Ecofeminism: what is it really about?
By Sofía Viramontes Molina
Ecofeminism: what is it really about?
Right in the center of the state of Yucatan, in Mexico, there is a very small city called Sotuta. It has less than six hundred inhabitants and it is very hot and humid throughout most of the year: the thermometer rarely reads less than 26º Celsius, and most of the time, sets around 30ºC or higher.
Cristi —Cristina Chuc Cámara, but she prefers the nickname — has lived there most of her life and is used to the weather, which is why every morning she wakes up before dawn to water her backyard, where since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, she grows vegetables, flowers and fruits. She is part of a group of women from this town that faced adversities by rekindling and nurturing ancient knowledge. They are the Solaristas, and they have revolutionized the way of life in Sotuta.
It started as a solution to an imminent problem: both Cristi and her husband lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and the government aid never arrived. The situation was critical, because ten people live in their household and rely on them.
With the help of two friends, they came up with the idea of reinstating something that had been done in their backyard 26 years ago: a solar, an organic polyculture orchard in the non-constructed part of the houses that is part of Mayan traditional culture.
However, the problem was that the space used to nurture the community two decades ago, was now used as a garbage dump. In Sotuta, as in many other cities and towns around the world, especially in the Global South, there is no waste collection system, so people have two options: they either burn their waste, or they bury it. In Cristi’s house, the latter was implemented, so before starting to grow any plants, they had to clean the space.
They needed three days and a lot of help to be able to take all the trash away, but eventually, where there used to be diapers, Coca-Cola bottles and Bimbo bread wrappings, now there are tomatoes, hibiscus,, habaneros, arugula, cempásuchil flowers, cucumber, blue corn and radish.
Other friends that were also in a critical situation followed their example, and so the Solaristas de Sotuta were born, inspired by the teachings of Vandana Shiva: “Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.” In August 2021, they opened a center to insure the alimentary sovereignty of Sotuta, a space that creates a productive cycle generating jobs for women and young people, workshops, nutrition information campaigns, a non-transgenic seed library and organizes food barters in which the entire community of Sotuta participates.
I write about the Solaristas because they are the perfect example of what ecofeminism is really about. It is not because they’re women doing an “ecological” thing, nor because since they’re females they’re supposedly more connected to nature. It is because the work they do restores the order of power and oppression. What does that mean? Their activities — which include men, by the way — do not promote the exploitation of any living being, but on the contrary, they protect and promote a healthy relationship between humans and non-humans, and they nourish and protect all kinds of life. So, that is ecofeminism.
This word, ecofeminism, was created by a French radical feminist called Françoise d’Eaubonne and it first appeared in the book Le feminisme ou la mort, which translates to Feminism or death, first published in 1974. In this book, she established a link between women’s exploitation by social roles and the ecological crisis, worsened by human overpopulation. Although she was a very recognized activist, very close to Simone de Beauvoir, her proposal didn’t stick in France. Other feminists claimed ecofeminism to be essentialist, saying that it justified women closer to nature, in a time when mainstream feminist movement was all about liberal fights: fight for the right to work, to have economic freedom, to have bank accounts, to get divorced, etcetera. Their fight was for women to be considered closer to Culture, not to Nature(*), so the idea of a proposal that could reattach women to their “natural” purpose did not seem convincing to them.
A few years after d’Eaubonne came up with that word, groups of women in the United States started protesting injustices towards minority groups that were also connected to ecological issues. The Women’s Pentagon Action has been defined as one of the most important ecofeminist manifestations, especially because it led an anti-nuclear movement that was picked up in many Western countries.
But the reality is that all around the world, and for a very long time, different groups have noticed the connection between violence against certain human beings (women being one of the most harmed) and against other forms of life. To define it very simply, they have noticed a structure where certain lives are more important than others, and those exist only to serve the most “valuable” ones. Ecofeminism, contrary to what its critics said, does not aim to reduce women to their “natural” roles, but understands that there are common violences performed against women (and other so-called minorities) and against what is considered to be Nature (as if humanity was not a part of it).
All across Latin America, we can find groups of organized women that have fought for their bodies and their lands, such as the very famous Amazons, but there are also groups in Guatemala and Mexico that offer a different understanding of the world, where the body-territories(**) are part of the same fight, since our bodies are our first territory, and they are directly connected to where we live.
In India, there are the Chipko, the tree huggers, that confronted the industrialization and deforestation that was threatening to destroy their forests. In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement restored thousands of acres of dried-up land which had left rural women more vulnerable and without resources.
The word ecofeminism is quite recent, but the fight against these connected violences is not. And even though it has been widely criticized for being “essentialist”, it actually connects an incredible number of theories, and answers plenty of questions on how power struggles take place. Ariel Salleh, an Australian sociologist, wrote in the prologue of the re-edition one of the most famous ecofeminist books(***): “Ecofeminism is the only political framework I know of that can spell out the historical links between neoliberal capital, militarism, corporate science, worker alienation, domestic violence, reproductive technologies, sex tourism, child molestation, neocolonialism, Islamophobia, extractivism, nuclear weapons, industrial toxics, land and water grabs, deforestation, genetic engineering, climate change and the myth of modern progress.”
It is this very possibility of depth that has left ecofeminism in the shadows. It is hard to explain, it cannot be defined in a few sentences, and it is deeply connected to context; the ecofeminism explored by Françoise d’Eaubonne is very different from the one from the Solaristas, not only because they’re decades apart, but also because their realities and the forms of oppression they have endured are completely different, as are their traditional heritages.
The diversity and extensiveness that ecofeminism offers has made it a great subject for philosophers, sociologists and other academics. Some of the greater names, besides the ones already mentioned, are Maria Mies, Val Plumwood, Carolyn Merchant, Donna Haraway, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Lorena Cabnal, Greta Gaard, Wangari Maathai, Starhawk, Myriam Bahaffou, Emilie Hache, Geneviève Pruvost… And the list could go on for a while, because since ecofeminism touches on so many subjects, it’s been largely intellectually explored.
Nevertheless, one of the crucial things about ecofeminism is that it’s not a theory, or at least, it is not only that. It must come back to actions, to real interactions. It has to be that way, because academic thinking is also patriarchal and hierarchized, and it belongs to the realm of Culture, while ecofeminism aims to dissolve the dualisms that separate thinking from doing, the heart from the brain, the emotional from the rational.
So, what is ecofeminism really about? It’s about realizing that there is a link between the overexploited groundwater of Vittel, in France, and the 11 femicides in Mexico every day. It is also recognizing that caring for people and other living beings is not only valuable, but necessary. It’s about transforming a space so that it nourishes your family and community. It’s about queer people being able to just be. It’s about hairy and fat bodies. It’s about hugging trees so that they don’t get thrown down. It’s about veganism but also about questioning the privilege of it. It’s about dancing to the moon, menstruation, and traditional medicine.
Ecofeminism is about truly and radically changing how humanity interacts with the world.
Vandana Shiva by Virginia Elena Patrone
* See “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”, 1972, by Shery Ortner and Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 1993, by Val Plumwood.
** This is a concept brought up by Lorena Cabnal, a communitarian feminist from Guatemala that has fought for decades for women’s rights and against territorial exploitation, criticizing the white-washing of ecofeminism and the erasure of indigenous women.
*** Ecofeminism, by Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies.
