If third wave feminism taught us anything, it was that women don’t need ovaries to identify as women. Our essence of woman-ness comes from our brains, heck, it could come from our kidneys or our livers if we felt it to be true within our own hearts and minds. But woman-ness especially comes from our constructions (read Simone de Beauvoir right now if you aren’t sure what I mean).
70’s feminism, AKA second wave feminism, is problematic for plenty of reasons including improving the lives of mostly white women of affluence. But at its heart second wave feminism addressed issues aligned with the civil rights era. Ecofeminists of the time used similar language to discuss the degradation of the earth as it did with violence against women and people of color. Part of the conversation included the reclamation of power that was lost a long time ago, a power, or energy source, found in earth based spiritualities. That power recognized a divinity as the body of the earth. Many people then and still do today, including yours truly, believe the earth and nature is a spiritual domain.
We practiced such recognitions in ceremony by calling God a woman, and therefore the earth we identified as female, (which actually has proven to have a long history. There is plenty of evidence that shows for the bulk of our human-like existence, 30,000 years, God was considered a woman as found in art and myth). In the creation of this space women infused intentional spiritual connotations, allowing ourselves a moment to bask in the realization that women are not originators of sexual filth. On the contrary, in this call to spiritual activism we stoked a fire declaring our bodies as sexual and spiritual at the same time. After four thousand years of body shaming through theology (as Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued, the bible does not dignify women), we found a way to honor our bodies where religiosity could not.
The ecofeminism of the 70’s that drew wisdom from Starhawk and Carol Christ got caught within the battle lines of the goddess politic. The pushback was fierce, for in identifying a Mother Goddess it reified strict gender binaries of male and female extremes: A deity had ovaries in a world that had begun to address the deconstruction of gender.
We have come full circle in the work of ecofeminism. We acknowledge the problems of cultural feminism’s assignation of aligning women’s biology with symbols of nature. Of course the truth is, all humans have a connection to nature. It’s not just the wisdom of celestial sphere cycles or a mytho-poetic relationship to animals and plant life that is saved for women only. We need to help each other, every one of us, to recognize that divine connection with nature right now.
Truth tellers Al Gore, Rachel Carson, and other Cassandras within the environmentalist movement of the last fifty years warned us that we were headed for global disaster if we didn’t put oil back in the ground, but here we are. Our efforts will have to be herculean to say the least.
Today’s ecofeminist scaffolding continues the work in uniting feminist theory with environmental issues — and the laundry list of crimes is long. The overlap of issues surrounding gender and the environment is a crucial conjunction for addressing the parallel ideology that denies the structural systems that are damaging to women and the earth.
A new alarm is sounding purporting that we have twelve years or less to stop climate catastrophe, meaning we have a short amount of time before we reach an untenable end for reparation of environmental devastation. Many who deny this are hiding within their bubble of privilege — they will always seemingly have access to tap water and a purse to pay for $1000 loaves of bread or the lion’s share for health care, to name a few. These are not the ones who should be leading us toward change. Because it is the marginalized who are hit hardest and first by these disasters.
Women, for instance, are more disproportionately affected by climate change than men. As they are so often care takers, many women around the world don’t have the privilege of tap water and must rely on retrieving (sometimes filthy) water from long distances to care for the family. Cleaning, cooking and drinking, water is vital for survival but it is becoming less and less accessible and more a commodity.
Medium writer Hayley MacMillen spoke with ER doctor, Dr. Cecilia Sorensen, whose research seeks to add gender to the conversation of climate change. Sorenson recently commented on how California wildfires, becoming more common, impacts women’s health. As more particulate matter from wildfires spikes, so do ICU admissions for respiratory and cardiovascular symptoms like asthma attacks. Sorensen argues, “inhaled particles appear to settle in women’s airways and lungs at higher rates than men’s, which could lead to higher risk of cardiovascular, pulmonary, and respiratory diseases among women compared to men breathing the same air.”
Add cultural factors and socioeconomic challenges that women face around the world, and it can be argued that climate change creates serious health risks for women. After Hurricane Katrina, for instance, reports spiked of sexual assaults, for one because of lack of shelters for women. Further, after climate disasters, men are more likely to find jobs and access other resources than women.
Our 11th hour of impending climate devastation is like a fifteen year old facing an unintended pregnancy. She is too immature to prepare for what’s coming. And as so often happens to teenagers who unintentionally get pregnant, they hope the crisis will go away on its own but instead the gestational months unfold until the teenager is forced to confront the new and obvious reality.
We are there, folks, and we need to put adults in charge. Those who knew about this and could have prevented our current status one hundred years ago are long gone. But every figurative teen ever since who has hoped for this crisis to disappear, or tried to eliminate data proving the facts, or pretend that the facts don’t exist, has been proven wrong again and again. The debilitating costs to humans and to nature are mounting. We need to agree on steps to keep fossil fuel in the ground, grow the development of renewable energies and stop denying that we are about to birth the ultimate fate of our planet from which there is no return.
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This post was previously published on Greener Together.
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