Women and Nature, a Recurring Mystique

by Janet Biehl

Are women “greener” than men? Do they have a special connection with
nature, or a privileged outlook on ecological issues? In the past several decades, some
women who call themselves feminists have proposed that they do. In fact, they have been
doing so almost for as long as the modern environmental movement has been around.

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb argued that what was ruining the planet was
human overpopulation. The best thing people could do for the earth, he proposed, was to
decline to reproduce. A few years later, in 1974, the French radical feminist Francoise
d’Eaubonne noticed that half the population lacked the power to make that choice: women
didn’t control their own reproduction. The patriarchal “male system,” as she called it,
wanted them to be barefoot, pregnant, and proliferating.

But women could and should fight back, d’Eaubonne said, by demanding reproductive
freedom--easy access to abortion and contraception. That would both emancipate women
and save the planet from too many people. “The first relationship between ecology and
the liberation of women,” she wrote, “is the reclamation by women of population growth,
defining the reappropriation of the body.” In her 1974 book Feminism ou la mort she
coined a name for this idea: “ecofeminism.”

Some American envronmentalists picked up her word, but applied a different meaning to
it. They remembered that the author of Silent Spring, the 1963 book that had inspired
environmentalism, was a woman, Rachel Carson. They noticed that women were now
leading protests against nuclear power plants, like Lois Gibbs at Love Canal, and against
chemical poisoning of their neighborhoods. One of the authors of the influential 1972
Limits to Growth report was a woman, Donella Meadows. One of the high-profile German
Greens was a woman, Petra Kelly. In Britain a group called Women for Life on Earth
formed a “peace camp” at Greenham Common air base, to protest NATO’s deployment of
cruise missiles: many of the campers identified themselves as ecofeminists.

But it wasn’t part of a struggle for reproductive freedom. Somehow, it began to seem,
women and nature had a special bond. They could see it in the language itself—“nature”
and “earth” are feminine; forests are “virgin”; nature is our “mother” who “knows best.”
Women can be “earth mothers” or “wild” enchantresses.

By contrast, the forces that were trying to “tame nature” and “rape the land” were the
forces of science, technology, and reason--masculine projects. Millennia ago Aristotle had
defined rationality as male; women, he thought, were less able to reason and hence less
human. For two millennia thereafter, European culture had seen women as intellectually
deficient—and, following Genesis, had sought dominion over the earth. Then
Enlightenment, another seemingly masculine project, had found new ways to ravage
nature, through science and technology and factories.. The perpetrators of this ecological
destruction were men, who reduced nature to a collection of resources that they could
exploit and transform into commodities. The whole Enlightenment project to dominate
nature—with its glorification of reason—was what was ruining the planet, or so argued
popular New Age philosophy—and ecofeminism.
But women’s hands, said the 1970s ecofeminists, were clean. What the world needed,
they thought, was less of that nature-destroying rationality; if women were more intuitive
and emotional than men, that was splendid—they were the antidote. Women had a sense
of connectedness to the rhythms of nature, and they understood intuitively the
interconnectedness of people and nature. The solution to ecological destruction was
precisely that special bond between women and nature.

So the identification of women with nature became a positive program, casting women as
special custodians of the environmental message. They felt validated by the work of the
psychologist Carol Gilligan, who proposed that women’s specific moral development
made them bearers of an “ethic of care.” Some even proposed that nature was a goddess,
immanent in all living things, in whose essence individual women specially partook.

But feminists—those actually struggling to advance women’s civil rights and economic
empowerment--were horrified. Ecofeminism, they said, trafficked in patriarchal
stereotypes. It took an ancient insult and tried to present it as a compliment. Such
stereotypes had been used to justify the nineteenth-century “separate spheres” ideology,
which had restricted women’s life-choices to domesticity, while gilded their cage with
paeans to their moral superiority. Ecofeminism was a revival of these constricting
stereotypes. However refurbished, however “greened,” they had no place in the feminist
struggle—they simply opened the door to a new iteration of the “feminine mystique.”

In reality, plenty of 1970s environmentalists were men: David Brower, Lester Brown, Barry
Commoner, E. F. Schumacher, Denis Hayes, Murray Bookchin, Ralph Nader, Amory
Lovins, David Suzuki, and Paul Watson. In 1989 I took part in an ecofeminist goddess-
ritual; a priestess instructed a roomful of us to “imagine that you are a tree.” Imagine
myself ... unconscious? immobile? No way! Two years later I wrote a book criticizing
ecofeminism for its New Age hokum and for being regressive for women.

Meanwhile Western ecofeminists were looking to the third world. There World Bank-
financed development projects were under way. Engineers were damming rivers to
generate hydropower, and in the process ruining diverse communities. Agribusiness was
transforming lands, long sustainably farmed, into monocultures, raising single crops for
export to the world market. Forests that had long provided villagers with fruit, fuel, and
craft materials, and that had protected groundwater and animals, were being clear-cut.
This “maldevelopment,” as its critics called it--rampant, exploitative international
capitalism--was destroying not only forests, rivers, and lands, but communities and
ecologically sustainable lifeways. Indigenous peoples were struggling against these
depredations. Most notably, in northern India, when a corporation planned to undertake
commercial logging, the local village women protested and resisted by physically hugging
to the trees to prevent their being cut down. In the next decade their movement, called
Chipko, spread to the rest of the subcontinent.

The Chipko movement fired the imagination of western ecofeminists, layering the woman-
earth mystique with real social facts. In rural Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Vandana
Shiva and others argued, women are the gardeners and horticulturalists, with expert
knowledge of nature’s processes. Masculine “maldevelopment” values resources only as
potential commodities for the market economy, but indigenous women understand that
these resources must be respected, to ensure that availability to future generations. Women
therefore instinctively give greater priority to protecting the natural environment.

