Category: Uncategorized

I consider myself to be pretty self aware when it comes to my carbon footprint, my consumption, and my waste. I’ve been on a mission for almost a year now to reduce all three of those things. I have been an ovo-pescetarian since 2012, meaning that I chose to remove the majority of meat from my diet, but still consume seafood (fish and shellfish) and eggs. In either one of my earlier blog posts or in a comment on someone else’s blog, I wrote about how I try not to talk about my diet and when I do I keep it brief because meat-eaters often assume that non-meat-eaters will verbally attack and shame them for their meat-eating ways. If someone offers me meat, I politely say, “no, thank you,” and leave it at that, no further explanation needed. I also don’t usually call myself an “ovo-pescetarian,” even though technically that is what my diet is called. About a year ago I decided that I was going to reduce my consumption of animal products, so now I limit myself to 4 eggs per week and i only eat seafood on weekends. I don’t drink milk, I buy dairy-free ice cream, I usually only eat cheese on pizza or sometimes a little bit of parmesan on pasta, but I do eat butter every day. I have considered becoming a vegan for a while now, but have been hesitant.

So, this week. . . I’m going vegan! I’m excited to try it out and see how it’s going to go. I’m going to keep a list of everything I considered eating, take note of which foods I avoid for not being vegan, and take note of anything I use as a vegan substitute for a non-vegan food. As an additional challenge, if and when an appropriate situation arises, I will attempt to have casual and educational, but not patronizing, conversations on the benefits of plant-based diets and reducing our animal product and byproduct consumption. Check back in a few days for an update!

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Wow! What a trip.

I know I said I eat butter every day, but oh my goodness I eat a lot of butter! I put butter on toast, pasta, I use it to sautee vegetables for stir fries, on baked potatoes and baked sweet potatoes, and it’s in cookies… Butter is my go-to fat when cooking. This week I bought vegan butter from the grocery store, which is a little more expensive so I tried to use it more sparingly. I think finding vegan alternatives overall made me eat healthier! Most days I’m on campus from around 9-3 with class, work, and meetings. For breakfast, I have a smoothie that is already vegan (8 oz orange juice, 1 banana, 1 cup chopped kale, 1 cup frozen berries). Sometimes in the mornings I also like to eat toast with butter, but this week I substituted peanut butter for butter, which actually has more nutritional value. I also drink coffee every morning, and I take it black. The rest of my meals throughout the day are a little funky. I’m on campus during lunchtime, but I don’t have a meal plan, and I don’t want to buy lunch everyday. The smoothie is surprisingly filling, but around  1 I start getting a little hangry. I usually bring a bag of my own “trail mix” of whatever nuts I have, usually peanuts, almonds, and sunflower seeds, and I add chocolate chips too. I also bring an apple or an orange. The chocolate chips are not vegan, so I decided to leave those out — I definitely missed them. That little snack isn’t very filling, but it does the trick until I get home.

When I get home around 3:30 I have a late lunch. I feel like I don’t have a lot of time to cook for myself lately with it being the end of the semester, so I try to make things that I can put on the stove or in the oven and leave until they’re ready. On Monday, I had brussel sprouts with a little bit of olive oil and salt and pepper and rice. Dinner is where I ran into trouble. I was just going to make pasta with butter, a little bit of garlic salt and pepper, and parmesan. To be vegan, I couldn’t use butter or parmesan. Instead, I used olive oil and added tomato and basil which I don’t usually do, and I skipped the cheese. It felt like a much fresher meal, and I felt good after eating it.

What I eat before I get home at 3:30 rarely changes. On Tuesday, I wanted something a little sweeter because I was missing my chocolate chips and I have a huge sweet tooth. One of my favorite things to make to satisfy that craving is a baked sweet potato with butter, a little bit of salt, and brown sugar. Butter isn’t vegan, so I tried the vegan butter that I had gotten. It tasted a little different, but wasn’t too noticeable. For dinner, I made a “stir fry” with rice. I used scare quotes there because it’s not really a stir fry. Like I said earlier, I like to get things going and walk away to do other things until it’s done cooking. For stir fries, I chop up my vegetables (broccoli, red pepper, onion, garlic), and put them on a sheet pan in the oven with a little butter or olive oil and salt and pepper. In order to be vegan, I used olive oil. I stayed up late and was craving something sweet and wanted a cookie, but, because they had butter in them, they weren’t vegan. Instead I made popcorn (on the stove with vegetable oil) and sprinkled it with a little brown sugar and cinnamon!

