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Ecofeminism as scholarship and practice continues to polarize, draw criticism, and inspire scholarly works and politics that account for the structures of domination that perpetuate sexism and ecological exploitation. Ecofeminist scholarship grew in volume and prominence in the 1970s and 1980s but began to falter under the weight of critiques that the approach upheld gender essentialism and a white western feminism that does not account for the needs, views, politics, and orientations to the planet outside of the global north. And yet, ecofeminism still holds relevance and offers significant perspectives and tools that can respond to these important criticisms and offer key insights in the ongoing efforts to address climate change and environmental and gender injustices. As a conversation among scholars working in ecofeminist political thought, this Critical Exchange asks about the contemporary relevance of this tradition to their approach as scholars, inside and outside of the academy.
Collectively, we raise the visibility of feminist approaches to environmental politics and critical ecofeminist political thought. For some of us, ecofeminism does not adequately describe the work we do or the work we like to engage in; for others, the aims of ecofeminism, even within a critical orientation, reaffirm forms of human domination. Ecofeminism is in need of revival and reconsideration as it carries potential to address the pressing challenges of climate change and justice. Sherilyn MacGregor (2021) so aptly argued that ecofeminism has dropped from the frame of analysis of sustainability and new materialism, especially as climate change and sustainability recenters the everyday and, by extension, the domestic sphere where women’s labor is often consigned to the margins of visibility while being anything but marginal. As a body of literature, ecofeminism carries unsettled disagreements about gender essentialism, the naturalization of women in the environment, and inclusivity for women in the working-class, women in the global south, Indigenous women, trans women, and people who are nonbinary and queer. Does ecofeminism still hold vital theoretical insights and tools necessary for scholarly and activist work on sustainability, climate change, and environmental justice? Does some other category of work that centers gender injustice offer a better frame? This Critical Exchange reaffirms the immense importance of addressing colonial, gendered, and climate justice, while also addressing the limitations of ecofeminism, particularly its scholarly legacy.
Climate change is a feminist issue. Thus considering ecofeminism as a response to climate disaster is an important shift from how capitalism and patriarchy have created crises through the exploitation of the environment, women, domestic labor, and colonization (see Bieler & Salleh, 2020). Ecofeminism can be part of a suite of anti-capitalist approaches to addressing climate change, but it can also be folded into liberal modes of market-based environmentalism and gender parity.
The revolutionary possibilities of ecofeminism are often ignored by recent shifts in environmental political theory that overshadow these unresolved but less exciting vexing problems. Material conditions of climate change and related oppressions are reexamined through “object-oriented ontologies” or “new materialisms.” However, questions of labor and uneven power relations as they pertain to women and nature, deserve more attention than they are given in those treatments. Ecofeminism even comes home to our own efforts to reinvigorate the conversation. The structural conditions of the academy—plus the reputation of ecofeminism—create difficulty for doing this work as inclusively and carefully as we desire because of overburdened faculty with disproportionate workloads, administrative obligations for their institutions, and unseen and uncompensated efforts in mentorship, counseling, committee work, and the maintenance of mental health for students and colleagues who are working to survive (and flourish) under institutional conditions that do not support their professional development and personal sustainability.
Despite the challenges faced by scholars interested in ecofeminist thought and practice, our hope for this Critical Exchange is to reintroduce ecofeminism as an important and contemporarily relevant aspect of scholarship to address the conditions that produce gender injustice within families, communities, society, and across geographies. We also hope that scholars will engage with the long history of ecofeminist literature as a way to address the underlying values, constructions, and conditions that inform policy, education, and politics.
Jennifer Lawrence and Emily Ray
Feminist approaches to environmental politics: a conversation
Jennifer Lawrence and Emily Ray (JL and ER): Do you consider yourself an ecofeminist?
Cara Daggett (CD): This question is something I’ve been rethinking lately. Five years ago, I would not have used the word ecofeminism. I was following those who were trying to find other language to get around using that word. In my earlier training, I heard many of the caricatures of early ecofeminist thought repeated by senior scholars, and I sometimes accepted those without doing my own reading or really thinking it through. Now I question the politics behind the erasure of that work. Feminist scholars have been reconsidering what gets lost when we erase early feminist scholarship. Reading earlier ecofeminist works for the first time, I am struck by how sharp and relevant some of these critiques of patriarchal capitalism still are, and how much they would have helped me if I had known them earlier.
The shaming and erasure does not happen as often in more masculinist canons, even when concepts are abandoned or reworked. So now I’m thinking about the strategic benefits of sharing a term like ecofeminism, and about what can be learned by reacquainting myself with that tradition. Lately, I have been more explicit in calling myself a critically oriented ecofeminist and naming my work as ecofeminist in the way that it makes sense to me today. Reflecting on where the scholarship needs to go, there continues to be a need to interrogate white and liberal feminisms, and to understand how patriarchal capitalism operates differently in overdeveloped and in marginalized spaces. We can learn from scholars like Maristella Svampa (2015), who is also engaging with ecofeminism and its ideas of relationality and care in close conversation with feminisms of Latin America, which are very distinct from northern, liberal feminism.
