ECOFEMINIST NATURES

Ecofeminist Natures
Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political
Action
Noël Sturgeon
 First published 1997
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
Copyright © 1997 by Noël Sturgeon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or
in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sturgeon, Noël, 1956–
Ecofeminist natures: race, gender, feminist theory, and political action /
Noël Sturgeon
p. cm.
Includes bibliographic references and index.
1. Ecofeminism. I. Title.
HQ1233.S78 1997
305.42′01—dc20
96-41479
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-91249-5 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-91250-1 (pbk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874
For Hart and T.V.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Movements of Ecofeminism
2. Ecofeminist Antimilitarism and Strategic Essentialisms
3. WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute and the Race for Parity
4. The Nature of Race: Indigenous Women and White Goddesses
5. Ecofeminist Natures and Transnational Environmental Politics
6. What’s In a Name? Ecofeminisms as/in Feminist Theory

Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
At the end of a long project that has taken many more years than I could
have imagined to complete, it’s hard to thank everyone that has contributed.
I’d like to start by thanking all of the activists with whom I have been
engaged in the antimilitarist, feminist, and ecofeminist movements. Without
a chance to work, sing, do civil disobedience, argue, laugh, and cry with
them, this project would never have been conceived, let alone completed. I
have been sustained throughout by the promise of such actions, and I hope
this book adds something to these and other future activist projects.
Some of the ideas and arguments found in this book were based on my
dissertation and were generated from within the intellectual and political
community I encountered while attending the History of Consciousness
Board of Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For making
my graduate experience there so stimulating and rewarding, I thank Don
Beggs, Elizabeth Bird, Caren Kaplan, Gregory Calvert, Rennie Cantine
Crystal (Chris Hables Gray), Jim Clifford, Giovanna Di Chiro, Barbara
Epstein, Ilene Rose Feinman, Ruth Frankenberg, Marge Frantz, Debbie
Gordon, Donna Haraway, Jackrabbit (Steven Mentor), Katie King, Hilary
Klein, Lisa Lowe, Lata Mani, Helene Moglen, Alvina Quintana, T.V. Reed,
Zoë Soufoulis, Chela Sandoval, Jack Schaar, Barry Schwartz, Andrew
Walzer, and Hayden White.
As this project has evolved, portions of it have been presented at
conferences and read in different stages by generous and critical readers. I
thank the audiences at numerous conferences for their comments, and I am
deeply appreciative of various readings of my work at various stages by
Elizabeth Bird, Elizabeth Carlassare, Greta Gaard, Julie Graham, Donna
Haraway, Chaia Heller, Deborah Haynes, Val Jenness, Susan Kilgore,
Hilary Klein, Katie King, Ynestra King, T.V. Reed, Virginia Scharff,
Frances Jones Sneed, Zoë Soufoulis, Andrew Stewart, Jude Todd, Anna
Tsing, Karen Warren, and Linda Zerrelli.
Two University of California Regent’s Fellowships and one University of
California Research Fellowship allowed me to lay the groundwork for
important parts of this work. Grants I received from the University of
California Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation supported two
years of participant-observation in the antimilitarist direct-action
movement, most reflected in chapter 2. A Washington State University
Research grant supported participant-observation in the ecofeminist
movement and interviews conducted during 1993–1994. A Rockefeller
Fellowship brought me to the Center for the Critical Analysis of
Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University for a year of exciting,
challenging, and incredibly productive work. I thank Joan Burbick, Donna
Haraway, and Karen Warren for supporting my application to CCACC. For
that important experience, I would like to thank John McClure, Bruce
Robbins, George Levine, Link Larsen, and all the members of the 1994–95
Colloquium, entitled “Environments in the Public Sphere,” especially my
fellow “Fellas,” Julie Graham, Michael Moon, and Maaría Seppanen. Neil
Smith, Cindi Katz, Dorothy Hodgson, and Richard Schroeder were
supportive friends, stimulating conversationalists, and knowledgeable
resources. I especially thank Neil and Cindy for letting me house-sit when I
most needed a space to work (especially since it allowed me to raid their
home library!).
Much of my thinking about ecofeminism in transnational politics was
formulated during my participation in Joan Scott’s feminist theory seminar
at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, January to May
1995, and in the “Transitions, Environments, Translations: The Meaning of
Feminism in Contemporary Politics” conference, at the Institute for
Research on Women, Rutgers University and the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton University, New Jersey, April 1995. I thank Joan and Cora
Kaplan for making my participation in these events possible. Of my
colleagues in the seminar and conference (all of whom were important
influences in one way or another), I’d like to single out Anna Tsing and
Yaakov Garb for special thanks. They were particularly helpful and
influential for me, and I owe them a large debt for shared materials,
engaging debates, and insightful critiques. Bina Agarwal was a challenging
and gracious interlocutor. Rosi Braidotti was also an inspiration, and her
expressions of solidarity with what she saw as my “deconstructive
ecofeminist” project meant a great deal to me.
The faculty, students, and staff at the Women’s Studies Program at
Washington State University have been central to the writing of this book. I
thank Sue Armitage, Chris Bergum, Linda Siebert, Patti Gora, Marian
Sciachitano, Nancy Keifer, Gail Stearns, Meera Manvi, Judy Meuth, Kendal
Broad, Bonnie Frederick, Jennifer Giovi, Wendy Mason, and Reis Pearson
for all their help and support. Linda Siebert deserves special thanks for all
her hard work in helping this book become a possibility. Ednie Garrison, in
her work and in her person, usefully reminded me of the way in which
generational tensions affect the history of feminism. Petra Uhrig, Kari
Norgaard and Katrine Barber provided excellent research assistance and
enlightening conversation about ecofeminism. My tenure review committee
(Sue Armitage, Joan Burbick, Bonnie Frederick, Linda Stone, and Gerald
Young) was a source of firm support and needed advice. To Jo Hockenhull,
my director, I owe endless thanks for her guidance, her example, her
protection, and her willingness to fight for me.
 I thank Cecelia Cancellaro for having such firm initial faith in this
project. At Routledge, Claudia Guerelick, Jeanne Park, Karen Deaver,
Laura Ann Robb, Lynette Silva, and Melissa Rosari were patient and
supportive. I also thank my anonymous copyeditor for a thorough and
immensely helpful editing job; any obscurity remaining in my text is a
result of my refusing her excellent advice. Karen Weathermon deserves
immense gratitude for putting together such an excellent index under
sometimes trying circumstances. I thank the Association for Philosophy
Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy; International Books; Indiana
University Press; and Women’s Environment and Development
Organization for permission to use previously published material.
As I wrote this book, five people played the part of “spirit guides,”
always in my imagination chiding me and inspiring me even when I
disagreed with them. In person, these people also gave me resources; talked
to me about movements, feminism, and writing; and in general represented
outstanding examples of feminist intellectuals who were also committed to
activism. Thanks to Greta Gaard, Marge Frantz, Katie King, Ynestra King,
and Donna Haraway for making me believe that my work was worthwhile.
Friends and family have given me the strength, material help, and support
that was most essential to writing this book. Paul Williams was dependable
and understanding, always ready to pitch in when I needed him. Bob
Greene cheerfully ordered books for me, both ones I requested and ones he
knew I needed. Don Beggs and Kathy Chetkovich were humorful and
dependable friends. I thank Hilary Klein and Larry Dublin for their
generosity in always putting me up when I came to New York, and Hilary
for applying her considerable intelligence to work on my problems and for
her constant love. Deborah Haynes has been my bedrock in Pullman,
always there to listen to doubts and spur me on. I owe thanks as well to Val
Jenness for feeding me all that junk food, making me laugh, and distracting
me when I needed it. Elka Malkis, my lifefriend, always brought me down
to earth and made me believe in unconditional love. Ilene Rose Feinman,
H.B., challenged me, cheered me on, and was my long-distance writing pal.
Joyce Steinlauf helped me to remember what’s important in life. My family:
Marion Sturgeon, Robin Sturgeon, Tandy Sturgeon, Timothy Sturgeon,
Andros Sturgeon, Judith Biewener, Kim Charnovsky, John Wolff, Ben
Wolff, Jordan Wolff, Jessamyn Wolff, Alice Reed, Linda Ware, Michelle
Ware, Jim Pizon, Kristel Pizon, Phoenix Pizon, Gabriel Pizon, Petere and
Inés Sturgeon, John and Rose McGahan, and Jayne Williams were loving,
and patient as I missed visits, and helpful in ways too numerous to detail.
To Marion most of all, thanks for your help, your humor, all those phone
calls, and your steadfast love. Special thanks to Marion for the cover art and
to Timothy for lending it to me. I deeply regret that three members of my
family, Grandma Sal (Theresa McGahan), Theodore Sturgeon, and Thomas
C. Reed, are not here to see my first book.
My love and gratitude for T.V. Reed are practically inexpressible, but I’ll
try. As my affinite, colleague, comrade, coparent, partner, and critic, he has
contributed immensely to this book. Thanks are due particularly for his
assistance with bibliographic materials and his diplomatic editing, useful
even when I disagreed with it. I am deeply appreciative of his willingness to
put aside his own work while he took over the role of domestic mainstay for
such an extended period of time. I thank him for sharing his intellectual
excitements with me, especially his love of both practice and theory, and
the task of bringing them together. Finally, thanks, T.V., for bringing the
most joy into my life (bundled and otherwise). To Hart, my son, thanks for
waiting while Mama got her work done. You were a big help, and I love
you very much. I hope that if you ever read this book, you will think it was
worth all the trouble.
Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-1

Surrogate Others is an affinity group that has already reached a certain

legendary status; perhaps we should start with its story. Affinity groups are
small groups organized to create independent actions as part of larger,
collective direct actions; they were used in many U.S. anti-nuclear actions
in the middle 1970s to late 1980s. Surrogate Others was a Santa Cruz-based
affinity group that came together to join the thousands of people protesting
continued U.S. nuclear testing through the Mothers and Others Day Action
at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site in May 1987. I was a graduate student at
the University of California, writing my dissertation on the antimilitarist
direct action movement and acting as the California state contact for the
national organizing effort for the Mothers and Others Day Action. It was a
women’s action, though men were allowed to participate, and many women
I knew, from the university and from the town, wanted to attend.
The group that became the Surrogate Others was like many other groups
in this action in that the women were of a wide age range, different class
locations and sexual orientations, and different political agendas. Yet, as in
other affinity groups, we had some commonalities that drew us together.
For us, it was a particular, mostly unarticulated and loose agreement of
what feminist anti-militarism was or should be. The majority of us knew
each other from our work at the university, though two of us were not
formally connected to UC. We were all feminists. We were all suspicious of
arguments for feminist antimilitarist action that portrayed women as natural
pacifists. We were all deeply concerned about militarism. We were not all
white, initially. Besides myself, we were Elizabeth Bird, graduate student,
author of a now well-known article about the social construction of nature; 1
Barbara Epstein, faculty member, socialist feminist historian, and activist in
the New Left, working on a book about nonviolent direct action; Donna
Haraway, faculty member, feminist theorist, and historian of science; Marge
Frantz, faculty member, feminist historian, and long-time radical activist,
starting with the labor movement in the ’30s as a Communist Party member
and from there active in the civil rights, student, feminist, and gay and
lesbian movements; Eleanor Engstrom, Marge’s life partner, a community
member, and Quaker pacifist activist; Wendy Brown, a feminist political
theorist visiting Santa Cruz on a research fellowship; Deena Hurwitz,
community member, Jewish feminist, organizer for Middle East issues for
the Resource Center for Nonviolence and editor of a book on Israeli and
Palestinian peace activism; 2 Sharon Helsel, graduate student working at the
time on a study of a group of pagan nuclear physicists; and Rosa Maria
Villafañe-Sisolak, undergraduate student, poet, and feminist. When Rosa
dropped out early in the planning, we were all white.
We spent several meetings going over the logistics of getting from Santa
Cruz to the Nevada Test Site, the legal ramifications of committing civil
disobedience there, why we were going and what we wanted to do as an
affinity group. We decided on creating a worm, for reasons that can be best
explained in Donna Haraway’s unique way: “in solidarity with the creatures
forced to tunnel in the same ground with the bomb, they (members of the
Surrogate Others) enacted a cyborgian emergence from the constructed
body of a large, non-heterosexual desert worm.” 3
Sharon and Elizabeth sewed the worm together, as I remember, and it
was a colorful, flamboyant object that was quite unwieldy to lift and carry
but opened into a graceful, undulating mass of color. We brought the worm
to the site, and at the appropriate moment, we hefted it over the fence, and
then, stretching it out on the desert floor well inside the fence, each of us
moved through it, enacting a symbolic moment of sexuality, birth, digestion
—a completely constructed transgressive moment of political passion,
mixed together with a lot of nervous laughter. We were arrested by the
desert-camouflaged law enforcement personnel as we came out of the other
end of our worm. We were taken to a holding site in a bus, led through the
formalities of arrest and release, put back in the bus, returned to the gate
and disgorged by the side of the road.
Near the fence where we had gone over the first time, we gathered
together. I remember I argued for going over again, but by that time the heat
had done its work, and as we talked it over, others pointed out to me that we
all lay prone on the desert ground, barely able to move from heat and
exhaustion. Even so, we were happy. Finally some of us agreed to go over
the fence again long enough to plant some seeds someone had brought, and
this we did one by one without attracting attention and getting arrested. Our
part of the action was over. But I often return to that moment, lying on the
ground, surrounded by all of those wonderful women—a chance grouping
that in hindsight seems somewhat fantastic—and thinking: What is this
really about? Why did these amazing women get together to do this rather
bizarre action? What kind of movement is this?
In some ways, the Surrogate Others were the beginnings of this particular
book, this particular effort to understand the movement that, in my personal
history, was tied historically to a movement now often called U.S.
ecofeminism. Were the Surrogate Others “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival!,”
as the political button invented by Elizabeth Bird proclaimed? Or were we
part of an ecofeminist movement that, as Cecile Jackson put it, is
“ethnocentric, essentialist, blind to class, ethnicity and other differentiating
cleavages, ahistorical and neglects the material sphere”? 4
How can we understand social movements in ways that capture their
contradictions, their deployment of theory-in-practice, their contextual
sensibility? What are the processes of creating political subjectivities in
oppositional movements? What are the costs and what are the advantages of
deploying collective identities? What are the ways in which actions like the
Mothers and Others Day Action function as an ecofeminist imaginary?
What are the boundaries of ecofeminism and who polices them? What are
the consequences of that policing for ecofeminism as a feminist theory and
as an activist movement?

Ecofeminism_ Movements, Histories, Theories

This book explores ecofeminism from a number of different angles
(historical, ethnographic, sociological, political, theoretical), as an
oppositional political discourse and set of practices imbedded in particular
historical, material, and political contexts. The ecofeminist movement I
examine, and in some ways construct throughout this book, is a fractured,
contested, discontinuous entity that constitutes itself as a social movement
with a particular place in a tradition of U.S. radical social movements. I
explore, characterize, and investigate ecofeminism as a social movement in
ways not entirely historical or sociological, attending to ecofeminism’s
development as a movement within particular political locations, tracing
both its effect on those locations and its construction by particular structural
factors in our late twentieth-century moment. My version of a history of the
origins and development of ecofeminism is thus not so much a coherent
narrative of the even, dependable growth of an independent political
position as it is several snapshots of scattered, uneven, and in many ways
disconnected beginnings, retreats, dormancies, and proliferations imbedded
within several different political locations. This is a genealogy rather than a
history, and as a result 1 am not following one unitary subject
(ecofeminism) through different historical moments. Instead, I am
articulating relationships, legacies, simultaneous births of related entities,
discontinuities, renamings, mutations, and throwbacks. 5 Readers will
notice, and may sometimes be frustrated by, the related necessity to keep
the definition of ecofeminism flexible and somewhat amorphous; my
refusal to essentialize essentialism as one thing is purposeful and
methodological.
In recognizing rather than obscuring its discontinuities and
contradictions, I want to analyze this social movement in relation to shifting
political and socioeconomic contexts embedded in transnational relations of
power. This effort is, in part, a case study, a methodological exercise in
understanding social movements as contestants in hegemonic power
relations, through which change is produced by numerous kinds of “action,”
including that of the deployment of symbolic resources, shifts in identity
construction, and the production of both popular and scholarly knowledge
—as well as direct action, civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts,
demonstrations, lobbying, and other more traditionally recognized forms of
political action. I stress not only the synchronic aspect of ecofeminist
deployment of concepts (of nature, women, and race) within certain specific
moments of socioeconomic restructuring, but also the diachronic aspect of
ecofeminism as a form of theorizing about social movements themselves in
contestation with other social movements that precede and operate
alongside it (such as radical environmentalisms, civil rights movements,
anticolonialist movements, and women’s movements) and in relation to
other interposing elements such as academic feminism and policy-oriented
discourses on women and development.
Though I will not stress this aspect in the chapters that follow, my
characterization of ecofeminism as a social movement in the ways I have
elaborated above is meant as an intervention into the arena of social
movement theory as well as feminist theory. For instance, in
contradistinction to the U.S. social movement theory paradigm called
“resource mobilization,” 6 I do not produce, through my narration of
ecofeminism’s beginnings and development, a story of self-interested
individuals mobilizing resources to influence policy formation, though there
are individuals in my story (some self-interested, some not), the use of
resources (but theoretical, rhetorical, and historical resources as well as
material and political ones), and occasions of institutional, governmental,
and elite policy change in reaction to political organizing by ecofeminists.
Neither—in contradistinction to the predominantly European school of new
social movement theory 7 —do I see ecofeminism primarily in terms of the
creation of new forms of collective identity. Rather than understand
ecofeminism as a new form of identity politics, I want to challenge the
notion that movements produce fixed identities. Instead, I want to
demonstrate the shifting and strategic qualities of various forms of identity
politics. Pointing to the usefulness and limits of political identities that can
mobilize collective action (such as claims that all women are naturally
environmentalists) or be used as tools for political analysis (such as claims
about different ways of knowing generated from women’s, or workers’, or
people of color’s standpoints), I want to also show the way these identities
appear and disappear, shift and change, when viewed in movement
contexts. I have argued elsewhere that social movements are involved in
theorizing both the relations of power existing at particular conjunctures as
well as previous traditions of opposition through their forms of action and
their particular political rhetorics, and I call this aspect of movements direct
theory. 8 Though I will not elaborate this concept in what follows, it is this
understanding of a social movement that informs my exploration of
ecofeminism and my methods of characterizing it as a movement.
The questions that guide me are numerous and intersecting. Why does
ecofeminism arise during the late 1980s? What are the processes of
exclusion and inclusion that ecofeminism is subject to within movement
and academic contexts? What kind of resonance does ecofeminism have
with popular notions and global constructions of environmentalism and
feminism? To what uses are ecofeminist theory put in various movement,
policy, and academic arenas? Finally, and most fundamentally, is
ecofeminism a political location productive of radical action, a political
position worth struggling over? With these questions as backdrop, my focus
in this book is on assessing problems involved with essentialist constructs
of nature as well as gender and race identity within ecofeminism as a social
movement. By “essentialist constructs,” I mean notions of nature, women,
or certain racially defined groups, that use biological, universalist,
ahistorical, or homogenizing ways of definition; I call these constructs
“ecofeminist natures.” Ecofeminism seems to be situated in a history of
feminism in such a way that it is required to solve the mystery of how to
create an anti-essentialist coalition politics while deploying a strategic
politics of identity. Why is this so? And can ecofeminism solve this
mystery? 9
Through the lens of ecofeminism it is possible to explore a range of
contemporary feminist and radical politics and to offer some tentative
answers to these questions. I want to use the problem of essentialism, one
that troubles virtually all contemporary movements, as a focus for such an
inquiry. This focus on the problems with essentialism calls for some
explanation, and I will spend most of the rest of this introduction in this
task.

