Care and connection between people and nature
Environmental Justice as Ecofeminism
The ties that bind people to nature – and to one another – are at their most powerful and radical when they exhibit care. Feminists have argued that care and connectedness are practices that go beyond impartiality, and that being guided by these practices in environmental politics will enable deep and genuine transformation of the relationships between people and nature, to the benefit of both. On this approach, environmental justice is ecofeminism.
‘To the extent that we hyper-separate ourselves from nature and reduce it conceptually in order to justify domination, we not only lose the ability to empathise and to see the non-human sphere in ethical terms, but also get a false sense of our own character and location that includes an illusory sense of autonomy.’
— Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (Routledge, 2002), p. 9.
Examples in action
Women’s Environmental Network – Climate Sisters programme
Founded in 1988, WEN takes an intersectional feminist approach to issues that connect gender, health, equality, and environmental justice, placing women’s experiences and voices at the heart of conversations for bolder, more inclusive changes that are more rooted in care.
Landworkers’ Alliance
As a UK organisation representing small farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers, the Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA) supports a growing number of women landworkers and identity-based groups from a range of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds to be heard and to take the lead in building better food and land-use systems.
Gaia Foundation – Earth Jurisprudence
Appreciating and practising Thomas Berry’s philosophy of earth jurisprudence, which considers humans as an inextricable part of the animate world, the Gaia Foundation works with the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective, committed to the systemic transformation from human-centred to earth-centred, from crisis to kinship, from ownership to belonging.
‘Throughout Africa, women are the primary caretakers, holding significant responsibility for tilling the land and feeding their families. As a result, they are often the first to become aware of environmental damage as resources become scarce and incapable of sustaining their families.’
‘We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.
In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.
That time is now.’
— Wangari Maathai, Founder of The Green Belt Movement, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2004
Further Reading
- Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge 1993. Link.
- Sherilyn Macgregor, Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care, UBC Press 2011. Open Access Link to Introduction.
- Karen J. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It is and Why It Matters, Bloomsbury 2000. Link.