Ch 12. Ecofeminism versus class politics
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Terry Leahy 2024
The interviews discussed so far show how some version of ecofeminism can be a way for women to think about environmental politics. However, it was much more typical for women in the interviews to interpret environmental politics through concerns related to their class position, broadly speaking. Nevertheless, in these more typical interviews, the issues raised by ecofeminism were not entirely absent.
The Ostrich Syndrome
Margie is a working-class woman whose ‘feminine’ concerns do not tempt her to take up an environmentalist politics. She rejects environmentalism as inconsistent with her version of ‘emphasized’ or mainstream femininity – empathy, ethics as particularistic, the rejection of politics. She distrusts environmentalists as ‘totalitarians’. They are too wrapped up in their extreme beliefs to understand the impacts of their actions on ordinary people.
In answer to a question about what she took to be some major environmental problems Margie replied.
Margie. Ohh. This is a tough one, I’ve heard about there’s a hole the ozone layer, I have heard, ohh you can see where the oil leaks out and all those animals are getting, full of oil. I don’t know. Other than that, there’s always the greenies going on about not cutting down wood and so on and so forth. Not much. I don’t really know much. I don’t seem to be worried about it too much.
Terry. What do the greenies go on about then?
Margie. Well, I think that they’re all into natural things and trying to save our natural resources and they don’t want to cut down the trees, and they don’t want you to kill off the animal life, which is all well and good, and it’s good of them to do that to be interested in and to take that part of their life, but sometimes I think maybe you’ve got to learn to stand back. I mean cutting down the rainforest is awful yes, but people do need fuel, don’t they and things like that. I mean you’ve got to sort of decide when it’s right to make a stand and when it’s right to let other people get on with their life.
Margie acknowledges some aspect of an ecofeminist politics. She immediately focuses on a problem experienced by another species and relates this to a particular piece of news footage in which we were shown birds and other animals covered in oil. We are being invited to feel sympathy with their plight. When she says that cutting down the rainforests is ‘awful’ she goes beyond merely human needs. In going on to reject environmentalist politics, what takes priority is her empathy with other humans. She imaginatively constructs a scenario in which people in other countries – the poor of the global South – ‘need fuel’ and are being blocked by environmentalists protecting the forests. Environmentalists should ‘let other people get on with their lives’.
Margie relates her opposition to environmentalists to her fear of political fanaticism.
I’m basically saying on human nature, using human nature that people when they get fanatical about something lose their sense of – what’s the word – judgement, they’re involved, they’re not standing back. But I don’t know because I can’t give you any actual instances. Hey, this is sitting on the fence. I don’t actually know any greenies. I hide from the news. Oh well sometimes you hear certain things, but I don’t go out of my way to keep informed about what’s going on in the world. It’s the ostrich syndrome. I don’t like to know about wars. Which have been going on for years. Over there. Most things I don’t think that you’ve really got much power to change, being one person on your own. So, it’s no good getting het up about it. And, I think it just sort of stems over from when I was a child and I first heard about concentration camps.
Margie goes on to say that at this time she decided that if she had been a Jew, it would have been better not to have known that the holocaust was going to happen, because you could have done nothing to prevent it. In this and other passages she links the fanaticism of environmentalists to totalitarianism. Environmentalists make decisions based on abstract principles without looking at the particular situation of individuals.
At another point in her interview, Margie claimed that environmentalists prevented the bush from being burned off. A common practice in Australia has been to set fires in winter to clear undergrowth. The object of this exercise is to prevent wild bushfires in the hot months of the year. Environmentalists are supposed to have stopped this — to save wild animals from fire. As a result, it is claimed, the ground fuel built up to the point where destructive wildfires were inevitable. She blamed environmentalists for the disastrous bushfires several years before this interview.
In this analysis, Margie construes environmentalists as a powerful middle class lobby group. They influenced governments to prevent burning off at the expense of the ordinary Australians. Homeowners and farmers. When I asked her what kind of people environmentalists were, she said that they were generally better educated and ‘more aware’, middle class people.
Her anti-environmentalist position reflects her working-class identity. Environmentalists are middle-class people who implement abstract theory to interfere in the lives of the less privileged — the working class, the poor of the world. Her statement that ‘there’s always the greenies going on’ encapsulates this critique exactly. Environmentalists are an extremist fragment whose constant barrage of moralising verbiage is typical of the middle class in general. As for herself, she does not expect to have any influence on things, being ‘one person’ on her own. Also, a position linked to her class identity. To the sense that the world is dominated by forces beyond her control.