While this is a more personal reflection, I wonder what is happening in the world that made it feel more comfortable for me to re-engage with ecofeminism at this moment. Perhaps scholars situated in more privileged sites can no longer avoid thinking about the issues ecofeminism has historically raised, to the point that other fields are now more open to critiquing global capitalism, imperialism, and misogyny—although usually without referencing earlier ecofeminist work. Feminists step up to say this isn’t new to us; we have thought a lot about how these problems are related. At the same time, I’ve also started to worry about pink-washing and how funders and institutions can see a benefit in having a feminist angle, and may work with feminism in a superficial or liberal individualist manner. Even with this concern about co-optation, it feels like we’re in a different context now, where ecofeminism is not so easily dismissed.
Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez (IA-J): I have never considered myself an ecofeminist, because for a lot of reasons as an Indigenous woman, and an Indigenous scholar, I have never felt represented in this body of literature. I felt that when the experiences of Indigenous people were incorporated, they were decontextualized, and Indigenous knowledge was not necessarily connected to context and processes. In that sense ecofeminism is not the label that does the work for me. I acknowledge that ecofeminism has evolved; it is not the same ecofeminism of the 1970s or 1980s. But as an Indigenous feminist, I cannot disconnect gender as an analytical category from other systems of oppression, such as capitalism, colonialism, and racism. For me, any conversation that has to do with the environment cannot be separated from self-determination and Indigenous sovereignty, which I rarely see discussed in ecofeminism.
From an Indigenous feminist perspective, this must be front and center. The environment is not something that is external to bodies, individual and collective; it is connected, including to bodies in the non-human world. While there have been some attempts to talk about the interconnectedness of life from an ecofeminist perspective, the conversation is still grounded in a western ontology that prevents us from going further in exploring what kinds of interconnections we are talking about and to what kinds of relationships we are paying attention when we talk about the environment and climate change. How do we talk about these issues in ways that are transformative and meaningful to other peoples and nations around the world?
As an Indigenous feminist who lives and works in Treaty 6 Territory in Western Canada but whose relationships continue to be grounded in the global south, particularly in southern Mexico, my work makes all these connections simultaneously. How do we talk about issues of environmental concerns and climate change in the global north? My work adds a layer of complexity, which has to do with how we define the environment and solutions to climate change, and asks about the consequences for the global south and the Indigenous people who live there.
This conversation becomes extremely complex in understanding what climate emergency is, what climate change is, what environment is—and understanding how these are socially produced. Considering the relationship between the global north and global south, even in terms of knowledge production, I am concerned about the impact of what is produced in the global north and consumed in the global south. I cannot not pay attention to those issues. For me, they must be at the center of these conversations. It’s about how we understand the world ontologically and epistemologically, and how we understand the kinds of knowledge that we are producing on these issues.
Sherilyn MacGregor (SMcG): For a long time, I felt it was very risky to use labels and attach the label of ecofeminism to myself. I can recall that in my very first academic job interview, one of the people on the interview panel asked if I was an ecofeminist. It was after I’d done my research presentation on the synergies between environmental politics and feminist politics. Even though I had not used the label, I was asked this in a job interview, and I remember my answer, which was that I was a critical sympathizer. I am critical, but I sympathize with some of the key ideas and the political vision. At the time, I had spent six or seven years being critical of essentialist and maternalist forms of ecofeminism.
Looking back over twenty years, I feel that I’ve been involved in defending ecofeminist work, trying to rehabilitate it, set the record straight, show the diversity within the field, and reflect on the academic politics that made it uncomfortable to be associated with that word. I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly labeled myself as an ecofeminist. I always say my work engages with ecofeminist theory, or that my work is trying to think about critical intersectional, interdisciplinary, ecofeminist ideas. I don’t wear the label, and I don’t use it often, but I consider myself an ecofeminist. I’m becoming more and more comfortable being associated with this term—and that’s because of what’s going on in the world, as Cara described, but because of younger generation activists who have embraced and are claiming the term. I feel quite proud to be involved in ecofeminism as a diverse, global movement, if indeed that’s what it’s becoming.
JL and ER: What brought you to care about these topics, and what led you to critical environmental approaches and feminist work?
IA-J: When I was a grad student I took courses in gender and politics, and when I said that I would write about Indigenous feminism the response was: “What is that? That doesn’t exist.” It’s something that stuck with me for a long time, because it showed me that the academy dismisses things that don’t meet the specific requirements of what feminism constitutes.
