Abstract
This chapter explores the intersection between two major strains of environmental thought and praxis, environmental justice and ecofeminism, two fields of inquiry which each examine the conceptual and material linkages between the degradation of natural places and the marginalization and oppression of human communities. It shows how the critique of unequal power relations—both intra- and trans-human—central to each can help scientists and policy makers to comprehensively address current environmental issues. The current state of environmental discourse tends to view environmental issues as problems for science, and not as issues of social justice. Such an approach ignores the fact that not all groups of humans are situated equally in regard to ecological degradation and exposure to environmental toxins, as a direct result of histories of inequality and oppression. These histories are linked through processes of dualism, in which nature/humans, Anglo-European “whites”/people of color, and masculinity/femininity are placed into opposition. Such conceptual pairings are gendered, as well as raced, classed, and specied. Ecofeminism directly interrogates the sources and effects of these pairings, exposing the ways in which sexist ideologies are connected to “naturism.” Therefore, this chapter argues, struggles for environmental justice that do not incorporate an explicitly gendered and ecofeminist analysis of ecological problems will not adequately understand the ways in which systems of oppression (such as racism, colonialism, gender discrimination, and environmental degradation) are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. For this reason, ecofeminism, a political movement and theoretical stance which identifies and articulates these interconnections, is a necessary intervention into discussions and debates about how to alter the fact of environmental injustice.
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Notes
- 1.
The view of human society as a cancer was portrayed, for example, in The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), the influential book by Paul Ehrilch who wrote that “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people” (p.152)
- 2.
Miss Ann Thropy is the pseudonymous used by Christopher Manes to publish about population and AIDS in the Earth First! newspaper in 1987.
- 3.
The term biocultural is adapted here from its original use by Latin-American Environmental Philosopher Ricardo Rozzi, who has deployed the term in several publications and has been one of the primary founders of the Sub-Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Program, an international program in Cape Horn, Chile (http://chile.unt.edu/). Biocultural—a term containing no hyphen or slash—is a term that highlights the ways in which the biological/ecological is intimately intertwined with the cultural/social; disrupts the notion of an ontological separateness between the human and the more-than-human worlds, and how preserving and protecting one necessarily entails protecting the other—a notion quite in line with the fundamental premises of environmental justice and ecofeminism.
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Mallory, C. (2013). Environmental Justice, Ecofeminism, and Power. In: Rozzi, R., Pickett, S., Palmer, C., Armesto, J., Callicott, J. (eds) Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World. Ecology and Ethics, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7470-4_21
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