminists defined masculinity and femininity as socially constructed categories which are detrimental to people and the environment and are linked to larger social processes such as colonialism and development. Subsequent critiques pointed to the monolithic and essentialist foundations of earlier ecofeminist work. These critiques argued against a monolithic view of woman that was unmediated by other social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and citizenship and pointed to the necessity of site specific empirical case studies (Agarwal 1992).

2. Critical Ecofeminism

Critical ecological feminism involves a conscious decision to align human and nature in a move beyond the binary dualism embedded epistemology and ideology in the West. In feminist postructural critiques, masculinity and femininity as modes of identity are examined in relation to our store of knowledge about the human link to nature and the ways in which nature and environment are gendered and socially constructed. Feminist political ecology rejects the dualisms of man nature and emphasizes multiplicity, diversity, and the complex interconnections among ecologies, societies, and politics in questions of environmental change of both short and long-term duration. This insight is linked to the critical examination of development policies and practices and increasing social inequality. A key question is how identity and difference shape resource control, access, and distribution in multiple historical and ecological contexts initially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Research examined how the marginalization and exploitation of local communities and ecologies is linked to larger social and economic networks, institutions, and processes.

3. Gender, Environment, And Development

Critiques of mainstream economic development and modernization theory at the international scale revealed how women were invisible in modernization initiatives and within development theory and policy more generally. For example, the majority of women in sub-Saharan Africa are food producers who are responsible for provisioning their households. However, throughout Africa and elsewhere, women were, and still are, unable to gain access to the social, financial, technical, and natural resources that would enable them to provide adequately for their households. As women were incorporated slowly and unevenly into the modernist project through economic development programs aimed at their inclusion, subsequent research revealed how gender bias in development and nesting patriarchal ideologies could exacerbate as well as alleviate their particular vulnerabilities. In addition, this research demonstrated how technology transfer deskilled or did away with working class women’s work, and how modernization and development policy and practices in Africa, Asia, and Latin America transformed rural environments and indigenous social and cultural networks, often reproducing or reinforcing gender stereotypes and inequalities. These critiques of mainstream development theory and practice drew from structuralism and Marxian political economy. Studies of the nexus of capitalism, development, populations, and ecologies stressed how oppression and injustice are linked to environmental transformation and change, the industrial geographies of resource extraction and capitalism’s creations of surplus (Di Leonardo 1991, Seager 1993).

Examining diverse dimensions of women’s work and access to natural resources was critical in revealing the ways in which women were largely disadvantaged by mainstream modernization efforts and policies. Intersections of imperial and indigenous forms of patriarchal power and control could constrict access to land, credit, technology, and education and shape human reproduction. Environmental justice movements and feminist research linked poverty and environmental degradation such as tropical deforestation, irrigation, and pesticide poisoning to gendered relations within the colonialism and to development induced scarcity. Household vulnerability, changing individual, household, regional and national entitlements, and a lack of democracy are linked to the persistence of poverty and to environmental degradation. Gendered identities and relations crosscut racism, class, age, marital status, ethnicity, and nationality.

Alternatives to mainstream development explore indigenous agroecologies and ecological knowledge, the organization and endurance of social movements linked to environmental concerns, and examine popular struggles and resistance by women and by marginalized and indigenous peoples. The ecofeminist project is one of inclusion and interconnectedness. Feminist political ecology refuses to accept binary dualisms linking gender relations and activities to nature and valuing women and/or nature as inferior or unequal (Plumwood 1993). Thus, ecofeminism and feminist political ecology concern struggles for liberation.

4. Human Ecology Politicized

Political ecology emerged from the subfields of human cultural ecology prominent in geography, anthropology, and sociology. The next section examines the emergence of political ecology and feminist political ecology from these subfields.

Cultural ecology examines society–environment relations and uses the concepts of adaptation and equilibrium and organic metaphors to explain these relations over time and place. Cultural ecologists focused upon case studies involving extractive economies and peasant societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Critics of cultural ecology pointed out its tendencies to explanations, which were functionalist, teleological and devoid of considerations of politics and power relations. Subsequent critiques questioned whether organic metaphors were appropriate for defining human societies and also indicated that research in ecology had moved beyond conceptualizing environments in terms of equilibrium states and were defining them in terms of dynamism, impermanence, and constant change. Women’s access and use of natural resources within a cultural and ecological frame progressed in this period as research focused upon issues of women as resource managers and farmers.