In my experience, there were some questions that other feminisms were not asking or helping me make sense of. This had to do with changes that were happening in the region I come from, Tehuantepec, the isthmus that is the narrowest part of Mexico. These changes had to do with sustainability and climate change. The discourses and narrative that were used to convince Indigenous communities to abandon their subsistence activities, particularly subsistence agriculture, was that these practices were a waste of land that could be used for better purposes, including the production of wind power.
This was framed in the language of mitigating climate change, which sounded nice but created a conflict in my mind about how the same people who were talking about this also represented people from the global south as fire-setters because of their traditional land management practices for replenishing the soil. This Indigenous practice of sustainable land management was used to portray Indigenous people as fire-setters who were destroying the environment and who needed to engage in more sustainable practices.
At the time, my father was the head of the communal assembly, and he asked me to go with him to a meeting with some of these representatives who were coming into the communities. He told me, “I would like you to come because I’m not understanding what these people are saying,” and “you have more education than I do so let’s go together.” By the end of the meeting, I felt exactly like my father. I didn’t understand what they were proposing, and I realized that this was their intention. They were using highly technical language so that we wouldn’t understand, so we wouldn’t know what to ask.
This unraveled a lot of questions for me. My father suggested that if this was something that my research was going to be about, I might work on what was happening in our region. And so that’s how in my work I started addressing questions that were affecting my community and the entire region, including concerns which my father was experiencing. This is precisely why I’m very concerned when I see narratives of climate emergency and sustainability: because they have an impact in our communities. I always read these discussions with a lot of attention and care. When policies are aimed at addressing the most important issues of our time and are presented as ways in which communities of the global south can benefit from the global north, we have to pay attention. Those narratives don’t exist in a vacuum. They are embedded in power asymmetries which tend to discipline those who do not necessarily have the largest footprint to start with.
JL: I appreciate how our personal journeys can lead us to this work. There are a lot of resonances for me with what Isabel has shared. I’m a first-generation scholar and student. My family’s livelihood and existence has been in relation to coal and the extractive industries, so I grew up seeing people struggle economically and in terms of their health in an incredibly beautiful and resource-rich place. Looking back, I think I always wondered about that contradiction, and now I can see that I’ve been deeply shaped by it. It was normalized and naturalized as a pre-existing condition in Appalachia, as it is in so many geographies of extraction. I don’t think that I began questioning this in any political way until the end of my undergraduate experience. It took me until the end of my doctoral program to see that through my scholarship I was also doing a personal project.
My engagement with critical ecofeminism and environmental justice questions around the body is really tied to my family. I saw my grandfather die from black lung disease as a result of his exposure to coal dust. This was such a normal story for so many people in my region. Political theory gave me a way to begin to understand what was happening and to wrestle with these contradictions. In her book Landscapes of Power, Dana Powell (2018) tells a story about the complexity of coal, the coal-boom in the Navajo Nation, and what the ecological and human health consequences of that were. She contrasts the pollution that comes from burning coal, and how that differs depending on its gradation, with the Diné cosmology of the resource, in which “coal is the liver of the earth, detoxifying the earth’s body, [and] suggesting an alternative landscape of power” (p. 57).
The story resonated with me and also reflected what I’d seen in Appalachia but was still struggling to articulate. The relationship between extractive industries and the embodied effects of coal—what happens to our respiratory systems, family systems, economic systems—would be fundamentally altered if we were to leave it in the ground. I think this likening of coal to the liver is more than a metaphor, where minerals and the biological remains of extinct plant and animal matter tell us about our own physical bodies and the social body or body politic. It helps us think about the processes of capitalism in relation to extraction, gender relations, and power relations, and how all this shapes our connection to the natural world.
For example, I’ve written about the process of necrosis to help me understand the scraping out of the bowels of the Earth, the eating away of communities and ecosystems, while still wondering and holding out for the possibilities that can arise from decomposition. I wasn’t exposed to this feminist reading of extraction in graduate school. I think I started learning about it through conversations with colleagues and by reading works from authors like Ariel Salleh (2017) and Sylvia Federici (2018) whose work is so piercing and which powerfully illustrates that this is not just about human bodies, but more-than-human bodies, and about ecological bodies which are impacted by systems of global power and uneven economic systems.
Part of my journey to critical political economy and feminist work has been about finding courage to speak and write. I’ve been heavily impacted by my family’s position in relation to extractive industries. And so I had a “you don’t bite the hand that feeds you” mentality. I’ve silenced myself as a result. I don’t want to hurt the people in my community or region, nor my family, because of the critical perspective that I’ve taken on. People who I care deeply about have their livelihoods, including things like health insurance, still tied to extractive industries and practices. How do you do this work and disentangle the individual from the system that is simultaneously exploitative and provisional?
