Elliott, Peter Ecofeminism 307

My Ecofeminist action, going vegan for a week, was a great success for me.  I knew it wouldn’t be too challenging, as I have lived with vegans for a long time, so I know many of the tricks to eat delicious vegan food.  Having a full meal prep plan ahead of time made cooking very simple and easy, and as many of my foods were quick and easy to make, I found it to be fairly similar to my regular lifestyle.  The vegan cooking was simple enough once I knew what ingredients I needed, so it ended up being less difficult that I had anticipated.

 

Was my plan effective?  More or less.  I did what I set out to do, but I don’t think this has pushed me to being vegan full time.  There were absolutely some stinkers in my cooking.  The oatmeal was terrible.  I never want to eat oatmeal again.  Having cereal four days in a row also felt rather bland.  Expanding my meal prep will take more years of practice before I feel prepared to go vegan full time.  My full review of the Impossible Whopper is that it is, indeed, a vegan option.  It feels like cheap fast food, except I can eat it ‘ethically’.  Fast food cannot be ethical, so it still feels like a loss. 

 

Overall, being vegan was fun!  I still would really like to go full time vegan, but right now is a difficult time.  I look forward to learning more about cooking, and eventually making my ethical dream, a reality.

For my Ecofeminist action, I think I’m going to attempt going vegan for a week.  I am well aware that this is going to be a very difficult time to ‘try’ veganism, but luckily I am fortunate enough to be in a position where cheap fruits, and ingredients, are readily available.  Veganism to me is less about saving animals, and more about saving the environment, as the meat industry is one of the planet’s top polluters. I am a big believer that veganism is going to be an essential step moving forward to save the planet, and I think it’s finally time to take the step for myself.  

In order to do this, I will need to do a lot of research and meal planning.  I’ve written out my three meals a day, and listed them below. Looking at it, it’s very clear that I like peanut butter.  A good friend of mine makes specialty vegan pasta, so I had him send me the recipe. The vegan meatballs are store bought, but they taste totally fine.  The tacos are a similar story, focusing on more beans and rice rather than the traditional meats.  This fulfills the protein needs, and it will also pack a delicious spicy meal.  

Monday

• Breakfast
  • Peanut Butter Toast (A personal favorite)
• Lunch
  • Fruits! (Apples, bananas, grapes, etc.  Depends on how I’m feeling)
• Dinner
  • Vegan Pasta w/ Vegan Meatballs

Tuesday

• Breakfast
  • Oatmeal 
• Lunch
  • Apples + Peanut butter (another favorite)
• Dinner
  • Leftover Pasta

Wednesday (this is gonna be fast food day)

• Breakfast
  • Boring regular toast
• Lunch
  • Impossible Whopper (Burger King’s Vegan Option)
    • I will definitely want to talk about this.
• Dinner
  • Vegan Tacos (Beans + Rice + Veggies)

Thursday

• Breakfast
  • Cereal & Coffee (w/ oat milk)
• Lunch
  • Peanut butter toast!
• Dinner
  • Leftover Tacos

Friday

• Breakfast
  • Cereal (Oat milk again here)
• Lunch
  • More fruit!
• Dinner
  • Vegan Pizza

Saturday

• Breakfast
  • Cereal (Oat milk again here)
• Lunch
  • Peanut Butter + Apples
• Dinner
  • Vegan Pizza leftovers

Sunday

• Breakfast
  • Cereal
• Lunch
  • Peanut butter toast!
• Dinner
  • Pasta (Round Three)

I am hoping this will snowball me into being vegan year round.  While the vegan lifestyle is already much more ethical than the regular diet, it is also generally quite healthy when taken alongside supplements, primarily vitamin B12.  I’ve got some friends who have also given me some great tips. Did you know sriracha was vegan?  Fantastic news.  

While being vegan is important for the animals, for me, practicing ethical veganism is more important.  If there are days when I can’t eat a vegan option, I’m not going to starve myself, I’m just going to eat something that I would eat regularly.  It is very important to me that my diet is practical.  I cannot stand when I see people practicing veganism, and they don’t put their own health first.

