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Terry Leahy 2024
This is my fourth chapter on ecofeminism. In this chapter, I want to look at how ecofeminism might be relevant to the environmentalist movement right now. Previous chapters have looked more broadly at the relationship between patriarchy, class society and environmental destruction. Including the way this plays out in dominant discourses of current capitalist society. This chapter will look at how these discourses take a role in political conflicts over environmental issues. As explained the most basic version of this discourse identifies men with civilization and women with the wild, with nature.
A lot of rejections of environmentalism are framed up around class issues. Not around the gender binary that ecofeminists write about. We will look at some examples in the next chapter. For a sneak preview. That environmentalists are middle class moralists with no concern for the working-class. That environmentalists in government would wreck the economy. But even these claims are often wrapped up in the gender and nature dualisms we have been talking about. For example, that environmentalists are emotional. They’re irrational. They’re too invested in the natural world. Whereas the reasonable people are those who stand back and look at things pragmatically. The people who can see the material needs of the human species. The spectre of gender haunts these characterisations. Men are pragmatic and reasonable while women get carried away by their emotions.
Ecofeminism can be construed as a strategic alliance between feminism and environmentalism. If current society identifies women and nature, let us use that identification. Let us validate women’s culturally constructed connection to nature by defending the environment. Let us strengthen the environmental resistance by attracting women to this alliance. To celebrate women’s connection to the natural world and invite men to link up to that. To offer this feminine culture to the world as a more appropriate way for humans to relate to nature. Using poststructuralist terminology. A reversal of the dualistic construction of gender and nature. The stigmatized subordinated side of that dualism is to be elevated.
I will examine these issues by looking at some incidents and interviews that I conducted when I was in Newcastle, in Eastern Australia.
The figs blockade
The first example is a political dispute in Newcastle. There was an avenue in front of the Newcastle library and art gallery, facing onto a park of about four hectares. Beyond the park across another street are the council chambers. A row of native fig trees (Ficus benjamina) was planted on both sides of the avenue as a commemoration of the first world war. The council, taking advice from its park officers, had decided to cut all these trees down. The Council argued that the roots of the trees were destroying the pipes and cables running under the road. They were attacking the foundations of the buildings. There was a danger that a limb would fall from the trees in a storm and kill someone. This decision provoked intense opposition. Big rallies, meetings and a blockade surrounding the avenue that lasted for weeks. Ultimately the blockade was unsuccessful. The trees were cut down and, strangely enough, new trees of the same species were then planted in containers in a new plaza replacing the previous avenue.
We can consider this struggle in the light of the dualisms described in ecofeminist writing. The dualism between men and women, and the linked dualism of the civilized versus the wild. On the other hand, this resistance was not conceived as ‘ecofeminist’ by most of the participants. It just worked out that way.
You could say that it was no accident that the nature that was being defended were these ancient figs. Fig species of one sort or another are sacred in much of Asia. For example, in Bali, statues of the evil goddess Rangda are placed under a banyan fig tree, with a shrine for offerings. The shape and habit of the banyan and also of this native fig tree lends itself to an association with the ‘monstrous feminine’ as Kristeva calls it. Like the Medusa of classic mythology. The trunks are smooth, like human skin. Bulbous and sinuous in their mature form. Dripping from the branches are aerial roots that can look like hair hanging down to the ground. In the avenue in question, the trees on either side of the road created a dark and shady space, either a meditative retreat from the surrounding city — or a sinister intrusion of nature out of control. It was common for open air weddings to be hosted on the road between the trees, making for dramatic photos.
In the context of this dispute, none of these psychic associations got a mention. It was all about how old the trees were, how they were a part of nature and a landmark of the city. Yet it is hard to forget the symbolism if you are doing a semiotic analysis.
The other side of the dispute was equally gendered in its physical embodiment. The architecture of the buildings lining the avenue. Revealed since the fig destruction in their bare austerity they are Soviet in their rectangular simplicity. An institutional bureaucratic masculinity. It is these buildings that must be saved from wild nature. Facing the avenue across the park, about 100 metres away, the Newcastle town hall, the seat of local government, is a Victorian grand edifice, complete with clock tower, columns, marble floors and sweeping entrances. The symbol of empire. Then there is the physical symbolism of the operation itself. Strong men in high vis working enormously powerful machinery. A high chain link fence enclosing the avenue and keeping out the demonstrators.
