Green Feminisms: Women, Sustainability and the Environment
April 28, 2011Dr. Suzanne Kelly
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When we first began collectively thinking about holding a conference on women and the environment, we had to face the obvious: that women's relationship to nature is as old as it is thorny. Some four decades ago the anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner asked this question "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" and in that time feminist theorists, activists and artists have worked to unravel as well as to complicate women's relationship to nature. They've pointed out that women and nature are both situated as background to the foreground of a male dominated world and culture, invisibly propping up and supporting a culture that has been long bent on ignoring both of their contributions. These visionaries have helped us to better understand women's and nature's shared debasement, and the violence and degradation that continues to be perpetrated against both of them.
It's that shared history of oppression that we've gathered here to think about today – and that we can most acutely see when we look at, as many folks will do throughout this conference, how women and girls are disproportionately affected by environmental hazards. Because women and girls make up the majority of the world's poor and because poverty is a central determinant for environmental problems, the truth is there's no getting around the question of gender. And, yet, when it comes to the environment, that question is still very often overlooked – particularly in mainstream environmental organizations and in the making of environmental policy.
Gender is also often ignored when looking at resistance to environmental problems. Women's important contributions to environmental justice and sustainability have often gone unrecognized, but both locally and globally, what the facts bear out is that women have fundamentally rethought and remade our philosophies and practices into ones that challenge the institutionalized racism, classism and sexism that have been the driving forces behind environmental decision making. Of course, it's also important for us to remember, that as these hazards seep across the boundaries of rural and urban, public and private, state and nation - even in the most privileged of geographies - environmental problems pose a threat to all women, especially when it comes to reproductive health.
Today, women make up 90% of the grassroots environmental activism throughout the world. It is an activism often borne from women's responsibilities to home and community – the places where environmental ills strike. Poor women, indigenous women and women of color have led the charge in recognizing humans as part of nature, and in protecting soil, air, water, food, animals, trees, bees, and bodies, while also charting new paths for better ways to live with the earth.
While Green Feminisms is about locating and celebrating the feminisms that have been driving environmental critiques and practices, this conference is also about honoring and remembering – about bringing to the foreground the women who have dared to challenge the structures of power that continue to impede our way to a sustainable future.
As we stated in our conference brochure, we claim the word "green," not to join the commercial "greening" of products and practices – far from it - but to recognize a long and powerful history of environmental activists and thinkers, women in particular who have used the word GREEN to evoke nature, growth and life.
In fact, as we collaborated to organize this conference we had a number of discussions about the cooptation of the word "green." We talked a lot about "greenwashing" and how the use of "green," like everything else that corporations get their hands on, has come to be aligned with consumer choice and personal behavior. The environmental writer Derrick Jensen wrote a piece not long ago criticizing this focus saying that we should not be fooled into thinking that taking shorter showers will solve our water issues. Our environmental problems are, of course, much bigger than our personal choices and behaviors. And while we know this, the rhetoric of green choice surrounds us.
Having said that, certainly what we each individually do matters in how we feel about our place in the world. And dissenting from practices that continue to violate "the GREEN" in profound ways, is absolutely important for prefiguring a more sustainable way of living with the earth.
And it's exactly in that spirit that we've arranged for a locally sourced lunch with compostable plates and compostable napkins and compostable utensils. So, we too are doing our part. But because the focus on individual green behavior prevents us from seeing that the power to change practices and policies relies in our collective capacity to resist the despoiling of the earth and reshape our future, we wanted to be sure that the scope of our conference moved far beyond the rhetoric of green choice and far beyond the individual's responsibility to make the right choices.
We also wanted to be sure that the conference steered clear of the kind of shaming and policing of individual behavior that often goes along with such thinking. In other words, feeling shame for not taking shorter showers, for not buying and eating the right foods, for not drinking from the right biodegradable cup, for not composting enough in one's backyard, or for not remembering not to idle one's car.
Obviously, all of these practices are good practices and they do matter, but the focus on them as a remedy to our problems and the shame that often accompanies them when we don't do them is unwarranted as it mistakenly places the possibility for environmental remedy on the shoulders of individuals, rather than on the corporations and policies that gave us bad choices to begin with.
It is our hope that today's keynote, the workshops, and our conversations will create an environment that pushes aside such shaming, and, instead pulls upon that powerful history of GREEN that many feminists have long drawn upon to stir up both problems and possibilities about issues such as climate change, water security, food sovereignty and awareness, local agriculture, animal justice and sustainable energies and environments.
And scholar of women's history, tireless leader of our conference and Professor and heart and soul of Women's Studies here at SUNY New Paltz for the last 30 years, Amy Kesselman, is here to introduce the first part of that stirring up for us – our keynote panel.