Critics of Essentialism and Essentialist Critics

In working on this book, I have often felt torn between contradictory
expectations. One is the frequent reluctance of those actively engaged in
building ecofeminist theories and movements to openly critique
“ecofeminism”, to involve themselves explicitly in debates between
ecofeminists of various persuasions. The other, opposite phenomenon is the
disparagement and rejection of ecofeminism by many of my colleagues in
the field of feminist theory because of its purported “essentialism” in
arguing that women and nature can be connected in positive ways. Such is
the prejudice against ecofeminists among many academic feminist theorists
that I was once advised, by a prominent feminist theorist who wanted to
support my work, to remove the word “ecofeminism” from the title of one
of my papers about the movement, because she said she would never
choose to read an article about ecofeminism. I have been advised by a
feminist mentor to leave my editorship of The Ecofeminist Newsletter off
my vita when applying for grants and jobs. I have been challenged by a
commentator during a conference presentation to call my position
“feminist” rather than “ecofeminist.” These are personal anecdotes, but
many more examples of feminist distancing from ecofeminism will be
reported in these pages. These factors—a reluctance for ecofeminists to
criticize each other and a hostility to ecofeminism in certain feminist circles
—are, of course, related, for external hostility to ecofeminism will inhibit
internal debate within ecofeminism.
 Unwilling to completely concur with either of these tendencies toward
complete rejection or unconditional support of ecofeminism, I have
struggled to maintain the somewhat precarious position of what, in a
number of very different contexts, has been called “the outsider within.” 10 I
am engaged here in a constructive critique of both ecofeminism and
feminist theory. This positioning leads me to pay special attention to
particular theoretical problems. Thus, a great deal of this book is engaged in
one way or another in the theoretical problem of essentialism, exploring
strategic essentialism or strategic anti-essentialism in ecofeminist and
feminist conceptions of gender, race, and nature.

Essentialisms in Practice
While the political implications of essentialist constructs of women or of
race are some of the central problems of contemporary feminist theory, they
are not often discussed in the context of a particular social movement
practice. Movement contexts suggest certain approaches to theoretical
problems that we will not find elsewhere. In general, feminist theory is not
used as much as I think it should be to illuminate radical activist movement
practice. Doing the reverse, looking to oppositional movement practice to
clarify theoretical problems, is also a necessary and underutilized analytical
method. Focusing on the relation of theory to practice is a very old problem
within political theory indeed, but teasing out the theorizing embedded in
various political practices is an overlooked procedure crucial to sustaining
activist practice within and outside the academy. Thus, I have tried to
understand the reasons why feminist theory has created what might be
pictured as an invisible moat between its most sophisticated and complex
political critiques and various kinds of social movement practices. Debates
around essentialism are at the heart of this problem.
 One can even see this division as created between feminist theory and the
politics of the practice of feminist theory. These terms, “theory” and
“practice,” are centrally contested and immensely slippery. Certainly,
“doing” feminist theory in a university context is a political act, particularly
as it is embedded in teaching, promotion, and publishing practices that
form, critique, and resist unequal arrangements of power. Yet much of the
time, the politics of the production of feminist theory are not articulated
within the theory itself. 11 Further, and most crucial to the way I will be
using the terms “theory” and “practice” throughout the book, certain strands
of academic feminist theory are not sufficiently articulated to feminist
activist practice outside, as well as within the interstices, of the university.
My efforts here grow out of the desire to sustain a critically constructive
theoretical practice that supports and furthers feminist movements rather
than simply rejects them for their theoretical insufficiencies.
An analysis of ecofeminism that problematizes the divide between theory
and practice is particularly interesting because of the way in which
ecofeminism itself both recreates and confounds this dualism. As I will
show in this book, U.S. ecofeminism’s strongest connection with an activist
mass movement is its relation to feminist antimilitarism. With the ebbing of
that movement in the late 1980s, ecofeminism’s role in activism (read for
the moment as “out-in-the-streets” political action) can be seen in feminist
animal liberation actions, U.S. Green politics, Earth First!, and international
development politics; ecofeminist theorists also often claim the large
numbers of environmental activists who are women, whether they identify
as “ecofeminists” or not, as proof of the ecofeminist argument that
environmentalism and feminism are profitably merged. Other than this
sometimes problematic relation to activism, U.S. ecofeminism is not, at this
writing, an activist mass movement.
 But if one thinks of political action as including the production of
oppositional knowledges, as theories that have popular resonances, then
ecofeminism certainly can be described as activist in this sense. 12 Theories
of the connections between sexism and environmental problems are
enjoying a widespread application, some of which I will be examining in
this book. Ecofeminist texts typically take up large areas in many
bookstores, usually next to sections on feminist spirituality or radical
environmentalism. Ecofeminist theories are influential in several disciplines
with a focus on “applied” scholarship, such as development studies and
natural resource sciences. Feminist artists creating environmental art are
reading ecofeminist theories. And young women, who frequently are deeply
concerned about environmental questions, are often introduced to feminist
arguments through exposure to ecofeminist theory.
Can academic feminists afford to dismiss ecofeminism because this
popular resonance is gained partly through the deployment of arguments
that make essentialist connections between women and nature, sometimes
claiming, for instance, that women are “naturally” environmentalists or that
the feminization of nature contains resources for empowering women in a
sexist society? I see the feminist contests over essentialism (and their
operation within the construction of various feminist politics of identity) as
creating barriers between academic feminism and feminist activist practices
of various kinds, including the political practices of academic feminism.
My objection is not to the prevalence of a feminist critique of essentialism;
on the contrary, both my academic training and my political persuasions
have produced a strong anti-essentialist imperative in my work. Indeed,
Virginia Scharff once characterized my work as a “Western feminist
postmodernist critique of a Western feminist postmodernist critique.” Given
my historical location, as a second-generation second-wave feminist located
in a postmodernist feminist theoretical moment, I encountered the growing
dominance of feminist anti-essentialism in specific, formative ways. In
particular, I noticed the ways a reductive anti-essentialism distorts the
history of second-wave feminism, 13 and the ways in which, more recently
within the academy, a reflexive anti-essentialism too often substitutes for
the critique of power that motivated earlier anti-essentialist critiques. Since,
as I will examine shortly, a number of feminist theorists have made clear
that anti-essentialism itself is dependent upon essentialism and cannot be a
pure position, my point is that we need to look more carefully at precisely
when and where both essentialism and anti-essentialism are useful, and
where and to whom they may prove to be disabling.

Anti-Essentialisms in Practice
Feminism has generated a powerful critique of the way in which sexism
was upheld by humanism, that is, Enlightenment ideologies that constructed
a generically masculine ideal of what it meant to be truly human. Relying
on notions of universal qualities of human nature, Enlightenment thinkers
consistently identified characteristics associated with masculinity
(rationality, the ownership of a soul, objectivity, membership in the polis,
etc.) as features of a universal, ahistorical, and naturally constituted
“humanity.” Feminist thinkers pointed out the way in which these notions
were defined against a similarly ahistorical, biologistic, and universalist
characterization of femininity (as emotional, soul-less, irrational, domestic,
and embodied). Feminists pointed out that humanism was masculinism, and
that the language of the generic masculine-as-human obscured the social
and political means of women’s oppression in sexist societies by a method
of naturalizing women’s supposed inferiority to men. As Trinh T. Minh-ha
says: “What can such a word as ‘human’ mean when its collaboration with
‘man’ and ‘men’ throughout the history of mankind has become obvious?”
14 Feminists, as well as other antiracist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist

theorists, have persistently called into question the move toward dominance
contained in any attempt to identify universal, ahistorical, cross-cultural
human qualities. They have argued that these discourses collude in making
invisible not only those coded as “different” but also the complicity of
Enlightenment humanism in justifying various modes of oppressing those
Others defined as less-than-human, or not-human. Feminists have been
particularly critical of ways in which female biology (pregnancy,
menstruation, lactation) is used in sexist ideology to justify women’s
unequal treatment.
A critique of the idea that social roles and personal identities must be and
are built on biologically determined, or ahistorical, or naturalized essences
is a crucial tool in the dismantling of ideologies of domination. This
motivation, however, must always be kept in view. In other words, unequal
power relations are the subject of an anti-essentialist critique, not
essentialism alone. The use of essentialist arguments to uphold inequalities
and perpetuate injustices is a historically situated phenomenon, not an
essence in itself. Essentialism is not a sin nor a permanent mark of
unexamined prejudice nor an enduring implication in domination. Though it
certainly can have the effect of maintaining positions of privilege, it can
also have the effect of producing an “oppositional consciousness.” 15 Thus,
one trajectory of this book is to entertain the idea that essentialist rhetorics
in the construction of political collectivities, in circumscribed situations,
can be a positive tool of liberation. I believe the important question is what
conditions serve to undercut the negative aspects of these universalizing
rhetorics. This can only be examined if we are willing to analyze
contextually the strategic nature of movement rhetorics, emphasizing the
political motivations of both the essentializing rhetorics and our critiques of
them. This method is crucial in providing theoretical criteria by which to
judge political discourses within radical movements.
To do this, as many feminist theorists have noted, we must move away
from reductive notions of essentialism as itself an essence. Below, I’ll
sketch the ways in which feminist theory has reached this conclusion and
posited various solutions. To anticipate this argument for a moment, I want
to point to one of the crucial ways to de-essentialize our understanding of
essentialisms: to differentiate what kinds of essentialism we are objecting
to, and pay attention to the consequences. For example, it is important
always to foreground the fact that unmasking the essentialism of the sexist
conception of women as more nurturing, more natural, more emotional,
more passive, and more exploitable than men is a political critique aimed at
producing equal and just relations between men and women. This is the
heart of the feminist critique of sexist essentialisms that describe “men” and
“women” as masculine and feminine (as biologically determined rather than
social categories). Similarly, attacking the essentialisms of feminists who
think “all women” are confined to suburban domesticity, or “all women”
are more concerned with gaining the right to abortion rather than the right
to have children, or “all women” are obliged to negotiate better sexual and
domestic relationships with men: these arguments are political critiques
aimed at producing equal and just relations between women of different
class, race, and sexual locations. It complicates a critique of essentialism
considerably if we recognize that different political aims may produce
different forms of essentialisms and anti-essentialisms. Additional
complexities appear if we acknowledge that particular strategic
essentialisms may have positive oppositional ends, even while they may
limit radical results; or if we posit that politically well-intentioned anti-
essentialisms may have destructive consequences for a promising radical
social movement.
Keeping the political endpoint in view means producing a critically
situated feminist theory that deconstructs any universalist version of the
category “women” through attention to historical and cultural specificities
of race, class, sexuality, religion, nationality, language, and culture. But
there is more and more agreement that such a politically motivated feminist
theory must also recognize the need for “contingent foundations” 16 (i.e.,
moments of toleration for certain universalisms and essentialisms) if it is to
remain politically useful, if it is to develop tools for the creation of a more
just society. This is the “essential difference,” as Teresa de Lauretis points
out, between feminist theory and any set of theories that deconstruct for the
sake of deconstruction. 17
It makes sense, then, in the present context of feminist theory, that a
reductive anti-essentialist position as well as an essentialist feminism can
produce politically problematic effects. This is a proposition I will explore
through a sympathetic, yet critical, analysis of certain kinds of “ecofeminist
natures” throughout this book. In this book, I distinguish between
essentialist notions of women and of racial identities, even while I aim to
point out their interaction. For example, while particular notions of women
as inherently sympathetic with wilderness preservation may operate to
exclude women from some racial or class locations, other notions of
“indigenous” women may work to confirm patriarchal assumptions about
the nature of women. Since essentialist concepts are often ultimately
grounded in notions about what is biologically or naturally determined, I
think of some ecofeminist notions of gender and race identity as
“ecofeminist natures,” even when they are not necessarily biologically
deterministic. Thus, one important trajectory of this book is to point out the
essentialism of some ecofeminist conceptions of “nature” and their relation
to gender and racial essentialisms.
In short, identifying problems with some anti-essentialist arguments does
not mean that I don’t myself find such a critique useful when called for as a
critique of power. At many places in this book, I engage in a critique of
various essentialisms within ecofeminism. In particular, I argue that the
compounding of essentialist notions of gender with essentialist notions of
race is deeply problematic for ecofeminism. However, I move beyond just a
critique of ecofeminist essentialism by insisting that the frequency of such
symbols and language must be explained as well as resisted. Essentialist
rhetoric and theorizations within oppositional social movements should be
recognized as complex deployments within particular social, political, and
historical contexts with ambivalent, contradictory outcomes.
Furthermore, the conditions for destabilization of these essentialisms
need to be explored. I find these conditions in particular U.S. social
movement practices and organizational structures, rather than simply in
improved theoretical approaches; more specifically, I use “direct theory” to
counter reductive understandings of “essentialism.” I show that certain
essentialist moments in ecofeminism, given particular historical conditions,
are part of creating a shifting and strategic identification of the relation
between “women” and “nature” that has political purposes: it creates unity
between very different kinds of women; it justifies a feminist critique of
environmentalists; and it solidifies connections among feminism(s),
participatory democratic structures, and nonviolent direct action. Drawing
my examples from ecofeminist theories, organizations, conferences,
gatherings, rituals, and direct actions, I argue that radically democratic
movement structures—such as alliances, coalitions, networks, affinity
groups, and consensus process decision making—that bring together
different kinds of women for the purposes of political action have served to
destabilize essentialist ecofeminist formulations, even if those formulations
enabled these structures in the first place.
In this book, then, I will suggest that one way to understand solutions to
what I see as a political stalemate between tropes of essentialism and anti-
essentialism within feminism is to carefully theorize feminist activist
practice and to see the theory in that practice. This might seem at first an
odd place to look for solutions to the problem of finding collective political
strategies in the context of anti-essentialist theoretical frameworks. Feminist
activists have been criticized frequently for using essentialist formulations
to justify political action: arguing that women’s difference from men is an
inherent mark of superiority to men, and/or assuming that women are in
most important ways defined by the same qualities or experiences. Because
I have been both an activist in and a scholar of the feminist antimilitarist
direct action movement and now the ecofeminist movement, I have been
struck by the way in which these activists have frequently appeared as the
quintessentialists against whom feminism must be protected. This rhetorical
move replicates previous debates within feminism in which first “lesbian
separatists,” then the “antipornography movement,” stood in as the primary
representatives of an essentialist position, sometimes codified as “cultural”
or “radical” feminism, for many feminist theorists. 18 However useful the
critiques generated from them, these rhetorical moves have been costly to
feminism as a social movement. Instead, I wish to point to the way in which
ecofeminism has sought to make political connections between various
radical movements. A closer look at feminist debates about the role of
essentialism and anti-essentialism within feminist theory can provide a
context for my treatment of these tensions and clarify the political stakes
(my own included) of these debates.
Critiquing Essentialism, Deploying Difference,
Reconstructing Foundations
Essentialism, or the positing of natural and ahistorical essences to define
characteristic qualities or behaviors of individuals as members of groups,
has been a central object of feminist critiques, because anti-essentialism is
the epistemological method for deconstructing sexist notions of what
women are supposed to be, as well as racist, classist, and heterosexist
notions of what kind of woman counts as woman. Historically, as I have
indicated earlier, these critiques of essentialism have been leveled at
masculinist ideas of “woman,” but more recently anti-essentialist critiques
have been directed also at certain feminist conceptions of “women.” 19 The
earliest critiques of feminist essentialism were leveled at a white, middle-
class, heterosexual feminism that dominated the representations of the
beginning of the “second wave” of U.S. feminism. Important moments in
that process occurred within the history of U.S. second-wave feminist
activism from its beginnings, but can be represented here by various
landmark publications. These writings were often not simply “publications”
but came out of particular feminist political contexts, especially
conferences. Some of these were Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which challenged the prevailing
assumption within feminist theory that heterosexual women were the norm;
the essay by Angela Davis, “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive
Rights,” which challenged the racism and classism of the feminist
reproductive rights movement; Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will
Never Dismantle the Master’s House”; the publication of This Bridge
Called My Back and the “Combahee River Collective Statement,” which
challenged the combined racism, classism, and heterosexism apparent in
feminism at the time; the publication of Carol Vance’s Pleasure and
Danger, which challenged the “vanilla” sexuality of the antipornography
movement as an essentialism dangerous to the expression of a variety of
female sexualities as well as to feminist freedom of speech; and the
publication of Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist
Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” which characterized prevailing U.S.
feminist theory as imbedded in Western colonial ethnocentrism. 20
These critiques came from feminists who were lesbians, U.S. women of
color, and nonWestern. That these feminists were often deeply involved in
feminist activism makes more curious the common implication that feminist
theory is anti-essentialist while feminist activism is essentialist. But these
critiques referenced above have been fairly successful, at least within an
academic feminist context, at dislodging a homogenizing feminism that
kept white, middle-class feminists as the implicit or explicit model for
“women.” 21 As bell hooks points out: “This effort at revision is perhaps
most evident in the current widespread acknowledgment that sexism,
racism, and class exploitation constitute interlocking systems of domination
—that sex, race, and class, and not sex alone, determine the nature of any
female’s identity, status, and circumstance, the degree to which she will or
will not be dominated, the extent to which she will have the power to
dominate.” 22
The critiques of feminists who were marginalized from the standpoint of
white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists were strengthened by the
influence of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories on the western
academy, especially during the past two decades. 23 Indeed, one could argue
that the influence of poststructuralism on feminist theory came from its
usefulness for constructing theories which avoided essentialisms and
centralized difference as their object of study. Joan Scott succinctly
summarizes the innovations in poststructuralism that have been particularly
useful for feminist theory, identifying three interrelated and illuminating
concepts. The first is the idea that language structures meaning rather than
referring to things outside of language, an idea that points us toward the
historical, political, and institutional contexts in which meanings are
constructed. The second is the realization that these contextual “ways of
knowing,” or epistemological constructions, are irreducibly implicated in
power relations, which are produced within discursive fields. The third is
the recognition that the power relations imbedded within meanings are
constructed through the deployment of differences that are usually
expressed as binary, oppositional, hierarchical, and unequally valued (such
as culture/nature; white/black; masculine/feminine, theory/practice). Scott
calls the analytical method that these poststructuralist ideas embody
“deconstruction,” which she defines as the procedure that interrogates the
operation of power within contextualized discourses, involving an
uncovering of the way in which oppositional differences are not naturally
separate entities but also require and produce each other. 24
In the effort to deconstruct essentialist understandings of differences
between women and men—as well as between groups of women—which
operate to justify and maintain structural inequalities, it has become
commonplace for feminist theorists to decry any sort of essentialism and to
center their work not on sexism conceived simply as hierarchical relations
between women and men, but on the assumption that there are multiple
genders, various notions of femininity differentially articulated by race,
class, sexual, and national differences and structured by specific historical
contexts. Thus, any statement about women must now be modified by
specifying what kind of “woman” is under consideration. Additionally, this
kind of theoretical practice often demands a politics of identity, which asks
feminist scholars to identify their own location within various fields of
power; whether they are white, working class, lesbian, Third World,
Catholic, and so on.
The poststructuralist feminist practice which questions the construction
of universalizing, stable notions of “woman” has been a useful assistant to
feminists of color, lesbian feminists, and postcolonial feminists in their
efforts to undermine the foundations of racism, classism, heterosexism, and
ethnocentrism within contemporary feminist scholarship. But this attention
to difference within the category “woman” has had it own problems. First,
inasmuch as “difference” operates to modify some assumed “sameness,” the
process of producing various identities as indices of particular
“experiences” can even reinscribe the dominance of the unmarked category,
the white, the middle class, the Western, the heterosexual. This is Chandra
Mohanty’s point when she objects to the “third world difference” produced
by white Western feminist scholars; as they mark the particularities of
“third world women,” they reinforce problematic notions of Western
women. “Universal images of ‘the third world woman’ (the veiled woman,
chaste virgin, etc.), images constructed from adding the ‘third world
difference’ to ‘sexual difference’, are predicated upon (and hence obviously
bring into sharper focus) assumptions about Western women as secular,
liberated, and having control over their own lives…. If this were a material
reality, there would be no need for political movements in the West.” 25