By Wednesday I was really craving chocolate. For some reason, I thought that all chocolate had dairy in it. One of my friends informed me that was a common misconception. There are actually quite a few standard chocolate bars that don’t contain dairy, the issue is that they are processed in facilities where they might come into contact with dairy. A lot of dark chocolates are vegan. My grandfather used to buy Chocolove chocolate bars that come with a love poem inside the wrapper — and the dark chocolate bar is vegan! It was a nice little sentimental treat.

Overall, eating vegan was much simpler for me than I expected. I solved my chocolate issue, but the one thing I didn’t try out was vegan cheese. I talked to some of my vegan friends, and they said that vegan cheese is just not the same, but they gave me a few kinds to look for in the future. I think I could eat vegan for the majority of the time, but I do really enjoy seafood and baked goods (eggs, butter, milk). I also realized when walking through the grocery store that if you buy packaged foods instead of fresh produce, the majority of labels say that the food was processed in a facility where it might come in contact with with milk and eggs. My intuition is that that would be very discouraging for someone who hasn’t already made the transition to eating a heavily plant-based diet. I think small steps are key. If you’re interested in reducing your consumption of animal products, maybe start by just trying to incorporate more fresh produce into your diet and get away from pre-packaged foods. Try limiting your meat and/or seafood consumption to only weekdays or only weekends or whatever fits your lifestyle — it will be more difficult to sustain your new diet if you make a drastic change.

If youre interested in going vegan, here are a couple blogs to check out!

Vegan in the Freezer (https://veganinthefreezer.com/) — “The recipes feature healthy and delicious food that you can enjoy now or freeze for future meals.”

Vegan Heaven (https://veganheaven.org/) — She has a nice section on Vegan Life including information on veganism and going vegan as well as vegan travel.

“Behind the material deprivations and cultural losses of the marginalized and the poor lie the deeper issues of disempowerment and/or environmental degradation” — I completely agree. The connections between the oppression of women and the oppression of nature are impossible to ignore or not recognize. Because of this, women tend to be leading environmental activist movements to fight back against their situations. Some key examples of this are Standing Rock and mining projects in Honduras.

Standing Rock has been heavily publicized, but in case you haven’t heard or need a refresher, this has to do with the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is an underground oil pipeline in the Midwestern US. This pipeline is an alternative to trains for transporting oil, and began being built very close to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. The Standing Sioux set up spiritual camps in protest. They argued that the pipeline “would contaminate drinking water and damage sacred burial sites” (BBC News). This project threatens the Standing Rock Sioux’s land and culture. Because of the matriarchal tribal structures, women are leading the fight against the pipeline, “protecting the basic human right to clean water. But for some indigenous activists, the internationally recognized movement has become a larger fight against a history of misogyny, racism, and abuse by law enforcement” (The Guardian). Law enforcement officers arrested pipeline protesters, many of whom were Indigenous women, and subjected them to cruel and inhuman treatment. One woman describes male and female guards forcibly removing her clothes when she refused to strip in front of them. Others describe being packed into vans and cells, with mostly native women. They describe these native women being incarcerated for a wide variety of reasons, not just related to the pipeline. The conditions in the jail were unacceptable. Those incarcerated include “one who was pregnant and feared she was having a miscarriage and another who appeared to be severely ill” (The Guardian). “Black Lives Matter” gets much more air time, but “studies have shown that Native Americans are more likely than any other racial group to be killed by law enforcement” (The Guardian).