I look forward to this upcoming week.  I can’t wait to tell you all about my experience.

In order to understand the ‘web’ perspective, we need to go to the source, A. E. Kings’ Intersectionality and the Changing Face of Ecofeminism, where they state “I have always approached intersectionality as being more of a web of entanglement, than a traffic junction or road. Each spoke of the web representing a continuum of different types of social categorisation such as gender, sexuality, race, or class; while encircling spirals depict individual identities.”  This author defines the web very similarly to Kimberle Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality, which reads “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.” These ideas mean that types of oppression can overlap, meaning that women of color face the discrimination of people of color, and the oppression of sexism.  While the concept of the web, or intersectionality, is very simple, it is one of the most powerful tools that ecofeminists have to understand social justice and social dilemma. 

 

I wanted to look at intersectionality through an ecofeminist lens, so I revisited an older topic, being the relationship between masculinity, meat, and the sexualization of women.  I went back to the list of images that we could use for that assignment, the pieces of media that displayed these characteristics, and with one exception, there were no bodies of color.  I believe this is because, stereotypically, women of color are not desired, so the marketing companies do not put people of color in their advertising, perpetuating this cycle that puts people of color down.  Cacildia Cain’s The Necessity of Black Women’s Standpoint and Intersectionality in Environmental Movements describes the impact of this by stating that “Ecofeminism lacks black women’s standpoint and only focuses on white women’s oppression. Ecofeminists argue that environmental degradation and the exploitation of nature and women are rooted in the same capitalist, patriarchal, dominant culture.”  Giving oppressed voices the space to speak would help us fight these problematic power structures and dynamics, as we can see from our meat example. But what about the one person of color I did see in the list? This image is a bit of a racist caricature, using a predatory black male stereotype, as well as the ‘black people like fried chicken’ racial stereotype.   These are problems that intersectional ecofeminism can analyze and understand, we still see muscle predation, but when applied to people of color it plays off a harmful stereotype.  

 

 

Ecofeminist issues are racial issues.  Ecofeminist issues are queer issues. Ecofeminist issues are gendered issues.  All forms of oppression are valuable in order to have a progressive framework in 2020.  Expanding the ‘web’ to get more oppressed group’s voices into the conversation is something that the world has needed to a long time, and with the unifying idea that Earth need protecting, we should be able to do that.

The destruction, and colonization of land is the oppression of all people who live on it.  The tie to nature that people have is a part of culture in the modern era. The best place to start understanding this concept is through an example.  Sam Levin starts showing us this concept in At Standing Rock, women lead fight in face of Mace, arrests and strip searches, where he describes “the jail was packed with native women incarcerated for reasons other than the pipeline actions, including one who was pregnant and feared she was having a miscarriage and another who appeared to be severely ill.”  There are two very important parts to this quote: what the protestors are fighting for, and the degree of punishment they were given. The native women were standing up against colonization of their land, and were punished by the government for protecting land that was rightfully theirs.  

To better understand this, we can look at another example of punishment in, Speak Truth to Power, Wangari Maathai states “when she returned to the park to lead a rally on behalf of political prisoners, Maathai was hospitalised after pro-government thugs beat her and other women protesters. Following the incident, Moi’s ruling party parliamentarians threatened to mutilate her genitals in order to force Maathai to behave “like women should.” But Wangari Maathai was more determined than ever, and today continues her work for environmental protection, women’s rights, and democratic reform.”  To understand the problem here, we again need to break the example into what the women are fighting for, versus what happened to them. Maathai worked to organize a rally, which was perfectly just, and was threatened to have her body deformed. Similar to the women at Standing Rock, this punishment was out of proportion, but because they were protecting nature, their own land and fighting for political justice, they are being targeted more violently with harsher punishments.  