This conversation is a reminder to reflect on how those experiences inform the work we do. I’m only just now beginning to feel comfortable enough to talk about my relationship with my family and how it shapes my work. I still have a lot of fear that I will unintentionally do harm while trying to do good, which is something that we see in a lot in feminist work. I just don’t want to hurt anyone through the work that I do. Nonetheless I feel like it’s my life’s work—to unveil systems of power and to create scholarship which helps people understand that you can abide these internal tensions between oppressor and oppressed and maybe break through some of these contradictions by bringing a conscious awareness to the methodologies and approaches that we use. I think it can help us understand the political production of silences, allow us to see what is missing, concealed, veiled, and how all of this is bound up within questions of power and gender.
CD: My first exposure to feminism was in feminist International Relations scholarship and its critique of war and imperial violence. It is hard to think about militarization without considering masculinity, and how misogyny and racism are key to normalizing and justifying state violence. For example, this happens in the separation of a feminized home-front to be protected from a war-front where violence is justified. That separation happens across state borders, in cities, and in neighborhoods. It’s interesting to think about how this scholarship on global violence has some parallels with ecofeminist insights about the divisions between where land is to be protected and pristine as wild nature or civilized space, and where it can be extracted as a resource.
As I began to study the history of energy, I saw that those kinds of gendered binaries were also at play, and my background in feminist thought made me more alert to them. I was interested in ideas about what is productive or wasteful, energetic or lazy, and how gender and sexuality were so fundamental to these valuations. Questions emerged around which kinds of activities, bodies, and land become feminized, as idle and fragile, or as wasteful, threatening, and excessive, in need of white man’s management to be productive. These assumptions are behind how labor is valued for fossil fuel industrialization—and not just the work of humans, but the work of the Earth and other living things too.
Also, feminist science studies gave me a framework for studying the science of energy outside the trope of the master discovery-narrative, which tells stories of genius white men teasing out the secrets of nature. As I wrote about this history, I started reading more about ecofeminism, especially those scholars who contended with imperial capitalism. I regret how late I came to ecofeminist and transnational feminist work. I still have much to learn.
Feminism is important to me because it emphasizes embodied knowledge and appreciates what bodies know and feel. Feminists look for which bodies are excluded or made invisible, and why. Feminism also reminds me to be engaged in self-reflection and humility, which pulls in the opposite direction of academic professionalization. I want to retain the ability to say, “I did that wrong,” “I missed that,” and “I don’t know that.” I’ve seen the violence that expertise can do, and as a method, that’s what I find so important about feminist work.
Hannah Battersby (HB): The notion of the margins is very pertinent. What brought me to this body of work is my interest in who or what sits on the margins of moral consciousness. My work in philosophy is really about the moral community. I am uncomfortable with the notion of a fixed moral community, especially how it’s envisioned in traditional philosophy. This has brought me to a more critical approach. I also want to speak to the personal relevance of this work as well, because I think as a disabled academic who has come to be more interested in the marginalization of disabled bodies and how it intersects with environmental matters. It has become increasingly important to reflect on the broader notion of which bodies are included, and which aren’t. I think feminist theory and ecofeminist theory can speak to this experience in a way that other disciplines cannot.
JL: This is an important reminder to think about the necessity of intersectional approaches and about how power that is maintained by institutional structures and norms, within the academy as well as the public sphere, wants us to understand these issues as disconnected.
IA-J: Sometimes in our attempts to talk about interconnectedness in environmental relationships we think about interconnections or relationships in very essentialized and universalist ways. That just ends up creating exclusions.
Magdalena Rodekirchen (MR): I’ve been struggling with questions around exclusions, not just by dominant systems and structures but also exclusions created by trying to do better and still messing up. I’ve found feminist tools and analytics useful here. What Cara said about the messiness and wanting to grow and learn is right, and I want to add a layer to this: research is a praxis. So, what it means for me to do ecofeminist work is not just that knowledge and practice are inseparable but also that research is a practice which requires certain commitments that go beyond the typical work day (which doesn’t really exist for academics anyway). The struggle is to remain open to be challenged and to accept challenges with grace as we are trying to do better.
ER: This helps us think about what ecofeminism does. There is room for critique and possibility here. We do not have to like or agree with all the contributions or interventions. How would you characterize these contributions and interventions of ecofeminist scholarship and praxis to political theory broadly, but to environmental political theory specifically?
HB: Ecofeminism can shed light on multiple ways of thinking about various power structures. I’ve been intrigued by how the invisibility of power structures can uphold oppressions by rendering them almost invisible. Ecofeminism can shed light on power dynamics and illuminate oppression. I’ve been worried that my relational approach to the moral status of the non-human world and non-human bodies might do something other than lend clarity to these conversations.