The Ehrenreichs argue that modern consumerist capitalism has thrown up a new class in the period following the second world war. Their function in capitalism is to control and supervise the daily work and consumption of the working class. They call this the ‘professional managerial class’ and include teachers, social workers, those in the entertainment industry and advertising, managers, bureaucrats and technicians. In all cases, the antagonism that exists between this professional managerial class and the working class is a result of a central reality of modern capitalism. Modern capitalism separates mental and manual work to remove the control of culture and work from the working class.
Margie was typical of many of my interviewees in her distrust of environmentalism, which she sees as one more way of moralizing and containing the working class. Her position is related to the construction of emphasized femininity in several ways.
- She defends a moral position based on empathy with particularindividuals — those whose homes are burned in bushfires, those who need to cut wood and so on. She opposes this to the abstracted ethic of environmentalist fanatics who seek to impose their views on other people regardless of the consequences. She defends an ethics of empathy, identification and particularism.
- Within a dichotomy between a public world of politics and a domestic world of empathy and concern, she chooses the latter. Her culturally constructed femininity makes her unavailable for ecofeminist politics — because it is unavoidably political.
Despite this, she shares some of the guiding ethical approaches of ecofeminists. She acknowledges the damage in human interference with other species. She responds with empathy to a video of birds drowning in oil.
Those bushies stand firm
The focus group for this interview consisted of Mandy, who is now a tertiary student, her husband Martin, who is employed as a tradesman and Mandy’s sister Adelle, who is on a supporting parents’ benefit. While they are concerned about environmental issues, they would never support the Greens party. Their unanimity is marked. While Martin does not dominate the conversation as patriarch, the two sisters relate their political position to the influence of key men in their life.
Martin. I still remember. Oh, you gotta vote Labor, as a young feller. And I haven’t seen a change in my life yet of what goes on in the Parliament. I reckon they’re both even terms. Whoever gets in, it’s good for their side. But there’s been no changes.
Adelle. Yeah, I agree.
Terry. You were saying before that you’d be worried by voting informal.
Adelle. Well, I think, ‘cause I’ve always voted Labor (Laughs).
Mandy. I think too that comes a lot from our father. He’s very Labor right down the line. He was a union delegate and whatever and very Labor and I think that we were just brought up to.
Adelle. Yeah.
In this passage the interviewees explain why they would not vote informal. Even though they have little faith in the political process. They relate their support for Labor to the influence of their fathers. Men are the active participants in the public political process, they carry the political culture of their families. This becomes a serious barrier to the ecofeminist political project. Ecofeminism requires that women take up a politics based in the culture of femininity – the alliance between women and nature. But patriarchy specifies that women are not to see themselves as political actors and should leave politics to men. Mandy and Adelle take their politics quite seriously, but their views owe much to the views of their fathers. These political positions can be based in the economic position of men as principal wage earners.
Within this context, class issues take priority. Adelle and Mandy said that one of the reasons they would not vote for an environmentalist party was that they feared that environmentalists were not concerned about unemployment. They thought environmentalists were mostly middle class. Adelle saw environmentalist protesters as the spoiled children of wealthy families.
Terry. So, what about you, Adelle?
Adelle. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about sometimes.
Mandy. (Laughs)
Terry. Mmm. Like in what way?
Adelle. I think a lot of them’d come from the city and they’d just go out there and just, you know.
Terry. What, do you think it’s all just theory?
Adelle. Yeah.
Mandy. Well, what were you saying to me about those umm, when they protest about the trees and they tie themselves?
Adelle. They just don’t know what they’re talking about. I really don’t. I mean, I think they go on, they do, they go on. That’s about it.
Martin. It gets attention though and that. That’s one thing. You see it, you always see ’em tied to the tractor or underneath, dug in holes or you got.
Adelle. Yeah, but the trees’d die off. I mean they grow again anyway. I reckon. I think half of them are going more for the fun of it. People that haven’t got better things to do, I think. They want to get attention.
Terry. So do you object to the fact that a lot of them are unemployed.
Adelle. Oh yes (Laughs).
Mandy. Think they’re a bit radical.
Adelle. Yeah radical.
Terry. And why is this a problem?
Adelle. I just think they carry it too far.
