Abby Rosenheck

7 February 1999

Environmental Capstone

Embodying Ecofeminism

I felt a little strange the first day I walked into our class, mostly because I was somewhat of an outsider in a group who seemed to know each other. I sat down and listened as class began. I found it hard to focus on what was being said. Words seemed to rise and fill the room without creating any form that I could recognize. I listened hard and tried to engage myself in the dialogue. Some of the other students seemed involved, some resistant, trying to argue their own space into the dialogue. Sometimes ideas would surface that would resonate with me and pull me in; I could see that both students and professor cared deeply about the things I valued most. Yet, somehow we did not tap my core of questions with the theories and frameworks we used. Logical arguments assigning ethical values to objects, abstract theories that universally prescribe for every situation, disagreement and defense, philosophical examples of extreme situations of morality that described violence, incest, rape . . . with all these things I felt more and more alienated from the group. I, an opinionated and outspoken woman, felt silenced. Surely the group would welcome my contributions, but why did I feel so stifled? How could a discussion of ethics so completely embody what to me is unethical? I should have known that even something so intense and personal as values could be pinned down and violated by patriarchal Anglo thought. If I were a survivor of sexual abuse, I certainly would have fled the classroom, never to return, feeling violated once again, due to the needless description of violence and rape in the philosophical examples. This, a perfect metaphor for the use of conceptual frameworks which value patriarchal-style rationality over all else, reenacts violence towards and render invisible many of the women, people of color, and poor people who inhabit this globe. Often these are the people who most intensively rely on the natural world for subsistence and survival, and for whom we should therefore use the most sensitivity and compassion in discussing environmental ethics.

For the past three weeks I have done the readings and returned to class, feeling invested in the material if not the frameworks for analysis. My deep relationship with the subject matter, my confidence that this subject is different than traditional academic disciplines, and the potential for a shared experience with my classmates kept me coming back. Often the readings presented the material through arguments and critiques among academics, but in such an aggressive way that I often felt disrespect between the writers, and a sense of the violence and individualism that spawn the abuse of natural resources that is the basis of our course topic. I persisted because I knew that "Week 4: Ecofeminism and the Gaia Hypothesis" might make the course worth while. I was right. The readings for this week articulate my feelings exactly. The conceptual frameworks used in our patriarchal, Anglo academic disciplines are viewed as oppressive and as justifying a logic of domination by people other than me! (By "patriarchal" and "Anglo" I mean Western, modern, scientific, white, imperialist culture which overarches the lives of all US-Americans. I do not mean white, male humans.) Many ecofeminist thinkers have, like me, had the experience of alienation in a male-centered logic of domination.

As Warren describes, there are good things about conceptual frameworks, even hierarchical ones, sometimes. This suggests there is still a place for people like me in a small liberal arts college, and the world we enter with our degrees. Most academic frameworks create a dualism between what is male, Anglo, rational, logical and what is female, non-Anglo, emotional, spiritual, as described by Warren and DesJardins. Many people fulfill both sides of the dualism, and can exist in both worlds. The "first wave" of feminism, as described by DesJardins, asks us women to deny our "female" side and accept only our "male" side. I am a good student, can play the game, and can do quite well in the rational, male-dominated world of academia. However, the denial of half of who I am keeps me unhappy, uninspired and therefore unproductive. The only way to end this oppressive dualism is to show that many of us do not fit on only one side or the other, but truly and deeply need to belong to both.

With ecofeminism we finally have an ecophilosophy that is inclusive and pluralistic. It is unlike mainstream ethical theory, which too often in its "abstracting to the universal has simply taken characteristics of the dominant group and turned them into ethical and philosophical ideas" (DesJardins, 257). Due to the dominance of this mainstream, women and people of color have historically internalized the value-hierarchy, as described by Bookchin, until in some ways we may ourselves reflect this conferred inferiority. This allows us to be dominated by mainstream culture and to have our voices silenced, affecting our actions and well-being both in our personal context and in relation to the greater society. The environmental movement needs to hear these voices. We will not be able to find a solution to our environmental crisis until we listen carefully to what those silenced voices can tell us. Warren, along with other writers including Wendell Berry, Masanobu Fukuoka, and Vandana Shiva, describe the concept of the relationship between humans and nature, rather than a concept of dominance of nature by man. It is this shift in philosophy that will change the nature of the decisions the dominant society makes regarding natural resource use and the preservation of natural areas. Many cases exist already which exemplify this attitude, but Anglo academic thought classifies them as female, primitive, inefficient, less rational and, therefore, inferior. To develop a successful environmental ethic, we need a diversity of ideas, frameworks and possibilities, from which to draw to find solutions. For those who accept only logical reasoning, here you have a rational explanation of the need for plurality of ecophilosophy.

For me, however the need runs much deeper. Last semester Father D'Escoto, the former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, spoke at Haverford about the crisis resulting from Hurricane Mitch. He spoke of the need for a political leadership with ethics, with values, with dreams of social justice. I asked where the future hope would come from, would it come only with ethical leaders, or from the people resisting on the ground? His answer got even deeper to the heart of my question, to the real question that even I had not known I wanted to ask. He said only love can change the world. He said love is like jumping into darkness; you can only hope some one is going to catch you. "Do you know what everyone needs?" he said, "Everyone needs a shot of divine insanity. We're not going to affect change until we stop thinking only of ourselves but think of service." I had tears in my eyes when he finished. I came to this course on environmental ethics hoping that we could explore this kind of ethics and how to incorporate them into our policies and actions regarding nature and natural resources. Ecofeminism is the only theory so far that has come close to addressing this. DesJardins describes an ethics of care, which "de-emphasizes abstract rules and principles in favor of a contextualized ethics focusing on caring and relationships" (252). Our relationship with the natural world, if it is respectful rather than violating, will determine an ethics of ecological sustainability, in a way that abstracted ethical codes and rules will never achieve. This provides an alternative conceptual framework within which to study environmental ethics. It is a framework which does not subordinate nature, women, and people of color by categorizing theirs as an inferior set of tools for understanding the world. Such a framework of oppression can only assign moral worth to these groups by arguing that they are similar to the dominant group (Warren, 177). Instead, this alternative framework views all frameworks as valid and legitimate, where the Anglo, patriarchal framework only considers itself to be correct.

As all of you have read these essays on ecofeminism, I hope you will keep them in your mind for the rest of the semester. As we discuss the variety of issues that lie ahead, I would ask you to be conscious of the oppressive conceptual framework that we may fall into and use. It is not sufficient to discuss oppression and injustice in one section as separate from the other topics we explore. In every issue we will encounter marginalized groups who are victims of environmental injustice, and I fear we may be tempted to blame them for environmental devastation. In reality, they may know part of the solution we seek. I would also ask that we expand the frameworks we use to include non-dominant frameworks, so that members of our class are not systematically alienated parallel to the groups we may discuss. Let's keep in mind our context, as students living in the upper-middle class, Anglo, patriarchal society of an elite college, as people who are born into conferred dominance. I think we will be able to discuss environmental ethics in a way that is inclusive, pluralistic, contextual and holistic, as recommended by ecofeminist thinkers.