5. Gendering Cultural Social Political Ecologies

Since the 1980s, political ecology has examined the political and social dimensions of environmental transformation and change primarily in rural areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It emerged as a critique of cultural ecology’s inattention to power relations and considerations of the politics of resource distribution, access, and transformation. Political ecology combines a broadly defined political economy of resource development and change centering upon the role of social relations and processes to environmental change and degradation, resource distribution, access, and control and the social constructions of nature. In its critique of adaptation and equilibrium, political ecology emphasized agrarian and environmental transformation and change throughout the colonial period up to the present day by examining the ways in which capitalism transformed societies, environments, and the relation between them.

Poverty and environmental degradation are proximate outcomes of the workings of capitalism and world market integration. Peet and Watts (1996) define four contemporary directions in political ecology. First, there are attempts to connect explicitly the dynamics of capitalist growth and environmental outcomes at varying levels and scales. Second, is the integration of power relations and politics into examinations of social and environmental change at varying levels of scale from the global to the micro-politics of the household. Third is the focus examining the roles of ideology and social institutions and/organizations. This involves probing the roles of knowledge construction and legitimization as well as state–society relations in terms of the politics of environmental development and change. Fourth, concerns the myriad perceptions of environmental and resource problems and the ways in which these problems are struggled over.

Notably, political ecology is also prominent in its critique of neo-Malthusian explanations of environmental degradation and change. These explanations avoid considerations of social structures and processes and gender identities and power relations within specific historical and geographic contexts as ways to understand the linkage between environment and population growth.

Bryant and Bailey (1997) outline four major research themes in political ecology. The first centers on a particular environmental problem or set of problems such as soil erosion, deforestation, or water. The second studies concepts that are linked to political ecology such as critiques of sustainable development. A third examines political and ecological problems by means of a specific regional case study. The final approach which is explicitly linked to feminism emphasizes individual and group social characteristics such as class, age, ethnicity, gender, and race.

Over roughly the same period, feminist studies in international political economy had taken up considerations of gender and environments, gendered resource access and control, and activism and social movements as they involve the environmental change and degradation ranging across geographic scale.

6. Research Directions In Feminist Political Ecology

Contemporary research directions in feminist political ecology concern how knowledge about society, environments, spaces, and places are gendered. Studies take up questions of local, gendered knowledge about ecologies and agrarian, rural, and urban landscapes. Gendered knowledge’s refer to particular bodies of knowledge such as that of plant species, agricultural techniques, and food preparation and processing which are frequently the provinces of women or indigenous groups. A second strand of research examines changing environmental rights and responsibilities as they pertain to resource access, distribution, and control. Gendered rights and responsibilities may involve differential access to natural resources such as education, technology, land and trees, and the impacts upon female headed households, the poor, or ethnic minorities. Third, feminist political ecology examines the social struggles that fuse social and environmental concerns and contribute to progressive social change. Environmental degradation is linked to survival and the quality of life. Survival pivots upon questions of entitlement within rural and urban spaces and is linked in by a diversity of production systems and subject to collective struggles. These microlevel questions and struggles are linked necessarily to broader processes of globalization and ecological dynamics across geographic scales.

Bibliography:

1. Agarwal B 1992 The gender and environment debate: lessons from India. Feminist Studies 128(1): 119–55
2. Bryant R L, Bailey S 1997 Third World Political Ecology. Routledge, London
3. Di Leonardo M 1991 Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
4. Kolodny A 1984 The Land Before Her. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC
5. Merchant C 1980 The Death of Nature. Harper & Row, San Francisco
6. Peet R, Watts M 1996 Liberation Ecologies. Routledge, London
7. Plumwood V 1993 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, London
8. Rocheleau D, Thomas-Slayter B, Wangari E 1996 Feminist Political Ecology. Routledge, London
9. Seager J 1993 Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms With the Global Environmental Crisis. Routledge, New York