Finally, a final example to illustrate the problematic relationship between women’s suffering and environmental suffering, In The Chipko Movement, they talk about their history defending their land from the government.  They state, “The original ’Chipko movement’ was started around 260 years back in the early part of the 18th century in Rajasthan by this community. A large group of them from 84 villages led by a lady called Amrita Devi laid down their lives in an effort to protect the trees from being felled on the orders of the Maharaja (King) of Jodhpur.”  The form of government, in the form of the king, had attacked a community living on the land for almost three hundred years.  This led to 84 deaths in an attempt to protect trees. I included an image of this protest below.  This is an absurdly unbalanced way of punishing these people who rightfully own the land, and want to keep their piece of culture intact.  This is a terrible problem. We as people who use the land everyday to nourish our society, and to help keep the peace, need to stand up to protect land and the people whose land was wrongfully, violently, taken from them.

Kari Norgaard and Richard York’s Gender Equality and State Environmentalism’s findings can be summarized fairly simply with the quote, 

“Our results clearly show that nation-states with a greater proportion of women in national Parliament, controlling for other factors, typically are more prone to environmental treaty ratification than other nations.” (519)

They conducted a study comparing how successful a country was at creating gender equality, and a country’s ability to help the environment (measured through ‘ratification of environmental treaties’).  The study found that there was evidence to support a correlation between positive gender equity and positive environmentalism.  The problem is that women are not getting these positions in order to fight for these issues.  

This then raises the question, do we know this to be true?

We were already shown the example of WE DO, but after doing some research I found some of their older files that also support what we’re talking about here.  In Sam Sellers’ Gender and Climate Change: A Closer Look at Existing Evidence, she talks about ways that women are, in general, better leaders for the climate crisis., citing examples such as “In Mexico, women who have access to irrigation plant a greater diversity of crops than comparable men” (9)  This idea, that women are more in touch with nature, and are able to succeed more as farmers, supports the idea that women would have more power and passion than men toward environmental agendas.  

We were asked this week to find an additional statistic of evidence to this thesis, so I found Alan Neuhauser’s The Climate Gender Gap, where he states “Women make up more than 80 percent of people displaced by climate change, according to United Nations data, and air pollution is a top threat to the health of pregnant women and their children.”  This statistic is arguably more important than any other about why women make more powerful agendas against climate change, as women are more affected, they’ll make more pushes toward saving the planet.

Finally, what I believe to be the strongest example in recent history, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ influence behind The Green New Deal.  Lisa Friedman writes about this in What is The Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained, where she describes The Green New Deal by stating “The resolution does call on the federal government to make investments in policies and projects that would eventually change the way we design buildings, travel, and eat.”  The Green New Deal is a revolutionary plan to rebuild our society in order to save the planet. Friedman writes a very negative opinion on AOC and The Green New Deal, but this bias can be seen as the sort of backlash that happens when a woman does something revolutionary that can save the world.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a perfect example of what Norgaard and York write about, and will hopefully lead the way for future generations of powerful women of color fighting for our planet.

(Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, pictured right)

Friedman, Lisa.  “What Is The Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained.” Nytimes.com. N. p., 2020. Web. 23 Mar. 2020.  <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/climate/green-new-deal-questions-answers.html>

 

Neuhauser, Alan.  The Climate Gender Gap. USNews.  November, 2018. <https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-11-20/yale-women-more-worried-less-knowledgeable-about-climate-change>

Sellers, Sams.  Gender and Climate Change: A Closer Look at Existing Evidence.  Global Gender and Climate Alliance, WEDO.  November, 2016. <https://wedo.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGCA-RP-FINAL.pdf>

When we defined ecofeminism at the beginning of the semester, I assumed that analysis would comprise of fifty percent women, and fifty percent with an environmental focus.  Reading the Ronnie Hawkins article for this week, it’s clear that my ratio is not one that everyone favors. While I do think that Hawkins makes some important points about the sustainability of our planet, I would like to add that he neglects to consider women in his ecofeminist approach to abortion, and he only considers the environment.  I overall agree with what Hawkins has to say, supporting her overall, but I do think that this is more of an ecological approach rather than an ecofeminist one.  

