Feminists say: ‘Patriarchs rule

the world’. And patriarchs of all

sorts say: ‘It’s money that rules
Reclaiming values
the world’. Today’s market
for a gendered sustainable economy

economy is in the centre of

paper on the course
EKOFEMINIZAM

man’s activities of ‘ruling the

Gender studies
University of Novi Sad

world’. Economy is the central

Supervison:
Mr Dragana Todorović
Prof. dr Svenka Savić

field in which power makes his

Morries Leeraert

moves. Feminists say: ‘Patriarchs

Free lance student

February-May 2008

rule the world’. And patriarchs of

all sorts say: ‘It’s money that
rules the world’. Today’s market
economy is in the centre of
man’s activities of ‘ruling the
world’. Economy is the central
field in which power makes his
 Reclaiming values
for a gendered sustainable economy
Contents
Contents............................................................................................................... 2

Abstract................................................................................................................ 3

Preface: Three considerations.................................................................................4

Ecofeminism: a normative science and practice..................................................4

Ecofeminism: a transgendered perspective?........................................................5

Ecofeminism: mirroring western orientated feminisms........................................6

Part One: Values in economics................................................................................7

Ecology in the economic framework.....................................................................8

A fractured worldview..........................................................................................9

Instrumental value...............................................................................................9

Development: The Blank Space..........................................................................10

Commodities...................................................................................................... 11

Outdated axioms................................................................................................12

Human resources...............................................................................................13

Reforming economy: sustainable development ................................................15

Part Two: Transforming economy.............................................................................17

Shift One: Redefining nature..............................................................................17

Shift Two: What do we need?.............................................................................18

Ecofeminizing Maslow’s pyramid of needs.........................................................20

Transforming economy......................................................................................22

Reclaiming Values..............................................................................................23

Conclusions.............................................................................................................. 28

Statements.........................................................................................................30

2
 Bibliography ......................................................................................................31

Reclaiming values
for a gendered sustainable economy

It is impossible, within patriarchy, to suppress a market economy.

And it is impossible, in a market system, to not devastate the planet.
It is up to women, now, to reclaim the voice of humanity.

Jeanne d’Eaubonne1

Abstract
In the contexts of ecofeminsm it is said that everything is connected with each other. Many
speak of ‘the web of live’, Gaia, or holism, as an alternative to the destructive, power-
abusing male-gendered discourse, policies and practices.
Along with the critique and deconstruction of male dominated values leading to the
degradation (devastation) of nature and the (further) exclusion of women, ecofeminism
provides a vision of another possible society. This is often stated in very positive terms as
for example ‘partner society’ or ‘Earth citizenship’. But what exactly means this inter-related
commitment? In this paper I2 will focus on one of such connections: that between ecology
and the most ‘other’of ecology: economy.3
The aim of this research is to contribute to possible answers and alternatives to the
following questions: which set of values concerning ecology dominate in the globalizing
market economy of today? What is the position and role of women in this? And: How can a
growth and profit based economy change into a life-supporting, welfare based economy?
You can expect an evaluation of the dis/connection between ecology and the dominant
values of (western, neo-liberal, financial) economy. After this I examine two preconditions
for re/claiming a different and diverse set of values: the redefinition of (non-human and
human) nature, and a wider spectre of ecological and human needs than economy can
provide. In the last part I sketch the outlines of the visions of ecofeminism of a non-dual,
sustainable economy that acknowledges the diversity in and inter-dependency between
these two realms.
However science aspires to tell a story of truth, also a true story (with facts and figures) is a
discoursal story, confined to the rules of academic storytelling, with its use of themas,
anathemas, motifs and metaphores. In the main text you will read the analytic, lineair
story. In the notes you4 will find –besides the references- an intertext of parallel and yet

1
Françoise d’Eaubonne, What could an eco-feminist society be?, In: Liberty, Equality and Women? Anthology,
Harmattan, 1990. At: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/twine/ecofem/ecofemreadings.html
2
To contextualize myself: I; Morries; male gendered; 42; nomad; journalist; teacher; vegetarian; lover of wife
and books (sometimes confusing them), graduated in Dutch linguistics & literature; graduated Genderstudies,
University of Nijmegen, Netherlands; youngest son of 4 children; ‘boss’ of Dunja, a half-domesticated dog. 10 yrs.
involvement in Dutch Vegan Society; 4 yrs. chief editor of the ‘Alternative Consumer Guide’, Amsterdam. 2 yrs.
editor of Onkruid (‘Weeds’), ‘magazine for earth, body, and spirituality’.
3
When, in main discourse, the essential connection recognized by ecofeminists is the identification of ‘woman’
with ‘nature’, then the essence of ‘man’ could in turn be identified with ‘economy’. Man –west, white and well-
bred- says: ‘Money makes the world go round.’
4
Here You are, reader. Derrida claimed that also the ‘most scientific’ (empirical) discourse has the form of a
letter, directed to a reader. Irigaray noted that this kind of letters is a correspondence among males, or females
immersed in male discours. What shall we do?
3
diverse and sometimes apocryph discourses, conmingled with the varia of personal
knowledge and experience.

Preface: Three considerations

Ecofeminism: a normative science and practice
The quality of our lives depends on much more than economy can fulfill. This seems
obvious. Yet market economy as a model claims to do so: its explicite ideology is to provide
a system of values that can satisfy individual and collective material needs, and through
that can provide in the satisfaction of immaterial needs. For that matter its representatives
and spokesmen now proclaim that a sustainable economy is within reach with the right
measures and solutions. Doubting this, ecologist Arne Naess felt incited to discern shallow
from deep ecology; shallow can be considered as a reformist ecology within the possibilities
and limitations of the dominant framework of the liberal, eurocentric economy; deep
ecology as the integral transformation of economy as a whole, grounded on another set of
values. Later, Naess even stopped to talk about ecology (having logos, science as centre)
and used the word ecosophy instead.
"By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. A
philosophy as a kind of sofia (or) wisdom, is openly normative, it contains both
norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning
the state of affairs in our universe. Wisdom is policy wisdom, prescription, not only
scientific description and prediction. The details of an ecosophy will show many
variations due to significant differences concerning not only the ‘facts’ of pollution,
resources, population, etc. but also value priorities."5

As such, also ecofeminism can be considered as a postmodern attempt to reclaim values

which have been supressed or devaluated by the dominant discourses. It does so in two
movements: by unveiling the masculine dominant structures of exploitation (of nature, of
women) through the exclusion of the feminine. At the same time ecofeminism seeks to
reveal a gender-differentiated set of values.
Stephanie Lahar defines ecofeminism in this twofold direction:
“An ecofeminist analysis includes the human exploitation of the nonhuman
environment in its list of interwoven forms of oppression such as sexism and
heterosexism, racism and ethnocentrism. (…) Ecofeminist theory includes a systemic
analysis of domination that specifically includes the oppression of women and
environmental exploitation, and it advocates a synthesis of ecological and feminist
principles as guiding lights for political organizing and the creation of ecological,
socially equitable life-styles.”6

This implies that ecofeminism contains and propagates normative, prescriptive –though
differentiated- values. This leads to the question what values are dominant in the field of
economy, which I will evaluate in Part One. In the second part I shall outline the values
proposed by ecofeminists and ecologists.

5
The main distinction between shallow and deep ecology is, according to Naess, based on the acceptance or
denial of the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world. Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep; Long Range Ecology
Movements, 1973. For an overview of deep ecology: http://www.envirolink.org/enviroethics/deepindex2.html
6
Stephanie Lahar, Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroots Politics. In: Hypatia, vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991), p..
[Italizing mine].
4
Ecofeminism: a transgendered perspective?
When we speak of feminism and feminists we mean a diversity of feminisms, differentiated
in time (waves; his-herstories; futures), position (social, cultural, tribal), and many diverse
epistemilogical perspectives (historical, social, poststructuralist, psychoanalytical, écriture,
theological, cyber-, queer-). Also our way of speaking of ecology is differentiated in ‘shallow’
or ‘deep’ (Naess), covering fields of biology, economy, sociology, philosophy, spiritual
cosmology… In this way, researching ecofeminism leads to a very wide and complex (inter-
connected) weaving web of theories and practices which it seeks to integrate. In this sense
ecofeminism can be seen as a metatheory7, a theory of the whole8, an integral science and
practice. Integral means balanced, inclusive, and comprehensive9, thus transcending
polarities – between people and planet, between modern science and indigenous knowledge,
between environment and human development, between First, Second and Third World, the
local and the global.

With the inclusion of ecology into feminism (and feminism into ecology?), would it
additionally mean transcending the polarity between male and female?
The implication of widening the perspective10 to the ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, global realm
in its interconnectedness to Gaia, would be that ecofeminism is principally transgender. As
Vandana Shiva argues:
“Woman’s ecology movements, as the preservation and recovery of the feminine
principle, arise from a non-gender based ideology of liberation, different both from
the gender-based ideology of patriarchy (…) and the gender-based responses, which
have, until recently, been characteristic of the west.”11
Of course, this transgender aspect of ecofeminism doesn’t whatever mean that gender
differences are eraised or again blurred in the traditional male distinction of the sexes as
‘complementary’ or ‘not relevant (anymore)’.

