Sunday, September 1, 2002		Books

New woman, new earth
Rumina Sethi

Feminism and Ecology
by Mary Mellor. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK. Pages 221. £14.99

ECOFEMINISM makes the assertion that the subordination of women and the debasement of nature are interconnected. Like women, the condition of nature is also fundamentally gendered. Ecofeminism links all of humanity to the physical and natural environment but believes that men and women have different relationships with it. Within such a perspective, all ecological damage is viewed as a disaster for humanity. But for women, especially, the effect is rather disproportionate since they also have to contend with disasters pertaining to nurturing and caring.

One of the risks of bonding women and nature is to fall back into the essentialistic trap where women have always been subordinated because of their identification with nature. The risk is grave and manifold: if women are aligned with ‘nature’, then men get attached to culture and hence reiterate their ‘sophistication’. Male identity immediately summons up its opposite — difference. In order to indicate who they are, they will inevitably have to show who they are not. Part of associating the ‘other’ with ‘nature’ will tend to reproduce women’s passivity and indolence as opposed to male intelligence and dynamism as well as perpetuate the culture-nature binary. Secondly, just as nature as the object of scientific study and material exploitation has been domesticated by men, so the taming of the woman can be squarely legitimised.

A third drawback is the affinity such identification assumes with ‘universal’ and mystical characteristics of loving and nurturing. Ecofeminism, it may be argued, is a reactionary philosophy in this case which perpetuates the difference and inequalities between men and women and disregards those which exist between women. The largest difference is that between the Western woman and her Eastern counterpart. As Amos and Parmar have written, the Western white woman’s concerns about ‘preserving the standards of life . . . and the planet’ sound pretty insignificant in front of the Third World woman’s daily battle ‘for survival, for food, land and water.’ Mary Mellor rightly highlights the importance of maintaining the distinction between global inequalities.

Mellor’s overall intention is to relate ecofeminism to both ecologism and feminism. This ‘new’ politics is radical enough to establish a new perspective on industrial capitalism, which thus far has been engendered and manipulated by male-dominated science. She cites the much ignored 19th century American ecologist, Ellen Swallow, who argued that science should be placed in the hands of women so that ‘the housekeeper should know when to be frightened’. The Chipko Movement of the Garhwal Himalayas is perhaps one of the best-recorded struggles that exemplify the relationship between women and nature.

Among the central concerns of this book are perspectives on social movements, grassroots agitations and academic discussions on political movements and women’s roles in them. Not all such concerns are treated as ‘ecofeminist’ although they can be set alongside these actions and debates. First-wave feminism had involved women only to the extent of listening to their male colleagues and licking envelopes. Hidden from history, they wanted to find a new basis for their class struggle. Women inevitably turned to essentialistic stereotypes of mothering and nurturing as the basis of their power. This representation led to their alignment with nature. Such an ecological equation, although spiritual and mystical, was to have profound implications for feminist theory and practice. It must be understood that while this argument may gesture towards biological determinism, it has certainly been manipulated to be an indication of genetic determinism. As Mellor writes: ‘Men are not genetically determined to be dominant or women to be inferior. Biological difference only becomes problematic when it is overlaid by "culturally defined value systems."’ So long as men and women appear to be polarised categories in the nature-culture debate, the dualism can never be bridged. The only solution is to follow independent paths.

However, to say that women know the Earth much better or that women are a unique agency in the world of Nature is again a privileged epistemological perspective that is fraught with contention. But as Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies argue, such knowledge is gained in struggle because of the experience of disadvantage. Indeed, women are better placed to take up the claims of ‘other’ living beings because ‘capitalist patriarchal societies’ have given them ‘a materially grounded base’ which makes them ideal agents in both praxis and theory. This line of argument is akin to Marxist analyses of the epistemic privilege of the working class or the Hegelian thesis of the master-slave relationship where the power structure begins to change. Were it not for the existence of the ‘slave’, the master can hardly have been ‘master’. In sum, Mary Mellor gives us enough exciting new substance to relate to our feminist concerns; she also leaves us with confusing messages about the relationship between women, nature and knowledge.