In environmental philosophy and environmental ethics, there certainly is a debate about who is the morally considerable subject, and how we know. And I was concerned that my work was obscuring things more. I remember Sherilyn saying to me, “that’s okay” and “perhaps that’s an important part of this process, to muddy the waters a little bit.” In my engagement with feminist bodies of work, there is receptiveness to muddying the waters and an acknowledgment that we haven’t fully unpacked these power dynamics.
JL: I appreciate this connection to the ethics of acknowledgment and questions around exclusions. What you’re saying resonates with Sherilyn’s work, which kindly and powerfully calls colleagues and friends to account for the exclusion of decades of ecofeminist literature that wrestles with materiality and how power shapes the world (see MacGregor, 2021). Ecofeminist ideas are there under the surface in so much of environmental political theory, whether or not they’re acknowledged or cited. Part of our job is to say that there’s an existing body of literature and research and experience that we need to acknowledge, and to do the work ourselves to understand what has come before.
This does not mean that exclusions are malicious or intentional. They reflect the educational situation that we mentioned earlier. Even though we were interested in questions of power and gender and sought out ways to get to that, for many of us, approaches that took up these questions were excluded from our formal education. Now as educators and interlocutors with other fields of study, the insistence to address gender and power relations as part of environmental work, decolonial work, justice work, work that connects capitalism, solidarity movements, and identity politics is something that we can approach with fierce kindness. This echoes Isabel’s earlier comments about how western thought remains dominant within ecofeminism, and how, even when you’re intentionally working against this dominance, you may, in fact, be reaffirming the very systems that you’re working to critique.
IA-J: I appreciate how ecofeminism has confronted the anthropocene and the very androcentric, technical approaches to questions of how we deal with the anthropocene. I also see how ecofeminism sometimes looks in a similar direction as Indigenous feminism. But when paying attention to the diversity of experiences and knowledges, much ecofeminist work is still grounded ontologically in the west. This is perhaps its biggest limitation. Considering questions about who or what deserves protection, this question would not necessarily be asked from an Indigenous feminist perspective. The idea of categorization, of going through a process of defining what is life and what is non-life, is in itself colonial and androcentric—especially when we as scholars are the ones deciding what has worth or value, and the value is socially constructed.
Colonialism and capitalism are embedded in this process of categorization. They couldn’t have existed without categorizing what constitutes life and non-life. And maybe in this process of categorizing, there are things that might not be of value for the Western world but are of great value for Indigenous communities. Another thing I’ve noticed is how the process of valuing and valuation changes historically as it provides opportunities for continuous capitalist growth. What at some point was not valued becomes valued when it provides an avenue for capitalism to continue growing. For ecofeminism to provide more effective responses, it needs to engage more thoroughly with Indigenous knowledge and non-Western ways of knowing. A point of interaction between ecofeminism and Indigenous feminism is the connection of research and practice. This is not unique to ecofeminism. The very idea of theorizing from an Indigenous perspective involves practice. There cannot be a separation.
Sarah Marie Wiebe (SMW): I appreciate the momentum of this conversation, which pushes us to consider how we are contributing, and want to contribute, to this scholarship. What do we imagine as we push for a critical ecofeminist lens? The term “critical” can get overused, but here we are using it specifically to criticize power, hierarchy, and oppression. Isabel’s earlier comments remind me of efforts in critical discourse analysis to challenge labels like sustainability. We can think about that conceptually and practically. To give an example, in Hawaiʻi there are conflicts over natural resources and energy initiatives like wind power, but there is no meaningful consultation or engagement with communities which live right next to wind farm locations. And there is a bigger problem of a kind of checkbox consultation, where governments are engaging communities to get social license and consent. But this is very limited, very colonial, and very extractive. So, when I think about our contributions and our hopes and fears for the future, I certainly want to hold on to a critical lens.
I am also encouraged by embracing messiness. I know from rational choice-oriented public administration scholars that there is a desire for modeling and mapping everything out in neat and tidy ways, which just seems suspicious to me, frankly. And so I hope that we can think about moving beyond these categorizations and limitations to challenge the language that we use to create categories which are so imbued with power and violence.
Ecofeminists, traditionally, have been very good at challenging binaries, dualisms, and essentialisms. But I want us to go further to think in layered, prismatic, complex, multidimensional ways that are beyond just challenging this kind of black and white, or nature versus human framing.
As we engage different ways of knowing, I’m curious to hear more about how others are thinking through embodiment, experiential ways of engaging with environments, and acknowledging that we are part of environments. As I’m trying to work through the lived experiences of climate emergency and extreme weather events, I find myself reflecting on my own life experience as a new nursing mother, who was extremely dehydrated during the heat dome event in British Columbia, which resulted in me going to the emergency department at the local hospital. These experiences prompt me to really try to understand what it’s like to embody emergency events, to live and feel them. This is leading me to research with planners here in Victoria, who are trying to understand equity and vulnerability and how those terms can be dangerous.