Hence, alongside the effort to specify differences of race, class, nationality,

and sexuality, which may produce different kinds of genders, there must be
a vigilance directed at previously “unmarked” categories that are often
presumed to be not raced, classed, etc.: categories such as white, middle
class, Western, heterosexual. Differences within these categories as well as
the marked categories must be uncovered and explored.
 Second, there has been growing impatience with a notion of difference
that, in its effort to avoid essentialism, becomes itself an essentialist notion.
Historical specificity alone does not solve the problem of essentialist
constructs; it only defers the problem to another level. Diana Fuss writes:
“To insist that essentialism is already and everywhere reactionary is, for the
constructionist, to buy into essentialism in the very act of making the
charge; it is to act as though essentialism has an essence.” 26 Fuss argues
that deploying a plurality of identities does not escape the problem of
essentialism, except to multiply it:
The constructionist strategy of specifying more precisely these sub-categories of “woman”
does not necessarily preclude essentialism. “French bourgeois woman” or “Anglo-American
lesbian,” while crucially emphasizing in their very specificity that “woman” is by no means a
monolithic category, nonetheless reinscribe an essentialist logic at the very level of
historicism. Historicism is not always an effective counter to essentialism if it succeeds only
in fragmenting the subject into multiple identities, each with its own self-contained, self-
referential essence. 27

Indeed, she claims that the difficulty of eradicating essentialism stems from
its necessary relation to the concept of constructionism. “[E]ssentialism
underwrites theories of constructionism and … constructionism operates as
a more sophisticated form of essentialism.” 28 This is because, she says, the
“strength” of constructionism as a theoretical position is “not built on the
grounds of essentialism’s demise, rather it works its power by strategically
deferring the encounter with essence, displacing it, in this case, onto the
concept of sociality.” 29
Like Fuss, Cristina Crosby is concerned about the use of historicism to
interrogate differences, because this method does not automatically address
the problem of the production of knowledge.
The problem is that differences are taken to be self-evident, concrete, there, present in history
and therefore the proper ground of theory…. It is impossible to ask how ‘differences’ is
 constituted as a concept, so ‘differences’ become substantive, something in themselves—
race, class, gender—as though we knew already what this incommensurate triumvirate
means! 30

Instead, Crosby suggests, “knowledge, if it is to avoid the circularity of

ideology, must read the processes of differentiation, not look for
differences.” 31 Joan Scott makes a related argument by challenging the way
in which the concept of “experience” is used to mask the processes through
which experiences are socially structured or semiotically constructed. 32
Third, the emphasis on anti-essentialism in contemporary scholarship
may have produced a methodological trap of sorts. This is the argument
Jane Roland Martin makes in pointing out that the anti-essentialist trend in
recent feminist theory has often ruled out consideration of certain “general
categories like women, gender, mothering, reproduction, and family” unless
those categories are thoroughly historicized. Martin argues, however, that
even historical treatment of particular categories “masks difference,” and
that a more effective treatment of the problem of essentialism is to explore
the use of these categories, to “decide to use ones that uncover the
differences we consider most important and that best fit our practical and
theoretical purposes.” 33 This may mean, she points out, using many kinds
of questions and methods without overprivileging historical ones, since
historical methods produce only particular (though useful and necessary)
kinds of knowledge. Though it is important to recognize how feminist
thinkers who are scholars of color, lesbian, and nonWestern have been
included as a result of the widespread recognition of the dangers of
essentialism, Martin argues that there may also have been costs. The use of
an essentialist label as a form of accusation against feminist scholars, and
the operation of a double standard of harsher critiques of feminist rather
than nonfeminist essentialists, are phenomena that Martin claims lead to a
“chilly research climate … [that] is far from welcoming to diverse
methodologies and divergent thought.” 34 With particular relevance to the
subject of ecofeminism, Fuss has pointed out that the constructionist
position assumes that the category of the “natural” is always already
essentialist. This is an assumption that has led some feminists to be hesitant
to investigate nature from a feminist perspective. A great contribution to
efforts that address the dangers of essentialism, therefore, would be
“questioning the constructionist assumption that nature and fixity go
together (naturally) just as sociality and change go together (naturally).” 35
Fourth, as I’ve suggested above, much of the anti-essentialist theory
produced in recent years has created a false and deeply problematic division
between feminist theory and feminist activism. Some of this stems from the
inaccessibility of most feminist poststructuralist theory; as bell hooks has
pointed out, “The separation of grass-roots ways of sharing feminist
thinking across kitchen tables from the spheres where much of that thinking
is generated, the academy, undermines feminist movement.” 36 Some of this
division has stemmed from the way in which, as Teresa de Lauretis points
out, “this word—essentialism—time and again [is] repeated with its
reductive ring, its self-righteous tone of superiority, its contempt for
‘them’—those guilty of it.” 37 This division between feminist theory and
feminist activism has been deeply inscribed by certain retellings of the
history of second-wave feminism that construct a “radical” (read “activist”)
feminism that is defined by its essentialism. The critique of essentialisms of
various kinds has been a prominent tool in creating various typologies of
feminisms, usually to support an “agonistic narrative structure” in which
certain feminist theories (usually socialist feminism or poststructuralist
feminism) come out to be the winners in the contest for the most politically
useful feminist theory. 38 That these winners in the anti-essentialist
competition have also been the feminist theories most embedded in
academic contexts is suggestive and will be looked at more carefully in
chapter 6.

Differences in Action
Thus, in recent years, many feminist theorists have been concerned with the
problem of difference, that is, how to conceptualize women’s differences
from men (differences, from a feminist point of view, imbued with the
consequences of women’s domination by men) and at the same time
acknowledge differences among women (also imbued with unequal power
relations). The heart of this concern is a political and practical one: How
can feminist coalitions be created without assuming (or requiring) that all
women are the same in some essential way, relying on some notion of
natural or universal female characteristics? The rationale for women acting
together politically against sexism contains its own challenge: if feminists
argue that “femininity” and women’s material inequality in relation to men
are not biologically determined but socially constructed, historically
specific, and variously shaped by hierarchies of race, class, culture, and
sexual orientation, how can feminism work against the oppression of
women as a group based on gender? Linda Alcoff puts it this way: “What
can we demand in the name of women if ‘women’ do not exist and
demands in their name simply reinforce the myth that they do?” 39 As the
trajectory of feminist theory has problematized a unitary conception of
gender, it has become unclear how to create collective political strategies
for feminists while at the same time avoiding essentialist formulations of
the subject category “women.” As Rosi Braidotti argues, it is not
necessarily the case that “the postmodernist emphasis on the contingency of
identity and the decline of metanarratives undermines political agency and
feminism with it…. [Rather] Postmodern nomadic feminism argues that you
do not have to be settled in a substantive vision of the subject in order to be
political, or to make willful choice or critical decisions.” 40 Still, the
question remains how to accomplish the feminist political project without
relying on a notion of a stable collective identity.
Most answers, including Braidotti’s, to the political questions brought
about by the predominance of anti-essentialist theories within feminism
have centered on the notion of strategically deploying political identities.
That is, if subjects are created within processes that are multiple and
ongoing, the task for scholarship is to analyze the operation of these
processes in producing subjectivities. As Butler has put it, “the task is to
interrogate what the theoretical move that establishes foundations
authorizes, and what, precisely, it excludes or forecloses.” 41 The task for
politics, however, is one of producing collective political subjectivities that
can be deployed in oppositional ways, while acknowledging that these
subject-positions are not universal, natural, or fixed, but positional, 42

situated, 43 strategic, 44 mobile, 45 nomadic, 46 and/or differential. 47

The popularity of recent anti-essentialist theories of situational political
identities notwithstanding, such theories rarely make explicit the conditions
for the creation of a politically “oppositional consciousness” 48 that is
strategic and positional. There is acknowledgment that an oppositional
consciousness is created by those movements that engage in
“consciousness-raising.” bell hooks, among others, points out that
consciousness-raising in small groups is a crucial practice for building both
a feminist movement and feminist theory. 49 But as I will point out later in
this book, simply exploring differences, finding patterns in experiences, and
bonding between women in such small groups is not sufficient. What is also
called for are specific political projects for such small groups that operate
with awareness of multiple and intersecting kinds of difference and under
conditions that allow these differences to influence the definition of issues
and the choice of strategies. A similar point is made by Val Plumwood, who
notes that “forms of oppression” can be seen “as very closely … related,
and working together to form a single system without losing a degree of
distinctness and differentiation.” 50 She recommends that such a conception
of oppression as both a “single mutual supporting system” and a
“differentiated system,” requires a “cooperative movement strategy [that]
suggests a methodological principle for both theory and action, that
whenever there is a choice of strategies or of possibilities for theoretical
development, then other things being equal those … that take account of or
promote this wider, connected set of objectives are to be preferred to ones
that do not. This should be regarded as a minimum principle of cooperative
strategy.” 51
Even more specifically, I argue that radically democratic, participatory,
and nonhierarchical movement structures, especially within movements that
attempt coalitions, provide the conditions for destabilizing the essentialist
moments that are perhaps inevitably involved in the construction of a
political collectivity or an oppositional consciousness. I intend to explore
the uses of various and heterogeneous kinds of essentialist formulations for
ecofeminism and at the same time point to the ways in which radically
democratic ecofeminist organizations and theoretical production constantly
revise and contest political identities. 52 I will try to mitigate what I see as a
prevailing reductionist account of the essentialism of ecofeminism by
examining contradictions, fractures, and debates within the movement’s
discursive practices. I also pay particular attention, however, to the
moments these essentialisms become barriers to more productive coalitions,
especially between ecofeminists and the environmental justice movement,
and between U.S. ecofeminists and nonWestern feminist environmentalists.
Ecofeminism seems to me to be an important candidate for the kind of
sustaining theoretical critique I try to develop here. While not presently a
coherent movement in most senses of the word, ecofeminism nevertheless
is a political location that I think has a great potential for supporting
progressive social, cultural, and economic change. It is an interesting object
of study for a constructionist feminist analysis, because an environmentalist
politics is a useful location for interrogating the construction of an “identity
politics” (or the deployment of strategic, political, but often embodied
identities), since it is not a political location solely located around a human
body constructed by axes of naturalized hierarchies of value, as in racism,
sexism, classism, and heterosexism. “Naturism” is about another kind of
body, “Nature’s body.” Primary among ecofeminism’s strengths is a
political theory that attempts to deploy at once a number of radical analyses
of injustice and exploitation focused on racism, classism, sexism,
heterosexism, imperialism, speciesism, and environmental degradation. It
may even be that this attempt to connect different radical analyses is one
source of ecofeminism’s essentialist moments. Where I think ecofeminism
underutilizes its most radical potential is in the possibility, and the
necessity, of theorizing the connection between these injustices through a
critique of the ways in which various raced and gendered concepts of
“nature” naturalize social inequalities and ecological crises. In particular,
the deconstruction of the category “nature” with a feminist political intent
should be extended as a crucial theoretical practice within present political
conditions. In several ways, then, ecofeminism is potentially a meeting
ground for contemporary radical movements. This is one reason why its
popularity as a set of theories continues despite the uneven development of
its radical political synthesis and its present lack of a movement
infrastructure.

Outline of the Book

This book, then, tries to do two things at once. On the one hand, I wish to
critique ecofeminist theory and practice with the goal of making
suggestions for the formation of a more inclusive, more politically engaged
ecofeminist movement. On the other hand, I seek to show the ways in
which ecofeminist practice provides resources for solutions, or at least
instructive concretizations, of central problems in contemporary feminist
and political theories.
But the ways in which I go about these tasks are determined largely by
the conditions in which I work, the political meanings attached to my life
history and construction of self, many of which are internally as well as
externally divisive. As an academic feminist theorist, I have found it
necessary to argue the political importance of my own location as an
“ecofeminist.” As a white person who has practiced being a “race-traitor”
most of my life, I want to critique particular kinds of antiracist theory and
practice within ecofeminism to the end of furthering coalitions between
white ecofeminists and women of color in the environmental justice
movement. As an activist in the antimilitarist direct action movement of the
1980s, I end up arguing for repeating certain of those movement structures
and practices in ecofeminism at the same time as I point out the limitations
for ecofeminism engendered by its historical connection with that
movement. An atheist by upbringing, whose only comfortable experience of
spirituality has been the “public happiness” 53 of collective, oppositional
political action, I try to account for the positive aspects of ecofeminist
spirituality at the same time that I criticize certain of its effects. An
Americanist by training, I explore ecofeminist efforts at creating a global
movement, and argue against certain U.S. notions of race, gender, and
nature that constrain such efforts.
The framework for these arguments and explorations is roughly
historical, though it is an interested, contested, disrupted, and unfinished
historical narrative. In significant ways, each chapter in this book can be
seen as offering a different inflection on the story of ecofeminism’s origins,
development, and boundaries. In “Movements of Ecofeminism” (chapter 1),
I start by tracing some beginnings, offering some definitions, and
mentioning some important moments in the formation of U.S. ecofeminism.
I then explore one way of thinking about the origins of U.S. ecofeminism—
as a feminist rebellion within male-dominated radical environmentalisms—
using as my examples social ecology, deep ecology, and Earth First! I note
along the way the different strategic but often essentialist notions of women
that ecofeminists deployed in the effort to carve out a place for feminism in
radical environmentalism.
A recurring theme throughout the book is ecofeminism’s connection to
feminist antimiliarism. In “Ecofeminist Antimilitarism and Strategic
Essentialisms” (chapter 2), I concentrate on the feminist critique of
essentialism that was leveled at the feminist antimilitarist direct action
movement in the 1980s (and that continues to be assumed in many arenas as
the only acceptable feminist reaction to ecofeminism). I offer some other
ways of understanding the essentialist moments of this manifestation of
ecofeminism as tactical by closely examining writings by Ynestra King and
early ecofeminist direct actions for the existence of debates, contradictions,
and analytic fractures.
While chapters 1 and 2 focus on questions concerning essentialist
constructs of gender, the two chapters that follow interrogate essentialist
constructs of racial difference in ecofeminism. In the latter half of the
1980s, some ecofeminists, like other white feminists of the period,
responded to critiques of feminism for its racism by making various efforts
to decenter white feminists and to encourage antiracist feminist analyses.
Within the context of a general critique by feminists of color of the racism
of the dominant version of feminism, some ecofeminists reacted to criticism
of the whiteness of antimilitarist ecofeminism by attempting to create an
organization, WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute, which would bring
together white women and women of color on an equal basis, a concept
they called “racial parity.” In “WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute and
the Race for Parity” (chapter 3), I examine some of the problems
WomanEarth encountered with the conception of racial equality as racial
parity. Reading from a position of hindsight, in which multiple rather than
binary notions of race are assumed, I show how racial parity prevented
these activists from identifying and processing conflicts stemming from
other kinds of difference. Despite these problems, I point out ways the
efforts of WomanEarth broadened the concerns of ecofeminists, who, after
WomanEarth, could no longer present ecofeminism as a purely white
women’s concern. In “The Nature of Race: Indigenous Women and White
Goddesses” (chapter 4), I show how, in the context of the waning of
ecofeminist antimilitarist action, a different ecofeminist antiracist discourse
centered on the category of “indigenous women,” often resulted in the co-
optation of Native American women and Asian Indian women as the
“ultimate ecofeminists.” Further, I show the manner in which the context of
this antiracist discourse produced a logic closely connecting ecofeminism
with certain versions of white pagan feminist spirituality. Thus, I argue that
this connection, which many feminists see as one of the marks of
ecofeminism’s inherent essentialism, ironically stems from antiracist
desires.
In “Ecofeminist Natures and Transnational Environmental Politics”
(chapter 5), I examine a dynamic effort in the early 1990s to construct an
international ecofeminist movement in tandem with the growth of the
disciplinary area called “women, environment, and development,” in the
context of a hegemonic process I call “globalizing environmentalisms.”
Here, I return to the same ecofeminist discourse about “indigenous” women
as the “ultimate ecofeminists” that I critique in chapter 4 as well as the
notion of women “mothering” Earth that I examined in chapter 2. But in
chapter 5, I am interested in the effects of the deployment of these
discourses under different organizational, political, and transnational
conditions. I center this discussion on the formation of an organization
called “Women’s Environment and Development Organization,” or WEDO,
which was instrumental in orchestrating a “women’s voice” at the UN
Conference on Environment and Development at Rio in 1992. I critically
examine WEDO’s efforts to form an international movement that can take
advantage of more mainstream state and UN organizations, which may see
the “women and environment” tag as useful in competing ways (as feminist
or nonfeminist, for instance).
In “What’s in a Name? Ecofeminisms as/in Feminist Theory” (chapter 6),
I bring the narrative up to date through a discussion of certain ecofeminist
texts published from 1992 to 1996, tracing the patterns of inclusion and
exclusion within an academic feminist context that marked contests over
the relationship between feminism and environmentalism. In the early
1990s, U.S. ecofeminist activism of the kind I focus on in chapters 2 and 3
had not given way just to attempts to create international ecofeminist
coalitions, but also to the production of ecofeminist criticism and theory. To
pay attention to this development, I address the strategies certain texts have
used to carve out a place for ecofeminism within feminist theory—
especially apparent in the search for the “correct” name for an ecofeminism
that contains no trace of essentialism. This chapter has the aim of
illuminating and interrogating feminist theory’s relation to feminist political
action, for academic feminism as well as ecofeminism (including academic
ecofeminism!). I close the book by offering some suggestions for
ecofeminist theorists and activists.
Overall, the aims of the book are to introduce new material on the history
of ecofeminism, to generate different ways to understand social movements,
and to interrogate the notion of strategic identities. I hope that my work
here goes some way toward furthering feminist and ecofeminist political
action and toward laying the groundwork for a wide variety of radical
political alliances.