There is a clear relation between violating land and violating women where mining project began in Honduras. Mines lead to increased violence against women because increased revenue leads to increased drugs and alcohol abuse which leads to higher rates of domestic abuse. One group that is largely affected by this is Indigenous women. In “July 2010 until the end of September there have been at least 72 Indigenous people killed. . . among the 72 are 8 Indigenous women. One of them was pregnant when she was killed. This violence is experienced at the mine site, at home, and in the community” (Gendered Impacts 5). Some women went to work at the mine as cleaning staff, making them very vulnerable to sexual harassment. In order for women to be empowered, they must be able to work so they can make money to buy things to own, to own their own land, their own shelter, to be financially secure, among other things. If women’s well-beings are at risk going to work, trying to improve their quality of life, women will never be able to rise up to a position of equality within society.

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Sources

BBC News “Dakota Pipeline: What’s behind the controversy?” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37863955

The Guardian. “At Standing Rock, women lead fight in face of mace, arrests, and strip searches.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/dakota-access-pipeline-protest-standing-rock-women-police-abuse

The beliefs that ecofeminist principles are based on are:

The building of Western industrial civilization in opposition to nature interacts dialectically with and reinforces the subjugation of women, because women are believed to be closer to nature, . . . life on earth is an interconnected web, not a hierarchy, . . . a healthy, balanced ecosystem, including human and nonhuman inhabitants, must maintain diversity, . . . [and] the survival of the species necessitates a renews understanding of our relationship to nature, of our own bodily nature and of nonhuman nature around us.

(“The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology” by Ynestra King)

Intersectionality is a way of considering how each aspect of our social identities intersect and relate to the privilege and oppression we experience. Aspects of social identities include, but not limited to,  gender, sex, race, age, class, and education.  There are three main considerations for the theory of intersectionality, “intersectionality theory viewed at the micro or individual level, . . . intersectionality [as] a framework for analysis, . . . [and] intersectionality as praxis.” The theory of intersectionality can be applied to the life and experiences of individuals, applied to social and political issues to identify groups of oppressed people, and it should be a praxis or customary focus of activism.

Use of the term “intersectionality” began in the late 1980s and early 1990s in feminism, however ecofeminists had been practicing it for many years prior (Kings 70). It is the main claim of ecofeminism that the domination of women and the domination and exploitation of nature are interconnected — ecofeminism specifically focuses on this interconnectedness, or intersectionality. All of humanity is linked to and inseparable from nature, so if nature is dominated, exploited, or damaged in any way, then the same follows for humans (Kings 71). However, ecofeminism suggests and proves that those most affected and earliest affected by a damaged environment are those who are marginalized — women, people of color, people with disabilities, the poor and working class, et cetera (Kings 71). Feminist and ecofeminist intersectionality looks deeper at the interconnected web of aspects of social identity to recognize how privilege and oppression are derived from a combination of these different aspects of social identity.

Feminism and ecofeminism have both been criticized for claiming to be intersectional theories, but having very white perspectives. Environmentalist movements have also been criticized for “a lack of recognition for black women’s work combatting environmental racism within the environmental justice movement” (Cain). Cacildia Cain calls for “an intersectional, black feminist, environmental movement that center black women’s standpoint to combat these [environmental and social] threats” (Cain).

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In Gender Equality and State Environmentalism, Kari Norgaard and Richard York study the gender gap for environmental concern. They prove the interconnectedness of sexism and environmental degradation and their reinforcing processes. They acknowledged three main ways that ecofeminist theory implies that environmental degradation and gender inequality are linked:

First, nation-states with greater gender inequality may be less environmentally responsible due to the hegemony of the logic of domination. Second, due to the presence of parallel social and historical constructions of women and nature, nation-states with greater gender inequality may be less concerned with environmental protection. Finally, the parallel valuing or devaluing of the reproductive labor of women and of the natural environment will likely affect both gender equality and state environmentalism.