Ecofeminism: mirroring western orientated feminisms

My third consideration is the relation between ecofeminism and other parts of the
movement, prevailing in the west.
Sonja Prodanovic said12 that ecofeminism is ‘not so popular’ in western feminisms. Maybe
this is a question of time. As for now I recognize an undeniable tension between
ecofeminism and other orientations of feminism. This has foremost three reasons, which I
like to mention here, for two of those ‘stumbling blocks’ are related to economy.

7
Usually philosophy is claimed to be a metatheory. This is strange since philosophers say their work of hard
thinking ends up as ‘only’ a footnote on Plato’s philosophy, and they seem proud of it. Well, for now Plato is only
in this footnote.
8
With this aspiration of integral holism, ecofeminism actually doesn’t ‘fit’ in the term postmodernism, nor a
‘regression’ into universalist modernism. Its aspiration could be called a trans-ism, aspiring to go beyond the
fragmentated and/or denied bits of truth.
9
On the other hand, without a conception of ‘integral’ implying nondualism, this whole-ism has undeniably
totalitarian characteristics. This is visible in some ecocentric movements as the militant Animal Liberation Front
who considers it rightful to protect animal rights by intimidating people who work in animal test laboratoria or the
fur industry. and in the aggressive campaigns of PETA. Also right wing groups use Peter Singer’s work Animal
Liberation and his ethics of anti-specisism to legitimate violent ‘solutions’ for the overpopulation of the human
species on Mother Earth.
10
I think this widening of perspective, critisizing but yet [also] including the male position is possible for
ecofeminism, because as far as I can see, the question of female subjectivity is not so much problematised.
Exactly this –a sexually differentiated subjectivity- is for western feminism the question of the 21st century.
11
Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive. Women, Ecology and Development, Zed Books, 1989, p. xviii.
12
During her lecture, Novi Sad, 5-3-2008.
5
1. The convergence of ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ as one of the central themes in ecofeminism is
conceived by many feminists as a highly dangerous terrain that might affirm and solidify the
very representations of ‘woman’ as ‘nature’. Exactly this essentialism is what feminism,
especially poststructuralist or postmodern feminism, has worked to dismantle.
Poststructuralist or postmodern feminisms (De Beauvoir, Butler, Haraway) ‘de-naturalize’13
the concept of ‘woman’ itself.

2. The urgence of ecology is not so much felt by most feminists in the west, especially
Europe and the US.14 Ecofeminism developed through the work of grassroot movements in
the so-called Third World, where the ‘link’ between ecology and women’s position is often an
existential matter. As Vandana Shiva states:
“Political struggles of women, peasants and tribals based on ecology in countries like
India are far more acute and urgent since they are rooted in the immediate threat to
the options for survival.”15
But also academic ecofeminism is highly indebted to non-Europeans as Anne Merchant
(Canada) and Val Plumwood16 (Australia).

3. Colonialism is by feminists condemmed as a bad thing, but at the same time we profit
from it. As Pam Colorado, a native Indian woman voices:
“… feminists appear to share a presumption in common with the patriarchs they
oppose, that they have some sort of unalienable right to simply go on occupying our
land and exploiting our resources for as long as they like. Hence, I can only conclude
that (…) feminism is essentially a Euro-supremacist ideology and is therefore quite
imperialist in its implications.”17
Dealing with economy is an area where also eurocentred feminism is confronted with some
of her biases.

13
Isn’t the very conceptional evolvement of Women’s Studies into Genderstudies witness to this dissociation
between essentialism/naturalism and women’s ‘second nature’?
14
Exceptional in Europe is Jeanne d’Eaubonne who included ecology and feminism into her marxist/anarchist
framework, or Petra Kelly who was ‘first’ a feminist before including ecology into her feminism, then rooted the
‘green movement’ in Germany (‘70’s) and the rest of Western Europe.
15
Shiva, ibid., p. 9
16
Val Plumwood died March 6, 2008, during our course. This struck me, on the moment I got to know her work.
17
Pam Colorado, quoted in: Andy Smith, Ecofeminism through an anticolonial framework, In: Karen Warren (ed.),
Ecofeminism. Woman, Culture, Nature, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1997, p. 25.
6
Part One: Values in economics
Costs and benefits, production and efficiency, jobs and childcare. These economic issues are
highly valued. How far away those issues seem from ecological issues like biodiversity,
intrinsic value of land(scapes) and animal rights. Meanwhile, ‘we’ all –men and women-
have a big heart for the protection and conservation of nature and ‘our’environment. But in
general those laments produce a lot of crocodile’s tears and sometimes genuine heart-
breaking dilemma’s. Since the ‘first’ institutional (‘official’) warning shot by the Club of
Rome, telling the western world that economic growth is limited upto the availability of
nature’s (fossile) resources, and that the planet as a whole is seriously threathened by our
need of (fossile) energy. But that was in 1968 –exactly 40 years ago. A lot has happened to
help ‘saving the planet (and us)’. However, the economical structures created by male
dominance, exploitation, expansion and profit for a minor group, still prevail.18

Feminists say: ‘Patriarchs rule the world’. And patriarchs of all sorts say: ‘It’s money that
rules the world’. That makes me conclude that today’s market economy is in the centre of
men’s activities of ‘ruling the world’. Economy is the central field in which power makes his
moves. The dollar and other hard currency make the music in the world’s economy. Above
that, most of the environmental risks are directly or indirectly caused by the conventional
market economy19. Turning global, also the environmental threats have grown to a global
scale, leading inevitibly to world scale disasters20.
The values that dominate economy don’t touch only ecology, but all realms of human life.
They are not the least present in our relationships –on private, societal and political level.
Marriage is a question of ‘give and take’; succes and status are measured by the number on
his bank account, and politicians need budgets for their policies and campaigns.

18
On an average day like today, 116 square miles of tropical rainforest will be destroyed; 70 square miles of
desert are formed in semi-arid regions as a result of population pressure, overgrazing, erosion, salination and poor
land management; 1,5 million tons of extremely dangerous waste will be disposed of; penguins will drop their
excrements in the ‘virgin’ Antarctic, containing DDT and radiation; 10 to 40 species will become extinct before
midnight. Also, on this day 250,000 babies are born on a dying planet. And tomorrow it starts all over again.
In 2008: “• Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are at their highest level in 650,000 years, and the Arctic Ocean
could be icefree during the summer as early as 2020. • Nearly one in six species of European mammals is
threatened with extinction, and all currently fished marine species could collapse by 2050. • The number of
oxygen-depleted dead zones in the world’s oceans has increased from 149 to 200 in the past two years,
threatening fish stocks. • Urban air pollution causes 2 million premature deaths each year, mostly in developing
countries. • The decline of bees, bats, and other vital pollinators across North America is jeopardizing agricultural
crops and ecosystems. • The notion of an approaching peak in the world’s production of oil, the most important
primary source of energy, has gone from an alarming speculation to essentially conventional wisdom; the
mainstream World Energy Council recently predicted that the peak would arrive within 15 years.”
World Watch Institute, State of the World 2008, Innovations for a Sustainable Economy, Washington, 2008.
19
Even the conservative, business-sponsored World Economic Forum admitted that 25 years ago many
environmental risks were nonexistent at a global level, such as climate change and the strain on fresh water
supplies; social risks, or the spread of new infectious or chronical (animal) diseases. “What is most striking is that
half of the 23 [mentioned environmental risks] are economic in nature or driven by the activities of modern
economies.” Global Risks 2007: A Global Risk Network Report , World Economic Forum, Geneva, January 2007,
p.3. /www.weforum.org/en/media/publications/index.htm
20
Fascinating is that in almost every introduction on ecology the author refers to the second law of
thermodynamica (I guess this is from fysicus Lovelock?) to emphazise that the planet must die if we continue to
consume (fossile) energy on this scale: a candle burns as long as there is fuel.
7
Conscious citizens and grassroot21 movements who see the environment steadily degrading
and call for change. Most people are willing to protect the environment they live in. But
most are caught in dilemma’s created by economic ‘laws’: one has just to say the magic
word ‘jobs!’ and a healthy environment quickly shifts to the background.

