Month: March 2020

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.