Notes
1. Elizabeth Bird, “The Social Construction of Nature: Theoretical
Approaches to the History of Environmental Problems,”
Environmental Review 11(4) (Winter 1987): 255–64.
2. Deena Hurwitz, ed., Walking the Red Line: Israelis in Search of Justice
for Palestine (Philadephia: New Society Publishers, 1992).
3. From Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology
and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), n. 6, p. 245. Haraway also recounts the story of the
Surrogate Others and their worm in “The Promises of Monsters: A
Regenerated Politics for Inappropriateld Others,” in Lawrence
Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, with Linda Baughman
 and John Wise, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992),
pp. 295–337.
4. From Cecile Jackson, “Women/Nature or Gender History? A Critique
of Ecofeminist ‘Development’,” Journal of Peasant Studies 20(3)
(April 1993); 398.
5. Here, of course, I am following Foucault’s notion of “genealogy.” For
an explication of Foucault’s use of the term, see David Shumway,
Michel Foucault (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989),
especially pp. 107–113.
6. For an overview of resource mobilization (RM) theory see, Craig
Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social
Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 527–53. Recent
rethinkings of RM theory can be found in Aldon Morris and Carol
Mueller, eds., Frontiers of New Social Movement Theory (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992).
7. Some of the range of new social movement theory could be
represented by Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981); Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the
Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); and various
essays in Dieter Rucht, ed., Research on Social Movements: The State
of the Art (Frankfurt, Germany/Boulder, CO: Campus/Westview Press,
1991). See also Margit Mayer and Roland Roth, “New Social
Movements and the Transformation to Post-Fordist Society,” in Marcy
Darnovsky, Barbara Epstein, and Richard Flacks, eds., Cultural
Politics and Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple University,
1995), pp. 299–319.
8. See Noël Sturgeon, “Theorizing Movements: Direct Action and Direct
Theory,” in Darnovsky et al., Cultural Politics; and Sturgeon’s “Direct
 Theory and Political Action: The U.S. Nonviolent Direct Action
Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz,
March 1991.
9. I thank Katie King for suggesting this “mystery story” trope.
10. I have learned a lot about the idea of the “outsider within” from Audre
Lorde. See, for example, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
(Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984).
11. See Katie King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S.
Women’s Movements (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1994).
12. I thank T. V. Reed for conversations that helped me clarify this point.
13. Especially in its treatment of “radical” or “cultural” feminism, a point
to which I will return in chapter 6. For a brilliant discussion of these
kinds of distortions of the history of feminisms in the U.S., see Katie
King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels.
14. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and
Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989).
15. The term “oppositional consciousness” is first used in Chéla Sandoval,
Women Respond to Racism_ A Report on the National Women’s Studies
Association Conference (Oakland, CA: Center for Third World
Organizing, n.d.), revised as “Feminism and Racism_ A Report on the
1981 National Women’s Studies Association Conference,” in Gloria
Anzalda, ed., Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras (San
Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), pp. 55–71.
16. The term is Judith Butler’s, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and
the Question of ‘Postmodernism’,” in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott,
eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992),
pp. 3–21.
17. Teresa de Lauretis, “Upping the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory,” in
Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, Conflicts in Feminism
(London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 254–70.
18. For a discussion of the way in which “lesbian separatists” were
characterized and dismissed as essentialist, see Katie King, “The
Situation of Lesbianism as Feminism’s Magical Sign: Contests for
Meaning and the U.S. Women’s Movement, 1968–1972,”
Communication 9 (1986): 65–91. For one recent criticism of the
essentialism of feminist antimilitarism and ecofeminism, see Kathy
Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist
Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), especially her
section on “cosmic feminism,” pp. 97–120. The conflation of activist
politics, essentialist formulations of female identity, and “radical” or
“cultural” feminism is apparent in many typologies of feminism and is
addressed specifically in chapter 6.
19. See Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion
in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988).
20. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,”
SIGNS 5 (1980): 631–60; Angela Y. Davis, “Racism, Birth Control and
Reproductive Rights,” in Women, Race and Class (New York: Random
House, 1981); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge
Called My Back (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Audre
Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s
House,” presented at the Second Sex Conference at Barnard in 1979,
then printed in This Bridge Called My Back, pp. 98–101; Combahee
River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Gloria T. Hull,
Patricia Smith, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Were Brave:
Black Women’s Studies (New York, Feminist Press, 1982), pp. 13–22;
 Carol S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Explorations of Female
Sexuality (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). The Mohanty
essay was originally read at a conference in 1983 (see King, Theory in
Its Feminist Travels, p. 35); it can be found in Chandra Mohanty, Ann
Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics
of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 51–
80. Of course, many other books and articles could be cited to show
different moments of a critique of Western, white, heterosexist,
middle-class feminism; here I am just providing a few important
touchstones.
21. For a rich discussion of this problem, see Elizabeth Spelman,
inessential Woman.
22. bell hooks, “Feminism_ A Transformational Politic,” in Deborah L.
Rhodes, ed., Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 185–93, p. 188.
23. Judith Butler points out that there is much confusion over the terms
“poststructuralism” and “postmodernism,” as well as over who gets
included within them. She finds the term “postmodernism” to be
particularly problematic, and prefers “poststructuralism.” She remarks
that the effort to lump several very different theorists within one or the
other of these terms usually has as its object the dismissal of these
theories and the various critiques of power that they enact. In contrast,
she notes the usefulness of these kinds of theories, in similar ways as I
summarize them above, for feminist theory, particularly the critique of
foundationalism. Butler, “Contingent Foundations.” An example of
such a problematically reductionist critique of “postructuralism” can
be found in Barbara Epstein, “Why Poststructuralism is a Dead End
for Progressive Thought,” Socialist Review 25(2) (1995): 83–120.
 While Epstein and I share a concern that there is presently a divide
between radical academics and movements, I don’t share her
assessment of “postmodernism” and I would not want my arguments
here mistaken for hers.
24. Joan Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses
of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” in Hirsch and Keller,
Conflicts in Feminism, pp. 134–48, esp. pp. 135–38.
25. Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” p. 74.
26. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (London and New York: Routledge,
1989), p. 21; her emphasis.
27. Fuss, pp. 19–20.
28. Fuss, p. 119.
29. Fuss, p. 6.
30. Cristina Crosby, “Dealing with Differences,” in Judith Butler and Joan
W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge,
1992), pp. 130–47, p. 137.
31. Crosby, “Dealing with Differences,” p. 140.
32. Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the
Political, pp. 22–40.
33. Jane Roland Martin, “Methodological Essentialism, False Difference,
and Other Dangerous Traps,” SIGNS 19(3) (Spring 1994); 637.
34. Martin, “Methodological Essentialism,” p. 654.
35. Fuss, Essentially Speaking, p. 6; her emphasis.
36. bell hooks, “Feminism_ A Transformational Politic,” p. 190.
37. de Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle, or, Taking the Risk of
Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and
Britain,” differences 1 (Summer 1989): 3.
38. The quote in this sentence is from Teresa de Lauretis, “The Essence of
the Triangle,” p. 10. I deal extensively with the problems of certain
typologies of feminism and ecofeminism in chapter 6.
39. Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism_ The
Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” SIGNS 13 (Spring 1988): 420.
Katie King points out that Alcoff “assumes that one must stand in the
place of ‘woman’ to make feminist politics” (King, personal
communication, March 1996).
40. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference
in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University,
1994), p. 34.
41. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” p. 7.
42. Alcoff’s term.
43. Haraway’s term.
44. Gayatri Spivak’s term.
45. Ferguson’s term. See Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of
Subjectivity in Feminist Theory (Berkeley: University of California,
1993).
46. Braidotti’s term.
47. Chéla Sandoval’s term. See Sandoval’s “U.S. Third World Feminism_
The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the
Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 1–24; and her “New
Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed,”
in Chris Hables Gray, with Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven
Mentor, The Cyborg Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp.
407–422.
48. Chéla Sandoval, “Feminism and Racism.”
49. hooks refers to the necessity of consciousness-raising groups in
numerous places in her work, especially in the essay I have cited
above, “Feminism_ A Transformational Politic.” See also Marilyn
Frye, “The Possibility of Feminist Theory,” in Rhodes, Theoretical
Perspectives on Sexual Difference, pp. 174. Chéla Sandoval also
places the practice of consciousness-raising at the center of her
description of the construction of feminist theory and political
identities.
50. Val Plumwood, “Fcosocial Feminism as a General Theory of
Oppression,” in Carolyn Merchant, ed., Ecology: Key Concepts in
Critical Theory (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press
International, 1994): 207–219, P. 215.
51. Plumwood, “Ecosocial Feminism,” p. 215–216.
52. Though I argue that certain movement structures are useful in that they
destabilize essentialism and provide opportunities for alliances, I will
not deal here with the question of other strategic consequences of these
structures for radical movements. The disadvantages of these
structures for the nonviolent direct-action movement have been
sympathetically presented and critically evaluated by Barbara Epstein,
Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in
the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
In my study of the nonviolent antimilitarist direct-action movement, I
deal at greater length with the question of the effectiveness of such
movement structures and the way in which a form of “direct theory”
(the construction of meaning through the use of particular
organizational structures and political practices) intervenes in
hegemonic processes. See Sturgeon, “Direct Theory and Political
 Action.” In important ways, my argument in this study challenges
many of the assumptions of Epstein’s critique in Political Protest.
53. The term “public happiness” is Hannah Arendt’s, which she uses to
describe the intense feelings of delight, joy, and community found in
collective political action, particularly during revolutions. See On
Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965).
1 Movements of Ecofeminism
DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-2

Ynestra King, one of the founders of U.S. ecofeminism, has called it the
“third wave of the women’s movement,” indicating her sense, at one time,
that this most recent manifestation of feminist activity was large and vital
enough to parallel the first-wave nineteenth-century women’s movement
and the second-wave women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and
1970s. 1 I agree with this assessment, understood as describing a
potentiality rather than an actuality, and this book is an attempt to analyze
what prevents the closing of the gap between the vision and the practice.
The task here is to seek out guides for radical political action from
ecofeminism while at the same time fully recognizing its limitations. But
first, I want to attempt some descriptions and definitions of ecofeminism as
a movement 2 and as a set of theories.
Most simply put, ecofeminism is a movement that makes connections
between environmentalisms and feminisms; more precisely, it articulates
the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race,
and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and
degradation of the environment. 3 In one version of its origins, the one I will
privilege throughout the book, ecofeminism in the United States arises from
the antimilitarist direct action movement of the late seventies and eighties,
and develops its multivalent politics from that movement’s analysis of the
connections between militarism, racism, classism, sexism, speciesism, and
environmental destruction. But, as I will also show, ecofeminism has
multiple origins and is reproduced in different inflections and deployed in
many different contexts. In particular, in this book I will argue that
ecofeminism has roots in both feminism and environmentalism.
Given both its attempt to bridge different radical political positions and
its historical location as at least one of many third-wave women’s
movements, U.S. ecofeminism aims to be a multi-issue, globally oriented
movement with a more diverse constituency than either of its
environmentalist or feminist predecessors. Ecofeminism is thus a movement
with large ambitions and with a significant, if at the moment largely
unorganized, constituency. Many people are interested in the scope of
ecofeminism, its drawing together of environmentalism and feminism.
Environmentalism is one of the most popular and significant locations for
radical politics today; it attracts people because of the seemingly
apocalyptic nature of our ecological crises and the many ways in which
environmental problems affect people’s daily lives, as well as the sense of
its global relevance. As a feminist movement, ecofeminism reworks a
longstanding feminist critique of the naturalization of an inferior social and
political status for women so as to include the effects on the environment of
feminizing nature. Coupled with environmentalism, this version of
feminism gains a political cachet not easily matched by other radical
political locations, particularly for young U. S. feminists who already think
of themselves as environmentalists, having been more or less socialized as
such. Ecofeminism is a significant and complex political phenomenon, a
contemporary political movement that has far-reaching goals, a popular
following, and a poor reputation among many academic feminists,
mainstream environmentalists, and some environmental activists of color.
Part of what I want to do in this book is to understand the sources of that
poor reputation and to explore the reasons for the failure of ecofeminism to
live up to its potential.
Ecofeminist Genealogies
A name that can usefully if partially describe the work of Donna Haraway
and Mary Daly, Alice Walker and Rachel Carson, Starhawk and Vandana
Shiva, 4 ecofeminism is a shifting theoretical and political location that can
be defined to serve various intentions. The present chaotic context of the
relatively new and diverse political positionings that go under the name of
“ecofeminism” allows me to construct within this book a series of
definitions and historical trajectories of the movement, ones I recognize as
always interested and certainly contestable. 5 In this chapter, I will piece
together stories about ecofeminist beginnings and evolution by tracing the
use of the word “ecofeminism” as it appears in political actions,
organizations, conferences, publications, and university courses. Not a
history so much as a genealogy, imbedded in this tracing is an effort to tease
out the label’s shifting meanings and political investments in order to
delineate the construction of ecofeminism as an object of knowledge, as a
political identity, and as a set of political strategies within the convergence
of local and global environmentalisms, academic and activist feminisms,
and anticolonialist and antiracist movements. 6 In this chapter, I will focus
on ecofeminism as a manifestation of feminism within environmentalisms;
in the last chapter, I will focus on ecofeminism within feminist movement
and theory.
Both an activist and an academic movement, ecofeminism has grown
rapidly since the early eighties and continues to do so in the nineties. As
activists, ecofeminists have been involved in environmental and feminist
lobbying efforts, in demonstrations and direct actions, in forming a political
platform for a U.S. Green party, and in building various kinds of
ecofeminist cultural projects (such as ecofeminist art, literature, and
spirituality). They have taken up a wide variety of issues, such as toxic
waste, deforestation, military and nuclear weapons policies, reproductive
rights and technologies, animal liberation, and domestic and international
agricultural development. In academic arenas, scholars who are either
identified with or interested in ecofeminism have been active in creating
and critiquing ecofeminist theories. A wave of publications in the area,
including several special issues of journals, indicates research activity on
ecofeminism in religious studies, philosophy, political science, art,
geography, women’s studies, and many other disciplines. 7
In this chapter, I concentrate on the way in which ecofeminism can be
seen primarily as a feminist rebellion within male-dominated radical
environmentalisms, where I have found it popping up in almost every arena,
often without communication between these slightly or greatly different
versions of ecofeminism. Thus, one can find ecofeminists appearing within
the anti-nuclear movement, social ecology, bioregionalism, Earth First!, the
U.S. Greens, animal liberation, sustainable development, and, to a lesser
extent, the environmental justice movement. In chapter 4, I take up the issue
of why the last, which is an environmental movement primarily of people of
color and working-class people, should be a place where ecofeminism has
had difficulty making a sustained appearance.
The origins of this varied activity called “ecofeminism” have been
described in different ways. 8 Certainly, an ecological critique was an
important part of women’s movements worldwide from the mid-1970s,
particularly those concerned with nuclear technology, neocolonialist
development practices, and women’s health and reproductive rights. In my
reading of these developments, ecofeminism in the U.S. arose in close
connection with the non-violent direct action movement against nuclear
power and nuclear weapons. Until the Women’s Pentagon Actions in 1980,
however, there were numerous events and groups connected with
ecofeminism that were concerned with a number of issues, militarism being
only one of many.
The earliest event I’ve seen described as making the connection between
women and the environment was in 1974, at the Women and the
Environment conference at UC Berkeley organized by Sandra Maburg and
Lisa Watson. An ecofeminist newsletter, W.E.B.: Wimmin of the Earth
Bonding, published four issues from 1981 to 1983, concerned with feminist
and lesbian back-to-the-land communities, health, appropriate technology,
and political action. 9
Most influentially, however, U.S. ecofeminism’s initiating event was the
Women and Life on Earth: Ecofeminism in the 1980s conference at
Amherst in 1980, organized by Ynestra King (then of the Institute for
Social Ecology), Anna Gyorgy (an organizer in the antinuclear Clamshell
Alliance), Grace Paley (a feminist writer and pacifist activist), and other
women from the anti-nuclear, environmental, and lesbian-feminist
movements. 10
The Women and Life on Earth conference organized panels and
workshops on the alternative technology movement (staffed by the group
Women in Solar Energy, or WISE), organizing, feminist theory, art, health,
militarism, racism, urban ecology, theater, as well as other topics: eighty
workshops in all. Over 650 women attended, far beyond the expected
hundred or so. 11 Speakers included Patricia Hynes of WISE; Lois Gibbs,
then of the Love Canal Homeowners Association and later of the Citizen’s
Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW); 12 and Amy Swerdlow,
feminist activist and historian. 13 The conference generated an ongoing
Women and Life on Earth (WLOE) group in Northampton, Massachusetts,
which published a newsletter entitled Tidings, as well as several other
WLOE groups in New York, Cape Cod, and other areas in the Northeastern
United States. 14
Several other ecofeminism conferences and organizations were either
inspired by Women and Life on Earth or assisted by WLOE organizers. A
conference already in the planning stages in 1980, Women and the
Environment: The First West Coast Eco-Feminist Conference drew 500
women, who listened to talks by Angela Davis, Anna Gyorgy, China
Galland, and Peggy Taylor. Workshops were offered on “alternative energy,
global view, planning, health, organizing media, no nukes, and peace.” 15 In
London, a Women For Life on Earth (WFLOE) group formed, inspired by
the Amherst conference, and organized a conference in 1981. Energy from
that conference spawned numerous WFLOE groups, twenty-six in the
United Kingdom and nine in other countries, including Australia, Canada,
France, Japan, and West Germany. 16 WFLOE put out a newsletter at least
until Winter 1984, organized a number of gatherings, and supported the
Greenham Common peace camp. Organizers of WFLOE, Stephanie Leland
and Leonie Caldecott, edited the first ecofeminist anthology, Reclaim the
Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, in 1983.
From the Women and Life on Earth conference at Amherst also grew the
organizing efforts for the Women’s Pentagon Actions (WPA) of 1980 and
1981, in which large numbers of women demonstrated and engaged in civil
disobedience. As defined by the Unity Statement of the WPA, 17 the politics
behind these early ecofeminist actions were based on making connections
between militarism, sexism, racism, classism, and environmental
destruction (however unevenly the action may have addressed these issues).
18Influenced by the writings of Susan Griffin, 19 Charlene Spretnak, 20
Ynestra King, 21 and Starhawk, a set of political positions that began to be
called ecofeminism developed among women sympathetic to the politics of
the WPA and other antimilitarist and environmental actions. Many women
involved in later antimilitarist direct actions thus began to call themselves
ecofeminists in the middle eighties as a way of describing their interlocking
political concerns. 22 In fact, an article in the 1981 issue of Tidings, the
newsletter of WLOE and the WPA, states that organizers decided not to get
involved with a Mother’s Day Coalition for Disarmament March in
Washington, DC, because “The Mother’s Day action is a single issue action
and not explicitly feminist.” Furthermore, the march was not organized
using a “participatory feminist process.” 23 Thus, even after the WPA,
“ecofeminism” referred not to antimiliarism alone but to a particular kind of
feminist, radically democratic antimilitarism that made connections to other
political issues. Rather than arising from “the peace movement,”
ecofeminists deeply influenced the nature of feminist peace politics in the
1980s.
As the label became more common among feminist antimilitarist
activists, a concomitant interest in ecofeminism was emerging in the
academy. The two arenas were intertwined at the Ecofeminist Perspectives:
Culture, Nature, Theory conference in March 1987 at the University of
Southern California (USC), organized by Irene Diamond and Gloria
Orenstein. This well attended conference was the beginning of a rapid
flowering of ecofeminist art, political action, and theory that continues
today. 24 This conference also marked the point where the word
ecofeminism began to be used outside the antimilitarist movement to
describe a politics that attempted to combine feminism, environmentalism,
antiracism, animal liberation, anticolonialism, antimilitarism, and
nontraditional spiritualities.
During the years following the USC conference, U.S. ecofeminists
became active in the international arena, intervening in the process of the
globalization of environmentalism. In 1991, a World Women’s Conference
for a Healthy Planet in Miami, Florida, was organized by the Women’s
Environmental Development Organization, or WEDO. For political reasons,
which I will discuss later, WEDO did not explicitly identify as
“ecofeminist,” but its rhetoric and vision were clearly in the ecofeminist
tradition. This conference brought together women from all over the world
to discuss environmental issues in the context of women’s knowledge,
women’s needs, and women’s activism. It served as a springboard for an
ecofeminist presence at the UN Conference on Environment and
Development at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which had some influence on the
international deliberations about solutions to worldwide environmental
problems. Besides this activity in an international arena, there have been
other important ecofeminist conferences, such as the Eco-visions: Women,
Animals, the Earth, and the Future conference in Alexandria, Virginia, in
March 1994 (which emphasized connections between feminism,
environmentalism, and animal liberation), and the Ecofeminist Perspectives
conference at University of Dayton, Ohio, in March 1994 (which
emphasized ecofeminist interventions into environmental philosophy). In
all these events, organizers stressed ecofeminism’s ability to make
connections between various radical politics. Which part of this multivalent
politics is emphasized or even included varies widely and remains deeply
contested among those that identify as ecofeminists. In particular, until the
late eighties, antispeciesist theories were underdeveloped portions of the
ecofeminist tool kit. Theories of the connections between heterosexism and
naturism remain underdeveloped within ecofeminism as of this writing. 25