In psychoanalytic terms, the project of the Council is to remove the dangerous abject, the monstrous feminine embodied in a nature gone wild. A horrifying and primal femininity to be destroyed by a triumphal, rational and progressive masculinity. St George and the dragon. The council is to come in like a knight on horseback to rescue the public from this danger. The Red Riding Hood myth.
The fig defenders, the people who were opposing this destruction were also framing the dispute in terms of these dualisms. Representing a conflict between femininity and nature on the one hand, and a dangerous patriarchy on the other.
In the blockade itself and in the rallies at the Town Hall, women were a majority. About three quarters of the participants. What is more, it was very common for people to attend the blockade with their children. Much more than in other protest rallies in Newcastle. The sense was that this was an issue of particular relevance to children. Their future was at stake. Some men who were normally involved in environmentalist activism avoided this action. I spoke to men like this who said that the issue was of little importance and a distraction from real issues like climate change. As mentioned above, the Council workers fenced off the trees to prevent protestors from occupying the site. Children in the protest prepared posters showing the trees, the birds, bats and possums that lived in the canopy, with slogans. They attached these to the wire fence. The Council is devoid of empathy where these precious species are concerned. Another gesture that links femininity, childcare and nature was the placing of soft furry animal toys in the trees. They were attached with ribbons of satin and with scarves. Skeins of wool decorated the wire fence. These symbols were copied from the famous Greenham Commons protests in the UK. A starting action for ecofeminism when women blockaded a site for nuclear missiles in the UK.
Anthropomorphic identification with nature is a heavily stigmatized form of femininity in the context of patriarchal dualisms. Embracing that stigmatized identity is a strategy of reversal. The denigrated position is defended, defying ridicule. In an interview on local radio, a woman demonstrator declared. ‘Those trees do not know what’s coming’. A personalization and empathetic identification also implied in the cute animals on posters and the soft toys attached to fencing. An event that protestors featured as a flash point of the blockade was a large truck pushing through the demonstrators. A small child fainted, and a woman doctor came to the rescue. She was pushed away by the police.
All in all, the protests played on the danger to feminine nature. They stressed empathy and identification with the natural world. They characterized the council’s actions as a danger to the lives of children, a concern associated with femininity. This is an issue of concern to women and children. Nature is like a child that needs to be protected by the human species — in the way that women protect their children. The discourse that women are closer to nature is embodied in the action.
Ecofeminism in the interviews
Shortly before the figs blockade, I interviewed ordinary people in the Hunter region, talking to them about their views on environment. Some interviews were conducted for me by my students. It was a fairly random selection, worked through snowballing. You find someone you know and interview them and then ask them to suggest other interviewees and so on. The students were often from working class or rural backgrounds, so their families were good to go beyond the middle class. Here I am going to concentrate on the interviews with women, though not exclusively. A lot of the interview responses can be interpreted in terms of discourses of class. For example, working class hostility to the cultured and educated middle class. Concerns about the impact of environmental activism on jobs. For the middle-class interviewees, environmentalists as culturally different from respectable people, as dangerous economic wreckers. This is all background. At the same time, the framing of environmental issues often reflected the split between the civilized and rational (regarded as the masculine side of the dualism) and the wild and emotional (regarded as feminine). As well, elements of an ecofeminist discourse would often come from interviews with women who were generally hostile to environmentalism.
I want to feature in this chapter a couple of interviews that were unusual in my sample. These were interviews in which the ecofeminist position was taken up and defended by the women being interviewed. Quite directly, almost as though they had read the ecofeminist literature. Which at that time in the mid-nineties seemed unlikely.
A student focus group
The first of these was a focus group run by students. I was not present. My student, Sally, interviewed her friends, Liz, Megan, Malcolm, Robbie and Guy. All young psychology students at the time. Sally was taking a sociology subject as an elective.
Sally. Okay. Does everyone worry about environmental issues?
Liz. Now and again.
Megan. Yeah.
So, all the women sign up to that idea and then Robbie, one of the three men, challenges it.
Robbie. No, I’ll be dead before it really, the shit hits the fan.
Sally initially ignores this provocation and responds to the earlier comments.
Sally. You do?
At that point, Malcolm joins the consensus expressed by the women.
Malcolm. Yeah, definitely.
Now one of the women goes on to reinforce this majority perspective. What she says touches directly on issues raised in ecofeminist writing. The mistake of attempted separation from non-human nature.
Megan. I think it’s really sacred. I think, you know, that it’s really, I don’t know, really. Energizing for everyone. Without it, you know, no kind of human potential would be able to be re reached. I don’t think.
