Image credit: Rachael Durrant

How can we live in harmony with each other and the natural world? How can we feed ourselves and others well, whilst caring for the land that sustains us?

These questions have woven their way through my research and private life since I was a child. They have also animated the personal, political, and professional ambitions of several generations of people before me. As such, there are any number of different ways to address them.

In my own education and research, I have worked with a range of different approaches. Most recently, I’ve focused on how alternative technologies – those that promise to be greener, healthier, and fairer – are produced and used. This has led me to advise others (businesses, policymakers, campaigners, activists, grassroots organisations, and neighbourhood groups) to help them tackle environmental issues.

However, I now believe that my previous efforts were unsatisfactory for (at least) one reason – they did not adequately address inequalities.

Ecofeminism

As both an intellectual project and a political movement, Ecofeminism emphasises the importance of inequality in relation to the environment and sustainability. It does this by raising questions about the 'winners' and 'losers' from any situation, action, or proposed intervention. In doing so, it lifts the lid on the inequalities that underpin human societies, often revealing unexpected and uncomfortable truths.

For examples that speak directly to the practice of agroecology, check out the life and work of ecofeminist scholar-activist Vandana Shiva. A keynote address that she gave at the Oxford Real Farming Conference in 2023 provides a summary of her activism and advocacy. Another great resource is this Food Research Collaboration seminar on ‘Ecofeminism, Food and Social Justice’ featuring Sheila Dillon and ecofeminist scholar Mary Mellor.

Þ    Read on for more of my own thoughts about ecofeminist theory, or

Þ    Watch out for my next post on ecofeminist activism in the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina, and its UK arm, the Landworkers' Alliance

Looking to the margins

Taking an ecofeminist perspective demands that we look to the margins and focus attention on those who have been sidelined within, or erased from, dominant accounts.

For instance, viewed from an ecofeminist perspective, the (until recent) invisibility of women in British agriculture has functioned to secure the dependability of women as 'farmers wives', providing domestic labour and raising the next generation without asking for remuneration or financial independence. This has enabled landowning men to cultivate themselves and their sons as 'farmers', and to benefit from being seen to be doing a worthy job and living a healthy, respectable life.

Although this lack of recognition within farming has been challenged in recent years, invisibility continues to be a problem for many women. Women of colour and those from working class, migrant, and refugee communities, in particular, are less often featured within media representations of agriculture than white, middle-class women.

“Black women, other women of colour, migrant and refugee women – combined an estimated 6.5% of the UK population – are marginalised, excluded and underrepresented”.

Actionist Deirdre (Dee) Woods commenting on the invisibility of women of colour within research and public policy that addresses social, environmental, and economic crises in the UK (Woods 2019).

To delve further into the issue of racism in particular, check out this short paper by Dee Woods which links to work on Intersectionality, Social Justice and Black Feminism.   

Ecofeminism also opens an enquiry into the value placed on productivity, output and growth, compared to the value placed on care, nurture and repair. In doing so, it highlights the way that productivity has long been linked with masculinity and care with femininity, providing a basis for devaluing the latter in relation to the former.

A crisis of care?

In fact, ecofeminist scholars argue that the social and environmental problems of our day are connected to an ongoing crisis of care that has its roots in the development of our modern capitalist economies and continues to spread further afield and reach deeper into our social systems over time.

“The climate crisis is exacerbated by, and intrinsically connected to, what ecofeminist political economists have called ‘a crisis of care’.”

Ecofeminist scholar Sherilyn MacGregor arguing for eco-political theory and practice to pay attention to ecofeminist insights on the value of care (MacGregor 2021).

Image credit: Rachael Durrant

At the core of this argument is the idea that – within Western culture and society – nature and the natural world have been construed as inferior to humanity and the human world since at least the dawn of the Modern era. This ‘dualistic’ position that puts 'man over nature' is also linked to the spread of a belief in the rational mind as separate to the sensual body, or 'mind over body'. From this perspective, to suggest that a person or thing is ‘natural’, ‘native’ or ‘bestial’ has long served as a way to derogate or deride it.