So lets start breaking down this argument.  In Ronnie Hawkins’ Reproductive Choices: The Ecological Dimension, she states that one of the most important issues surrounding abortion and overpopulation is due to the standard of living, and how our low standard of living effects the planet.  She states, “A growing number of poor people are forced to make a living on increasingly marginal land, with resultant deforestation, overgrazing, soil erosion, or an assortment of other environmental problems further exacerbating their poverty.” (690)  This was the closest idea in the article to focusing on women’s issues, and it was still primarily focused on the planet. While I think there is a lot of value in this idea, I do think that it undermines the impact abortion, and children can have on people’s lives.  While there are plenty of sources saying that people should not get abortions, our society has little to no support available for these babies once they are born. While thinking about the planet is important, feminism needs us to consider that people who get babies forced upon them, with no choice for anything else, who are the most impacted by this discussion.  

Another big point that Hawkins makes is about overpopulation.  I’ve provided a graphic of what scientists think about the population, as many people have theorized that overpopulation isn’t a real issue as population will come to a natural equilibrium at approximately eleven billion people.  This does significantly affect Hawkins’ argument, as much of his argument revolves around overpopulation’s impact on the planet. She specifically talks about the impact on the soil, and on the ecosystems, but not about the humans that are effected on the smaller scale.  While it’s important to consider these problems, abortion is easy enough to argue on an interpersonal scale, as the impact is has on everyone involved can impact a life so dramatically. It feels dehumanizing to see this argument taken away from the individual and put toward a more massive collective.

Overall, I think Hawkins provides some important insight into humanities impact on the planet through just existing, but this idea neglects how abortion and human lives impact each other.  Hawkins considers abortion on the worldwide scale to be valuable, but on the interpersonal level I would argue that it’s even more important and worth fighting toward a pro choice society.

Sexism is rampant in the meat industry.  We know this from our readings last week, but this week in Carol J. Adams’ The Politics of Meat, we can understand this idea, and develop a framework around it through understanding her key ideas.  The most important ideas from her reading include, “Meat-eating is associated with virility, masculinity. Meat eating societies gain male identification by their choice of food.” and “Women are animalized and animals are sexualized and feminized.”  These ideas a fairly simple to understand and see, so let’s look at a few examples. From the list provided, I chose three examples of meat being sexualized that I thought were the strangest and funniest. First, there is this feminized cow. What I thought was most interesting about this image is the emphasis on how thin the cow is.  This is a huge juxtaposition between how we view women and how we view meat. Sexualized women are often glamorized for being thin, but cows are glamorized for being fat and providing more meat. This ad juxtaposes these ideas in a way that makes me uncomfortable. In Lisa Kemmerer’s The Pornography of Meat, an analysis of Carol J. Adams’ work, she states that “Animals are assumed to want it like women. One can consume either a pig or a woman. One can exploit and destroy a calf or a woman. ‘Because women are not being depicted, no one is seen as being harmed and so no one has to be accountable. Everyone can enjoy the degradation of women without being honest about it’” This is exactly what this image is doing, and it’s much creepier than what ‘meats’ the eye. 

My second image takes this idea in another strange direction, depicting the burger as a child, and the doctor as a lucky man who ‘delivered’ (?) it, and now gets to eat it.  There is also this strange undertone of sexualization of birth, which again feels very strange here.

Finally, the third image I chose from the list is a Twitter post from ‘butt praxis’, questioning the validity of the sexyness of meat.  I think that butt praxis makes a good point here, that this sexiness does not seem real when we think about it critically. What about meat makes men sexy?  I would like a second opinion as well, preferably not affiliated with Fox News.

When I went to look for examples of this in my day to day life, I looked up the #meat on Instagram.  Here are my search results:

There are two images that stand out here.  There are four images of actual meat, but then a lingerie ad, as well as a picture of a regular man.  I think this set of images is a perfect answer to the question ‘Who is consumed and who is the consumer?’  This average man clearly is in a dominant position, and in my search of photos of meat, there were no photos of women, but there was this ad for lingerie.  As our quotes explained, women depicted to be consumed, or ‘conquered’ which results in these, frankly disgusting, and strange advertisements.