Ecology in the economic framework

Since the Club of Rome’s report Limitations to Growth, many changes for the better have
been achieved. There’s an official ban of most countries on nucleair testing; there is an
international climate agreement (COP). UNDP relates ecological problems to poverty,
striving to legitimate access to vital resources as safe drinking water, basic education, and
(children’s) health as human rights. Habitats of some animals and plants are protected.
Organic food production counts now for about 4 % of world’s agriculture22. Waste is no
longer waste if it can be used as a new resource: in western Europe around 70 to 80 % of
cans, glass, paper, and 50 % of hard plastics are recycled23. In Germany and the
Netherlands cow dung –causing too much concentrations of nitrates and ammonia in the
soil- is used to make fuel (biogas)24.
But the solutions so far implemented by governments and corporations, are for the most
within the value-system of market economy, dictating growth and profit increase. Lead is
abandoned out of fuel, but we use more fuel; cars run on 40 percent less pollution than 25
years ago, but more and more cars are sold; affilates25 are banned out of children’s toys,
but we use more plastics.
I don’t want to suggest this kind of measures are morally to be disqualified.26 I mention
these examples to argue that far the most ecological successes are limited on the field
where they take place: the financial and instrumental value27 continues to be the central
value.
The most effective treaty so far is the Kyoto-protocol (reducing the world’s emissions of
greenhouse gases by 6 %, indexed to 1990). But this hard achieved treaty concerns only
one aspect of ecology - global warming and with it the rising of sea level, changing gulf
streams. The relative success of Kyoto is actually achieved, because these climate processes
hit the world market economy where it hurts: food production and agricultural interests.
It is not only that only those ecological protective measures are succesfull which fit in the
economic frame. What is more is that ecology itself became a commodity. Clean air, clean
drinking water, CO2 reduction quotes, became –by that same Kyoto-protocol- commodities
that can be traded for the highest bidder. Green became a marketing tool to ‘modernise’
brands for the next generation.
21
The term grassroot as a bottum-up movement of a group of citizens existed for decades without a direct
ecological connection. Besides the location of the movement (in the hierarchy of power), this metaphore transmits
the speed in which a movements grows. More ecologically correct, however, would then be to name it weedroot
movement, or ivy movement, overgrowing the roof movements of the power institutions...
22
See www.eko-monitor.org for details per country. The monitor is compiled by national eco-movements and
Oxfam.
23
Report, Recycling in Europe, RIVM, Bilthoven, Netherlands, 2006.
24
The idea has been taken from India, where women fuel their cooking fire, not with expensive or
labourintensively obtained burning wood, but with dried cakes of cow dung. Originally the plan was to import the
cow dung for Dutch biogas, by way of a development project. But that didn’t work, for two reasons: the transport
was not rendable (surely not for ecological reasons), and the Indian government refused the dung to leave Indian
land – the Cow (and her products) being sacred, symbol of Bharat Mata = Mother India.
25
A chemical additive to make plastic more soft, and bitable for baby’s, turned out to be cancerogene.
26
After all, also results from shallow ecology are results. But if we continue in this tempo to make, f.e., chemical
agriculture completely sustainable/organic (which took as long as 30 years to get to 4 %), the process would take
another 750 years.
27
Instrumental value will be discussed on the next page.
8
A fractured worldview
Ecological movements usually assume that ecological crises reflect a disastrously fractured
worldview; a worldview often condemned as dualistic, mechanistic, atomistic,
anthropocentric, patriarchal and pathologically hierarchical; a worldview that ‘splits’ humans
from nature, mind from body, and spirit from everything. This view posits humans as above
or outside nature, as the source of all values. Ecofeminists prove that this ‘split’ is based on
an antropocentric, eurocentric, and a to economics reduced perception and practices.
Due to an ‘ontological dichotomisation’, modern science as a whole is said to be
‘epistemically’ reductionist28 - mis/taking its found fragment of truth as the whole truth. This
leads to a dualistic and inherently violent hierarchy of domination and suppression, and the
neglect and exclusion of ‘otherness’.
Vandana Shiva states that
“the reductionist worldview, the industrial revolution, and the capitalist economy
were the philosophical, technological and economic components of the same
process.”29

Instrumental value
Economy as a system and practice (and not to forget as an ideology), follows this
underlying reductionism30. It not only splits us, alienates us from nature, but exploits and
reduces nature, humans and especially women exclusively to their economic, instrumental
value. Instrumental value is the value of a product to be used by human beings. This
functional or utalitarian value applies also to non-human nature. Animals are valuable to the
measure in which they can be domesticated (and even industrialized, as in Holland) or can
be exposed for amusement (pets, zoo, circus). The wildlife, mirroring our dreams and
fears31, is sensational to be hunted32, or merely to be looked at on safari or on Discovery
Channel. Landscapes account for the value of enjoyment, or a restaurated culture landscape
with a recreative (touristic) value.
Non-human life which doesn’t have a recognizable value through the fractured lense of
economics are seen as ‘useless’, ‘wild’, ‘ugly’ or ‘dangerous’, such as weeds, deserts, insects
and reptiles. So, nature and people are –within the frame of economy33- only seen as

28
See for an extensive elaboration and analyses of these terms the poststructuralist library, from Althusser to
Žižek.
29
Vandana Shiva, Staying alive, ibid. p. 43.
30
Up to today economic models use the ceterus paribus-principle; an account based on selective and conditional
criteria.
31
Please read Hermann Hesse’s short story Knulp, or more recently Peter Hoeg’s, The Woman and the Ape, in
which the antropocentric view is reversed. Also, a lot has been written by feminists about women’s (sexual)
fascination for an imagined animal like King Kong.
32
Instead of a cruelty and an anachronism, the English, aristocratic tradition of the fox hunt, is seen as esthetic.
33
This accounts for command economies like marxism as well. Marxism never worked, because this reductionism
of human beings as proletariat is imbedded in the marxist ideology.
The power of marxism was that it found a communal trait in all people, regardless of race, nationality, mythology,
or gender. We all have to work in order to survive, and this makes us to world citizens, claimed Marx. Everybody is
dependent on natural resources, and exchange of commodities, that makes us equal. The fatal weakness of
marxism, however, was that it reduced man and women’s social, cultural and spiritual needs and aspirations to
merely the material realm. Thereby were also people reduced to the gross measure of historic-material dialectics.
Other human values (individual differences, art, spirituality) were brought back to the level of the material,
physical level. This reductionist move had to lead to the incorporation of these other needs /levels into a material
religious marxist mythology of ‘brotherhood and unity’.
9
usefull/valuable when they can be used as a resource. Products that don’t have any
instrumental value anymore turn into the opposite of value: waste.
Instrumental value is critisized by eco/feminists to create space for the understanding of
intrinsic value, the value of the life of an animal or plant (or mountain) ‘for itself’, with no
nessecary use for humans.

According to ‘his Master’s voice’, nature in itself has no value. The underlying assumption is
that nature is unproductive, passive, and needs to be cultivated. Cultivation means to make
it into a product that has instrumental, and thereby economical value. This happens by
uniforming it, as in a monoculture. A forest, hosting a diversity of plants and a variety of
animals, maintaining a rich mineral soil, in itself has no value to the economist. Only when
the space is cleared and the useful trees are left to be grown in monoculture, the trees
turning into products, an economic value is established34.

Development: The Blank Space

In this manoeuvre of mastering and controling nature, shaping nature to the ‘master’s’
image, are a lot of similarities between nature and the patriarchal view of the ‘nature’ of
women35. A land has to be tamed36 by clearing it into an empty, blank space37, and then
‘worked on’, ‘inseminated’, cultivated. The most meaningful example of clearing the space,
is the work of America’s colonists, by shifting the frontier of the waste land into ‘the riches
of Eden’, leaving the forests and native people destroyed.
The reduced notion of development which ocurred in the west under specific circumstances
of the industrial revolution, was raised and implemented to a universal level. People (mostly
women) who sustain themselves and their children by producing ‘only’ the basic, vital
needs, as many people in so called Third World countries do, were devaluated. They were,
and are, –according to assumpted values of western market economy- poor38, and need to
be cultivated, developed. Institutional development programmes (Worldbank, IMF,

34
A very interesting exception are the natural recources, deeply hidden in the earth. Minerals and metals are
considered to have economic value in advance. Especially oil, gold and daimonds (and nowadays uranium) are
presumably for their rarity very precious. However, it’s not just for their rarity but for their being the very
fundaments of the economic system, that man is preoccupied by these resources: oil, because it is the main source
of fueling the world’s economy; gold, because credit banking is funded on the available reservoir of it, in the
banksafe, and in the earth.
35
For a deeply researched (mainly philosophical) analysis of the male perception of ‘nature’ and its identification
with the ‘nature’ of women, see: Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, New York: Routledge,
1993. Plumwood insists upon a ‘master’ rather than a masculine identity in order to argue that this figure is not
only responsible for gender domination, but the dominations of race, class, and species as well.
36
The master says ‘tamed’, ecofeminists like Susan Griffin say ‘raped’. Rape “describes the desire to conquer and
violate woman and nature, and a less evident fear of both, since why has one have to conquer what is not
challenging, fearsome in some way, wild, falling as it does outside the idea of mastery and control?”
Susan Griffin, Ecofeminism and Meaning, In: Karen Warren (ed.), Ecofeminism. Women, Culture, Nature. Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1997, p. 226.
37
Masculine imagination starts more than often with such a blank space, or a ‘clean sheet to inscribe his
imagination onto her’ (Irigaray), also in his relation to women. Blank is her virginity, and blank is also her skin, rid
of all body hair and other ‘imperfections’. The implication is indeed, that what was there before –whether it be an
in itself functioning ecosystem, or feminine subjectivity- must first be eradicated, to start again what god did:
creation from ex nihilo. The archtypical figure for this master is Goethe’s Faust (co-opting with his devellish
counterpart, Mefistofeles), leaving/losing Gretchen, and running away for the ‘mothers’, and instead sees his and
man’s life aim to cultivate nature by mastering even the blank space of the sea. See for details my paper, Faust,
the divine entrepreneur, Nijmegen, 1991.
38
The World Health Organisation sets the poverty line on a minimum of $1 per day (without inflation correction).
2.5 billion (around 30%) of the world’s population live on $2 per day. You would ask, how do they manage to
survive? Well, by living outside the market economy.
10
UNESCO) are in the end almost wholly focussed on monetary and technological
development. However, despite of 50 years United Nations’ Development Programmes, the
gap between rich and poor has become wider39.