They then began research to consider the relationship between gender and environmentalism empirically by analyzing the associations between the representation of women in Parliament and state environmentalism. Their results show that the greater representation of women in Parliament leads to more environmental treaties being ratified. They then considered feminist theories that could provide a reason for this positive association. “These reasons include the fact that women have more pro-environmental values, are more risk averse, are more likely to participate in social movements, typically suffer disproportionately from environmental degradation, and sexism and environmental degradation can be mutually reinforcing processes.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/us/womens-crucial-role-in-combating-climate-change.html

This New York Times article discusses the relationship between women in politics and environmentalism. They claim that climate change has a greater impact on women because women’s roles often are focused around providing food and water for their family, which is getting increasingly difficult. With women being elected into more political positions, these issues receive more attention. Women have been able to make significant and positive change in the communities they have been elected to represent and support. Some of the changes that have been made are public transportation becoming electric powered, some roads in big cities being converted to pedestrian only, and solar panels being installed. They claim that it doesn’t matter who is in political power at the top, because it doesn’t change the plan to assess and implement systems for environmental change.

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Invest in Women to Tackle Climate Change and Conserve the Environment

I also chose this article from Women Deliver. Women Deliver is a global advocate group promoting gender equality and health and rights of women and girls. While they mention the relationship between representation of women in parliament and environmental treaties ratification, they do so in a list of other reasons to invest in girls and women to create a ripple effect of benefits. “Including women in climate change mitigation will help guarantee enough clean air, safe drinking water, sufficient food, and secure shelter for future generation.”

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Only 35% of environmental sector ministries have a gender focal point.

This is a statistic I found on the Women Deliver website. With all of the information we have showing that women tend to have more first hand experience with environmental issues, and the association between women in parliament and environmental treatise ratification, it seems silly to not specifically include women in environmental efforts. There is so much evidence supporting women’s significant and positive effect on the environment from a position in politics and just as citizens, one could easily assume that the environmental sector ministries would make more, more meaningful, and lasting effects and improvements if they made gender a focal point.

I’d like to begin this post with complete transparency. I am pro-choice and within this group I tend to hold the extreme liberal view. I think people too often tip-toe around the topic of abortion. I fully understand that it is an extremely difficult decision for some people to make, making it more difficult to talk about conceptually and objectively. I, personally, have not yet had to make this decision, but I know what I would do. (You can tell me it will be different if I actually went through it; you can tell me I have no frame of reference; you can tell me I’m heartless — but that won’t make me feel ashamed or guilty or change my stance) I firmly believe that it is the mother’s fundamental and unalienable human right to all decisions regarding her body, without needing to justify or defend her decisions to anyone. I think it is really self-centered and inconsiderate for pro-life individuals to shame and guilt women for their decision to abort, especially knowing and acknowledging how difficult of a decision it is. I also think it’s backwards to claim that you don’t/won’t judge a woman for her decision, but in the same breath call her reasoning evil.

Furthermore, it’s as if pro-life individuals feel like they bear the moral guilt and negative weight of other women’s decisions. We bear the weight and accept the consequences of our own decisions, not others’. That is the responsibility we accept for any decisions we have the right to make.

I agree with Hawkins. I briefly skimmed some of my classmates blog posts, curious what their tendencies were and I felt like there were many misinterpretations.

Hawkins is defending abortion from an ecofeminist perspective. While considering population size, poverty, and environmental degradation, she writes:

While the poor may seek to have large families as a way of coping with their immediate economic conditions, providing more hands to work and offering an increased chance that parents will be cared for in their old age, the long term trade-off parallels that of employing ecologically damaging farming practices because of today’s need to eat: tomorrow, the overall needs will be greater, while the resources for meeting them will be proportionately less.

She is not blaming environmental degradation on poor communities, often which are communities of color, but rather just acknowledging the short term and long term effects of the choice to have a large family. It may appear to some as a white and classist perspective, simply because of the example used.

She does not promote abortion as the ideal primary form of birth control, but rather as “backup birth control.” When talking about developing countries she notes “when smaller family sizes are becoming desirable but contraceptive use is unfamiliar or unavailable, that abortion plays a prominent and necessary role in fertility reduction, with abortion rates later declining as contraceptive use increases.”

While I think most people tend to consider abortion with an individualized and personal perspective, this essay considers its use systematically. This may feel inhumane and reductive, but I believe it’s just objective (which is a necessary perspective to consider).