Women and Nature, Feminism and

Environmentalism
Within this multivoiced and vibrant set of political positions were very
different theorizations of the connections between the unequal status of
women and the life-threatening destruction of the environment. A constant
and ongoing focus of ecofeminist theorizing, as well as critiques of
ecofeminism, has been how to conceptualize the “special connection”
between women and nature often presumed by the designation ecofeminism.
Very briefly and generally, I will outline five ways this relationship is
described. Though I isolate these analyses as positions, in operation they are
often combined and intertwined.
One position involves an argument that patriarchy equates women and
nature, so that a feminist analysis is required to understand fully the genesis
of environmental problems. In other words, where women are degraded,
nature will be degraded, and where women are thought to be eternally
giving and nurturing, nature will be thought of as endlessly fertile and
exploitable.
Another position, which is really the other side of the position just
described, argues that an effective understanding of women’s subordination
in Western cultures requires an environmentalist analysis. In a culture that is
in many ways antinature, which constructs meanings using a hierarchical
binarism dependent on assumptions of culture’s superiority to nature,
understanding women as more “natural” or closer to nature dooms them to
an inferior position. Furthermore, in a political economy dependent on the
freedom to exploit the environment, a moral and ethical relation to nature is
suspect. If women are equated with nature, their struggle for freedom
represents a challenge to the idea of a passive, disembodied, and objectified
nature.
A third position argues for a special relationship between women and
nature using a historical, cross-cultural, and materialist analysis of women’s
work. By looking at women’s predominant role in agricultural production
and the managing of household economies worldwide (cooking, cleaning,
food production, and purchasing of household goods, health care, and child
care), this position maintains that environmental problems are more quickly
noticed by women and impact women’s work more seriously. 26
A fourth position argues that women are biologically close to nature, in
that their reproductive characteristics (menstrual cycles, lactation, birth)
keep them in touch with natural rhythms, seasonal and cyclical, life- and
death-giving. Ecofeminists who are comfortable with this position feel that
women potentially have greater access than men do to sympathy with
nature, and will benefit themselves and the environment by identifying with
nature.
A fifth position is taken by feminists who are interested in constructing
resources for a feminist spirituality and who have found these resources in
nature-based religions: paganism, witchcraft, goddess worship, and Native
American spiritual traditions. Because such nature-based religions
historically contain strong images of female power and place female deities
as at least equal to male deities, many persons who are searching for a
feminist spirituality have felt comfortable with the appellation of
“ecofeminist.”
Before proceeding, I want to point to just one of the most obvious
contradictions within ecofeminism_ the serious lack of agreement between
positions one and two and position four. The first two positions see the
equation of women and nature as patriarchal; the fourth position sees this
equation as empowering to women and as providing resources for a
feminist environmentalism. Some variations of position five, concerned
with feminist spirituality, also see the equation of women and nature as
empowering. This contradiction is obscured by reductive depictions of
ecofeminism as “essentialist” without noting the existence of strong
constructionist positions within ecofeminism. That this contradiction—
between the critique of the connection between women and nature and the
desire for a positive version of that connection—is so deeply embedded
illuminates the consistent recurrence to essentialist notions of women and
nature that ecofeminism encounters in its attempt to construct a collective
subject within a social movement. It is also what prevents me from
assigning one or the other of the positions described above to one or another
ecofeminist author; in most cases, these different analyses of the
connections between women and nature are operating at the same time. One
of my contentions here (see chapter 4) is that white ecofeminist discourses
about “indigenous” women function to obscure this particular division
within ecofeminism. Thus, particular ecofeminist discourses of racial
difference side-step the contradictions between particular theorizations of
the connection between women and nature. Other political dangers as well
as advantages inhering in the essentialism of some ecofeminist formulations
of the connection between women and nature are discussed in the next
chapter. But to make a more general point about these positions here, there
has been a greater effort within ecofeminist theory to make connections
between women and nature rather than between feminism and
environmentalism as political movements, even though, as I show here,
such movement connections are often at stake in the production of these
theories. The subtext of movement contexts influences theoretical
constructions in which essentialist connections between women and nature
are more frequent than they otherwise might be.
To construct these and other variations of the theoretical connections
between women and nature, or between environmentalism and feminism,
ecofeminists have drawn on a number of feminist theories that, while not
necessarily aimed at answering questions about the relationship between
feminist and environmental politics, provided crucial analytical tools.
Feminist philosophical critiques of forms of abstract rationality that reify
divisions between culture and nature, mind and emotion, objectivity and
subjectivity; psychoanalytic theories of the ways in which masculinist
anxiety about women’s reproductive capacities structures male-dominated
political and economic institutions; feminist rethinkings of Christian
theology; critiques of the patriarchal nature of militarism; feminist
anthropological research; feminist critiques of science; feminist analyses of
the sexual objectification of women and feminist poststructualist theories of
constructed subjectivities and critiques of essentialism_ these are only a few
of the vital feminist resources for ecofeminist theories. 27 Despite its
reliance on central feminist theories, most strongly reflected in position two
above, ecofeminist theory remains in a tenuous relation to feminist theory, a
problem I’ll address more directly in chapter 6.
Feminist antiracist theory was also an important resource for
ecofeminists, providing a foundation from which to analyze the ways in
which hierarchies were created and maintained as well as a guide to
constructing a movement that attempts to be inclusive and antiracist.
Antiracism was thus a political position apparent in the very beginnings of
ecofeminism as theory and as practice, even though it has been a movement
that is predominantly white. At the same time, there are many women of
color who are either prominent in the movement or who serve as role
models for white ecofeminists. To further complicate the picture, many
environmental activists are women of color who do not identify as
ecofeminists, given that the genealogy of the label arises from the white
feminist antimilitarist movement and that U.S. ecofeminism has continued
to be a movement largely of white, middle-class women. 28
 In the sections that follow, I examine some environmental and feminist
contexts of ecofeminism’s development as a political location. In doing so, I
will be tracing the way in which ecofeminism developed as a process of
political negotiation within various environmentalist and feminist political
spaces.

Ecofeminism as a Feminist Intervention into

Environmentalist Contexts
Among other things, ecofeminism can be seen as a feminist rebellion within
radical environmentalism. Given that feminists had developed a number of
theoretical critiques of the ways in which the nature/culture split produced
various kinds of dominance that undergird sexism, racism, and classism, 29
it made sense that feminism should especially inform those radical versions
of environmentalism that analyzed the exploitation of nature as related to
various social injustices, and that feminisim would also be quite useful for
critiquing the bases for continued environmental degradation.
But such a logical relation between feminism and radical
environmentalism was not enough in itself to overcome sexism within
environmentalism. In a number of radical environmentalist contexts,
feminists had to challenge both male leadership and patriarchal thinking in
order to make room for a feminist analysis and presence. Often, these
challenges were not received positively, and, in reaction, feminists carved
out their own position: ecofeminism. To do so, essentialist notions of
women (and of men) were often deployed. This pattern can be traced in a
number of radical environmentalist contexts, as I have said, including the
antinuclear movement, social ecology, deep ecology, bioregionalism, Earth
First!, the U.S. Greens, animal liberation, and sustainable development. (To
some extent, I’ll address feminist interventions into the antinuclear
movement in chapter 2 and into sustainable development in chapter 5. But
in this chapter, I have only the space to trace this pattern in social ecology,
deep ecology, and Earth First! Such an analysis, however, could also be
made of the U.S. Greens and animal liberation. 30 A similar tracing of the
intersection of movement contexts could be done in the reverse, examining
ecofeminisms as environmentalist interventions into feminist contexts. I
will address this aspect to some extent in chapter 6.)
Before I proceed to a discussion of different environmentalist contexts in
which ecofeminism has been a factor, I’d like to stress that these accounts
are necessarily brief sketches, general pictures, ones that in some of these
cases should be considered preliminary. The kind of genealogy I am
attempting here is a political history, a narrative about social and intellectual
movements that are complex, contested, and amorphous. There are written
histories of various complexity and thoroughness for each of these
movements as movements as well as bodies of thought. I am interested here
in each environmentalist context only as ecofeminism appears as a point of
negotiation, a political location within different radical environmentalisms.
I am focused specifically on the appearance and definition of feminism as
ecofeminism; this gives an emphasis to each environmentalist context that
skews it toward its relationship to feminism rather than providing an
explication of each environmentalist context in its entirety. I draw on
published material, personal accounts of participants, and my own
experience as a participant within or observer of these movements for my
narrative to make a tracing of ecofeminism’s construction in relation to
strategic concerns within these political contexts.

Ecofeminism and Social Ecology

Murray Bookchin, a socialist-anarchist, is the founder and primary theorist
of social ecology. As an anarchist theory, social ecology advocates the
elimination of all social hierarchies, including that between humans and
nature. As a socialist theory, a critique of capitalism is at the center of its
vision of an ecological and free society. Bookchin’s influence on U.S.
radical environmentalism is enormous, though not often attributed. He was
an ecological activist as early as 1952, when he published an article on
chemical additives in food; he protested nuclear radiation and nuclear
power from 1954 onward. He was also an early advocate of alternative
technology. 31 Social ecology, the radical environmentalist theory that
Bookchin did so much to promote, analyzes the relationship between
environmental problems, capitalist labor relations, and social hierarchies. It
is a central and influential radical environmentalist theory that inspired
many organizational entities and environmental activists.
The development of Bookchin’s thought and of the Institute for Social
Ecology (ISE), which he cofounded in Vermont with Dan Chodorkoff, had
a close relationship to the thought and activism of second-wave feminists,
particularly those who were interested in anarchism, antimilitarism, and
environmentalism. Bookchin at one point recognizes this, in an essay
published in 1980. There, he said, “Only insofar as a counterculture, an
alternate technology or anti-nuke movement rests on the non-hierarchical
sensibilities and structures that are most evident in the truly radical
tendencies in feminism can the ecology movement realize its rich potential
for basic changes in our prevailing anti-ecological society and its values.” 32
From 1976 to 1984, the feminist activists in the antinuclear movement came
closest to Bookchin’s vision of radical social ecology, and many of them
were involved in the Northeast communities that formed the basis for the
ISE. Most relevant to our subject here, Ynestra King was closely involved
with the ISE from its beginnings, as a colleague of Bookchin who deeply
influenced and was influenced by him. King’s brand of ecofeminism was a
social ecofeminism (though she did not often use this label), a form of
social ecology that put questions of sexism at the center instead of the
periphery. The first classes in ecofeminism in the United States were taught
by King at ISE in 1978, and there has been an annual colloquium on
ecofeminism held there almost every summer since.
Social ecology had a strong influence on two areas of left
environmentalist activism_ the U.S. Greens and the antinuclear nonviolent
direct action movement. In both cases, ecofeminism was a concurrent
influence. The antimilitarist nonviolent direct action movement was in
many respects an anarchist movement advocating decentralization,
cooperative structures, and the elimination of hierarchies, and as such, was
deeply informed by social ecology. The influence of Bookchin on this
movement can be seen especially in its use of affinity groups, which
Bookchin did a great deal to popularize, though the practice was primarily
shaped by Quaker and civil rights protest methods. Bookchin and other
members of ISE were involved in the Clamshell Alliance, which was the
first antinuclear group formed on the basis of the identifying features of the
nonviolent direct action movement, using affinity groups and consensus
process and engaging in nonviolent direct action to try to halt the
construction of the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear power plant in 1976.
These actions and organizational forms were precursors to the first
ecofeminist antimilitarist actions, the Women’s Pentagon Actions,
organized by Ynestra King and others from the Clamshell and from ISE. 33
Social ecologists from ISE and elsewhere were also important
participants in the U.S. Greens, particularly in the Left Green Network, a
radical social anarchist wing of the Greens. Again, the stress on
decentralization, participatory democracy, and sustainable economic and
ecological practices made social ecology a foundation for Green politics,
and the Greens’ desire for a “postpatriarchal” society made it a logical place
for ecofeminist practice. Thus, for both the antimilitarist nonviolent direct
action movement and the U.S. Greens, social ecology and ecofeminism
were foundational radical political theories.
But the link between ecofeminism and social ecology contained several
tensions. Primary among them was the secondary place of feminism within
social ecology for Bookchin. Despite his organizational and activist ties to
feminists, his theoretical practice tended to elide these connections. A brief
foray into Bookchin’s written work will demonstrate this point.
An essay by Bookchin entitled “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”
was published in 1971, at the very beginnings of the radical
environmentalist movement in the United States. This essay made the
central connection between growing ecological devastation, social
hierarchies, and capitalist labor relations that defines social ecology. Here,
Bookchin argues that
the notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by
man. The patriarchal family planted the seed of domination in the nuclear relations of
humanity; the classical split in the ancient world between spirit and reality—indeed, between
mind and labor—nourished it; the anti-naturalist bias of Christianity tended to its growth.
But it was not until organic community relations, feudal or peasant in form, dissolved into
market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. 34

Bookchin’s work ties together the ecological concepts of balanced

ecosystems and unity in diversity with the anarchist values of
decentralization and participatory democracy.
As is apparent in the language of the above passage, an analysis of
sexism was present but underdeveloped in Bookchin’s conception of social
ecology at the outset. In this selection, he points to the domination of “man
by man,” stemming from the “seed of domination” planted in the
“patriarchal family.” Though he does not spell it out, here Bookchin seems
to be following Engels in arguing that the patriarchal family served as
originary foundation for exploitative relationships between men (as owner
and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker)—indeed, as the foundation
of property and capital accumulation. 35 The domination of women by men,
or the possible relation of that specific form of domination to the
exploitation of nature, is not considered explicitly, points that would have
been part of an ecofeminist analysis. In an article written ten years later,
Bookchin makes a similar statement: “Intertwined with the social crisis is a
crisis that has emerged directly from man’s exploitation of the planet.” But
this time he footnotes his use of the generic masculine. In the footnote, he
states: “I use the word ‘man’ here advisedly. The split between humanity
and nature has been precisely the work of the male, who, in the memorable
lines of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘dreamed of acquiring
absolute mastery over nature, of converting the cosmos into one immense
hunting ground’.” 36 The shift in emphasis between these (representative)
moments in the development of Bookchin’s thought show that while his
early formulations potentially include a feminist perspective, it is
unarticulated. Ten years later, he’s aware of the need to mention the “male-
dominated” characteristics of the social and ideological systems he is
criticizing, but only in a footnote, and only with reference to Adorno and
Horkheimer, rather than to feminist thinkers (to whom, by 1981, he must
have had access).
The essay from which the quotation above, citing Horkheimer and
Adorno, is drawn is an excerpt from Bookchin’s classic work, The Ecology
of Freedom. 37 In this book, Bookchin presents a more thoroughly worked-
out analysis of the relation between sexism and the origin of hierarchy.
Here, again, the possibilities of a feminist analysis within the framework of
social ecology are clear but underdeveloped. Bookchin sees the gendered
division of labor in what he calls “organic” societies (or tribal, hunting-
gathering, non-hierarchical cultures) as a natural one, based on the
reproductive characteristics of women. He rejects the notion that women are
physically weaker or less intellectually capable than men, 38 but he posits
the idea that the gendered division of labor produced different masculine
and feminine “temperaments.”
The male, in a hunting community, is a specialist in violence. From the earliest days of his
childhood, he identifies with such “masculine” traits as courage, strength, self-assertiveness,
decisiveness and athleticism—traits necessary for the welfare of the community. The
community, in turn, will prize the male for these traits and foster them in him…. Similarly,
the female is a specialist in childrearing and food-gathering. Her responsibilities focus on
nurture and sustenance. From childhood she will be taught to identify with such “feminine”
traits as caring and tenderness, and she will be trained in comparatively sedentary
occupations. The community, in turn, will prize her for these traits and foster them in her. 39

Bookchin does not argue that these different temperaments must be, or
were, valued unequally. He argues that many organic societies saw the two
sexes, their temperaments, and their spheres of work as complementary. It
is only after hierarchy is introduced by a gerontocracy, especially elders-
cumshamans, 40 that the domination of women and the equation of women
with nature is achieved. First, Bookchin argues, the elders begin to “abhor
natural necessity,” the “dumb ‘cruelty’ that the natural world inflicts upon
them” as they age, lose strength, and become dependent on others. 41 But
notably these are not just all elders, but specifically male elders, who begin
to equate women with nature because, Bookchin argues, of women’s
reproductive capacities. 42 Like all origin stories, this one depends upon
logic that seems commonsensical to the teller of the tale. Nothing about
these causal links—neither an apparent separation between nature and
human, nor a greater fear of nature by the aged rather than the young, nor
the assumption that the elders whose interpretations would predominate
would be the male rather than the female elders, nor the more apparent
“naturalness” of women’s reproductive capacities rather than other
biological capacities—is logically necessary. Even if one accepts that the
aged would begin to fear “nature” (rather than death, for instance), it is not
clear why women would then be equated with nature, or that nature would
be thought to be inferior, producing the social superiority of male rather
than female elders. Bookchin assumes that it is women’s ability to
reproduce that produces this equation. And this reduction of women to their
roles as mothers is important to his own thesis. Throughout the book,
Bookchin celebrates the mother-infant relationship as the basis of ethics and
reason in a social ecological society, the “cradle in which the need for
consociation is created.” 43 In doing so, even though Bookchin clearly
wishes to see women as equals to men, he leaves intact the familiar
patriarchal reduction of women to their reproductive role. While he stresses
that an ecological society is not the same as the organic societies he treats
favorably as nonhierarchical, he nowhere discusses whether gender roles in
the future utopian ecological society would be different, or would need to
be different, than those “temperamentally” different masculine and feminine
roles he described in organic societies.
My point here is not that Bookchin’s work is antifeminist, but that he
does not use feminist texts (The Ecology of Freedom mentions only Simone
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and only in a rather unfavorable and
dismissive footnote), he does not employ the feminist concept of gender, he
does not explore the implications of seeing the gendered division of labor as
socially constructed for his vision of a social ecological society, and he does
not examine motherhood as an historical and social institution (which
seems particularly lacking, given the emphasis he places on motherhood as
social fundamental). In short, he does not engage in a feminist analysis.
While several nuances to this conclusion could be added from Bookchin’s
later work, the choice of an excerpt from The Ecology of Freedom to
represent the position of social ecology in Merchant’s Key Concepts in
Critical Theory: Ecology, published in 1994, suggests that little of
substance has changed in Bookchin’s treatment of feminism.
Related to the tension around Bookchin’s lukewarm acceptance of
feminism is the central place Bookchin has held within social ecology. As
its grand old man, Bookchin has maintained a strong sense of ownership of
the theory, and this aspect of his influence was an obstacle to the growing
independence and popularity of ecofeminism. As ecofeminism found it
necessary, in some of its versions, to critique Marxist and Enlightenment
rationalism as well as notions of evolutionary development, 44 —both of
which were important to Bookchin as a theorist—it became more difficult
to contain ecofeminism as a subsidiary theory within social ecology. The
organization of the Women’s Pentagon Actions as separate, women’s-only
actions indicates the felt necessity for an independent ecofeminism and a
decisive break with the ambivalent treatment of feminism by masculinist
radical environmentalists, because of the difficulty of sustaining equal
leadership roles for women or a central theoretical place for feminism
within social ecology as well as other forms of radical environmentalism.
As I will argue in more detail in the next chapter, this imperative for
autonomy supported a particular rhetoric centered on justifying both
separate (or, in some cases, separatist) women’s actions and organizations
and a close connection between feminism and nonviolent direct action. It is
this particular rhetoric in early ecofeminism that has often been criticized as
essentialist by other feminists, but without a recognition of its function as a
feminist rebellion within a male-dominated form of radical
environmentalism.
Another tension generated between the early formulations of
ecofeminism and social ecology came from the complex interrelationship
between ecofeminism and feminist spirituality. As I’ve mentioned above,
some of those searching for forms of feminist spirituality turned to nature-
based religious practices, such as Native American religions, Goddess
worship, Wicca (witchcraft), or, in general, what Barbara Epstein
(following Margot Adler) calls “neo-paganism.” 45 Practitioners of these
forms of feminist spiritualities, as well as feminist and radical Christians
and Jews, were very active in the nonviolent direct action movement. Thus
these three sets of interests—ecofeminism, social ecology, and feminist
spirituality—were intertwined in the antinuclear and antimilitarist
movement of the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, as well as in the U.S.
Greens. But this interrelationship was not a totally harmonious one. Murray
Bookchin was particularly disturbed at connections with feminist
spirituality, perceiving it to be the worst form of apolitical mysticism. 46