Shiva understands this kind of development as maldevelopment40 –‘production’ is in fact

destruction, and the regeneration quality of nature is een as ‘unproductive’ and ‘passive’.
This view has generated a crisis of survival, denying the activity of nature and displacing
women from their life sustaining activities.
“Statistics show that about 50% of women living in rural areas fail to meet basic
standards of physical well-being and that meeting these standards is strongly
conditional on the agricultural cycle, the season and time constraints. At the most
vulnerable end of the scale are women and their dependants who experience
continuous insecurity with regard to adequate nutrition and access to clean water
and health services.” 41
The Green revolution (cultivating cash crops for export) stole the land for sustenance, and
the most recently revolution of gmo-technology – marketed as the ‘Golden revolution’-
additionally deprives local people of their seeds, leading to poverty, urbanisation (leaving
the women behind) and even suicides42.

Commodities
Another important aspect of the fragmentated economist43 worldview is the view on
production. Production is almost identified with manufacturing. Consequently, it sees
economic value only in the endproduct. Only finished commodities (products and services)
count in the economic valuesystem. How they are made –on what ecological costs, injustice
or neglect- and by whom, is not included in the market value. The process of production is
mostly only important in a technological and distributional sense.
Women and sustainable societies in Third World communities don’t produce (such)
commodities for profit, which makes their work invisible.
As natural resources get scarcer also these are more and more defined and
controlled as commodities. This leads to the commercialization of now public
resources as plant seeds, plant medicines, water, and crops into the hands of
corporate business, leaving even the resources for sustanance of live for great
numbers of people unaccessable.44

39
The combined income of the world’s 500 richest people was about the same as the income of the world’s
poorest 416 million people. Human Development Report 2006, New York, p. 80. At:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2006/
40
One of Shiva’s oneliners: ‘More development means less life’. Shiva, ibid. p. 42.
41
The economic role of women in agricultural and rural development: promoting income-generating activities,
UNIFEM Seminar report, Athens, 18–22 October 1999.
42
Shiva notes a wave of suicides among peasants in India who made high debts for buying gmo-cotton seeds and
pesticides. In: BT Cotton and Farmers Suicide, at: www.navdanya.org
43
Why I don’t bluntly write ‘colonist’? It’s hard writing this paragraph without getting angry, and I need to control
myself to be scientificly correct.
44
See for a critique and action against this kind of WTO measures as TRIPS, gmo-trade, Vandana Shiva,
Commodification and Privatisation of the Planet, at: www.navdanya.org

11
Outdated axioms
Besides a reductionist worldview the dominant economist discourse is funded on axioms,
which are still common –except some cosmetic surgery and a lot of lipservice -, but are
indeed quite outdated. Here I summarize five of the main presumptions of market economy.

1. Nature and its resources are infinite.

That was once so in the ‘good old times’ of the 18th century when the fundaments of today’s
market economy were laid. Earth’s population was at 1 billion, resources seemed
unexhaustable, the technology that facilitated the industrial revolution was about to be
developed45, and there was a whole wide world outside to colonize. These circumstances
made economists of the Enlightenment, as Adam Smith and David Ricardo (in the footstep
of Byron and Locke) believe that human being is independent of nature.
Of the three production factors -natural capital (resources as materials, fish, meat), created
capital (factories, machines, funding), and labour-, the first was considered avail. It’s
obvious that this axiom of more than 200 years ago is completely outdated. Natural capital
(read: resources) became more expensive, but the market still works on this axiom46.
2. Growth is the primary goal.
And growth is identified with the accumulation of capital, profit. This remains the central
operating assumption in finance ministries, stock markets, and shopping centres worldwide
despite the clear threat to exhaustion of nature’s resources, and the exclusion of most of
the world’s population.
The bigger the better, is the logic of the market economy. This leads in a conventional way
to the penetration of new consumer markets, expanding economic activity, and not counting
the losses: of ecosystems, species, and a ‘lost continent’, Africa.
Making an economy bigger is not consistent with development (making it better47): the
nearly
fivefold expansion of global economic output per person between 1900 and 2000 caused the
greatest environmental degradation in human history and coincided with the stubborn
persistence of mass poverty48.
Homo Economicus, the master accredited by god, Bible and the amalgam of discourses,
wants ever more. Enough is not good enough. He is blind to the invisible wealth that is
already there49 in sustenance: when human needs are in harmony with local ecosystems.
3. Money is a value in itself.
Creating a virtual reality, consisting only on finances, independent even of production and
consumption. Speculation on high risk options at the stock market; trading with credits;
flash capital moving from New York to Amsterdam to Tokio. The game ends where people or
traders want to materialize their virtual money50.
4. The market has an ‘invisible hand’.
45
The industrial revolution in Britain followed an ecological crisis. Savory constructed the first steam engine to
replace the burning of wood, used to pump water out of the coal mines, because almost the whole British island
was deforestated.
46
With important exceptions as oil and drugs, for which wars are fought, and fish, whose availability have become
very limited. Fish are more and more reared in basins – aqua agriculture.
47
As a way of mind experiment: if one supposes a constant, annual growth of GNP by an average of 2 % (which is
conservative), and we extrapolate this to the future, lets say to the next 500 years, then we’ll have a GNP that is
(1.02)500 ≈ 200 million times higher than it is now. Nobody –including Bush and the World Bank- would believe that
also our individual and collective welfare would increase in such a measure.
48
Global economic growth increased more than 18 times in the 20th century. People in Europe in the year 2000
were 10 times wealthier than in 1900. Yet one in every eight people in the world was chronically hungry in 2001–
03. U.N. Development Programme, 2006, p. 80.
49
Maybe it’s the same with the invisible wealth of being in a stable, healthy body. Health is a basic need, and we
too often take it for granted. Only when we are ill, we value that very basic need.
50
As happens now in the US.
12
The still celebrated view of Adam Smith that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market leads self-
interested individual actions to positive collective outcomes, is in principle a powerful idea.
The idea of tax raising and paying is funded on this: individual profit is turned ‘back’ to the
state to provide and secure collective interests. But humans in the role of consumers differ
sharply from this ideal model of a ‘self-regulating market’. Individual interest, especially
corporate and political interests have overshadowed the communitarian dimension of liberal
market economy.
5. Corporate market interests are superior to public interests.
With the ongoing globalisation companies are even more and more superior to the interests
of national governments. The market is exclusively focussed on producing and spending, no
matter on what51. Markets do little to provide public goods such as parks, safe drinking
water, and healthcare.
Market economy is principally injust. In corporate economics, value is defined mainly by
purchasing power. That means that the rich get a lot of what they want, and the poor get
just as much as they can pay for.
This is the cynical side of economics; those with the greatest wealth get the most;
producing for those who need it (but don’t have money) is a waste. Thus, creating a waste
of 3 billion people in the world who form the lumpenproletariat of the ‘have not’s’.
6. Profit is private, problems are public.
Environmental and social unequal (and unjust) is also the dichotomy between the private
and the public sphere. Companies are by principle only responsible for the quality of the
manufacturing and safety of the commodity. Profits belong completely to them (due taxes
are converted into the consumer price as VAT’s). The environmental problems or the social
injustice this manufacturing may cause, are shifted to the public spere. Air or water
pollution caused during the production process, and health risks caused by the waste of
those same products, are on account of the community52.
Multinational companies who work with chemicals or other risky manufacturing, settle in
countries where environmental laws are weak or absent.53 Hazardous chemical and nucleair
wastes are dumped in Third world countries, as Nigeria.54

Human resources
Not only nature, but also we, human beings, are by the master – Homo Economicus55-
reduced to his and her instrumental, functional value. Market Economy makes us first into
workers and then consumers56, defined by our work force and buying/purchasing force. In
Jeanne d’Eaubonne’s view:
“This is the fundamental structure of all human community. The relationship that
exists now consists of working, in other words, selling one’s time and one’s active
force against a salary which permits consumption, thus the purchasing of the fruit of
the work of others. Exploited masses can produce or transport an object of
consumption without ever profiting from it. Tamils grow fruit that they do not eat,
Latino’s harvest coffee that others consume, production line-workers on cars,

51
For example, one may choose among 25 sorts of müesli or hundreds of weaponry, but not among 25 parks and
hundreds of childcare places in the city.
52
Mc-Libel case ….
53
As we can notice f.e. that companies experiment with gmo-crops in non-EU countries (where this is forbidden
outside the laboratorium), as in the field in Rumenia and Serbia.
54
Ministry of Environment, Holland, press release.
55
I thought a long time to use this term. Because this Homo Economicus is not outside us like a Big Brother or
Father, but inside us, reckoning our opportunities to gain profit wherever we can get it.
56
Producing goods and services in order to earn our money in order to spend it on consumer goods. A round circle.
13
 stereo’s, etc., that they could never themselves afford. This relationship must be
abolished.“57
The poor work for the rich. This is in ‘modern times’ not different. Vandana Shiva cites
S.Eyre who cites A. Lovins, according to whom
“each person on earth, on an average, possesses the equivalent of about 50 slaves,
each working 40 hours a week.”58
The gender of these ‘slaves’ is mostly female (and their children).
“Women bear the costs but were excluded from the benefits, dispossed from land
ownership, and being forced to participate in the ‘project’ of development, taken the
control of their management off their hands.”59
Producing commodities, the value-increased endproduct, uses natural resources and the
work of woman as ‘material60’:
“’Productive’ man, producing commodities, using some of nature’s wealth and
women’s work as raw material and dispensing with the rest as waste, becomes the
only legitimate category of work, wealth and production. Nature and women working
to produce and reproduce life are declared ‘unproductive’.”61 62
In addition to all the objects one can possess, one of the consumable goods in this system
remains: that of woman. As subjects women themselves are reduced to objects, and traded
as commodities.
Most relations, like marriages, in the world are ‘managed’ by men (fathers, brothers).
“’Work and you will have a wife; succeed and you will have a mistress’ is a popular
proverb of a very illuminating cynicism. All mental structures result from this
perverted, misleading and prostitutional relationship of consumption to production
(consuming in order to reproduce ones manpower) and of production to consumption
(producing by means of ones work in order to spend ones salary) have rested for
millennia upon this foundation,”
remarks d’Eaubonne bitterly63.
According to Claudia von Werlhof there is a downshift in power in hierarchical capitalist
society; the master exploits workers in exchange that they can exploit women:

57
Françoise d’Eaubonne, ibid., p.
58
A.Lovins, cited in S.Eyre, The Real Wealth of Nations, London, 1978. Cited in Shiva, ibid. p.9.
59
Shiva, ibid. p. 42.
60
One of the most striking examples of the identification of ‘woman’ with ‘nature’ is that the words ’material’,
‘matter’ and ‘mater’, ‘mother’ have the same (Greek) root; in the binair opposition of ‘form’ and ‘father’.
61
Shiva, ibid. p.43.
62
To make this in the masculine, economic eye ‘unproductive’, unvalued work for sustanance visible, the ‘second
working day’ of a rural African woman, after a half day’s working in the field:
• Processing agricultural products is the most time- and labour-consuming of all rural activities. Processing
for household consumption (such as the grinding of grain) as well as for the market.
• Storage of food crops is critical for ensuring stable supplies and narrowing seasonal price variations.
• About 90% of households use wood fuel for cooking. In many areas the rate at which trees are chopped for
wood considerably exceeds regeneration capacity. Women are the first to feel the brunt of this scarcity as
the time and energy required to gather and transport the wood becomes greater.
• Water collection is a task that is almost exclusively the responsibility of women. Fetching water typically
takes several hours a day, or even longer in areas characterised by dry seasons.
• Preparing family food requires on average 2–3 hours per day. It is time- and labour-consuming because of
the rudimentary methods used for preparation. Also, because food is allocated to individual family
members by preference, usually men, effort is required to balance food availability with individual
demands.
Saito, 1992, cited from The economic role of women in agricultural and rural development: promoting income-
generating activities, UNIFEM Seminar report, Athens, 18–22 October 1999, p.20.
63
D’Eaubonne, ibid. p.3.
14
 “Every wage-worker receives as compensation for his alienation and exploitation the
right and the guarantee to a woman, that is the right to exploit her as a 'natural'
object. So far, very few wage-workers have rejected this non-collectively bargained,
life-long bonus.”64

Reforming economy: sustainable development

Of course, also conventional economists see that something must change, that the
continuation of nowadays market economy and its implications of endless using resources
and endlessly striving for growth and profit has its limitations. The goal of development is
alledgedly replaced by the concept of ‘sustainable development’. This term was first
‘coined’65 and popularized 20 years ago, with the publication of Our Common Future66, also
known as the ‘Brundtland-report’ (named after the chairwoman, the Norwegian then-
premier Gro Brundtland). She defined sustainable development as ‘the ability to meet the
needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet the needs of
the future.’ The report argued that despite the inherent risk of environmental degradation
as a consequence of further 'development', economic growth and care about ecology can go
together. All that is required is to guide economic growth by the principle of sustainable
development and remain true to ecological integrity. This ‘win-win-situation’ got a jubilant
response by corporations67, politicians, policy-makers and some ecological movements. 20
years after ‘sustainable development’ got popular, we see how ecology is further
commercialized, and mis/used to polish a ‘green’ imago to corporations and politicians.
The idea that both ecology and conventional econony can get better, contains a logical
inconsistency, presuming that growth can continue as before, while natural resources are
definitly limited.
As argued before (p. 3), the assumption still is that economy can grow with some
adjustments and ‘refinements’, finding solutions on technological level and limiting the costs
of waste dump. As if it is a question of smart effeciency, to be controlled by ecological
managers.
With this concept of ‘sustainable development’ man can continue to believe that he is still
the ‘Lord of Nature’68, rather than acknowledging that he is part of it. The ‘blind spot’ is still
intact: i.e. the assumption that the ecosystem causes us a lot of trouble by not ‘obeying’ the
master.
I see this mainstream conception of ‘sustainable development’ as a dangerous current,
risking that ecology and ecological movements will be incorporated in the dominant values
64
Claudia von Werlhof, On the Concept of Nature and Society in Capitalism. In: M. Mies (ed.), Women: The Last
Colony, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1988, p. 109, quoted in: Craig S. Benjamin & Terisa E. Turner,
Counterplanning from the commons: labour, capital and the 'new social movements, University of Guelph,
Canada, July 1993.
65
The term ‘coin’ is, of course, taken from economic discourse. We often see this word in texts of/about
definitions of ecofeminism as well. Tracing the history of ecofeminism it is often said that Jeanne d’Eaubonne first
‘coined’ the term ecofeminism. I see this term as problematic. Not only because of its implication to conceive
ecofeminism as some kind of symbolic currency, but also the suggestion about the origin of an idea in the mind of
one individual. It is part of the patriarchal myth about ‘male birth’, origin and genius: something new created and
forthcoming out of one person. Mostly it is the work of a team, or ideas ‘hang in the air’, in the time spirit of an
age. See for example, the discussion about ‘who was first’ concerning Tesla and Edison.
66
World Commission on the Environment and Development (WCED), Our Common future, 1987, p. 43. At:
www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.htm
67
Which is, by the very ‘nature’ of business, suspicious.
68
The succes of a film as Lord of the Rings is also due to the ecological dimension of the story: a ‘dark force’
threatening to destroy the planet with its ‘beautiful nature and friendly people’. The film is as such not quite
different than the usual Hollywood genre of the disaster film: human beings are portrayed as innocent, and the
threat comes from outside. Films wherein human being is held responsible for their (catastrofical) deeds are
relatively new, since the eighties, with The Day after (1982) about a nuclear catastrofe, as a landmark. Mel Gibson
and Antonio Bertolucci are two Hollywood directors who portray an endangered environment produced by men.
15
of market economy, leaving women, indigenous people and other committed people
powerless. Furthermore it totally ignores the role that women can play as change agents in
the restoration of the environment.
“While the institutional environmentalism is interested only in ‘solutions’ that will
permit industrial growth to continue, the movements are carving out a very different
path. Their demands centre not on refining market mechanisms, nor incorporating
text-book ecology into economics, nor on formulating non-legally binding treaties,
but on reclaiming the commons; on reappropriating the land, forests, streams and
fishing grounds that have been taken from them; on reestablishing control over
decision-making and on limiting the scope of the market. In saying ‘no’ to a waste
dump, a dam, a logging scheme or a new road, they are saying ‘yes’ to a different
way of life: ‘yes’ to the community’s being able to decide its own fate; ‘yes’ to the
community’s being able to define itself.”69

Reforming today’s economy into a reality based (= ecologically founded) system is certainly
nessecary, as ‘sustainable development’ ambiates. But staying within its own logic, it would
not change underlying assumptions causing the inherent injustice to most women and so
called indigenous people who organize life in a different way than the eurocentric,
antropocentric economics.
Transforming economics, however, goes a neccesary step further: it is based on a widening
and diversification of perspectives, from the understanding that economy is merely one
(material) part of life.

69
The Ecologist, editorial, ‘Whose Common Future?’, april 1992, p. 196.
16
Part Two: Transforming economy
Monocultures of the mind make diversity disappear from perception,
and consequently from the world. The disappearance of diversity is
also a disappearance of alternatives –and gives rise to the
TINA (There Is No Alternative) syndrome.
Vandana Shiva70

The big question is, of course, what now? Economy has us in its grip; we, as human beings,
are reduced, mastered, and blackmailed by the economic values that are lawfully
established by patriarchy. Mainstream ‘sustainable development’ is likely to be absorbed in
the rules of the game of commodity economics and mal/development.
How would an economy look like that sustains instead of exploits nature and non human
life? How would the exchange of products and services serve our diverse needs instead of
dictate the lives of women and men?
At least 2 shifts are needed to escape the economic dominant notion of instrumental value
and the one-level-needs it propagates. The first is redefining nature, and the second shift
would be to widen the values of economy, nature, women and men, as more than only
resource.