Sources:

Abortion

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/abortion-right-to-privacy-women-right-to-equality

“Reproductive Choices: The Ecological Dimension” by Ronnie Zoe Hawkins

I chose these three images from Carol Adam’s “Sexual Politics of Meat” examples. The “Hey Babe / Fresh Chicken” image immediately recalled in my mind Adam’s comments on non-human animals as whores. The chicken’s proportions are not nearly as humanized as some of the other illustrations, but the way it’s posing with its “hand” on its hip and the one bent leg and head turned to the side is sexualized in a way that is very much directed towards men. I remember in highschool some girls were having a conversation on the proper way to pose for pictures or when you see a cute boy so that your body looks its best. You apparently weren’t “supposed to” directly face the camera/boy, but be at a slight angle, bend a leg to angle your hips more, turn your face to the side so they see more of your jaw line, put your hand on your hip to accentuate the curve, et cetera. By the end of it you might as well have tied yourself into a knot, how can that be comfortable? (I assume comfort isn’t the point. . .) And the phrase “hey babe.” It’s casual, it’s flirty, it’s something you might say to a love interest. This chicken has been illustrated for the consumer to lust for it, not just craving the meat, but a sexual lust and attraction because of the similarities between that chicken and women.

The second image of “meat makes men sexy” is something I’ve never understood. There has always been something dominant, masculine, strong, alluring, whatever that advertisements and our society attribute to meat-eaters. Even when girls eat burgers it’s like the men are more attracted to her because she’s somehow more powerful or confident for eating meat. It’s not just “meat makes men sexy,” it’s “meat makes people sexy.” All people, everyone everywhere. That’s the message being sent, that’s the message being echoed. Adam’s references Catherine MacKinnon saying inequality is made sexy and tasty. It’s seen here as well as anywhere else. The consuming of meat is the same as the consuming of women. A man eating meat is often viewed as equal to a man having a hookup or a one-night stand — consuming the woman and leaving, dinner.

The last image I chose just kind of shocked me in a different way. Most of the images in Adam’s pool of examples are of signs or advertisements, but this one appears to be writing on the back of a woman’s shirt — why would a woman (or anyone) want / choose to wear this shirt? It reads “women are like calves only takes two fingers to make them suck.” Eeesh. There’s an obvious woman-nature association here between cows and women. If my extended family weren’t farmers I would not get this “joke.” For those of you who are unfamiliar, one way to teach calves to drink (“suck”) is to put two fingers in their mouth and stick their head into a bucket of milk and when you spread your fingers and let the milk get into their mouth, they start to learn how to drink. Seems like an innocent thing, to teach a young animal to eat and drink. . . The quote on the shirt sexualizes the calves and animalizes the women.

I chose this Burger King ad to analyze in addition to Adam’s examples. There is a pretty blonde woman with eyeliner, blush, red lipstick and her mouth open waiting for the “BK Super Seven Incher.” Everything about this is sexualized. The woman has been made up and posed a very specific way. The sandwich is coming towards her from outside of the frame, and we can’t see the other end. A sandwich on its own typically isn’t considered to be a relatively phallic food, but in this case the sandwich’s sexual nature could compete with a cucumber. Even the name “super seven incher” feels sexualized. And how have I not commented on the slogan yet?! “It’ll blow your mind away.” Gross. It may be a woman about to eat the sandwich in the advertisement but this is definitely not targeted towards women. Like Adam’s talked about in the interview, most advertisements are made for white men — this fits the bill. Everything about this ad is oppressive from the imagery to the copy language.

I’m not entirely sure what type of meat that is (pork? maybe?) or what the whole loaf of meat typically looks like, as I have been a vegetarian for almost 8 years now, but it looks to me like this image has had a little photoshopping done. I think it looks like a loaf of bread that has the meat texture applied to the slices. I’ve seen that anonymous character doing many food-related activities, however the addition of the chef’s hat kicks the character out from its context and into the more well-know world of the Pillsbury Doughboy. With these things in mind, it appears that the Pseudo-Doughboy has murdered one of its own species and is preparing to participate in cannibalism. It doesn’t matter what type (read: species) of dough of which the Pseudo-Doughboy and loaf are made. It’s also a proportionately massive loaf. I’m interpreting this image as speaking to the leading-majority, speciesist attitude of food consumption as well as the fact that “American consumers throw away 21.7% of the meat they purchase–needlessly killing billions of animals” (Animal Kill Clock).