So bringing a critical lens, I ask myself how we reflect on terms and labels and make space for diverse forms of lived experience and knowledge. As we work toward growing future directions of ecofeminist thought and imagining more emancipatory futures for human and more-than-human life, what does that look like? How do we think about that in non-essentialist ways that are messy, fraught, complex, open, and meaningful?
JL and ER: Adding to Sarah’s questions, what are your hopes, dreams, and aspirations for ecofeminist thought and reproductive justice?
MR: Following up on Sarah’s observation that ecofeminism is good at challenging binaries, and Isabel’s earlier comments about categorization, it seems to me that ecofeminism has a lot of tools to critique binaries, but it doesn’t have ways to move beyond categorizations. This is one of the most interesting tensions in ecofeminist work: even as it provides tools for critique, it nevertheless falls back on what Audre Lorde (2003, p. 27) calls the “master’s tools.” I hope that ecofeminism can come up with better ideas when it comes to categories and categorizations, to think about how to engage with the world in a way that is messy without trying to find simple solutions and reproducing categorizations. This requires us to find new ways of thinking about knowledge—not in the sense of invention but looking to what is not taken into account.
For example, there is something very subversive about queering knowledges not just in terms of identity categories but in terms of a consideration of the long history of how queerness is erased through colonial systems of knowledge production and masculine notions of knowledge. Ecofeminism doesn’t always manage to emancipate itself from that history of knowledge production, and at the same time it also doesn’t always manage to emancipate itself from the whiteness of its own knowledge production.
HB: I am very sympathetic with this line of thinking and hope that we can move toward emancipating knowledge. There are not only different ways of knowing but also different ways of expressing what you know. As a disabled academic, it’s sometimes hard to fit my ways of knowing into standard ways of expressing knowledge. My aspiration is to bring attention to ways of expressing knowledge that don’t conform to able-bodied forms of knowledge.
IA-J: Ecofeminism has been criticized for appropriating Indigenous knowledge and knowledge produced in the global south. I wonder if ecofeminism can turn inwards, and instead of looking to Indigenous knowledge or Indigenous feminism start paying attention to what it has reproduced in its attempts to respond to some of the criticisms it has received. Turning inward and addressing how ecofeminism has been implicated in a particular form of knowledge production is an important task for ecofeminists that might allow them to address how knowledge is produced, from where, for what purposes, and to challenge what it wants to achieve in practice and in theory.
SMcG: This idea of turning inward reflects what I’ve been thinking about recently. Much of my work has been oriented outward to attack the lack of attention to ecofeminist ideas in mainstream, androcentric, environmental political theory. So, it’s been about muddying the waters, calling out the exclusions, and I’ve been called “a flea on the bum” or a “kill joy.” I’m tired of doing that and playing that role, even though I think there’s still a need for critique and intervention.
What I would hope to see more of is confidence within ecofeminisms in their differences to have internal conversations and to reflect on their own history and evolution. A really great example of this is the founding text of ecofeminism, Françoise D’Eaubonne’s Feminism or Death, which was originally published in 1976, and has now been translated into English for the first time in 2022 by French feminists Myriam Bahaffou and Julie Gorecki (see also Bahaffou & Gorecki, 2022). Their introduction to the translated edition is an absolutely fantastic piece that thematizes D’Eaubonne’s insights and flaws. They show that now is the time to rediscover these insights. If ecofeminism is to have a future, it must grapple with its past and reinterpret and revitalize its insights.
New ecofeminists and feminist environmental activists will find new texts that haven’t been included in the canon but are very relevant. Bahaffou and Gorecki mention Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Winona LaDuke, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison, whose works are very much about land and capitalist suppression but haven’t been defined as ecofeminist scholarship. Maybe this excavation work can be done by turning inward and finding what resources are there—not in an extractive way but in a way that is enriching to a global dialogue.
Another thing that gives me hope is the work done by the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), which brings together activists and researchers from all over the world around a decolonial feminist agenda for the Green New Deal. This organization is a practice of global solidarity which creates space and acknowledges who needs to speak and who needs to listen. It is a model for ecofeminists, researchers, scholars, and activists to enact solidarity in ways that are consistent with the values and ideas that we’ve preached for so long.
JL: This affirms much of what we’ve seen in trying to organize this Critical Exchange and working collectively. There’s a heavier burden on women of color in terms of what is asked of them in the academy and in society more generally, which highlights the importance of looking inward. But there is also more hesitancy to engage in conversations about ecofeminism. Even while scholars are doing work that is in alignment with feminist methods and practices, there’s hesitation to be aligned with the label ecofeminism. There’s an abundance of scholarship and theory that is very much in line with ecofeminist thought but doesn’t refer to itself in this language. And there’s a reason for that. What I hope is that we will cultivate open spaces, collaborations, and conversations, not just to advance particular ideas but also to grapple with questions of power in social and environmental crises.