Malcolm jumps in to back this up and directly confronts the position that Robbie has taken. The ethics he enunciates is shared by ecofeminism and deep ecology.
Malcolm. I don’t think it’s ours to ruin.
Megan. No, it isn’t.
Guy now joins the discussion and directly addresses this moral claim, backing Robbie’s anthropocentric ethical standpoint. An ethics from the perspective of human claims, ignoring the interests of any other species.
Guy. Oh, yes it is. [ours to ruin]
Robbie is encouraged to elaborate his moral position in more detail. Taking into account the argument put by Megan that we depend on nature.
Robbie. We belong. And it’s part of us that we belong with. It’s made out of the same basic matter as us.
Meaning there is no human nature split. We are all just atoms on the planet. So, humans are as much a part of nature as non-human species. So, we have an equal right to do what we like with the natural world. Through all this, Robbie and his accomplice Guy are taking the typical ‘masculinist’ position. I am a cynical selfish person, created as such by evolution. I am just being reasonable and not letting foolish emotions get in the way. I am telling it like it is — rather than being swept away in unscientific nonsense. At this point Liz and Sally join together, finishing each other’s sentences in a show of solidarity.
Sally. We come from it. So, if we rely on it so heavily …
Liz. So, you just turn around and kill it. Thank you.
Sally. Would you kill your mother?
Nature is personalized as our mother. The obligation of the child is to defend the mother, paying her back for her nurturing. There is a parallel between women’s nurturing of children and nature’s nurturing of the human species. But also of course there is a pragmatic claim here. If we depend on nature so heavily, why destroy it? Liz backs her up and attacks Robbie’s ethics. Robbie and Guy maintain their rationalist perspective, while trying to avoid the ethical issues.
Liz. Very much. That’s the most egotistical.
Robbie. I don’t think we look at it as if we’re going to kill it. I think we use it and use it. We use it first. The abuse comes later as greed becomes more of an issue.
Guy. We get what we can get out of it.
Following from this, Robbie produces a long exposition of his position. He defends the civilisation versus nature position that he and Guy have been advancing— but with a somewhat pessimistic conclusion.
Robbie. It’s human nature. Economics is defined by human nature and politics are defined by human nature which is to procreate, dominate and expand.
Sally. So that’s human nature?
Liz. But that, that’s only a problem of our society. I think there are societies that aren’t based …
Robbie. Well, we, because we are that. We are sort of directed in that manner to dominate is why capitalism and western society is dominating the rest of the world, because it’s a much more powerful form of expansion than any other sort of more equal socially structured system.
Sally. How do you see that sort of problem? Do you think it should be stopped?
Robbie. I don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to do it. I think humans as dinosaurs are doomed. We’re going to die. The planet’ll be alive a lot longer than we are. I mean even if we kill it the earth and soil will still be there, and it’ll regenerate in a hundred thousand years or the meantime.
It is human nature to exploit the natural world. I am the rational scientist dealing with the world as it is, rather than imposing a moral framework. Robbie’s analysis of human nature is the sociobiological position, explained in Part A of this book. A social Darwinism. The demands of evolution predispose humans to behave this way. This is what is successful. Capitalism has come to dominate the globe because it is more in tune with these basics of human nature and their origin out of evolutionary pressures.
The political philosopher C. B. Macpherson calls this view of human nature ‘possessive individualism’. According to Macpherson, this view of human nature originated as an ideological defence of capitalism with philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. It was perpetuated in classical economic theory, by writers such as Adam Smith. Clearly it is also alive and well in much contemporary sociobiological theory. This theory of the inevitability of aggressive competition also fits with a hegemonic masculinity which upholds this behaviour as a masculine ideal. These discourses treat men as the primary instance of human nature, with women departing from this normative standard.
What is fascinating in this interview is that this competitive human nature and its expression in capitalism are not regarded as ultimately benign. The end result is catastrophe. Fatalistic acceptance of this outcome fits another norm of hegemonic masculinity — death and destruction can be seen as merely events, to be regarded dispassionately without identification. From a purely scientific, that is detached, point of view, none of this really matters, since life on earth will regenerate even in the absence of the human species.