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Society has conditioned its members to believe that there is a positive and negative body type, character traits associated with the gender binary, and, with the rise of social media, an increase in self-consciousness and insecurities. This is oppressive to all genders, making it more difficult for people to accept themselves, nevermind begin to accept others. Fitting into the stereotypical mold formed by the gender binary, masculinity has come to represent domination, stoicism, meat-eating, beer-drinking, and being muscular; as Curtin remarks, “to have muscle you need to eat muscle.” Femininity is often considered an antonym of masculinity. It represents submission, sensitvity, salad-eating, fruity-cocktail-drinking, and being slender; as Curtin writes, “women are associated with vegetables and passivity.”

In food commercials, if the product is typically cooked in the kitchen, you can almost guarantee there will be a female actress; if the product can be cooked on a grill (so, if it’s a meat product), you can almost guarantee there will be a male actor. This reinforces the outdated husband-wife relationship roles where the wife cooks and cares for her family, and the husband cooks on occasion handling the “important part,” the meat. This scene also reinforces the idea that meat is and should be a significant part of a person’s diet.

I appreciated that both Curtin and Gaard comment on the fact that vegetarianism and veganism are not accessible to everyone, and even if one is able to be a vegetarian, they may not be able to guarantee their food was harvest by someone with proper working conditions and a fair wage. Because of this, it’s more important for those who do have the access and ability to commit to vegetarianism to lessen the stress on the livestock and people living in developing economies. Curtin comments that, “much of the effect of the eating practices of persons in industrialized countries is felt in oppressed countries. Land owned by the wealthy that was once used to grow inexpensive crops for local people has been converted to the production of expensive products (beef) for export.”

Curtin wrote more about non-human animals in the context of food-sources, whereas Gaard wrote more generally about the human-animal relations. Gaard took into consideration animals in the livestock/factory farming industry, zoos, and pets. Running through Gaard’s theory was this story of her interaction with Bella, the parkeet, at a local video store. She explains that she feels connected so deeply to the bird because, as feminism explains, women have a relational self-identity. In contrast, men have an autonomous self-identity, leading to their development of a rights-based ethics rather than the ethic of care that relational self-identity produces. In order to reduce suffering on non-human animals, Gaard suggests limiting or forgoing relationships with animals as pets. In addition to this, those who have the access and ability could choose to practice vegetarianism or, even better, veganism. Curtin notes that women may have more gender-specific reasons for vegetarianism, and thus “for men in a patriarchal society moral vegetarianism can mark the decision to stand in solidarity with women.”

I grew up in Minnesota in the suburbs, about half an hour north of Minneapolis. The specific places present in my mind are the parks and nature trails by my house and the corn fields of my extended family in Iowa.

Three Rivers Park district is a huge natural area with wide paths for bikers and pedestrians. In the summers, my family would go on bike rides on weekends; during the week, my brother and I would bike to the gym. Towards the end of my gymnastics career, I didn’t want to go to the gym, it felt forced, so I would take my sweet time biking through the trails; breathing in the fresh air; listening to the cicadas and the birds chirping. It was peaceful, quiet, but filled with sounds, void of people but overgrowing with life.

I was born in Iowa, but my family moved before I was even a year old. All of my memories of Iowa are from visiting family there. I come from a family of farmers. My great grandfather had a farm, I think he mostly grew corn. When he and my great grandmother got too old to take care of themselves, they moved in with my great aunt, who also married a farmer. Their land is still being farmed by the family, but no one lives there. I went to visit a few years ago and it was just as I remembered. there was still the big red tractor, the fields of yellow that went on as far as the eye can see. Corn fields in the golden hour have always resonated with me. I didn’t grow up there, I know nothing about farming, but I know it’s where my family’s history lies, and it’s reminiscent of those road trips and family visits. The midwest has the bluest sky I’ve ever seen. As the sun sets and gets low on the horizon, its beams shine through the corn fields making them glow. The warm, yellow glow of the corn against the bluest sky is such a simple landscape, but so powerful. No image does it justice.