CD: I want to add that turning inward is not only a way to recognize how ecofeminism is erased from mainstream androcentric fields. It can also be a warning for ecofeminists not to engage in the same kinds of erasure or misappropriation of other minoritarian fields. There are many fields with rich histories of asking questions about ecology, empire, and western capitalism. In thinking about my hopes for ecofeminism, I am reminded a piece by Emma Foster (2021), where she’s reflecting on her own unfair dismissal of ecofeminism as a younger scholar, and she revisits some classic texts with more nuance. She notices that although there are diverse strands of feminist thought, including liberal feminism, there is not really a liberal version of ecofeminism.
I would go so far as to say that ecofeminism has been incompatible with liberal feminism. That is one reason Foster thinks that a critical application of ecofeminism can be helpful in resisting the neoliberal, technocentric style of most mainstream climate policymaking. When I see feminism adopted in problematic ways in climate and environmental work, it is often in that liberal framework of representation and rights, which can be somewhat accommodated by current systems without threatening capitalism and western power.
For example, you find this in calls to add more women to the boards of energy companies, or in solar and wind industries, or to give women more access to renewable energy. These things are not inherently bad, but they do not address the deeper problems of exploitation, extraction, and inequity. Ecofeminists have been deeply critical of global capitalism; theirs is a structural and relational critique, and not an individual rationalist one. I suspect that it is this anti-capitalist and anti-imperial critique that made ecofeminism so vulnerable to erasure in the first place.
JL and ER: How does the plurality of ecofeminisms inform your teaching and pedagogy and help you develop praxis and build solidarities?
IA-J: Indigenous feminisms cannot be separated from what happens in the classroom, at the same time that the work is not just limited to the classroom. Part of what I do is engage in working with communities and Indigenous women’s organizations and groups. Pedagogy is, therefore, not contained in an institution or in the classroom but a part of co-producing knowledge together. I look at this as a process where knowledge is produced by doing, listening to others, exchanging experiences, and so on. It necessarily goes beyond institutions and what the institution values and sees.
The work that I do is not necessarily something that can be added to my annual report, not only because it extends far beyond the classroom but also because there is an important dimension of mentoring, listening, and accompanying other processes that happen within communities. Reflecting on where I spend my time, I know that I’m not going to be compensated for much of it; but this time reflects my commitment to doing the work that I do. For me, research with people is about establishing relationships and maintaining them for a long time. Research also transpires in the classroom in how I talk about what is important to Indigenous feminisms and how we can understand the issues that confront our communities. And so, in that sense, it’s always a way of being in and being out of the classroom, of bridging the outside and the inside as a way of saying “this is an artificial division.” The work that is practical involves moving back and forth between the classroom and the communities that we accompany, that we work with, and that we have a relationship with.
ER: This makes me consider what pedagogy and teaching mean outside of our classrooms and how teaching theory in specific ways gives us hope for what our students might do with it. My hope is that ecofeminism can continue to do this, even if the label of ecofeminism is no longer sufficient to contain the body of concerns and needs that we are expressing through what we’re calling ecofeminism. Perhaps there’s something more we can do with that—what can we take with us and what should we leave as markers of the past, particularly in how we might think about this in relation to when we want to be inward and when we need to be outward with our pedagogy.
SMW: I agree that pedagogy is not contained in an institution or in the classroom. This resonates with me as I think about trying to work with students and local planners and develop relationships and initiatives locally. I’m also thinking about decolonizing land and how we might learn from some of the local First Nations communities who are doing ecological restoration initiatives. In Hawai’i, there is an emphasis on ‘āina-based learning and working with community associations to cultivate land. I think that a more experiential learning approach is something that chimes with how I’ve been thinking about pedagogy as well, and I really appreciate the prompt to challenge the artificial division between the classroom as a formal space of learning to consider our fuller lives that extend much beyond the classroom, and beyond the timeline of the class and semester.
Future directions for critical ecofeminisms
Global warming is a multilayered crisis: capitalist, patriarchal forms of exploitation threaten planetary well-being. Ecofeminists have theorized the historical emergence of these crises, and have envisioned healthier, more generative and decolonial alternatives. But we acknowledge that ecofeminism is an imperfect term, one that does not neatly capture the multidimensional critical work we do as feminists. We convened this Critical Exchange to explore the contemporary relevance of ecofeminisms to us as scholars, both inside and outside the academy, united by an interest in critiquing extractive systems of power and centering more caring relations (see also The Care Collective, 2020).