By saying environmentalists are ‘from the city’ Adelle identifies them as middle-class urbanites. According to a typical sentiment of working-class culture, they are seen as mere theorists with no practical hands-on knowledge. Adelle uses the same phrase as Margie to describe the vocal style of environmentalists — ‘they go on’. By implication they are haranguing, moralistic, and overly verbose! The direct action taken by environmental protestors is seen as theatrical and extremist. Adelle’s attack expresses the puritan norms of Anglo-Saxon culture in Australia. Overt moralism, theatricality and public displays are seen as deeply embarrassing. The term ‘radical’ says that environmentalists threaten the fundamental economic order. Finally, Adelle’s most bitter critique of environmental protestors is that they are going for the fun of it, they have nothing better to do, they are unemployed and seek attention. In all this Adelle draws on more themes from puritan culture. These people are flouting the norms of the work ethic, they are not serious, they have chosen not to have a job, they are displaying themselves in public. These criticisms amount to the view that environmental protestors are the spoiled children of middle-class parents who have the time and money to go around interfering in the serious business of other people’s employment.
The next passage shows Adelle moving quite close to an ecofeminist position and then putting it into perspective in terms of the centrality of class issues.
Martin. Well, they don’t actually all go on just forestry alone, do they, the greens? Well, Greenpeace, you got that.
Adelle. I like the ones on the water.
Mandy. (Laughs) You like the ones on the water!
Terry. Well, yeah, yeah. So, when they’re saving the whales, you think that’s fine, you don’t have a problem with that?
Adelle. No.
Terry. Is that because it’s not involved in our jobs in Australia, is that the big problem with the other stuff?
Adelle. Yep.
Mandy. I’m just wondering Adelle, if that opinion of it had any to do with Dad working in, when he used to work in the, when he used to work with the logs years ago.
Adelle. Or even Mick was saying around the work.
Mandy. Yeah, see we come from a real country family. We all come from the bush.
Martin. That’s why I was going to bring that up, from Scone. And what’s the name of that where they’re logging up there? Barrington Tops. Well, they’re logging there now, Adelle’s uncle, Mick. Well anyway, he’s, he’s a man on the country all his life and he’s explained it to us.
Adelle. And he knows the land.
Martin. And he said, what they’re chopping down now is nothing to what’s going to grow anyway. And he’s saying, they’ve just picked a little spot which people are making money on and causing a ruckus over really nothing.
Mandy. See, most of our family, they come from Wauchope, and it used to be a timber town. And I think maybe a lot of our views about chopping the trees down and the unemployment whatever.
Terry. So are you worried that the environmentalists are, you know, going to wreck the timber industry.
Adelle. Oh, no. I don’t think they’ll ever do that.
Mandy. (Laughs) Those bushies stand firm.
Adelle’s curious statement that she likes ‘the ones on the water’ is related by me to the main issue for which Greenpeace has received media coverage — their water protests against whaling. One might also mention their protests against drift netting (turtles, dolphins), long lines (albatrosses), killing baby seals and so on. In all these cases an appeal is made to the public in terms of what I have referred to above as the ‘Bambi’ view of nature. These are innocent animals which we should protect as a mother protects her child. Although the interview data is sparse here in view of Adelle’s replies, she agrees with me that she likes Greenpeace because of their protests against whaling. If you like, this is the one place in this interview where Adelle takes up the position of an ‘ecofeminist’. Certainly, it is a rare moment in her talk.
This leads to another discussion in which Martin, Mandy and Adelle collaborate to reject environmentalist attacks on the logging industry. They refer to an Australian icon – the ‘man on the country’ who ‘knows the land’, in opposition to impractical city folk who base their views on mere theory or sentiment. A dichotomy popularized in the Crocodile Dundee movies. For Mandy, Adelle and Martin, this iconic support is mustered in defence of working-class jobs. The success of the capitalist economy is ultimately the source of jobs. The problem with environmentalists is that they attempt to prevent activities that ‘people are making money on’ with a consequent danger to jobs. Adelle and Mandy have both a father and an uncle involved in the timber industry. They identify themselves with these people as members of their family, including them in Mandy’s statement ‘we come from a real country family’. Adelle and Mandy round off this discussion by arguing that environmentalists will never defeat the united power of the country people — ‘those bushies stand firm’.
As women, Adelle and Mandy subordinate any ‘feminine’ concerns they may have about the environment to a politics which is tied into the requirements of men as key family wage earners. Almost every environmental policy threatens the jobs of some section of the working class. This becomes the key issue in the way these working-class women relate to the environmental movement.
Looking at the response of working-class women to environmentalism through these interviews, we can argue that ecofeminism is just one way in which women may view environmental matters. Margie, Mandy and Adelle have moments in which they express some sympathy for the environmental movement in terms of their empathetic concerns for other living creatures. However, dominating their talk are the class concerns of working-class women.
The ecofeminist project is to represent the interests of women. It stresses aspects of the culture of women which separate them from men on environmental issues. However, links of marriage and kinship also tie women to collective practices that define their interests in solidarity with the men in their lives — to issues of social class. These class interests are often in conflict with the aims of the environmental movement.