Ynestra King, while not an adherent to and at times a critic of these forms
of spirituality herself, nevertheless was more tolerant of them, seeing the
ritual practices of neopaganism within political groups as helpful in some
cases for producing group cohesion—not unlike the songs, dances, and
other ritual forms used in left movements such as the civil rights and labor
movements. In this she was influenced by Starhawk, a Witch who had
developed an intricate theory of group processes to be used for radical
political goals using pagan symbols and rituals. Starhawk clearly operated
with a complex awareness of the metaphorical power of these tools, of their
instrumentality for political action rather than a naive conversion to
neopaganism. 47 Her influence on antimilitarist nonviolent direct action was
especially strong in the San Francisco Bay Area, where neopagan practices
and left political groupings coexisted with somewhat less tension than on
the East Coast. King, aware of the importance of Starhawk’s brand of
feminist spirituality to the nonviolent antimilitarist movement, and
appreciative of the effectiveness, in some cases, of such practices in
creating forms of radically democratic, anarcha-feminist politics, refused to
repudiate feminist spirituality outright. Chaia Heller, another important
social ecofeminist theorist (she coined the term “social ecofeminism”) 48

who taught at ISE from 1983 onward, was similarly ambivalent about
certain forms of feminist spirituality. Critical of the conceptualizations she
considered apolitical, she nevertheless saw the practice of feminist
spirituality within the feminist antimilitarist movement and within
particular lesbian-feminist communities as complex and often positive. 49
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bookchin engaged in several
acrimonious and often public debates with advocates of feminist
spirituality, particularly Charlene Spretnak, the editor of a ground-breaking
anthology on feminist spirituality who was active in the U.S. Greens. But
since his adherence to feminism was tenuous in the ways I’ve outlined
above, his critique of feminist spirituality could be easily dismissed on
those grounds. To legitimate this critique, a female feminist who was a
social ecologist needed to conduct it. Since both King and Heller’s complex
appreciation of the diversity within feminist spirituality did not lead them to
publicly denounce it, another social ecofeminist and student of Bookchin’s,
Janet Biehl, came forward to do this work.
Biehl identified as a social ecofeminist originally, writing two important
ecofeminist essays, “It’s Deep, But Is It Broad? An Ecofeminist Looks at
Deep Ecology,” 50 and “What is Social Ecofeminism?” 51 However, in
Biehl’s 1991 book, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics, she disassociated
herself from ecofeminism, saying that “the very word ecofeminism has
become so tainted by its various irrationalisms that I no longer consider this
a promising project.” 52 As the book was being written, the conflict between
Bookchin and King over the place of feminism and the superficial attention
to antiracism within social ecology had increased to acrimony, leading to
King’s ceasing to teach the summer classes on ecofeminism in 1989
(though she once again participated in the summer colloquia from 1994
onward). By the time Biehl’s book was completed, it was more than a
critique of feminist spirituality within ecofeminism_ it was a denunciation
of ecofeminism itself as a form of feminist spirituality.
Biehl’s book is a thoroughgoing attack on ecofeminism for what she sees
as its incoherence, its rejection of the liberatory potential of the Western
philosophical tradition, its reliance on metaphor, its mysticism, and its
essentialism. Many of Biehl’s critiques are worthwhile and thought
provoking. In particular, her warnings about the reactionary possibilities in
holistic thinking, her rejection of any kind of biologistic arguments for
women’s greater sympathy with nature, and her cautions about the
idealization of ancient Goddess religions are important contributions to
ecofeminist thought. 53
What remains problematic about the book is its desire to draw a sharp
line between ecofeminism and social ecology, its misleading (and some
claim unscholarly and dishonest) 54 portrayal of some ecofeminist positions
(particularly those of Ynestra King, Charlene Spretnak, and Starhawk), its
uncritical valuation of “rationality” and the project of the Western
Enlightenment, and its simplistic rendition of complex theoretical problems
(such as the use of metaphor in theoretical work, the role of “scientific”
thinking in political movements, or the analysis of gender as an historical
category). But most blatantly unreliable about Biehl’s portrayal of
ecofeminism is her willful ignorance of the work of ecofeminists who do
not fit her characterizations. Through the twin distortions of unfairly
presenting some ecofeminist positions in the book and completely ignoring
other ecofeminist work that cannot be twisted to be appropriate targets of
her critiques, Biehl achieves a reductive description of ecofeminism, a
straw-woman against which she can define “social ecology.” Douglas
Buege describes in detail the ways in which Biehl’s criticisms cannot be
leveled at the work of Karen J. Warren, Jim Cheney, and Val Plumwood, for
instance, pointing out that their work was available to Biehl at the time of
her writing, and therefore their invisibility within her book is inexcusable.
However useful or accurate Biehl’s criticisms may be in relation to certain
kinds of ecofeminism or feminist spirituality, Buege points out that the
narrow and misleading nature of Biehl’s characterization of ecofeminism
“leaves in question both the value of Biehl’s criticism against ecofeminism,
conceived as one position, and her scholarly integrity.” 55
As I will have occasion to discuss at different points in this book, the
creation of an ecofeminist straw-woman by reducing ecofeminism to its
most biologistic, essentialist, and apolitical manifestations is a technique
used by many critics of ecofeminism (many of whom compound the
problem by relying heavily on Biehl’s critique). I focus on Biehl’s book
here because it is so important in the history of the relationship between
social ecology and ecofeminism. The publication of Biehl’s book marks a
moment in which social ecology begins to be thought of as separate from
ecofeminism by many people, particularly those unaware of the close
relationship between the two in constructing social ecological theory and in
building the Institute for Social Ecology. This appearance of separation and
intolerance has been particular difficult for social ecofeminists who have
remained connected to social ecology. Chaia Heller, for instance, has
worked at ISE for over twelve years without encountering personal or
theoretical difficulties with the integration of feminism within social
ecology. Indeed, her invention and continued use of the label “social
ecofeminist” shows that she didn’t think the two were incompatible. From
this perspective, it’s ironic that Biehl’s book is seen as representative of
social ecology’s negative assessment of ecofeminism. Biehl’s arguments,
however, were prominently featured in Bookchin’s 1991 introduction to the
revised The Ecology of Freedom, where he followed her reduction of
ecofeminism to the most essentalist practitioners of feminist spirituality and
her misleading representations of many ecofeminist positions. Given
Bookchin’s adherence to Biehl’s critique and his prominence within social
ecology, Biehl’s book has become the one social ecological critique and
definition of ecofeminism that has mattered publicly. 56
The widespread concern over Biehl’s book among ecofeminists made its
mark in a continued unwillingness to directly critique the use of feminist
spirituality within ecofeminism. Critiques of biological essentialism are
frequent among ecofeminist theorists, but since the publication of Biehl’s
book, a certain agnosticism prevails among those ecofeminists who are not
practitioners of feminist spirituality. Rather than be associated with Biehl’s
critique, many ecofeminists have remained silent on the problems
embedded in the relationship between ecofeminism and feminist
spirituality. While there have been numerous writings on connections that
can be made between feminist spirituality and ecofeminism, the possible
conflict between the two has not been addressed with equal attention. This
does not mean that the connection is always made in the essentialist,
romanticizing manner criticized by Biehl. 57 Acknowledgment of the stigma
attached to ecofeminism through its alliance with certain essentialist,
apolitical, and ahistorical forms of feminist spirituality exists as a mumbling
around the edges of ecofeminist gatherings, a venting within isolated
personal conversations, or negotiations around whether and how to include
discussions of spirituality at ecofeminist conferences; but these are
anecdotal and subtextual knowledges of the conflict rather than worked-out
or published analyses or critiques. 58 This silence has its costs, however, as
critics of ecofeminism (or feminist spirituality, for that matter) who are
willing to reduce it to its most essentialist practitioners can use Biehl’s book
as support for their claims unchallenged.
In its critique of all forms of hierarchy, ecofeminism remains close to the
anarchist political theory of social ecology. Some ecofeminists have pushed
an antihierarchical stance farther than social ecology. Val Plumwood points
out that Bookchin’s “defence of the supremacy of reason and the western
tradition” and his view that politics is “confined to intra-human
relationships” means that social ecology “defends assumptions associated
with the human colonisation of nature and retains forms of intra-human
hierarchy which draw on this.” Thus, his theory falls short of “reconciling
the various critiques of domination.” 59 Though these comments by
Plumwood would seem to locate her version of ecofeminism as a stronger
version of anarchism, for the most part ecofeminists who are not explicitly
social ecofeminists have not developed an anarchist critique of bureaucracy
and the state. 60 Another theoretical difference, as I’ve mentioned above, is
that ecofeminism’s emphasis on feminism is more central than that found in
social ecology. But the fact that some social ecologists, notably Chaia
Heller, have brought social ecology and ecofeminism closer together
theoretically than has Bookchin suggests that theoretical differences are less
important in understanding the distinction between the two than
ecofeminism’s history of conflict within the organizational formations of
social ecology. As long as Bookchin retains a proprietary interest in social
ecology, an independent identity for ecofeminism is a requirement for its
full development. Social ecology remains a valuable potential ally for
ecofeminism, however, given the important place it gives to the relationship
between social problems and ecological problems, and its highly developed
analyses of the environmental and social costs of hierarchical economic,
political, and technological arrangements.

Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology

One of the most exciting moments of the Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture,
Nature, Theory Conference in March 1987 at the University of Southern
California occurred when George Sessions, one of the founders of deep
ecology, was challenged on the podium by ecofeminists in the audience.
While constituting a relatively friendly challenge, and acknowledging
Sessions’ courage in even attending the conference, the sight of various
ecofeminists standing in the audience to insist that Sessions attend to the
inherent sexism of his version of deep ecology was a deeply satisifying
experience for those feminists who had chafed under the pronouncements
of deep ecologists that their version of environmentalism was sufficient
ground for an adequate radical environmentalism. This event was an
embodiment of the sharp conflict between theorists of ecofeminism and
deep ecology that had preceded the conference and continued after it, as
well as of the conflicts over sexism within radical environmentalist groups
inspired by deep ecology. Deep ecology is a radical environmentalist
philosophy formulated primarily by Arne Naess, Bill Devall, George
Sessions, and Warwick Fox. Its central point is that environmental problems
stem from anthropocentricity, a human-centered ideological position. Thus,
environmental problems can only be solved by taking a biocentric or
ecocentric 61 approach, one that puts the needs of nature first, or at least on
a parallel with human needs. Though deep ecology has had an abiding
influence on a number of activist-oriented movements, it remains primarily
an intellectual movement. Though Earth First!, as an activist movement,
hews to a similar biocentric line, the two have separate origins; the founders
of Earth First! were not carrying out a plan laid down first by philosophers
of deep ecology. I will treat them as separate here, while acknowledging
their connection and their theoretical similarities.
In challenging deep ecology, ecofeminism was not alone; social
ecologists, particularly Murray Bookchin, had sharply critiqued deep
ecologists. Some of the ecofeminist and social ecologist objections to deep
ecology were shared ones, others diverged. The triangulation of this debate
is not always acknowledged, and this has functioned to obscure the close
theoretical relationship between social ecologists and ecofeminists as well
as to marginalize ecofeminism. 62 What is called the “deep ecology-social
ecology debate” is emphasized by many male historians of
environmentalism, often without reference to ecofeminist critiques of deep
ecology. What is called the “deep ecology-ecofeminist debate” similarly
ignores the social ecological critiques of deep ecology. 63 The frequent
obfuscation of this strategic alliance between social ecology and
ecofeminism by ecofeminists is one consequence of the split between the
two discussed above. The obfuscation of this alliance by social ecologists is
an indication of both the sexism of some of its practitioners as well as their
acceptance of Biehl’s reductive portrayal of ecofeminism.
Usually, the reference to the debate between ecofeminism and deep
ecology is to a series of disputes that have been carried out primarily in the
pages of Environmental Ethics, within the parameters of environmental
philosophy. 64 At the same time, conflicts over sexist theories and practices
have occurred within two radical environmentalist activist areas, Earth
First! and bioregionalism, which have been deeply influenced by the
theories of deep ecology. I will examine the theoretical debate first, and
then discuss the conflict within activist arenas, concentrating on Earth
First!. One of my points here is that though in both arenas we have
“ecofeminists” critiquing a biocentric perspective, these ecofeminisms
(philosophical and activist) are different from each other, and indeed not
often in communication in any active sense.
Arne Naess, in his 1973 essay, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range
Ecology Movement,” first introduced the term “deep ecology” to describe
an environmentalist tradition of ecocentrism as opposed to “shallow
ecology,” characterizing the latter as a “fight against pollution and resource
depletion [with the central objective of] the health and affluence of people
in developed countries.” 65 The position that nature has its own value and
should not be seen as principally a resource to satisfy human material needs
is traced by deep ecologists through Henry David Thoreau, John Muir,
Robinson Jeffers, and Aldo Leopold. Many deep ecologists also claim a
spiritual aspect to the position. As one introduction puts it: “Further
inspiration for contemporary ecological consciousness and the Deep
Ecology movement can be traced to the ecocentric religions and ways of
life of primal peoples around the world, and to Taoism, Saint Francis of
Assisi, the Romantic Nature-oriented counter-cultural movement of the
nineteenth century with its roots in Spinoza, and the Zen Buddhism of Alan
Watts and Gary Snyder.” 66 Snyder, in particular, is credited with a major
influence on deep ecology, and his essay “Re-Inhabitation,” as Drengson
and Inoue note, “is a seminal essay”; his writings, they state, deeply
influenced the countercultural back-to-the-land movement, “implicitly
[conveyed] the shallow-deep continuum for discovering the inherent values
of nature … [and] crystalized the Eastern influence on the Pacific side of
North America.” 67 Eastern religions are thus refigured in deep ecology as
ecological spiritualities and reflected in deep ecological philosophy as a
specific psychology of the self-in-nature. Naess’s version of this
construction of self is most influential for deep ecology and is explicated in
what Naess called “Ecosophy T,” the “T” standing for “Tvergastein, the
name of Naess’ tiny mountain hut in Norway,” in which he “developed a
deep spiritual kinship with the hut and its surroundings.” 68 “Ecosophy T,”
in Naess’s words, has “only one ultimate norm_ ‘Self-realization!’” 69

Naess distinguishes between “self” and “Self”: the lower-case nomenclature

indicates an individualistic, egoistic self; the upper-case Self is an expanded
Self, “as conceived of in certain Eastern traditions of atman. This large
comprehensive Self (with a capital ‘S’) embraces all the life forms on the
planet (and elsewhere?) together with their individual forms (jivas).” Such
an expanded Self is achieved through identification with others, including
nonhuman others, since “the higher the levels of Self-realization attained by
any one person, the more any further increase depends upon the Self-
realization of others.” 70 Fox’s word for this ecological self-realization is
“transpersonal ecology,” and he emphasizes that this “cosmological” or
“ontological” identification (in which “I” am seen as part of a “whole”—
nature, or the cosmos, or “being”), rather than “personal” identification (in
which the whole, or the other, is seen as part of “I”), is central to deep
ecology. 71
Early in the elaboration of deep ecology as a position, ecofeminists
critiqued this notion of Self-realization achieved through a process of
identification with or incorporation of the Other, whether that Other be
human or nonhuman. Before the publication of George Sessions and Bill
Devall’s landmark book, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Ariel
Salleh critiqued deep ecologists for identifying anthropocentrism (human-
centeredness) rather than androcentrism (male-centeredness) as the culprit
in producing a world view that assumed not only a radical split between
culture and nature but also the right of mankind (generic masculine
intended) to use nature at man’s discretion. Salleh criticized deep ecologists
for turning to an abstract, transcendentalist view of becoming one with
nature, rather than grounding their arguments on women’s lived experience
of boundarylessness between themselves and Nature. Further, though Salleh
notes deep ecology’s concern with “biological egalitarianism,” “diversity
and symbiosis,” and class domination, she asserts that without recognizing,
analyzing, and opposing male domination, such a theory will not eradicate
domination unless it accounts for the “parallel between the original
exploitation of nature as object-and-commodity resource and of nurturant
woman as object-and-commodity.” 72 Salleh, articulating a point that will
be echoed throughout the debate, warns that the focus on reducing
population—a central principle of deep ecology—without a feminist
politics visits a set of technocratic, oppressive policies on women resulting
in what she characterizes as “another [male] grab at women’s special
potency.” 73 Finally, Salleh is deeply suspicious of deep ecologists’ reliance
on Eastern religious philosophies, which as she points out, cannot simply be
assumed to be feminist. The desire to become one with nature that is
celebrated by deep ecologists reflects, in Salleh’s view, “not just a
suppression of real, live, empirical women, but equally the suppression of
the feminine aspects of men’s own constitution…. This is the self-estranged
male reaching for the original androgynous natural unity within himself.” 74
Thus, without analyzing and eradicating the sexist sources of masculine
alienation from nature, solutions to that alienation will in turn replay flawed
masculine preferences for abstraction, atomism, and domination.
 Written in 1984, Salleh’s piece is perhaps one of the best examples of a
clearly essentialist version of ecofeminism. She identifies patriarchy as a
realm of male dominance, without allowing differences of class, race, or
other vectors of hierarchy to modify male responsiblity for the domination
of nature. Though she acknowledges a social dimension to women’s
experience that accounts for the fact that “the traditional feminine role runs
counter to the exploitive technical rationality which is the current requisite
masculine norm,” 75 she privileges a biological determinism to explain her
position that women’s identity with nature is a “fact of life”: “Women’s
monthly fertility cycle, the tiring symbiosis of pregnancy, the wrench of
childbirth and the pleasure of suckling an infant, these things already
ground women’s consciousness in the knowledge of being coterminous with
Nature.” 76 These turns to essentialism occur in her essay precisely where
she is trying to establish that women and women’s lives should be resources
for a new environmentalism aimed to eliminate the domination of nature. In
two later essays, however, Salleh rejects an essentialist position explicitly
and clarifies her comments in the earlier essay by pointing to “the historical
process at work here, namely, that it is patriarchal domination that puts
women close to nature. Not only is the feminine pysche constructed
differently by this means, but the work roles that women are assigned also
revolve around nature.” 77 Further, she explains:
It is nonsense to assume that women are any closer to nature than men. The point is that
women’s reproductive labor and such patriarchally assigned work roles as cooking and
cleaning bridge men and nature in a very obvious way, and one that is denigrated by
patriarchal culture. Mining or engineering work similarly is a transaction with nature. The
difference is that this work comes to be mediated by a language of domination that
ideologically reinforces masculine identity as powerful, aggressive, and separate over and
above nature. 78
Salleh concludes that deep ecology cannot reach its goal of a biocentric
egalitarianism without attending to sexism, racism, classism, and the
“complex interlocking issues, economic and ideological, that have to be
dealt with, [as well as] a sense of the ‘labor’ involved in bringing about
social change.” 79 She suggests that ecofeminism has a clearer sense of the
integrated nature of these issues and the activist challenges that must be
engaged, a sensibility that, unlike deep ecology, does not shy away from
human concerns in its struggle for ecological sanity.
Marti Kheel was also an early ecofeminist critic of deep ecology. In “The
Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair,” she argues that a feminist version
of holism that values individuals as interrelated, dynamic constituents of a
whole is preferable to the holism found in deep ecology (her examples are
versions proposed by J. Baird Callicott and Aldo Leopold), which allows a
unified (biotic) whole to determine the value of individuals. 80 Further, in a
paper originally delivered at the 1987 Ecofeminist Perspectives conference
at USC, Kheel points out that:
When deep ecologists write of anthropocentrism and the notion of an “expanded Self”, they
ostensibly refer to a gender-neutral conception of self. Implicit in the feminist analysis of the
androcentric worldview, however, is the understanding that … women’s identities, unlike
men’s, have not been established through their elevation over the natural world. On the
contrary, under patriarchal society, women have been identified with the devalued natural
world, an identification that they have often adopted as well. 81