When I turned 18, I moved to Massachusetts to go to college. I’ve been here almost 4 years now. Place and home are interesting to think about. While I feel some attachment to those nature trails and the corn fields, I never felt like I was home in either place. I always felt out of place. Coming here I continued to feel out of place because so few UMassD students seem to have grown up outside of New England. If I’m honest I still don’t feel like I’ve found my home, but I do find places like the nature trails and corn fields that give me a sense of peace. I discovered Allens Pond Wildlife Sanctuary near Horseneck Beach the first weekend I moved here and I’ve been going ever since. There’s nothing like the sound of the waves to silence all woes.

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Kingsolver wrote in her final paragraph, “people need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. . . To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd.” I wholly agree with this. Most of my experiences with nature make me feel removed from society, removed from the trivialities of life; simple, peaceful and reflective. I didn’t make this connection until about a year ago, however acknowledging the impact being with nature has on my being has simultaneously strengthened and weakened my sense of self. Being able to search inside my mind and cultivate my morals and beliefs in nature has allowed me to grow and change and feel at home within myself, no matter the place. It helps me to put everything into perspective.

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Williams wrote, “once strengthened by our association with the wild, we can return to family and community. Each of us belongs to a particular landscape, one that informs who we are, a place that carries our history, our dreams, holds us to a moral line of behavior that transcends thought.” I agree that we are benefitted and strengthened by being in nature / the wilderness, but I don’t think I completely agree that we each belong to a particular landscape to which we will one day return. I believe it’s important to travel and see many different places, landscapes, and people. Associating with many different landscapes give a person a broader, more inclusive perspective, rather than living in the echo chamber of a singular place. A person matures and is strengthened by exploration and experiencing new and different landscapes, and through the process a person will find the landscape they are attracted to and feel associated with. I felt like Williams was implying that the landscape we belong to must be the same as the landscape our family belongs to, or the place we grew up. I, like many others, only ever wanted to leave the place I grew up, move away from my family, and to step out in my own right. I don’t have much to say about William’s bedrock of democracy, because I think her initial statements on landscape, as I explained, are flawed.

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Sources

Barbara Kingsolver’s “Small Wonder”
http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transcript_smallwonder_print.html

Terry Tempest Williams’ “Home Work”

Women in the Global South are experiencing the serious effects of climate change and environmental degradation more than anyone else in the world. In this region, women are expected to take care of household duties including fetching clean water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. The more the environment suffers, the more these women and girls struggle. There are few places that have water that isn’t contaminated. The women and girls often have to walk for hours in order to bring water to their families. Because of this they don’t have time to get an education, which means they don’t have the knowledge needed to get a job. These women and girls likely have the least impact on climate change, but they are experiencing some of the worst effects first hand, maintaining their status in poverty for generations.

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Bina Agarwal claims that the Western definition of ecofeminism is primarily ideological, while her definition of “feminist environmentalism,” essentially non-Western ecofeminism, is not. She outlines the four main points of Western ecofeminism and briefly critiques them. Her first criticism is that in the Western argument, the association between women’s and nature’s domination, oppression, and exploitation are based on ideas and concepts rather than material evidence. The solution given to this problem is that people need to rethink their positions and hierarchical status, again ideologically with no physical call to action. The Western view of social hierarchy and the relationship between men and women compared to culture and nature are just that, a Western view. They are not inclusive of other cultures’ beliefs and customs regarding nature. She criticizes ecofeminism for not differentiating women by race, class, caste, culture, et cetera. There are non-gender-specific ways that women are being dominated that are not being addressed. Her main concern is that with this ideologically-based thought structure, Western ecofeminism fails to connect fully to the materialistic implications of dominance.