They fancy themselves as greenies
It can be even more obvious that middle class women filter environmental issues through their class politics. Beth is trained as a graphic designer but now stays at home to look after her children. This choice fits with her husband’s long and unpredictable hours of work as a contract engineer for mining companies. Her critique of the environmentalist movement is both political and cultural.
Terry. So, when you say it was greenies who were against burning off.
Beth. Well, that’s what they always say. The greenies don’t want you to burn off, so no one burns off. You can’t burn off. You’ve got to have a building permit virtually to burn off.
Terry. Yeah, that’s right. But see I don’t see all that as coming from greenies. It’s also the local Fire Brigades.
Beth. Oh, yeah, you’ve got all that too. But then just talking to the average person, like our neighbours around here, they fancy themselves as greenies. I mean I have a number of friends in the Wilderness Society, and they are against all those sorts of things. They don’t want the burning off. Until now. They’ve seen the devastation. And where we had our farm there was a mob down the end. She works for some Government Department. And they have never burnt off. They have never cleared their land of even all the weeds. So, all the scotch thistles and everything are coming up. ‘Cause they just want it for the wombats and the you know. There’s noxious weeds and they won’t even pull those out. Now it’s just invaded the whole property. I mean but you don’t go crazy with these things. You don’t just go and burn everything either. I mean back burning. When you’re burning off you do it sensibly. That’s what we tried to do.
Beth sees environmentalists, who are disparagingly referred to throughout as ‘greenies’, as fellow members of the middle class, as neighbours and friends. The phrase ‘they fancy themselves as greenies’ implies they seek status through their claim to environmentalist virtue. Taking the moral high ground, a status that they do not really deserve. Environmentalists are responsible for an unwanted increase in governmental surveillance. As with the working-class interviewees, environmentalists are seen as impractical people whose actions are ultimately harmful to others — the massive bushfires supposedly caused by the failure to burn off.
Beth distinguishes her own family’s farming practices from those of the environmentalist ‘mob down the end’, the term ‘mob’ suggesting that they may not live in families like normal people. Her family’s practices are ‘sensible’ control – control of weeds and bushfire through burning off. As in Margie’s interview the dichotomy is pragmatic reason versus emotional excess. Presumably the ‘mob down the end’ allowed plant growth as part of a bush regeneration strategy. Beth sees their behaviour as causing a massive invasion of feral nature — ‘it’s just invaded the whole property’. The concept of ‘noxious weeds’ that is employed here treats land as serving primarily for the commercial production of grazing animals. Within Beth’s productivist ethic, the development of land for the sake of other species is regarded as irrational — ‘they just wanted it for the wombats and the you know’.
A later comment in the interview reinforces Beth’s disparaging picture of environmentalists.
Beth. Some of the ones that I know who are middle class people. On the weekends they like to dress sort of hippy-ish. And go to the Wilderness Society shop and buy all their Christmas presents and that. Well, that’s fine. But I don’t always know if they actually do as much as they say that they do. I think it’s just an image for them, rather than getting out there and doing anything.
Terry. So why has that image got appeal for those people?
Beth. I don’t know, they’re still living in the sixties I suppose. I mean if you stuck them out in the log cabin out in the bush, they wouldn’t be there for very long I don’t think.
The view that environmentalists are all talk and no action is a typical working class critique of the middle class. Here, this accusation is used by Beth, a middle-class person herself, to attack another section of the middle class. The environmentalist movement is disproportionately drawn from sectors of the middle class in government employment — in education, social welfare and the like. Beth, however, comes from a different section of the middle class — those with jobs as scientific advisers to industry, a group who are understandably worried by environmentalist policies. Her rejection of environmentalists here is a rejection of their culture – a form of ‘social closure’ that separates her section of the middle class from their section.
Beth says that the lifestyle of environmentalists is merely an ‘image’. Their ‘hippy-ish’ clothes are a conscious display, a style. This is related to a common view in Anglo Saxon puritan culture that clothing should be ‘sensible’, ‘rational’ and ‘practical’, rather than individualistic and expressive. According to Beth, the image favoured by environmentalists lies. The ‘hippy’ image affected by ‘greenies’ pretends that they live a subsistence lifestyle in the bush. In actual fact, they are no different to the rest of the middle class, who get in their cars to go Christmas shopping. They are merely weekend hippies. They have good jobs within the capitalist system. While the hippy counterculture has been decisively defeated politically, these people are a sad self-deluding relic of that social movement. Sensible, normal, people know that times have changed.
Despite this dismissal of the environmental movement, Beth has her own share of apocalyptic nightmares about environmental problems.