Shift One: Redefining nature

Movements such as deep ecology and ecofeminists advocate a new worldview which is said
to be more holistic, integrative and relational. Redefining nature starts with a discoursal
‘movement’– much in the same way as feminists define ‘woman’ anew. To see nature
different than the assumptions of economy, without ‘replacing’ it with a metaphysical,
dualistic concept71.
70
Vandana Shiva, Understanding the Threats to Biological and Cultural Diversity. First Annual Hopper Lecture
presented at the University of Guelph, September 21, 1993, p.1. Shiva studied philosophy there in the late 70's. By
the way, Guelph University has rich resources on environmental issues online.
71
I refer to images that define ‘nature’ as ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘The Planet as our Home’. As Lucy Reid writes with
passionate commitment: “The problem is one of loss of connectedness, of amnesia: a culture which destroys its
ecosystem and seeks to annihilate its enemies has forgotten that it is part of the whole, there is no other; it is
destroying itself. The ecofeminist voice names the connections that have been severed, and speaks of reweaving,
re-membering the dismembered world. It is engaged in a passionate, spiritual process which goes beyond
theology and environmentalism to address a soul wound.” (Lucy Reid, The Spiral of Life, p.1)
This (mostly western) style of re-connection with nature is above all a movement of restauration; of re-connecting
different from inter-connnecting. It finds inspiring models from the past, in pre-modern or earlier, in pre-christian
(pagan) cults in order to abandon ‘the toxic waste that the judeo-christian tradition’ (Reid), the time when it
supposedly went all wrong with male estrangement from himself, the systematic exclusion of the ‘feminine’, and
nature. Restoration also of the negative image about witches (wicca, white magic women). Often these
conceptions of ‘nature’ are still bound in cultural images of ‘nature’ with vague, romanticized values which fill our
fantasies when we dream of life in the countryside while trapped in the city. It seems that this kind of ‘nature
dwelling’ is often a kind of escapism from the strains and stress that the dominant economical model releases on
us, ‘infecting’ also our social and even our spiritual life.
Many of those movements and activities tend, above that, to be a-political, and function more and more
commercial.
Also, the inspiration for another (than western) concept of nature, is found in a rather opportunistic (instrumental)
use of ‘unspoilt’ non-western cultures: popularization of the wisdom of North-American natives or Tibetans, or
Celtic spirituality, Maya cult, Touareg nomads, Maori, or the aboriginals…
Another notion about ‘nature’ is problematic; the notion of ‘nature as our home’. This image of the home needs
definitely a critical stance. Because home is the central locus of patriarchat, and the home is the essential
production unit in economics (therefore ECOnomy). The dominant image of ‘home’ is a family, harmonious living
17
What makes all that nature grow by itself, when it is presumably ‘unproductive’ and
‘passive’? Answer: nature is productive and intelligent. This is where Shiva (inspired by
Maria Mies) claims nature as a productive, active entity. Her basic notion goes back to the
Indian concept –and lived reality in India- of nature as Prakriti, meaning ‘the creative life
force’, that brings the world into being.
“The creative force and the created world are not separate and distinct, nor is the
created world uniform, static and fragmented. It is diverse, dynamic and inter-
related.”72

Arne Naess redefined nature in a non-instrumental way, by reclaiming the value of integrity.
He formulated the values of deep ecology in an eight point manifest73, of which the first one
is:
“The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in
themselves (synonyms: inherent worth; intrinsic value; inherent value). These
values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human
purposes.”
His purpose is, from the fundamentally non-antropocentric (ecocentric?) view of deep
ecology, to argue that there are agents of valueing outside human subjectivity, a kind of
‘objective ethics’.
This comes close to the concept of Gaia by James Lovelock. The Gaia Hypothesis actually
extends the functioning of an ecosystem, applying its capacity further and applies it to the
whole planet.
Living systems have a tendency to keep themselves in balance but also to adapt and evolve
over time. Scientists like Lovelock have found that the earth also has these tendencies, with
feedback mechanisms to 'keep in balance' the temperature and oxygen levels of the
atmosphere, just as our bodies maintain the temperature and oxygen levels in our arteries.
Very important is here to note that nature is very economical in handling its own
sustenance, regeneration and renewal. I suggest to call this ecological economy.

Of course, redefining ‘nature’ also involves redefining ‘human nature’. On this theme
ecofeminism can find her ‘sisters’ in different orientations of feminism, including the post-
structuralists. With probably some different accents, concerning autonomy74. Where a
dualistic male-perceived definition of self is predominantly defined as ‘independent’ (me and
the world, me and the other), ecofeminists outline a self-in-relation.

Shift Two: What do we need?

This question of human (men’s and women’s) needs is very important, because the global
market economy in which we all live, shapes the illusion that it can provide in all human
needs. Its ideological (or rather cynical) claim is that we are free citizens, able to chose
‘whatever we want’, and through material satisfaction of our needs can provide in our

together. This, of course, is highly ballasted by gender-roles. And, what about the home of couples without
children, mixed marriages, single people, gay and lesbian homes?
72
Shiva, ibid., p. 39.
73
See his book, or www.deepecology.org
74
Donna Haraway became known with her Cyborg Manifest, because of making a connection between people and
machines. But she also mentioned the connection with animals. “… a cyborg world might be about lived social and
bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines…”. PAGE?!!
18
immaterial needs75. In fact economy provides only for our material needs, so its role in
society should be limited to fulfill this task. That would be quite enough.
Meanwhile, the market economy, with its huge marketing machinery, tells us what we are
supposed to need. It says we need the commodities it produces. Our style of life is reduced
to lifestyle, to the private sphere, and reduced in terms of materialism (i.e. consumerism),
as is shown in numerous glossy magazines for ‘happy, healthy women’. In reality lifestyle76
means how we envisage the quality of our lives –the way we live, the choices we make
based upon our personal/collective values-. And this quality of life, of course, entails much
more additional values than economy can provide: relational needs, social needs, spiritual
needs.
I argue that a transformation of economy can only be useful and realistic by implicating all
evolved needs of nature, women77, and men from an ecofeminist point of view. For one part
this means that economy would be deeply based in an antropoDEcentric78, sustainable, and
at the same time gendered perspective. Ecofeminism evolves more and more into a moral
theory and searching for ways how to live that morals. To Stephanie Lahar, this includes
“… a prescriptive psychological and social model that includes an idea of future
potential and how best to unfold it…”79

With trying to find such a ‘psychological and social’ model to classify different kinds of
needs, the pyramid of Maslov seems a good starting point. Abraham Maslow discerns five
levels of human needs:
1. Biological and Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep,
etc.
2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc.
3. Belongingness and Love needs - work group, family, affection, relationships, etc.
4. Esteem needs - self-esteem, achievement, mastery, independence, status,
dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.
5. Self-Actualization needs - realising personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking
personal growth and peak experiences.
Also the authors of the Human Development Report must have had Maslow’s piramid of
needs in mind when they defined ‘development’ in a way beyond economics:
“Development is ultimately about improving human well-being—meeting
fundamental human needs for food and shelter, security, good health, strong
relationships, and the opportunity to achieve individual potential. Much of
conventional economic activity is indifferent to this well-being focus: the $1.2 trillion

75
The cynism lies in the devillish play that reduces need to the need of money. It tells us with hypnotizing force
that our material needs will never be enough, as also the market economy is insatiable with eating the earth
without paying for the meal.
Economical cynism lies also in the assurance that our needs are deeply rooted in desire. This is a misunderstanding
that started since our forefathers started to believe in the myth of Adam and Eve. She needed to bite the apple
where patriarchy mistook it for ‘filthy female’ desire.
76
Rather I would use the notion ‘art of life’ but that requires a completely other register of language, which
would make things in this context (even) more complicated.
77
To define values based on needs is a tricky thing. For ages we are told what we need or don’t need. That is
inherent in ideologies and principles that get into power. Especially women, more than men, are told not only
what they need but who they are at all. So caution is at place.
But still, I think we need an outline of needs, because any proposal of changing economy into a greener
(sustainable), juster and genderly equal, cannot surpass this question.
78
As you see, I skip here the discussion about (anti-)antropocentrism, (anti-)androcentrism and ecocentrism. I
presume within the context of ecofeminism there is a consensus about these questions, considering the dualism
that any centrism beholdes. In a dialogue however, between ecofeminists and, for example, poststructuralist
orientated feminists, or a group of deep ecologists, this discussion is very relevant. See, a.o. Val Plumwood,
Androcentrism and Antropocentrism. Parallels and Politics. In: Warren (ed.), Ecofeminism, ibid., pp. 327-355.
79
Stephanie Lahar, ibid. p.36.
19
 spent on the world’s militaries in 2006, plus the billions spent on emergency room
visits, police, security systems, hazardous-waste site cleanups, litigation, and other
“defensive” measures, are all major contributions to economic growth, even though
they may have contributed little or nothing to actually improving people’s well-
being.”80

Ecofeminizing Maslow’s pyramid of needs

Psycholog Abraham Maslow draw his pyramid of needs in 1953 and was actually designed to
understand people’s motivation in work and so optimalize productivity. This ironical
circumstance should, however, not withhold us to interprete his pyramid out of ecofeminist
perspectives as a scope of human needs in her environment. That means to interprete it in
its inter-connectedness and diversity. Therefore some preliminairy notes (to be further
developed81).

1. Maslow was thinking in psychological categories. They are the needs that motivate, drive
individuals to satisfy or at least aspire to fulfill those needs. We can ecofeminize them by
interpreting the diverse levels in:
1. Ecological needs: intrinsic value of nature; planetairy sustenance; human survival
2. Self-orientated needs: safety; stability, in developing the female and male self.
3. Other-orientated/Relational needs: community, culture
4. Group orientated/Social needs: ethics, civil society
5. Spiritual/PhiloSophical needs
All together they define the quality of life, of the planet that hosts us, as ourselves.

2. Important is to note that the needs are hierarchical82 . Level 3, for example, can only be
reached when the needs of level 1 and 2 are sufficiently met. This hierarchical structured
needs don’t make the underlying levels less crucial; they are indeed fundamental, basic,
preconditional. A ‘higher’ level could not exist at all without the underlying levels. Therefore
Wilber (following Lovelock) speaks of Holarchy in stead of Hierarchy: “a nested order of
levelled needs.”83
That would mean: one can't motivate a woman to achieve her magistrat thesis (career;
level 4) when she’s having problems with her marriage (level 3).
A girl would not attain healthy self-esteem (level 4) when being [violently] modelled to the
image and likeness of her parents (level 2).