 

Today, I’d like to open with a quote from Gaard’s Ecofeminism on the Wing: Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations, she states that “we live in paradoxical times.  We don’t have good choices, choices that allow us to live in this culture and maintain our relationship with other animals without violating their integrity.”  I do believe there is a huge amount of truth to this quote. When thinking about veganism, it is really important to keep this philosophy in mind. Many vegans that people imagine when they think of vegans, are hardcore people that never even look at meat.  When I think of a vegan, I think of my roommate. My roommate embodies what Curtin defines as ‘moral veganism.’ Deane Curtin explains this idea in his article, Contextual Moral Vegetarianism where she states “The injunction to care, considered as an issue of moral and political development, should be understood to include the injunction to eliminate needless suffering wherever possible, and particularly the suffering of those whose suffering is conceptually connected to one’s own.”  Being a vegan means understanding the suffering that animals face, and aligning your life with that suffering to a point that you make huge sacrifices to support them.

That’s right, you CAN be vegan and a reasonable person.  This, at first, was a crazy idea to me. What’s the point in being vegan if you aren’t going to follow the rules?  It’s all about being a reasonable person and still making small choices when you can to help the environment. Sometimes you’re in a situation where there are no vegan options, or you order food without animal byproducts and the Burger King worker puts the mayonnaise on the Impossible Whopper anyway.  The most important part of being vegan, as I see it, is reducing waste, and that means breaking the rules rather than complaining and ordering a new Impossible Whopper.   

Thinking about these ideas in compilation with gender, we get an article like Meat Heads: New Study Focuses on How Meat Consumption Alters Men’s Self-Perceived Levels of Masculinity, by Zoe Eisenberg.  This article discusses the way that eating has been gendered, and how the vegan diet appeals more to women, as meats are typically branded as masculine.  An example of this is through We can see an example of this in Bloomberg’s recent ad against Trump. This ad is hilarious. Bloomberg is a disgusting excuse for a person, and this billboard highlights that through the absurd idea that the way you eat your steak reflects on masculinity.  These two men are both terrible, without a doubt. They remind me of the image that was chosen for this week, of a man cutting up some meat for some more men, presumably. There isn’t a huge amount of substance to this image, but it does create a disconnect between the consumer and the animals that were killed to result in that meal.  Two huge examples of gendered food are meat for masculinity, and plant based foods for femininity. This is arbitrary and stupid, but can be seen in media, like this Bloomberg ad.

 

I picked an image of my barn in the middle of winter last year.  I live in Western Massachusetts, so our winters are much worse than here.  I live in the middle of nowhere, so when we get snowed in like this we are unable to get to a grocery store for multiple days.  This also means we do a lot of activities relating to nature. For example, we cut all of our own wood and heat our house with a wood stove.  Living on a farm, we tend to a variety of animals, who graze and fertilize the ground.  Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s description of her walking up the driveway made me feel quite nostalgic, as she experienced many of the same things I do.  This has given me a personal connection to the environment and weather that feels fairly unique.  I’ve lived there most of my life, resulting in many memories and feelings associated with the wilderness.  

The importance of this concept can be analyzed all throughout ecofeminist theory.  Ecofeminist theorists believe that the connections that humans have with nature is important, and is influenced by a variety of factors.  For example, in Terry Tempest Williams’ Homework, she defines the bedrock of democracy, and in her definition he states,”in each of these places, home work is required, a participation in public life to make certain all is not destroyed under the banner of progress.” (Williams, 19)  This idea, of the bedrock of democracy, works really well in my personal relationship with the planet through my home. We do a lot of work to keep ourselves warm and alive that really connects us with the planet, and the environment around us.  This idea immediately plays into Barbra Kingslover’s Small Wonder, where she discusses the importance of the ‘wildness’.  She states that, “What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.”  Wildness as a concept has an indescribable value.  Each person has their own relationship to the environment that is reflected in our own pasts. Something about the connection we hold to the planet as ecofeminists keeps the value of the environment high, and that helps us keep the connection we have with it.