Beth. I suppose it’ll take a long time before something drastic happens.
Terry. Yeah, it’s hard to know.
Beth. But I guess we’ll adapt. You have to adapt. Maybe we’ll end up in one of those glass bubbles (Laughs). That big glass dome thing that they’ve got in America.
Terry. I know, the Ark or whatever it’s called.
Beth. Yeah. I think that’s a good idea what they’re trying to do there ’cause it might be necessary in a hundred years (Laughs). But I’m certainly not pessimistic. Like I think it’s a shame that a lot of young kids now are feeling that there’s nothing to live for, you know and they’re committing suicide and all that. ‘Cause I think there’s always something to live for. There’s always something will be sorted out.
In this passage, Beth paints a scenario which one would have to classify as apocalyptic – the life support systems of the planet will be so much destroyed that we will have to live in glass domes. The fact that she shares this apocalyptic view with so many of my other interviewees implies a deep, if often unconscious, fear of environmental apocalypse. Beth distances herself from the horror. She moves this scenario at least one hundred years into the future; a time by which her own children will be dead. She is supremely confident that these problems will be solved by technology. She argues that there is always ‘something’ to live for, however drastic things get. It is worth noting the way that these apocalyptic concerns relate to an ecofeminist project. A project in which women’s concern for their children, their ethics of care, becomes a resource for environmentalism. Here Beth envisages a future which is so depressing that young people are committing suicide. But in the end, she sidesteps this position to affirm the necessity to keep the economy running smoothly.
I asked Beth whether a continuation of economic growth was advisable, or even possible given finite limits to growth. Beth indicated that she has perfect confidence that the growth economy can be maintained indefinitely. Beth argues that the appropriate role of environmental parties is to influence the major parties to consider environmental problems. Personally, she would not vote for them.
Terry. Would you ever vote for an environmentalist party?
Beth. If they were sensible enough about it and it wasn’t just. I mean you can’t just vote for someone because they’ve got some environmental issues that they want fixed. Because that’s not going to help run the country.
Terry. What about groups like Greenpeace, the Conservation Foundation and so on?
Beth. I mean I think they’re necessary and they might be very radical to start with and I think that’s necessary to get the politicians thinking, ’cause if you don’t have the radicals well nothing happens. It’s like with every movement that’s ever happened. Then after a while all the radicals are pushed aside, and the normal people flow through. You do need that because it makes everybody aware. They can be a pain in the bum at times, but at least it’s helping make people aware. It’s making the governments more aware.
Beth welcomes tendencies in environmental groups to modify their radicalism by cooperating with business and abandoning their countercultural idealism. They need to become ‘normal people’ and their proper role is to influence governments rather than to attempt to ‘run the country’. Clearly, she is concerned that if they were permitted to ‘run the country’ they might destroy the economy.
In Beth’s analysis, environmentalists are seen in terms of their class position and rejected as a danger to the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy. They are an annoying and impractical section of the middle class who let bushfires, feral plants and wild animals take over the cultivated space – ruining it for commercially productive use. They are irrational extremists who have given up on sober restraint in dress and appearance. They are liars who take the moral high ground, pretending that they are monks in hair shirts. The reality is that they are actually well-off middle-class people who display themselves in ridiculous dress on the weekends. During the week, they have sensible jobs like the rest of the middle class. These people in their self-delusion and obsessions are a danger to the smooth functioning of an economy that benefits everyone. Thankfully, this kind of extremism is no real threat.
Conclusions
Ecofeminism suggests an alliance between women’s culture and environmental concerns. My interview study explains some of the barriers to that alliance. The most fundamental of these is social class. For both working class and middle class, environmentalism is perceived as a threat to the capitalist economy. For women, class politics can be taken to be more important than any alliance with nature that they may experience as part of their feminine culture. As well, a barrier to ecofeminism lies in the fact that women are expected within patriarchy to stand back and follow their husbands and fathers in political matters. This is a serious enough barrier to feminist politics itself, but it is even more so for environmentalism, which operates directly on the terrain of class politics.
While this is all very disheartening, we can see that even women who reject environmentalist politics also express aspects of the ecofeminist position. Margie specified her concern for animals, when she was asked to nominate key environmental problems. She focused on the plight of third world people when she looked at environmentalist issues. Adelle specified Greenpeace and their actions on the water as one of the things that drew her towards environmentalism. These protests are closely linked to the sufferings of non-human species. Even Beth is plagued by the concerns that ecofeminism addresses – what will be the long-term consequences for our children and grandchildren if we go on in this present course? Why are young people so despairing of the future that they are turning to suicide?