Taken as a whole, the focus group indicates the ways in which these various discourses of gender and the environment are available. Ready to be taken up by the interviewees and used to construct their identities. The rational man of science. Exploitation of the natural world as an inevitable consequence of human nature — as it actually is. Capitalist civilisation as the most complete expression of selfish individualism — the real core of human nature. In opposition to this account the women, and one of the men, take up an identification with non-human nature. They link their environmental politics to a metaphor of gender. Mother nature. The appropriate response to the natural world is empathy and care. The surprise in this interview is Robbie’s pessimistic conclusion. Science and the rational pursuit of self-interest is not leading us to a world of successful mastery over nature, a progressive evolution of human potential. Instead, we are doomed.
A local activist
The other interview I want to describe also reveals the way an ecofeminist politics can be implied in women’s responses to environmental issues. Diane was a librarian who was a member of a local environmental group. We were working to prevent a road being bulldozed through a small bushland park on the edge of our suburb. We were also weeding the bushland reserve to wind back an invasion of exotics taking over the understorey. I interviewed her about her views on environmental politics. The following passage from her interview mirrors much ecofeminist writing. The manner in which she talks about these issues also makes a political point.
Diane. We’re not giving any thought to the future. It’s a here and now thing, even though we mouth off about we’ve gotta save everything for our children. I don’t truly believe. We mean that. I think we, as human beings are quite selfish. We think we own all this, that it’s our playground and whatever we destroy will come back again.
So, she starts off by identifying the problem as how we might save the environment for our children. A theme of feminine identity within the dualisms of patriarchal capitalism. As women we are concerned about what will happen to the next generation. But she speaks to that and wonders whether our professions of concern are real. In fact, we, as humans, are quite selfish, thinking of ourselves rather than our children. The critique is addressed to women as mothers. Step up and do your duty as mothers. In effect she replies to Robbie from the previous interview. It may be your human nature to be selfish, but you can do better than that and think of your children’s futures. As in the previous interview, the ownership of nature becomes a key issue. Within capitalism, nature is literally owned as real estate. From the perspective of deep ecology ethics, you cannot own nature, it is not ours to own. Plants and animals own themselves, they have rights, just like human persons. She continues.
Diane. ‘Cause you don’t see the harm you’re doing. I mean, I can’t comprehend what it must be like to pull out a whole load of bush rock and take your little lizard’s home or even smaller than a lizard. Yeah, we are replacing trees, but we don’t put back the same because we can’t. Because the big trees get into the drains or into the swimming pool. So, we can’t have anything that’s gonna get into the drains. So, we’ll rip that big tree out and we’ll put a little, we’ll put two bushes in, but that’s not the same, not like that big tree that used to stand there. And think, oh my God, how old are you? What have you seen? Who sat up in your branches. Wow. Two nice little bushes. Yeah. Birds are attracted to them. They come running tweet tweet. But they can’t nest in these little bushes. Got nowhere to sleep. Now, these little birds. Oh, it’s sad.
This passage is a rampant embrace of ‘Bambi’ femininity. She personalizes and anthropomorphizes non-human species. From a lizard, to birds, to the tree itself. Through this she constructs a position of empathy and care. The non-human species are attributed concerns directly related to femininity — as it is constructed in capitalism. The home as a place of safety and nurture. The birds looking for a place to raise a family. Strategically, the cuteness of this discourse is a reversal of the stigma associated with ‘sentimental’ attachment to the natural world. You think I am a silly woman because I have an emotional reaction to these issues. Well take this.
Conclusions
The figs blockade shows how an environmentalist defence of non-human nature can end up working through various themes of the ecofeminist analysis. How this local struggle came to embody an ecofeminist political strategy. That this happened willy nilly. Without any guiding political theory. With no conscious attempt to ‘do’ ecofeminism at all. In other words, it is no myth that current capitalism genders nature and culture according to the dualisms that ecofeminist theorists write about. That this dualism lays itself open to ‘reversal’ at this time of environmental crisis. Let us look again at the puffed-up claims of civilisation, science and patriarchy and turn instead to the despised negative of these dualisms. This is not an optional extra for environmentalism in the present time. The dissociation from nature that is the hallmark of capitalist ideology is inextricably a gendered rendering, premised on the patriarchal dissociation from the feminine. As we have seen in previous chapters, this founding dualism of humans versus nature is not attached to gender dualism in classless societies. Within class societies it is not restricted to capitalism but also finds purchase in other regimes linking class, patriarchy and separation from wild nature.
Nevertheless, lest we get carried away with this insight, the next chapter will show how these associations between femininity and environmentalism are far from a done deal where most women are concerned. Instead, issues of class politics can be more pressing, leading women to attack environmentalism for its likely effects on the economic status quo of the capitalist order.