Being connected to nature makes us feel like we are part of a community.  The connection that we get with the Earth can be strengthened through the work that we do with the environment, which is an important principle to ecofeminism, that there should be a balance between nature and humanity.  Again I feel myself sympathizing with Barbara Kingsolver, as in her conclusion she struggles to describe why we need wilderness as much as we do, but I believe that bellhooks put it best in Touching The Earth, as she states her thesis, that,  ”When we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.”  (bellhooks, 363)

Throughout the readings I’ve done over my various classes, in general the Global South typically has a more intense relationship with problematic ideologies than the northern hemisphere.  Using ecofeminism, we can analyze these types of activisms and ideologies to compare and contrast our situations.

We can start understanding the south’s interaction with ‘environmental degradation’ by looking at Scott London’s interview with Vandana Shiva.  In the interview, Shiva states that, “I’ve just been told that Nestle has taken out patents on the making of pullao. (Pullao is the way we make our rice in India, with either vegetables or meat or whatever.) Before you know it, every common use of plants will be patented by a Western corporation.”  Shiva’s point here is that capitalism is clearly negatively affecting many parts of the planet.  

We can use this anti capitalism ideology to look at some ways that ecofeminism excels in the western world.  The Green New Deal is a perfect example of ecofeminism making strides to limit corporation’s carbon footprint.  I’ve included a picture of me at a protest on campus, hosted by the Sunrise Movement. The Sunrise Movement is a large group with an on campus chapter.  We organized the climate walk out last semester, and are working this semester to support Ed Markey and Bernie Sander’s campaigns. I believe that the Sunrise Movement embodies some of the most important things that ecofeminism stands for.  

Comparing this week’s spotlighted ecofeminist, Bina Agarwal, with last week’s, Hobgood-Oster, we can compare the way they talk about ecofeminism to analyze topics, like corporations, with differing frameworks.  Starting with this week’s reading, Agarwal’s The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India looks at the global south’s ecofeminism through agriculture, stating, “The Green Revolution embodies a technological mix which gives primacy to laboratory-based research and manufactured inputs and treats agriculture as an isolated production system.” (pg135)  Agarwal’s description of the agriculture industry in the south is a discussion that has many different factors than that of the traditional western ecofeminism, as there is a large disparity in the access to resources that we have in the western world. Then, we can look at Hobgood-Oster’s Ecofeminism: Historic and International Evolution, “Combining feminist and deep ecological perspectives — in and of themselves extremely varied ways of thinking about reality — is a complex, transgressive process that is often in flux.”  Hobgood-Oster’s perspective looks at more theoretical discussion. While Agarwal looks at serious physical problems effecting her reality, Hobgood-Oster looks at theory, and how feminist perspectives change.   Both of these types of ecofeminism are important to utilizing ecofeminism to its maximum potential.

Overall, I found the traditionally western ecofeminists to be relatable, which made their content more engaging for me.  I do believe there is a huge amount of value in comparing and contrasting these different mindsets, as they allow for more types of solutions.  The involvement I’ve had with ecofeminism and social justice has been liberating and fulfilling for me, which has made ecofeminism an even more valuable ideology for me.

 

The Green New Deal:

<https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf>

Last week reading:

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/bron/pdf–christianity/Hobgood-Oster–Ecofeminism-International%20Evolution.pdf

This week’s reading:

<https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.umassd.edu/stable/3178217?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=Bina&searchText=Agarwal&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DBina%2BAgarwal%26amp%3Bacc%3Don%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff&seq=4#page_scan_tab_contents>

<https://www.globalresearch.ca/in-the-footsteps-of-gandhi-an-interview-with-vandana-shiva/5505135>