Kheel’s work, less explicitly than Salleh’s early essay, exhibits arguments
referring to women’s biological attributes as establishing a superior
standpoint in relation to nature compared to men’s. This tendency in
Kheel’s work occurs where she feels the need to argue for the usefulness of
a feminist analysis of environmental exploitation, and as an explanation for
the inadequacy of the deep ecologist position.
 Other ecofeminist critiques of deep ecology more firmly reject the
biologism of Salleh’s 1984 article, taking up some of the same critiques of
deep ecology, but through a feminist politics grounded on an analysis of
women’s experiences as ordered by patriarchy rather than biology. Ynestra
King states that “connecting women to nature need not acquiesce to
biological determinism … if nature is understood as a realm of potential
freedom for human beings—both women and men—who act in human
history as part of the natural history of the planet, in which human
intentionality and potentiality are an affirmed part of nature.” 82 She goes
on to argue that “deep ecology ignores the structures of entrenched
economic and political power within society, concentrating exclusively on
self-realization and cultural transformation, taking the side of nature over
culture, thereby insisting that human beings conform to the laws of nature
as understood by deep ecologists.” 83
Influenced by the debates between ecofeminism and deep ecology, a
distinctively philosophical version of ecofeminism arose that, in opposition
to the incorporative holism of deep ecology, constructed a contextual
ecofeminist ethics oriented toward a relational notion of self and a feminist
analysis of the patriarchal socialization of women and men into different
ethical practices. Jim Cheney notes that: “The basic claim [of ecofeminism]
is that, through linking or identifying women with nature, the need for
domination and control of nature becomes charged with the same irrational
fury and ambivalence as the need for domination and control of women.” 84
Deep ecology’s desire to rid society of the need for the “domination and
control of nature” would seem to ally it with ecofeminist concerns, but, as
Cheney argues, “deep ecological attempts to overcome human (really
masculine) alienation from nature fail in the end because they are unable to
overcome a masculine sense of self and the kinds of ethical theory that go
along with this sense of self.” 85 The “oceanic feeling of fusion” with nature
promoted by deep ecologists is just the flip side of a dualism that allows
only two choices in our relationship with nature (and with other human
beings): “either we ‘respond to nature as a part of ourselves,’ or we treat it
‘as a stranger or alien available for exploitation.’… We have either
atomistically defined selves who are strangers to one another or one
gigantic self.” 86
Moving beyond a critique of deep ecology, Cheney offers an account of
an ecofeminist ethical perspective that honors both nature and human
beings, the whole and various selves. Instead of seeing ourselves either as
atomistic or a “community of one,” he suggests that we use the feminist
idea of the “defining relationship,” or that we use how “our relationships
with others are central to our understanding of who we are” 87 as a way to
understand selfhood and appropriate ways of being in the world. Thus, he
argues, moral decisions would be contextual rather than abstract and rule
bound. Cheney recognizes that in a patriarchal society, women who define
themselves by their relationships to others are often subject to the
“pathology of self-sacrifice,” but he argues that such pathology only arises
when others in the society define themselves atomistically, using a
masculinist notion of autonomous self-construction. 88 In Cheney’s view,
contextual ethics in a society where selves are defined relationally and
decisions are based on the most complex, detailed narratives possible is
potentially more able to break down Western dualisms between culture and
nature than can deep ecology’s false “feminization” of environmental
attitudes grafted onto masculine ethical sensibilities.
Cheney’s argument is closely associated with, and indeed constructed in
relation to, the work of Karen Warren. Warren’s classic description of
ecofeminism, “Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections,” appeared in
the same 1987 issue of Environmental Ethics as another important essay in
the ecofeminist/deep ecology debate, Michael Zimmerman’s “Feminism,
Deep Ecology and Environmental Ethics.” Warren’s essay outlines the
“minimal conditions” of an ecofeminist theory, positions with which, she
says, all ecofeminists might agree: “(i) there are important connections
between the oppression of women and the oppression of nature, (ii)
understanding the nature of these connections is necessary to any adequate
understanding of the oppression of women and the oppression of nature,
(iii) feminist theory and practice must include an ecological perspective,
(iv) solutions to ecological problems must include a feminist perspective.”
89 Clearly, Warren’s argument is aimed at convincing both feminists and
radical environmentalists that ecofeminism is the best theoretical grounding
for their arguments. I shall examine Warren’s claim about the importance of
making “eco-feminism central to feminist theory and practice” in chapter 6.
Here I want to underline the second part of Warren’s agenda: making
ecofeminism central to radical ecology. Though not emphasized in this
essay, one part of Warren’s project is to argue that deep ecology cannot
substitute its own principles of “biospheric diversity” and “holism” for a
feminist perspective. If one aspect of the devaluation of nature in our
culture is the feminization of nature, then a feminist analysis must be part of
a perspective that wishes to revalue nature. Warren is more explicit in a
1990 essay, “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism.” Here
she takes on Warren Fox’s critique of ecofeminism, in which he argues that
there is no conflict between deep ecology and ecofeminism, but that a
critique of anthropocentrism can easily incorporate a critique of
androcentrism. 90 On the face of it, this position might not seem
objectionable to ecofeminists, many of whom have noted the similarities
between the two positions. But Fox, in arguing that anthropocentrism is the
“root cause” of not only ecological destruction but also of human
domination of other humans, refuses to deploy the ecofeminist analysis that
locates “humanism” as a specifically masculinist construct. Warren says:
Whatever the important parallels between deep ecology and ecofeminism (or, specifically,
my version of ecofeminism)—and indeed, there are many—it is precisely my point here that
the word feminist does add something significant to the conception of environmentalist
ethics, and that any environmental ethic (including deep ecology) that fails to make explicit
the different kinds of interconnections among the domination of nature and the domination of
women will be, from a feminist (and ecofeminist) perspective such as mine, inadequate. 91

Warren’s version of ecofeminism, in which she argues for a “transformative

feminism” that moves beyond the inadequacies in—as well as building on
the strengths of—liberal, Marxist, socialist, and radical feminism, places
analyses of the domination of nature in relation to, rather than superior to,
other analyses of domination. A “transformative feminism” would,
according to Warren, make the connections between all systems of
oppression explicit, including racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism,
speciesism, and naturism; it would “provide a central theoretical place for
the diversity of women’s experiences, even if this means abandoning the
project of attempting to formulate one overarching feminist theory or one
women’s voice”; it would promote values and social processes (such as
“care, friendship, reciprocity in relationships, appropriate trust, diversity)
underplayed or lost in traditional … ethics”; and it would challenge
masculinist versions of science and technology. 92
A similarly complex version of ecofeminism, opposed to essentialism
and holism (whether feminist or masculinist versions) can be found in Val
Plumwood’s work, which, like Warren’s, develops in the context of
philosophical debates between deep ecologists, social ecologists, and
ecofeminists. Plumwood’s work centers on the deconstruction of Western
versions of the self, humanity, and nature, which she argues are imbedded
in a tradition of rationalism that has had damaging consequences for
women, people of color, and nature. An Australian theorist, Plumwood
brings to her theorizing a particularly sharp understanding of the horrifying
uses that rationality and humanism have been put to in colonialist
endeavors. 93 Like Warren, Plumwood prefers a relational account of the
construction of self, and promotes an “ethic of care” as one contribution
ecofeminist theorists make to an adequate environmental ethic. But
Plumwood is focused on more than ethics; she is also interested in a critique
of ontological and epistemological aspects of the Western attachment to a
masculinist and naturist version of rationality. “Mainstream environmental
philosophy is problematic not just because of restriction in ethics but also
because of restriction to ethics…. [T]his neglects the key further aspects …
of dualism and the account of the self and of human identity as
hyperseparated from nature … as well as the broader historical and political
aspects of the critique of dualism and instrumentalism.” 94 The ways in
which Western rationalism and humanism have defined humanity and the
self as precisely not nature (and the ways in which nature has been defined
as those aspects that are seen as particularly feminine) are labeled by
Plumwood as the “discontinuity problem,” i.e., constructing the essence of
(masculinist) humanity as its separateness from nature. Deep ecologists, she
says, have been an exception to mainstream environmental ethicists in
attempting to address the “discontinuity problem,” but they have done so in
ways that are inadequate and can be traced to their dismissal of feminist
arguments about the self, ethics, difference, and the critique of humanism.
Plumwood identifies three ways that deep ecologists have tried to argue for
bridging the gulf between humans and nature: the “indistinguishability
account,” “the expanded self,” and the “transcended or transpersonal self.”
95 In all cases, Plumwood says, the solutions offered by deep ecology
ignore difference and particularity and imagine a “oneness with nature” that
leaves no room for the separateness and autonomy of the other. Plumwood
points out that feminists have long critiqued the idea of feminine self-
sacrifice for the other, and have been suspicious of “the arrogance in failing
to respect boundaries and to acknowledge difference which can amount to
an imposition of self.” 96 Instead, she prefers the feminist idea of the
“rationality of the mutual self, the self which can take joy in the flourishing
of others, which can acknowledge kinship but also feast on the other’s
resistance and grow strong on their difference.” 97
The deep ecology/ecofeminism debate, as Deborah Slicer has pointed
out, has not been much of a debate. Most of the deep ecologists purporting
to answer ecofeminist critiques do not seem to have bothered, as Slicer puts
it, “to familiarize themselves with the feminist and ecofeminist literature
that has been accumulating in various feminist journals and texts for some
three decades now before taking feminists and ecofeminists to task.” 98 She
notes that Warwick Fox, in his essay “The Deep Ecology-Ecofeminism
Debate,” takes up ecofeminist arguments primarily in the form of two male
authors, Jim Cheney and Michael Zimmerman. While Slicer does not
dispute that Cheney, in particular, and Zimmerman, with qualifications,
present satisfactory ecofeminist arguments, she notes that this rhetorical
strategy of taking men’s arguments, even about feminism, more seriously
than similar or better ones made by women is a familiar experience for
women in a sexist society. The experience of “having men talk through
[women] to other men as though they did not exist” is relived by Slicer
“each time I read the essay by Fox, who is having a conversation with
Zimmerman and Cheney while the women stand gagged in the footnotes.”
99 The attempt by deep ecologists to subsume ecofeminism is an attempt to
silence them and to avoid learning how to engage in the kind of complex
feminist analysis of sexism (or androcentrism) that underlies an ecofeminist
critique of anthropocentrism. 100 Instead, deep ecologists like Fox claim
that ecofeminism simply adds concerns with gender equality to the
foundational positions of deep ecology that construct a radical
environmentalist stance beyond “reformist” environmentalism. As Slicer
points out, some even go so far as to say that ecofeminism is derivative of
deep ecology. 101
In elaborating the variant of ecofeminism found in environmental
philosophy, especially environmental ethics, I have not argued that this
ecofeminism is born from its debate with deep ecology. Rather, I have tried
to show that the debate has pushed ecofeminist philosophy to emphasize
certain concepts, particularly the idea of the relational self, a contextual
ethics of care, and a respect for difference and particularity over
universalism and holism. There is much more to ecofeminist philosophy
than these concepts, of course, but my purpose here is not to elaborate the
entirety of ecofeminist philosophical postions. Rather, I want to note the
historical and political specificity of these debates—which influence the
creation of a particular form of ecofeminism—centered on specific
concerns that both differ and resonate with other ecofeminisms. In
particular, as one would suspect because of the ideological relationship
between Earth First! and deep ecology, ecofeminist philosophers come to
somewhat the same positions and articulate similar critiques of the sexism
of biocentrism as ecofeminist activists in Earth First!. Yet the route taken to
these ecofeminist places is separate. It is to the place of ecofeminism in
Earth First! to which I will now turn.

Ecofeminism and Earth First!

Given that deep ecology is often credited with being a major philosophical
influence on the radical activist organization Earth First!, it is not surprising
that similar ecofeminist critiques have been made of both deep ecology and
Earth First!. Like the ecofeminism-deep ecology debate, ecofeminism has
had social ecology as an unacknowledged partner in this critique. And, in
similar ways, ecofeminists have sometimes been excluded in order to
portray the debate as being between men only.
For example, one of the most glaring omissions of ecofeminism as a
critic of deep ecology and Earth First! occurs in a book called Defending
the Earth. This book arose out of a public dialogue set up between
Bookchin and Dave Foreman by the Learning Alliance in New York City,
which has organized a number of public radical political debates. That no
one in the organization saw the need to include an ecofeminist as one of the
main contenders (Judi Bari, an Earth First!er critical of Foreman’s brand of
eco-macho as well as Bookchin’s perceived “anthropocentricity” would
have been an appropriate and interesting addition) is bad enough. But
ecofeminists were not even allowed a secondary role. The format of the
dialogue was to have Bookchin and Foreman each stake out their positions.
Then they were questioned by various speakers positioned as interrogators
from the outside of both social ecology and deep ecology: Paul McIsaac,
representing “the left”; Linda Davidoff, representing “reformist
environmentalism”; and Jim Haughton, representing “anti-racist
environmentalism.” That ecofeminism was not considered a worthwhile
participant given this structure is indicative of the widespread sexism of
radical environmentalisms. 102
What is interesting, however, in thinking about ecofeminism as a
movement that arises out of different movement contexts, is that the
ecofeminists who critique deep ecologists are a different group from those
that have critiqued Earth First!ers. The latter have generally been Earth
First!ers themselves, while the former have been feminist philosophers.
That a similar critique should be generated by two groups of feminists in
very different class and philosophical locations, without communication
between the two, shows the way in which ecofeminism has developed as a
feminist rebellion within various radical environmentalisms rather than as a
coherent, single-source movement. It also demonstrates the strength of
feminism as a widespread and diverse political consciousness.
Earth First! was the brainstorm of five men who were on a camping trip
in 1980 in the Southwest: Dave Foreman, Howie Wolke, Mike Roselle, Burt
Koehler, and Ron Kezar. 103 Like their fictional counterparts in Edward
Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey-Wrench Gang, 104 the five men turned
their camping trip into a prowilderness action. The mythology of this trip is
replete with masculinist images: drinking beer, visiting a whorehouse
(probably apocryphal), smuggling beer over the border, erecting a sign
memorializing an Indian warrior. 105 The motto: “No Compromise in
Defense of Mother Earth!” was Earth First!’s war cry: a volatile mix, part
male protectionist, part biocentrist, and part determined confrontation.
Nevertheless, Earth First! attracted women activists from the start.
Earth First!’s exclamation point signaled the imperative quality of its
intention to stop the destruction of wilderness. Defending Mother Earth for
Earth First!ers was an activity characterized by direct action, with no
hesitation about property destruction, motivated by a passion for protecting
wilderness areas and their dependent species. The forms of direct action
pioneered or preferred by Earth First!, such as “desurveying” (pulling up
stakes marking future roads through wilderness areas), disabling road-
building and logging machinery (through sugar or sand in gas tanks, or
breaking delicate parts with hammers and wrenches), tree spiking (putting
nails into trees chosen to be logged causing damage to logging machinery),
and tree sitting (occupying trees which had been marked for logging for
days or even weeks), were all tinged with a patina of toughness, risk taking,
and military-like stealth that lent itself easily to machismo. A refrain from a
popular Earth First! song written by Mike Roselle, one of the founders, and
Darryl Cherney, one of the most prolific and well-known of the Earth First!
traveling bards, went: “We’ll have an Earth Night Action, it’s instant
satisfaction,” 106 marking the pleasure in taking direct action aimed
precisely and often effectively at the agents of wilderness despoliation, and
constructed in opposition to both environmentally exploitative corporations
as well as mainstream environmentalism. Such delight in radical action
attracted both men and women, but remained embedded in a masculinist
culture. As “redneck” environmentalists, Earth First!ers constructed an
ironic image counterpoised to the image of mainstream environmentalists as
middle- to upper-class liberals. A popular portrayal of Earth First!ers,
printed in The Earth First! Journal, depicted a hairy man outfitted in “size
11 mountain-climbin’, woods-hikin’, desert-walkin’, butt-kickin’, rock-n-
rollin’ waffle stompers,” complete with “massive 12 inch knife,” “massive
40-inch beer belly,” “camouflage bandanna (multipurpose),” “permanent
snarl,” and “wrench—fer ‘fixin’ things.” Joni Seager, reprinting this image
in her book’s section on Earth First! entitled “Deep Machismo,”
appropriately notes the image’s “self-irony.” 107 The ironic, humorous, and
theatrical element of Earth First!, not generally appreciated by outsiders to
the culture, also made it possible for women Earth First!ers to appropriate
“deep machismo” for their own purposes of empowerment in rejecting a
feminine (and middle-class) stereotype of delicacy and passivity. Yet, given
the masculinist basis of the eco-warrior image, this feminist appropriation
was severely limited by the requirements of such a sexist culture that
women also act as earth mothers and sex objects. Joni Seager notes that
“with very few exceptions, the self-styled leaders and spokespeople of
Earth First! were all men, as was a considerable proportion of its
membership (in contrast with all other environmental groups)…. It is clear
that Earth First! is attractive to women who want to participate in
environmental change; it is not clear how feminist women within Earth
First! reconcile their involvement with the deeply misogynistic face of the
national and international branches of the movement.” 108
One answer to Seager’s question is found in the decentralized structure of
Earth First!. Organized in small, independent, “affinity groups” (though the
term was not always explicitly used within Earth First!) and tolerant of
individual, autonomous actions, the anarchistic structure of Earth First!
allowed for a great deal of variation along the lines of political beliefs,
direct action tactics, and use of cultural symbols. That this variation and this
humor does not come across at the “national and international level,” as
Seager says, is a result of the sexism and conservatism of the press as much
as of Earth First!’s own sexism. In his book on radical environmentalism,
Rik Scarce quotes Nancy Zirenberg, long-time merchandise manager for
The Eaüh First! Journal, as saying: “There’s a macho image. There’s also a
very feminist image that is not portrayed in the media,” and she notes that
the media insists on male spokepeople at Earth First! actions. 109 Contrary
to this public persona, Scarce found that several Earth First! women felt that
there was more equality at the grassroots level of the organization. As a
result, the adherence to the macho public face of Earth First! was uneven
and, within certain areas, actively rejected. Nevertheless, conflicts over
sexism within the movement and its cultural symbols was one major bone
of contention within Earth First!, adding to a series of internal conflicts
from 1987 to 1992 that changed its tenor away from its original conception
as a loose affiliation of “butt-kickin’” radical biocentrists identified not as
leftists but as wild men of the forest.
One influential region in the often acrimonious debates over the politics
and cultural symbols of Earth First! was Northern California, where
organizing against the logging of old-growth redwood forests brought Judy
Bari to prominence. Bari, a feminist with considerable experience in labor
organizing, was pivotal in the creation of ecofeminism as a feminist
rebellion within Earth First!, and her story will be the centerpiece of my
discussion here.
Bari was deeply influenced by Marxist analysis as an anti-Vietnam war
activist in her college days. After several years of radical union organizing,
Bari moved in 1988 to Northern California, where she became involved in
trying to prevent the logging of old-growth redwood that was planned by
the multinational conglomerate Maxxam. Her interest in saving the trees
was complemented from the first by her interest in labor and feminist
issues. As Scarce writes, “In order to pay off the massive junk bond debt it
had incurred in the purchase of Palco [the local family-owned logging
company], Maxxam had to ‘liquidate’ the only real ‘capital’ Palco owned—
the redwoods. That, Bari recognized, spelled doom not only for the forests
but for the workers as well. There was forced overtime, meaning less time
with family and more accidents, and the faster the trees were cut, the sooner
the workers would lose their jobs.” 110 Bari’s politics were always
multileveled; concerned for the environment, she also focused on the
mostly male workers’ labor conditions as well as on issues important to
women and to the families of the loggers. Within Earth First!, she argued
for a change in tactics as well as analysis: “By and large, most of the people
who had the freedom for [the] kind of travel and risk-taking [characterized
by early Earth First! actions] were men.” 111 Instead, when Bari organized
the massive actions in 1990 against the logging of redwoods in Northern
California called “Redwood Summer” (a reference to the civil rights
mobilization in Mississippi in 1964 called “Freedom Summer”) she
promoted an explicit code of nonviolence, renounced tree spiking in order
to maintain an alliance with timber workers, and encouraged female
leadership within the action. 112 Indeed, the organizing culture of the region
was oriented toward a different kind of direct action from that preferred by
Earth First! founders. Northern California had been a hotbed of
antimilitarist nonviolent direct action in the 1980s, and hundreds of activists
had experience in direct actions against nuclear weapons, nuclear power,
and anti-U.S. intervention (all of which also contained an environmentalist
analysis). 113 Borrowing from the antimilitarist movement organizational
methods such as affinity group structures, nonviolent training and
nonviolent guidelines for activists, and actions involving hundreds rather
than tens of people, Redwood Summer marked a significant departure from
earlier Earth First! action styles. And such new tactics and multilevel
politics caused considerable controversy.
Much of the debate over the political shift represented by Redwood
Summer can be traced within the Earth First! Journal. A lot of these
debates also took place within Earth First! regional or national
“rendezvous,” which were gatherings of Earth First!ers in wilderness area
for several days of meetings, music, and partying. The biggest gathering
was the annual Round River Rendezvous, which essentially served as a
national policymaking entity for the loosely affiliated Earth First! regional
groups. In the Earth First! Journal, Bari’s voice appears consistently as a
feminist agitator, marking many women’s discomfort with the macho
tendencies within Earth First! and promoting Northern California Earth
First! as a region in opposition to this aspect of the movement. In a report
on the California Rendezvous, for instance, Bari says: “Another significant
facet of this rendezvous was the absence of that male machismo with which
EF! has become associated. This was partly because California has such a
strong feminist contingent, and partly because some of the worst offenders
didn’t show up.” 114 Bari’s comments were objected to by a number of letter
writers to the Journal, including some women. 115 Her insistence on
including sexism as an important issue within the movement was forcefully
rejected by many Earth First!ers, such as co-founder Howie Wolke, who
wrote: “Racial and sexual discrimination, human rights, religion, foreign
policy, lifestyle, diet and a host of other issues are important, and do have
serious ramifications for the health and survival of diverse life on the Earth.
But in the Journal and elsewhere in EF!, any discussion or inclusion of
issues such as these should be subservient to the real focus of our
movement: wilderness, biodiversity, planetary survival.” 116
This debate, defined as a conflict between “biocentrism” and
“humanism” by the old guard of Earth First!, raged throughout the
movement until 1990, when it came to a head. Though, as in Wolke’s
statement above, other issues besides sexism were seen as tainting the
purity of Earth First!’s commitment to biocentrism, feminism was hotly
debated within the movement. Dolores La Chappelle had a short-lived stint
as a columist in the Journal, where her essay “No, I’m Not an Eco-
Feminist: A Few Words In Defense of Men,” generated intense reaction
from several feminist Earth First!ers. 117 Much of the argument took place
in the Redneck Women’s Caucus (convened annually, along with a Men’s
Caucus, during the Rendezvous): Loose Hip Circles reported in “Riotous
Rendezvous Remembered” that the 1989 Women’s Caucus “renamed
ourselves the Wild Women, [and] decided that we didn’t need to talk about
male domination anymore.” 118 Until 1990, however, feminist voices
besides Bari’s were mostly restricted to the letters section, which was called
“Dear Shit Fer Brains.”
In September 1990, in response to criticisms from many Earth First!ers,
including a vocal Northern California contingent, that the Journal’s
emphasis on a purist version of biocentrism and its continued criticism of
Redwood Summer as a “leftist” rather than a “biocentric” action was
unrepresentative of the movement, the original Journal staff resigned en
masse. In addition, stung by internal criticisms of statements he had made
that were widely seen as racist, misanthropic, and misogynistic, Dave
Foreman resigned from Earth First!. Foreman, the most well-known
founder of Earth First!, was seen as a liability at this point by many Earth
First!ers, because of his widely reported statement in an interview that
famine relief in Ethiopia was contrary to a biocentric perspective opposed
to population growth, and because of his refusal to repudiate Edward
Abbey’s statements that immigration into the United States should be halted
for environmental reasons. In addition, articles printed in the Journal in
1987 by a pseudonymous author, Miss Ann Thropy, suggested that AIDs
may be a natural defense of the Earth against overpopulation. 119 Taken
together, these statements tarred the biocentric perspective, opening Earth
First! to criticisms of being against people, especially people of color.
Though there was also plenty of positive feeling toward Foreman,
particularly since he had been recently arrested by the FBI as a co-
consipirator in an attempt to cut down power lines (an action promoted by
an FBI infiltrator), the extremist biocentric position he represented came
more and more under attack. In the September 1990 issue, Foreman and his
long-time companion, Nancy Morton, wrote a letter announcing their
resignation from Earth First!. A relatively gentle letter, calling the decision
a “no-fault divorce,” Foreman and Morton cited as their reason
 an effort to transform an ecological group into a Leftist group. We also see a transformation
to a more overtly counterculture/anti-establishment style, and the abandonment of
biocentrism in favor of humanism. Mind you, we are not opposed to campaigns for social
and sconomic justice. We are generally supportive of such causes. But Earth First! has been
from the beginning a wilderness preservation group, not a class-struggle group…. Moreover,
we are conservationists. We are not anarchists or Leftists. We are biocentrists, not humanists.
120