Dualism and its consequences

According to ecofeminist scholars, this dualistic rhetorical schema has historically been used to make women, the young, the poor, disabled, queer, and black, indigenous, migrant and other people of colour seem inferior to wealthy, white, older men, on account of being 'closer to nature'.

This is evident in our current economies, with sectors traditionally associated with nature, the land, and the body, and roles associated with manual and caring labour, being valued poorly in comparison to sectors associated with industry, technology, and the mind, and roles associated with mental and managerial labour. Unsurprisingly, the former are overwhelmingly populated by the same marginalised groups just mentioned, whilst the latter have been dominated by wealthy, white, older men.

The ‘man over nature’ schema also paved the way for the historical colonisation and enslavement of people in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas, as well as the enclosure of common land and the persecution and mass murder of women and the poor in Europe – securing a supply of low cost labour for capitalist enterprises in the process, and ensuring the loss of traditional and indigenous ways of living that were in many ways less harmful to the natural world than our western capitalist economies.

“Witch-hunting was a war against women, a war carried out by those who used terror to destroy a communal, subsistence-oriented world.”

Silvia Federici on Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (Federici 2018)

To learn more about these historical events and processes, the works of ecofeminist scholars Val Plumwood, Silvia Federici, and Maria Mies provide thought-provoking and well-evidenced accounts (references provided below).

Revaluing care

From this perspective, it becomes imperative to find and adopt new ways of living that value nature, the body, and care as highly as ideas, technology, and productivity.

For clues about what these new ways of life might look like, Ecofeminism again turns towards those who have long been exploited, devalued, and made invisible, as well as the natural, ‘non-human’ world (which we can alternatively call 'more-than-human', as a way to resist portraying it as a negative, or as implicitly ‘less than’).

For some ecofeminist scholars, this has meant exploring the experiences of rural women in particular – see works by Ariel Saleh and Carolyn Sachs referenced below. Others have focused their search on people living at the margins of society, indigenous knowledge systems, and the social and political organising of peasant movements.

A place where all these perspectives (at times) converge is the global peasant movement for food sovereignty and agroecology, La Via Campesina, which was founded in 1993 and has a presence in over eighty countries across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, including the UK.

Ecofeminist movements

The international organisation of La Via Campesina puts forward an ecofeminist position, promoting indigenous knowledge and claiming that women are key participants and leaders of the global peasant movement.

"The role of women is part of what makes this movement unique both in the history of peasant movements and among other international social movements and organizations. The work, perspectives, analysis, energy, leadership and presence of women in La Via Campesina has fundamentally shaped and strengthened our movement."

The original text is available at: https://viacampesina.org/en/women-la-via-campesina/  

This viewpoint is also apparent within the Landworkers' Alliance (LWA) – the arm of La Via Campesina that is based in the UK. To find out more about this pioneering ecofeminist organisation, see my next post on ecofeminist activism, which will explore how Ecofeminism is embodied within the LWA.

Resources

Vandana Shiva (1988) Staying Alive: women, ecology, and development. India: Zed Books.

Val Plumwood (1994) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Taylor & Francis Group. 

Silvia Federici (2018) Witches, witch-hunting, and women. PM Press.

Silvia Federici (2021) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Penguin Classics.

Maria Mies (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London and Atlantic Heights, N.J: Zed Books Ltd.

Sherilyn MacGregor (2021) Making matter great again? Ecofeminism, new materialism and the everyday turn in environmental politics, Environmental Politics, 30:1-2, 41-60.

Deidre Woods (2019) “Invisible Women: hunger, poverty, racism and gender in the UK”. Right to Food and Nutrition Watch. Issue 11: Women’s Power in Food Struggles. Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition.

Sachs, C.E. (1996). Gendered Fields: Rural Women, Agriculture, and Environment (1st ed.). Routledge.

Salleh, A., 1997. Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. London: Zed Books Ltd.