This was an opportunity to discuss the promises and pitfalls of “critical ecofeminisms,” and to consider how we might collectively move the discussion forward to challenge and contend with western ontology and epistemology. Doing so requires cultivating space for diverse ways of knowing, being, and relating to more-than-human lives. While the discussion revealed no simple answers, there was a sense of commitment to pluralism and self-reflection.
In our conversation, we shared personal journeys of learning and introspection about what we are calling “critical ecofeminisms” and reflected on how these sharp feminist critiques of Western ecological violence have been marginalized. At the same time, we are aware of the risks that come from a field that has been largely located within white, western scholarship. Ecofeminists have developed important analyses of ecological imperialism and western dualisms that separate human from nature, mind from body, and reason from emotion (see Plumwood, 1993; Merchant, 1980; Ruether, 1975; Mies & Shiva, 1993). These insights have been erased and caricatured by scholars who have not always engaged meaningfully with the texts in question.
It may be that ecofeminist thought was vulnerable to erasure in part because of its anti-capitalist politics, which did not provide a comfortable home for liberal approaches (see Foster, 2021). Sherilyn MacGregor (2021) has pointed out that these more radical political and economic demands are lost when ecofeminism is ignored by fields like new materialism, whose concepts mirror ecofeminist insights but often lack an analysis of labor, gender, and imperial capitalism (see also Mies, 1986). The effect of ignoring ecofeminist work, in short, is a further tendency toward depoliticization and western-centrism in sustainability studies.
While ecofeminists have been critical of western imperialism and capitalism, many are women of the global north. Several ecofeminist classics, like Maria Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation on a Global Scale, or Mary Mellor’s Feminism and Ecology, are global in scope and engage meaningfully with global south scholars and activists. But there may be material and political insights that are occluded when a scholar has been disciplined by white western systems, even when she begins with the intention of critiquing them. Most notably, Indigenous, decolonial, and Black feminists have advanced analyses of ecological and political violence and forms of environmental racism and violence that bring distinct demands and concepts into the foreground, such as anti-Black racism, Indigenous sovereignty, Black and Indigenous cosmologies, and settler colonialism.
As Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez reminds us, any conversation about the environment must be connected to self-determination and Indigenous sovereignty. Critical ecofeminisms can do better to center the voices and vantage points of Indigenous political theorists and activists in this respect. Indigenous feminists call attention to how environments are not external to individual and collective bodies. Environments are connected to the bodies of human and more-than-human worlds. All too often, these analyses have been marginalized and silenced, often by the same fields that ignored critical ecofeminists. Instead, as Altamirano-Jiménez prompts us to consider: how might we talk about feminist approaches to environmental politics in ways that are transformative and meaningful to other people and nations around the world? How might the term ecofeminism become more inclusive, expansive, and tactically generative?
We offer no straightforward answer to how different feminist approaches to gender, land, labor, and power should relate to each other, as scholarly and political movements. Our shared sense is that the goal is not to subsume all feminisms under one label (e.g., ecofeminism). At the same time, what counts as ecofeminist knowledge might be expanded to include many thinkers, leaders, and artists who have analyzed the nexus of ecological, imperial, racist and gender domination, but who have been excluded from ecocritical scholarship.
For example, Chelsea Mikael Frazier (2020) calls for an appreciation of the long tradition of Black Feminist ecological thought, which has been absent in ecocriticism. This includes environmental justice leaders, writers, and artists like Toni Morrison and Latoya Ruby Frazier, who, Frazier writes, are “rooted in an ecological world-sense completely alternative to what readily comes to mind when we think about the environment.”
Our conversation brings into focus the insight that to contribute to conversations about global domination and extraction, white western scholars need to contend with the ambivalent legacies of western feminist thought. While ecofeminisms have been marginalized by other fields, this does not remove the risk that scholars working on these questions might also appropriate from, or fail to listen meaningfully to, other marginalized knowledges. This is a both/and that disrupts any sense of innocence or righteousness and encourages ongoing learning and humility as core to a feminist ethics.
Three core features of critical ecofeminisms can be identified.
First, there is the desire to center labor, land, lived experiences, and embodied knowledges, both in research and in pedagogy.
Second, there is a practice of “fierce kindness” in listening, mentorship, and engagement in the messiness of critical reflection, even as this work will not usually be counted by the metrics of the neoliberal university.
And third, there is the need to cultivate community within and beyond the traditional classroom, as well as outside the formal spaces and texts of the academy.
Much knowledge lives outside the academy and in the world, where scholars co-produce ideas that build upon the rich foundations laid by community leaders and activists, who are enacting restorative relationships with the lands, plants, waters, and atmospheres upon which we depend, and to which we must be accountable, now and for the generations to follow.
Cara Daggett and Sarah Marie Wiebe
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Lawrence, J.L., Altamirano-Jiménez, I., Daggett, C. et al. Feminist approaches to environmental politics. Contemp Polit Theory (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00707-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00707-y