3. The form of the piramid shows that each level has its proper place. The first level of
ecology forms the wide basis to provide the resources for sustaining itself and has a
proportional surplus to provide for the needs of other levels. That implicates that the
fulfillment of needs must be balanced. Too much need of self-esteem and mastery would
put level 4 on level 1, and so sabotage the underlying levels.84

80
Human Development Report 2006, United Nations, New York, 2007, p. 78.
81
It would be nessecary, for example, to analyse to what extend the qualification of these needs are gender-
specific, and to make a gender-differentiated and ecological hologram, giving the pyramid three inter-connected
sides, immersed in a whole.
82
Hierarchy is in itself not ‘wrong’, states also Karen Warren: “Contrary to what many feminists and ecofeminists
have said or suggested, there may be nothing inherently problematic about ‘hierarchical thinking’ or even ‘value-
hierarchical thinking’ in contexts other than contexts of oppression.” [Ecofeminism, ibid. p. ]
83
Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Shambala Press , Colorado, 2000, p. 55.
84
Which is, as I argued in Part One, happening in economy.
20
4. Needs have a limit. As a need on level 2 is sufficiently met, a motivation starts trying to
fulfil the need on the following level. This ‘natural’ limitation however is often disbalanced.
All of us know that we sometimes compensate for the dissatisfaction or pain by eating
something or going shopping. In our culture, dissatisfaction is seemingly innocently
expressed in consuming.85
According to Andre Gorz, a great deal of our dissatisfaction is work related. The economic
system compells many people to do work that is not meaningful (enough) to meet their
other than material needs86.

5. The pyramid should be ‘pluralized’. What accounts for the psychological needs of the
individual (level 1), or the family/tribe (2) counts from level 3 for the common needs of a
society.
You can't expect an Indian peasant community to work as a team member in a western
ngo- development program (level 3) when it’s land and houses are being re-possessed by a
multinational (level 2).

6. Maslow’s pyramid as a whole should be ecological inclusive. The version of Ken Wilber is
useful:87

85
On the agression of ‘compensatory consumption’, see Andre Gorz, Critique of economical reason, Verso, New
York, 1989.
86
It’s not coincidentally that women are the chief target group in advertising. They are most compelled to buy
consumer goods impulsivly, because their needs (for aknowledgement of their (female) subjectivity?; level 2) are
not met. Which is on its turn, caused by their exclusion by that same economic system.
87
See www.integralschool.org for an elaboration of Wilber’s version of the piramyd.
21
Having this spectre of needs in mind, it is easy to understand how today’s market economy
relates to our diverse levels of needs. And especcially how it does not. Economics is only
one aspect in our existence but in a market economy, economics becomes more important
than everything else. All of the physical, social, religious, and emotional aspects of our lives
are subsumed in the values that dominate the eurocentric world economy. The exploitation
of nature and half of mankind; male self-orientation; material growth; capital accumulation
(profit); wealth for a selected group- they are almost all reduced to the (male) needs on
level 4: self-esteem, achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige,
managerial responsibility. The other needs are reduced to fit into the framework of
economics. At the same time the values of market economy –competition, independence,
status (mostly fitting in level 4)- are elaborated and universalized to the whole culture.

Transforming the economy would therefore mean that economy finds its proper place by
providing the conditions that serve planetairy life and the diverse human needs of all
people88.

Transforming economy
Green economics advocate a transformation of the economy in a way that markets express
social, ecological and ethical values. A green gendered economy pays attention to the
effect of economic policy on all peoples, men and women, and the environment, recognizing
the dependence of all of human life on the natural world.

88
This whole story and argueing could be essentialized in the famous quote of Mahatma Ghandi: “There’s enough
in the world for everyone’s need, but not for some people’s greed.”
22
As we saw (p.2), ecofeminism is also actively orientated to alternatives. It does so by
reclaiming values which were previously claimed and mis/used or lost. Karen Warren is even
clearer in stating that ecofeminism is about reclaiming values:
“An ecofeminist ethic provides a central place for values typically unnoted,
underplayed, or misrepresented in traditional ethics (e.g., values of care love,
friendship, and appropriate trust). These are values that presuppose that our
relationships to others are central to an understanding of who we are.”89

Adjustment is needed in our economic systems if we and this planet are to survive. This
transformation, has to be in the direction of making the market economy subservient to
-rather than dominant over - the people's survival economy and nature's economy.
Now we can see that there are not one but three economies:
1. The market economy organized around the need for profit90; the economy that is
ecosuicidal.
2. The sustenance economy organized around the provisioning of sustenance for the need of
survival.
3. Ecological economy; organized by nature around essential ecological processes.

In the transformation of economy, a special role is seen (expected?) of women, as the

motto of this paper by Jeanne d’Eaubonne already notes. According to Vandana Shiva,
however, the most experience experts live not in the west91 but in the so called Third World:
“Most work on women and environment in the Third World has focussed on women
as special victims (…) Yet (…) their voices are the voices of liberation and
transformation which provide new categories of thought and exploratory
directions.”92

Reclaiming Values
Of all the values that passed in this paper it is possible to sketch an outline of reclaimed
values concerning the field of economy that were oppressed, disqualified or unnoted by the
dominant values of market economy. It is definitely only an outline and is far from
complete.

Ecology
• The basis
Economy depends completely on nature for raw materials, energy stocks, and indispensable
services such as water and air purification, soil fertility, and waste absorption. An economy
that tries to grow beyond a size the biosphere can support will simply destroy it. To be sure,
improving well-being can involve growth: offering access to food and shelter for all,
especially the desperately poor, will require economic expansion in some locales.
• Include ecology in economics
That means in the first place that not instrumental value is on the first and only place, but
the intrinsic value of nature and human and non-human animals.
• Ecological Footprint
89
Karen Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy. Quoted in Chris Cuomo, On ecofeminist Philosophy. In: Ethics & the
Environment, Vol. 7, no. 2.
90
Here, again, I remark that this includes conventional marxism, which only differs (in ecological sense) in that it
wants to distribute the natural resources more equally. But also such an economy denies its dependence of nature,
and equally needs growth and mal/development.
91
Except maybe peasant groups in Eastern Europe, the roofless and (‘illegal’) immigrants in the cities, and the
Roma’s.
92
Shiva, ibid. p.47.
23
We have only one Earth, but for the scale and the speed in which we use the Earth’s
resources, we would need the size of 3,5 Earths.
The Ecological Footprint is a way to balance our consumption to an acceptable measure. It
calculates the space which is neccesary for the production of all that we –individuals,
countries, mankind- consume.93

Women
• Visibility
Bringing gender into trade and economic policies: Invisibility is one of the numerous
obstacles preventing women from realising their full potential94.
• Include the informal and love economy
Another criticism that has been made of money-based economies like market and command
economies is their lack of recognition of unpaid work. In response to this gap Hazel
Henderson developed the idea of the love economy. She estimates that
"50 percent of all useful products and services in even industrial societies are unpaid
and largely produced by women, including volunteering, caring for the young, old
and sick, household management, do-it-yourself housing, food-growing, and
community service."95

Henderson endeavered to estimate the value of this unpaid work. With data of the UN
Human Development Index she came to 16.000.000.000.000 dollar ($16 trillion), all of
which is missing from the GDP of all countries. Because this kind of work doesn’t fit into the
reductionist value system that allows only commodities and exchangable services as
‘production’.
This half of all human activity is not merely a hidden part of the economy, it is also the
basis of the monetary economy. The basic economic unit in this kind of economy system is
the family. The definition of family is very specific: a male earner, a dependent female
caregiver, and dependent children.
Integrating the work in the love economy values all the work of production, reproduction,
and caring for human life and the natural world as the foundation on which the economy
functions.
• Care
Sustainability is only possible with caring.
Women’s most fundamental role in patriarchal society is procreation. This is even very often
given a negative (economic) value, being seen as a hindrance to ‘productive’ activities.
Neither is a value given to the emotional and social support women provide for the family
and community, particularly with regard to child rearing.
• Expanding women’s access to markets
With many poor women either locked out of economic opportunities or into a growing
number of low-wage informal jobs, need access to be able to sustain themselves.
Organisations as Mama Cash and UNIFEM provide microcredits to women to start their own,
small scale business.

93
www.ecologicalfootprint.org
94
The absence of substantial data on women’s role in agricultural and rural development is the most notable, and
hidden factor, that shows how women’s work is un(der)valued. Terms to describe women’s economic activity have
not been defined or given a value.
95
Hazel Henderson and E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: 25 Years Later with commentaries. Vancouver,
Hartley & Marks, 1999. Quoted in State of the World 2008, ibid. p. 54.