Looking directly at what women are experiencing is how Agarwal believes we should formulate feminist environmentalist arguments. Like most developing countries, the women in India who are most affected are poor and living in rural areas. It’s not simply women, but poor women and rural women who are suffering most. It is important to look at these issues intersectionally in order to see the whole picture. She writes that “an alternative approach. . . needs to be transformational rather than welfarist — where development, redistribution, and ecology link in mutually regenerative ways” (pp. 151). Agarwal’s non-Western view of feminist environmentalism encourages not just thinking about these issues differently, but also acting on them differently.

I am drawn to the feminist environmentalism of Agarwal over ecofeminism as explained by Hobgood-Oster and others. I found the explainations of ecofeminist theories very interesting, but they never seemed whole.  The concept of dualities is interesting, but out of date. It relies on the male-female / man-woman duality or gender-binary that is so often rejected in the contemporary, developed regions and cultures. Feminist environmentalism has an inclusive, intersectional, systematic view of issues surrounding but not limited to the domination, oppression, and exploitation of women and the environment. It’s not just conceptual but also crucial in informing alternative actions to restructure malfunctioning social, economical, and political systems. It strives to find sustainable solutions to whole issues rather than a quick fix to the symptoms or parts of issues.

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The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India by Bina Agarwal

Ecofeminism: Historic and International Development by Laura Hobgood-Oster

 

http://feministcampus.org/campaigns/women-and-climate/

 

Women and nature have such a strong connection. In many developing countries, women make up almost half of the agricultural workers. These women gain a lot of experience with nature and understand farming and gathering.  They know if plants are poisonous or not; they know which have healing properties. They have the same or sometimes more skills than the men, but barely any women in these developing countries own their own land. With little education and opportunities, women work the fields and perform their household duties without any future or financial gain. People in developing countries don’t have easy access to clean water, more often than not. Because of this, the women and girls have to take long walks to and from the water sources, making them increasingly vulnerable to physical or sexual assault the further they have to travel. The families and societies rely on the women and girls to truly know and understand the earth that they farm, the plants that they gather, and the natural resources they draw water from. If it weren’t for the women and girls the men would be starving and dehydrated, but the women are nonetheless devalued. Without women being able to own their own land and use their knowledge and experience to help support their family, their society, and their world, they have no hope for a better future. Safe and easy access to clean water should be guaranteed for all people, but these women and girls risk their health and safety daily for the most basic of needs.

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Ecofeminism is a movement and method of analyzing structures within societies. As the name suggests, it can be categorized under ecology or feminism. It is not one or the other, but rather the intersection of environmentalism and feminism with a little activism thrown in as well. According to Dr. Laura Hobgood-Oster, ecofeminism is “an environmental critique of feminism and a feminist critique of environmentalism.” It studies the structures and systems of all forms of oppression, as they are all interconnected. More specifically ecofeminism studies “patriarchal power structures'” oppression of nature and women, together not separately. Hobgood-Oster states that if these are examined separately, the whole issue will never be addressed.

Karen Warren, an ecofeminist scholar, identifies eight woman-nature connections with which to analyze the nature of dominations. The fourth, Symbolic Connections, examines female and natural symbolism in relation to the different fields of art and thought. Reading this sparked memories of many art history classes when we discussed the representation of women in art. During the nineteenth century in the Colonialism Era, women were painted in the nude surrounded by material possessions and exotic objects from the Orient (Near East / North Africa). One of these paintings is La Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. An odalisque is a concubine in a Turkish harem. The woman, given her position in sex slavery, is portrayed erotically and exotically. The exotic objects like those surrounding her weren’t often bought, but rather obtained violently. In her hand she holds a fan made from peacock feathers. Her back is elongated, making her look less like a natural human. By seeing her in this environment and knowing her role in society, she doesn’t appear to be an everyday woman. She isn’t just objectified, but she’s also animalized; eroticized and exoticized.

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Sources:

https://www.iucn.org/content/women%E2%80%99s-rights-make-difference-environment-and-sustainability

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/bron/pdf–christianity/Hobgood-Oster–Ecofeminism-International%20Evolution.pdf

Warren’s Introduction to EcoFeminism