But ecofeminism’s fascination with the Chipko movement bordered on romanticization of

subsistence farming. What about women who had modern aspirations, to education and
professional lives and full political citizenship? Ecofeminists appeared to prefer that they
stay in their old roles, barefoot and gardening. And as a matter of fact, men are
prominently involved in Chipko too.
[http://www.iisd.org/50comm/commdb/desc/d07.htm] Still, the ecofeminists had made
the valuable contribution of spotlighting the specific ways in which environmental
destruction affects women. For example, women do the bulk of work in subsistence
economies [http://www.uah.edu/womensstudies/ws200/Readings/women_work_int.htm]; so when
agriculturally productive land is converted to monoculture, female subsistence farmers are
relocated to the hillsides where farming is less productive, resulting in deforestation and soil
erosion, and sending the women into poverty.

And global warming too hits women in particular ways: their unequal social status and
different roles leave them more vulnerable to severe storms, fires, floods, droughts, heat
waves, diseases, and impaired food production. Each year, according to a report by the
U.K.-based Women’s Environmental Network (WEN), more than 10,000 women die from
climate-change-related disasters, compared to 4,500 men. Women make up 80 percent of
climate refugees; out of 26 million people who have lost their homes and livelihoods due
to climate change, 20 million are women.

For example, in Bangladesh in 1991, when a cyclone drove people from their homes, five
times as many young women died as men. The women’s clothing hampered their
mobility; they stayed at home too long waiting “for a male relative to accompany them.”
Meanwhile the men, in the more public spaces, warned one another of the danger and left,
sometimes without communicating the problem to the women at home. In places where
women have more equal social status with men, according to WEN, poor women are more
vulnerable to rising food prices, heat waves, and diseases, caused by environmental
destruction.

Recently in the United States, where Wall Street greed created a financial meltdown, the
woman-nature romanticization is undergoing yet another renascence. “Women lean
toward relationships and long-term strategies that prioritize future generations,” says
Shannon Hayes, author of The Radical Homemaker. This new incarnation of the earth
mother renounces economic advantages that her fine education and professional career
might have brought her: she chooses instead to stay at home to raise her family, feeding
her children healthful, tasty food that she cultivates in her backyard. She nurtures
relationships, she values simplicity and authenticity—and at the same time reduces her
carbon footprint. Her home is self-sustaining, a safety net during economic disaster. And
her carbon footprint is very small. She thereby achieves personal fulfillment and a
meaningful life, or so it seems.

Environmentalism has now been around long enough that the social scientists have
repeatedly studied men’s and women’s attitudes toward environmental issues and looked
for potential differences. Since the 1980s, most researchers have concluded that in the
industrialized countries, women are indeed somewhat more concerned about
environmental destruction than men. According to a study by the Institute for Women’s
Policy Research (IWPR), women are more likely than men to make “green” lifestyle
choices and “green consumerism.” Others have found that women really do have a
somewhat smaller carbon footprint than men. According to a Swedish report, men
contribute disproportionately more to global warming than women, because they drive for
longer distances: Swedish men account for three-quarters of car driving. "The fact that
women travel less than men ... means that women cause considerably fewer carbon
dioxide emissions than men, and thus considerably less climate change."

What about political action around environmental issues? At the national level, according
to the IWPR, women’s participation and leadership are lower than men’s; the leadership of
large, national environmental organizations is mostly male. But at the local level, in
groups formed to combat a specific environmental threat to a community’s health or safety,
women participate more than men, both as leaders and as members, Almost half of all
citizen groups formed in response to local environmental disasters (like harmful factory
emissions and nuclear incidents) are led by women or have predominantly female
membership.

But to consider these findings evidence of some essential difference between men and
women is simply regressive. If men dominate national environmental leadership, then that
dominance should be contested, not accepted with “radical homemaker” renunciation. If
women have a smaller carbon footprint, then men should reduce theirs. If women care
more about connection, then men need to cultivate that in themselves. Otherwise we are
back to “separate spheres. Even for “radical homemakers,” the domestic sphere eventually
loses its joy, as Peggy Orenstein has pointed out, if the women’s husbands weren’t equally
involved. “If you don’t go into this as a genuinely egalitarian relationship,” she warned,
women can experience “loss of self-esteem, loss of soul and an inability to return to the
world and get your bearings.”

When men make most of the money and women do most of the caring, as as Nancy J.
Hirschmann points out, the result is a power imbalance within families that harms women
and children. Realigning that power imbalance is necessary to effect real change, that is
social as well as ecological. But as long as women’s self-inflicted disempowerment is being
rationalized under a feminist rubric, that can’t happen. Radical homemakers and other
“care feminists,” Hirschmann laments, are opting out not just of the career track, but of the
fight for equality more generally. What we need is to insist that men participate equally in
caretaking.

As for environmentalism, we all live downwind. The dependence of human life on earth is
unisex; global warming threatens us all. At the same time we must recognize that people
who already suffer social injustice most prone to suffer from environmental degradation.

But we can recognize that fact without reviving patriarchal stereotypes about women being
“closer to nature” or resorting to the ecofeminist mystique. The woman-nature mystique is
both insulting and untrue. If people are to live on this planet, we will all need every bit of
reason, ethics, and self-control that is available. Fortunately those aspects of the human
condition belong to us all. Recognizing our common capacity for reason is not only
necessary for human emancipation, it is necessary for saving the planet.