24
Economy
• Include the true costs of production
The instrument used as indicator for economical succes and growth, the Gross National
Product, is false.
One of them is that all kinds of social and ecological costs are not included in the GNP.96 On
the contrary: costs that are spent on dealing with pollution, exhaustion of natural resources
and militairy expenses are accounted as ‘production’.
If the costs of the degradation of nature, the loss of biodiversity and the consequences of
the use of chemicals were included, the GNP balance would give a total different picture of
the ‘benefits’ of market economy. 97
• Enough is enough
Natural resources are limited, so in the same economic logic, there is a limit to growth98.
That means that economic growth serves those who need it to provide in basic needs for the
sustanance of their society. The ones who already have it, were to downscale economic
activity to an appropriate99 measure. See what time and energy will be liberated to strive at
the other human needs. Down-shifting in America became a trend lately, half burnt-out
males are working less for the company in order to have time to raise children, volunteer
work, and family life.
• Companies are responsible for the ecological and social costs they cause
The social and ecological costs, caused by processing and manufacturing, distributing,
selling, and disposing of its waste, should be paid by those who cause it. Not on the
community.
• Fair trade
Fair trade means that economical trade is subordinated to environmental and social justice.
…., paying a fair price for a product means that the costs of . Make production proces
visible. To raise conscious that products are made by sustainable material and social
justicehands that manufactured them.
• Welfare
Attempts to include the value of welfare, some kind of compromis between economical
development of the rich to economical development of the poor (Hernando de Soto’s
attempt to include and value the informal economy of the poor people).
• Happiness instead of growth
Our time, our energy, the societal structure of the male dominated world is all turning
around the centre of the marketplace. But it doesn’t make us happier.100

96
The damage that Holland caused (‘produced’) by polluting soil, air and water nature in 2002 is estimated at 16
billion (miljard) dollar. The Ministry of Environment spent in that year another 2,6 billion dollar on environmental
policy. The Dutch Institute for Food and the Environment estimated the environmental damage in 2000 at 40
billion gulden (around 20 million euro). This damage is not included in the GNP, while those costs account for 1,7
to 2,8 % of the GNP of that year.
RIVM, Valuing the benefits of environmental policy, Bilthoven, The Netherlands, 2001.
97
Economist Brent Bleys calculated and integrated those costs for the Dutch GNP during the last 33 years in a so
called Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW-index). The standard way of calculating the Dutch GNP shows
during that period a steady growth. But the ISEW shows that economical growth showed an average of... 0 %.
Brent Bleys, A Simplified Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare for the Netherlands, 1971-2004, Vrije Universiteit
Brussel, 2007
98
A funny, but meaningful metaphore is used by the writers of the State of the World report to describe the
limitations of economic growth: “An analogy might be a baby growing in its mother’s womb; it is a subsystem of
the mother, totally contained by and dependent upon her. Birth marks the point at which the baby has reached
the limit of the mother’s ability to host it. Further growth in the womb makes both baby and mother worse off.”
State of the World 2008, ibid., p. 9.
99
Sorry, I can’t tell what is ‘appropriate’ and what would be ‘too much’, or ‘compensatory need’. The clue in
finding the right ‘human measure’ lies, I think, in the measure to which we actively use other resources to satisfy
our needs. These sources are not economic, but social, cultural and spiritual.
25
The measurement of well-being of all people will establish a shift from financial growth to
‘real’ human development in nature. The Happy life index gives such an indication.101

Community
The social space is for a great deal also defined by economy and the global market. To find
new ways of exchange many environmental and ecofeminist movements focus on the
collective than the individual.
• The whole household produces
The assumption that households are no location of production meant that within the
traditional household of male breadwinner, female caregiver, and children, only the male
breadwinner is seen as being 'productive.' Women's traditionally defined work of bearing
and raising children, maintaining a home, providing food, and providing emotional support
for everyone, is simply assumed despite the fact that the economy is absolutely dependent
on it. The contributions of children are also assumed to be without value.
• Connect households to communities
Ecofeminists extend (or replace) the classical economic unit of the family to the level of the
community. Partly this is motivated to find different, and voluntary motivated relationships,
than in the main economical entity: the family.
“Many communities are defined along lines of national identity, family and
neighbourhood into which one is born. These are nonvoluntarily; they are
communities in which we simply find ourselves and discover relationships rather than
ones in which we create ourselves and our relationships.”102
Would the Yugoslav samzat be a positive example to such communities on a voluntary
basis?103
• Connect private and public interest.
Besides the connection between the economic and the household realm, a similar
connection can be/should be made between the corporate and the public. A lot of people do
already voluntairy work. But also ‘bussiness’could do things without commercial interest.
That means that corporations and institutions (where people work like you and me) produce
not only for the market, but produce for and sustain also public interests. This is now
sometimes done as sponsoring, and sometimes without any commercial interest, as
philantropy.
• ‘Think globally, act locally’
• Bioregionalism
Choices and actions of the individual can be based on the consciousnees of their
consequences and effects on the global ecosystem and the people living on it. That means

100
Prof. Ruut Veenhoven published a study on hedonic [hedonistic?] psychology. “It reveals that higher incomes
only improve life satisfaction up to a point. The research also says that the more materialistic people are, the
lower levels of happiness they report. And it says that there appears to be a correlation between rising
consumption and the erosion of the things that do make people happy, especially social relationships, family life,
and a sense of community.” Ruut Veenhoven, in an interview in Onkruid, Avenhorn, Holland, March 2001.
101
“The Happy Planet Index is the first ever index to combine environmental impact with human well-being to
measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live long and happy lives. The HPI
shows that around the world, high levels of resource consumption do not reliably produce high levels of well-being,
and that it is possible to produce high levels of well-being without excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources.
The Global HPI is calculated by incorporating three separate indicators: the ecological footprint, life-satisfaction
and life expectancy. Put another way, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite
resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.”
New Economic Foundation, The (un)happy planet index, 2006. www.happyplanetindex.org
102
Lori Gruen, Revaluing Nature, in: Warren, ibid., p.357.
103
Or cyberfemnism?
26
practically to develop local, or regional economies. Producing and trading what will be
consumed in the region, and vice versa.
• Service economy
Emphasis of economic activity is on non-commodity goods; so more on services rather than
products.
Relation between producer and consumer more visible
The exchange of specialized knowledge could, in a stage further along, replace the
monetary system without going back to the awkward bartering of developing societies.
The Local Exchange Trade System (LETS) is one of those beautiful ideas of a money-free
exchange.
In a network of people one offers and uses services, not with paying money but by offering
your services to others. The exchange çurrency’ in Holland are foppen ( recimo, Frkove) or
Dinges (Svašta) as currency it’s an example of a local, self-managed economy.
• Environmental justice
Clean neighbourhoods for the rich, and polluted areas and landfills near the housings of
social or ethnic vulnerable groups is the reality of today. Environmental measures should
be budgetted and implemented in an environmental and social just way.

27
Conclusions
By pointing out the underlying values and outdated axioms within the ruling, globalizing
market economy, ecofeminism helps to demystify this economy. Its pretended universalist
yet truly reductionist view on nature and women (as resources), and humans as producer,
worker, or consumer (regarding about 60% of the world’s population as waste), lead to
ecocide and mass exclusion of women and indigenous people.

Reforming the economy by way of ‘sustainable development’ can only be realized within
economy’s own values, axioms and limitations, leading to the commercialisation of ecology,
and leaving the unvisible role of women as unvalued suppliers of this economy intact.

An eco- and gender-inclusive piramid of needs is one way to unmask the myth that
economics can provide for all of life, and that quality of life can be reduced to its monetary
aspects. It also shows the inter-relatedness of a holarchy to which a transformation of
economy could be directed.

Transforming the economy into an exchange system that serves instead of rules, starts with
the (ecofeminist) perspective that economy is simply the part of our life that deals with how
we share the resources the planet has to offer, and that it has no place dictating other
values to the lives of women and men.

A gender-equal, sustainable economy is imbedded in values that acknowledges the instrinsic

value of ecosystems and in the inter-dependence in nature as in humans, in individuals as
in communities. Not money but quality of life of all beings is the main drive of this
transformal economy.

To summarize:

28
 Leading values in market economy compared to a gendered, ecological
economy

Market economy Gendered, ecological economy

‘Male principle’ ‘Female principle’ (Prakriti)

Market Ecology
Power over Power with
Man as producer Nature, woman and man are re/producers
(Women and nature as resources)
Hierarchy Holarchy

Antropocentric AntropoDEcentric
Androcentric Co-operative
Scientific knowledge Ethics
Scarcity Enough / Abundance (Surplus)
Waste Renewability

Independent Inter-dependent
World Planet
Exclusive Inclusive
Self Self-in-relation
Individual Communal
Segmented Related
Uniform (monocultural) Diverse (biodiverse, multicultural)
Global Local/regional
Private vs. Public Private with public with private

Economic ‘laws’ Ethic values

Formal economy Sustainable formal, informal and love economy
Mal/development Sustainability
Commodity value (price) Intrinsic value
Progress (lineair) Quality of Life (circulair)
Profit Life sustenance
Wealth through growth and Welfare through sustanance,
accumulation of money care, and service
Trade Fair trade
Corporate freedom Corporate responsibility, Sharing [filantropy?]
Consumer society Civil society

Sustainable development Integrated development

Commercial ecology Ecological commerce
NIMBY Environmental justice
Conservation of non-human world Integration of human and non-human world
Recycling, zero waste Ecodesign, using less, zero waste

29
Statements

Living in the patriarchal world is living in a onedimensional world.

Feminism is the right of women to define the reality in which women and men live.

The first wave of feminism contributed to our understanding of oppression, the second wave
to our understanding of oppression and female identities. The third is also adding to
creating alternatives.

Ecology may tell us more about the inter-connectedness of life and death; of what we are,
and who we are; our bodies and our identities.

The sincere answer to the question ‘what do we need?’ is the way we want to live and die.

Our style of life is economically colonized and reduced to lifestyle.

Go veggie! Let’s LETS. Step on the grass!

To be ecofeministic orientated means we should also have compassion with male chauvinist
pigs.

30
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31
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32