In the same issue, founder Howie Wolke and deep ecologist Bill Devall also
said good-bye to Earth First!. Wolke wrote: “I’m tired of being sidetracked
by eco-feminism, sanctuary, anarchy, woo-woo, coalition building, bleeding
heart humanists against misanthropy, sexist animal lovers for gay rights,
and all of the other egostical fodder for human chauvinistic cause-lovers.”
121 And Devall complained that “it seems the rainbow coalition, anarchists,
hippies, ecofeminists, anyone who wants to be ‘where the action is’, and
leftists of all varieties, including so called social ecologists, have infested
radical environmentalism because radical ecology seems to be the only
game in town in the 1990s.” 122
In the same issue, Judi Bari responded: “The only way to preserve
wilderness and the only way to save our planet’s life is to find a way to live
on the earth that doesn’t destroy the earth. In other words, Earth First! is not
just a conservation movement, it is also a social change movement.” And
she argued that an important cause of the dispute within Earth First! was
sexism in the movement:
Another change that goes with our world view is the prominence of women in EF!. Ed
Abbey’s retrogressive view of women as sex objects doesn’t make it [at Redwood Summer],
where about ¾ of the EF! organizers are strong and competent women. And although male
dominance is not the only problem with our society or the sole reason for the destruction of
nature, it’s definitely a factor. Any change toward a non-exploitive culture would have to
include a balance between masculine and feminine, and we had better start with our own
movement. 123
Clearly, the tactics and political philosophy of Redwood Summer were seen
as one of the major problems for the “old guard” of Earth First! in this
debate. The renouncing of tree spiking, the prominence of women, the
adherence to explicit nonviolent guidelines, the recruiting of thousands of
new activists in mass actions, and the forming of coalitions with non-Earth
First!ers such as the Industrial Workers of the World and Seeds of Peace 124
were all seen as threatening to a purist notion of biocentrism embedded in
the masculinist culture of early Earth First!. And just as obviously, the more
inclusive politics of Redwood Summer were also threatening to timber
interests and to the U.S. government, who saw such widening of Earth
First!’s concerns and constituency as alarming. On May 24, 1990, at the
beginning of Redwood Summer, a car bomb exploded in Judi Bari and
Darryl Cherney’s car, crippling Bari for life. Despite Bari and Cherney’s
well-known commitment to nonviolence, and despite a complete lack of
evidence linking them to the bombing, the Oakland Police and the FBI
charged Bari and Cherney with constructing the pipe bomb themselves.
Though they eventually backed down from that charge, little investigation
was done to find the actual bomber. A letter from a person self-named “The
Lord’s Avenger” was sent to a Northern California paper taking credit for
the bombing, and specifically pointing to Bari’s pro-choice and feminist
stance as the cause for the bombing. 125 As of this writing, the FBI and
Oakland Police still have not done a satisfactory investigation of the
bombing. 126
Despite the intentions of the bomber and the FBI, Redwood Summer
continued without Judi Bari. Thousands of activists engaged in numerous
big and small actions throughout the summer of 1990, trying to stop the
logging of old-growth redwoods and to bring up the issues of the loss of
jobs and the stress on logging families brought on by clear-cutting versus
sustainable logging practices. As a result of Redwood Summer, a small
portion of the old-growth redwoods that Redwood Summer activists were
fighting for, called the Headwater Forest, were preserved.
Bari had self-identified as a feminist for many years prior to her
involvement with Earth First!; at some time in the midst of her struggle
with sexism in Earth First!, she began to identify as an ecofeminist. In
1992, she published an article called “The Feminization of Earth First!” in a
Ms. column called “Ecofeminism.” In 1995, she was interviewed by Greta
Gaard for a video documentary entitled Ecofeminism Now! 127 Bari’s brand
of ecofeminism was activist and materialist, including, as we have seen, an
analysis of sexism and classism as well as environmental destruction.
Oriented less toward the production of theory and more toward the
production of direct action, Bari focused on the daily lives of the women
she worked and lived with, and constructed an ecofeminist politics that
could enable their empowerment and political engagement. An example of
Bari’s analytical approach can be seen in a story she tells in “Ecofeminism
Now!” about a tactic developed in post-Redwood Summer actions called
“the Albion uprising.”
[In the Albion Uprising we] developed a tactic explicitly as a women’s tactic. We talked
about why are there not more women in these demonstrations, well there were plenty of
women, but not compared to the population. And we discussed the fact that women can’t just
show up, because they have to get childcare, and can’t risk arrest because they have to be at
work the next day to take care of their kids, so we came up with a tactic to answer
specifically to those needs, this tactic called “yarning”. And what we’d do, is we’d go out at
night, so you can get childcare and it’s a very low arrest risk, and we’d take yarn and weave
it in and out, and in and out of the trees, and it may not sound like much, but it turned out to
really slow them [the loggers] down (and all of these tactics only slow them down, they don’t
stop them) because when they come in and try to cut it with their chainsaw, the yarn wraps
around the chainsaw and stalls the chainsaw out, and when they try to whack it with their
logging axes, which is always the next thing, the logger’s axe bounces off. Actually the most
efficient and aggressively nonmacho way to get rid of a web is to cut it with a scissors, but
 they won’t do that, they use their knives instead which takes longer…. [Yarning] became the
symbol of the Albion Uprising and along with it developed a mythology. We said to the
loggers: “This is the web of life and when the web is cut the spell is cast.” You know, just
little things like that to freak them out. 128

It is interesting to note the way in which the primary rationale for the tactic
of “yarning” is to facilitate women’s participation, and the “web of life”
imagery is ironically chosen after the fact, contrary to the way in which this
“web” imagery is thought to inspire or represent women’s actions. Bari’s
form of ecofeminism is inclusive and pragmatic, activist and analytical.
While all feminist Earth First!ers may not have been as willing as Bari to
wear the label, after the 1990 controversy over which many of the Earth
First! founders resigned, the Earth First! Journal became much more open
to feminist expression and analysis, though not without continued
controversy. On the cover of the last issue of the Earth First! Journal edited
by the original journal staff, there was a cartoon of “The Compleet
Radical/Woman Environmentalist,” a counterpart to the “Compleet Radical
Environmentalist” that celebrated earlier Earth First!’s “redneck warrior”
image. Obviously meant as a parting shot from the old guard and as an
implicit comment on appropriate “feminism” within biocentric Earth First!,
the cartoon depicted a blonde, long-haired, big-breasted, and slender-
waisted woman who nevertheless modeled “trail-trekkin’ tree-climbin’
river-runnin’ butt-kickers,” “bolt-cutters (for bulldozer modification),”
“natural body hair” [on her lower legs], and a clenched fist labeled an
“attitude adjuster.” In a position allowing display of her shapely legs, she
has her foot on the back of a prone “timber beast (degeneratus
humanoidia)” wearing a hat with the label “Kleercut Logging Co.” This
image among others was the subject of a feminist analysis of cultural
images used by Earth First!ers printed in the new Earth First! Journal
several months later. 129 Criticitizing images of women as sex objects and
as Mother Nature, the author, Simon “De Beaulivar” Zapotes analyzes the
feminization of the earth and the naturalization of women in fine
ecofeminist terms. Though there were many letters written rejecting the
article, the Journal under new editorship continued to make much more
room for women’s voices and feminist analysis than the old Journal had
ever done. Thus, ecofeminism found a place, albeit under constant attack
from sexists, in Earth First!

Ecofeminisms Revisited
In this chapter, I’ve moved through a constructed history of ecofeminism
from 1980 to 1994 by examining the use of the label “ecofeminism” as a
point of negotiation against sexism within male-dominated radical
environmentalisms. In doing so, I want to make several points. The first is
that ecofeminism has multiple origins. The second is that ecofeminism is
centrally a part of a history of feminism in the United States, a result of a
broad feminist consciousness that provides resources for resisting sexism in
numerous locations. The third is the diversity within ecofeminism. As
feminist resistance to different kinds of male domination in radical
environmentalism appears, it takes a variety of shapes and inflections
suitable to a strategic intervention within a particular political context. In
the examples I’ve examined in this chapter, ecofeminism has used separatist
arguments for the necessity of women’s independent action; biologistic
arguments for the value of women’s experience; materialist arguments for
defining women’s experience as socially constructed and internally
differentiated; arguments for an “ethic of care” that assumes a universalistic
aspect to a female ethics; arguments for a feminist reworking of “holism”
that rejects totalizing understandings of human relationships to nature and
to other humans; arguments that insist on including racism and classism as
factors which divide women into different groups and deeply influence the
tactics that must be used against a sexist and environmentally destructive
culture. It is central to my thesis in this book that the theoretical
inconsistency found in these various ecofeminist positions is a result of the
strategic and dynamic qualities of the formation of ecofeminism as a
political location within specific historical and political contexts.
The environmentalist arenas I have examined in this chapter—social
ecology, deep ecology, and Earth First!—are not the only or the most
important arenas in which ecofeminism arises as a political location.
Similar stories could be told about others, especially the animal liberation
movement and the U.S. Greens. I do not cover these areas in this book, not
because they are not important (in particular, animal ecofeminists are an
important facet of ecofeminism), but because of space considerations. I am
at ease in doing this because I know that others, better equipped than I am,
will tell these stories in the near future. 130 In the rest of the book, I will
sometimes revisit portions of this history by looking in more detail at
particular ecofeminist organizations and texts. In the next chapter, I will
look more closely at the connection between ecofeminism and feminist
antimilitarist direct action.

Notes
1. Ynestra King, personal communication, May 1990, repeated in several
public speeches. The concept of ecofeminism as a “third wave” is
echoed by Val Plumwood, who usefully qualifies the claim by stating:
“It is not a tsunami, or freak tidal wave which has appeared out of
nowhere sweeping all before it. Rather, it is prefigured in and builds on
work not only in ecofeminism but in radical feminism, cultural
feminism, and socialist feminism over the last decade and a half.”
 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York:
Routledge, 1993), p. 39.
2. As I have mentioned in the Introduction, I do not see ecofeminism as a
“social movement” in most traditional senses, i.e., a particular
mobilization around a specific grievance that acquires organizational
form. Neither do I see it purely as an “intellectual movement,” the
other way the term is often used—that is, a set of ideas elaborated by a
school of thinkers and writers.
3. This definition paraphrases Greta Gaard, “Living Interconnections
with Animals and Nature,” in Ecofeminism_ Women, Animals, Nature
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 1–12, p. 1.
4. Donna Haraway, a white socialist feminist deeply influenced by
poststructuralism, explicitly aligns herself with ecofeminism in
“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 201, and
in Haraway’s interview with Marcy Darnovsky entitled, “Overhauling
the Meaning Machines,” Socialist Review 21:2 (1991): 65–84, esp. 69–
70, 78. Mary Daly’s radical feminist classic, Cyn/Ecology (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1978; 1990) is now considered by many to be one
foundation for ecofeminist theory. Alice Walker, a prominent best-
selling African American writer, has contributed explicitly to
ecofeminist antimilitarist and animal liberationist concerns, most
clearly through her pieces, “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse,” in In
Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1983), pp. 338–42, and “Am I Blue?” in Living By The
Word (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 3–8. Rachel
Carson, a natural scientist who was not an explicit feminist, is claimed
 as an ecofeminist foremother because of her book, Silent Spring,
which arguably intitiated the first nonconservationist environmental
movement in America (see Grace Paley’s dedication to Rachel Carson
in Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the
World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism [San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books, 1990], p. ii). Starhawk, a pagan, witch, activist in the
nonviolent antimilitarist direct-action movement, writer, and theorist,
has been an important influence on ecofeminism; see her Dreaming the
Dark (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of
the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1988), and Truth or Dare (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1985). Vandana Shiva is a theoretical physicist who
is also the director of an environmental research institute in Dehra
Dun, India; her book Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development
in India (London: Zed Press, 1988) is an important ecofeminist text.
5. However, my description is not simply an arbitrary construction. Both
my own participation in the ecofeminist movement as an activist and
theorist since 1984, and my experience as the editor of The
Ecofeminist Newsletter (published annually from 1990–1996), gives
me a broad and immediate sense of the movement and ongoing
personal contact with a wide variety of people who call themselves
“ecofeminists.” In the following section of this chapter, I deliberately
avoid the typologizing of ecofeminisms as radical, cultural, Marxist,
socialist, and poststructuralist for reasons I will address in chapter 6.
Here, I will just say that such typologies would work against the
genealogical method I employ in this chapter.
6. The term “genealogy” in its current usage is derived from Nietzsche
via Michel Foucault in the latter’s essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
 History,” in D. F. Bouchard ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,
trans, by D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977),
pp. 139–64.
7. The last few years have seen a rapid increase in the literature on
ecofeminism, in the context of a growing body of environmental
literature. An analysis of the publication history of ecofeminist
literature indicates a trend from more marginal “movement-oriented”
publications to more scholarly journals and university presses. Journals
that have devoted special issues to the topic are: Heresies 13 (1981);
New Catalyst 10 (Winter 1987–88); Woman of Power (Spring 1988);
Studies in the Humanities 15(2) (1988); Hypatia: journal of Women
and Philosophy 6(1) (1991); American Philosophical Assocation
Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 2 (Fall 1991); and Society
and Nature 2(1) (1993). Besides those listed above, journals that have
published numerous articles on ecofeminism include Capitalism,
Nature, Socialism; Environmental Ethics; Environmental Review; The
Trumpeter; Women and Environments; Women’s International Network
News; and Women’s Studies International Forum. A partial,
chronological listing of books on ecofeminism would include
Rosemary Radforth Ruether, New Woman/New Earth: Sexist
Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York, Seabury Press, 1975);
Susan Griffin, Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978); Elizabeth Dodson Gray,
Green Paradise Lost (Wellesley, MA: Roundtable Press, 1979);
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the
Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980);
Brian Easlea, Science and Sexual Oppression: Patriarchy’s
Confrontation with Women and Nature (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1981); Leonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland, eds.,
Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth (London: The
Women’s Press, 1983); Andreé Collard with Joyce Contrucci, Rape of
the Wild: Man’s Violence Against Animals and the Earth
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Vandana Shiva,
Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development in India (London:
Zed Books, 1988); Irene Dankelman and Joan Davidson, Women and
Environment in the Third World (London: Earthscan Publications,
1988); Judith Plant, ed., Healing the Wounds: The Promise of
Ecofeminism (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989); Carolyn
Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in
New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989);
Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the
World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books, 1990); Janet Biehl, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminism
Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991); Carol Adams, The Sexual
Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York:
Continuum Press, 1991); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God:
An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1992); Mary Mellors, Breaking the Boundaries:
Toward a Feminist Green Socialism (London: Virago Press, 1992);
Greta Gaard, ed., Ecofeminism_ Women, Animals, Nature
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Carol Adams, ed.,
Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum Press, 1993); Val
Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1993); Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism
(London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Press, 1993); Vera Norwood,
Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Karen Warren, ed.,
Ecological Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1994); Irene Diamond,
Fertile Ground: Women, Earth, and the Limits of Control (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1994); Vandana Shiva, ed., Close to IJome: Women
Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide
(Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994); Rosi Braidotti, Ewa
Charkiewicz, Sabine Häusler, Saskia Wieringa, Women, the
Environment and Sustainable Development (London: Zed Books,
1994); Carol Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the
Defense of Animals (New York: Continuum Press, 1994); Vandana
Shiva and Inguna Moser, eds., Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological
Reader on Biotechnoology (London: Zed Books, 1995); Carol Adams
and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist
Theoretical Explorations (Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press, 1995); Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the
Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Karen
Warren, ed., Ecological Feminist Philosophies (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press/Hypatia, 1996), and Karen Warren, ed., Ecofeminism_
Women, Culture, Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997). A number of books on ecofeminism are forthcoming at this
writing, including Ynestra King, Ecofeminism_ The Reenchantment of
Nature (Boston: Beacon Press); Chaia Heller, The Revolution That
Dances: From a Politics of Desire to a Desirable Politics (Littleton,
CO: Aigis Publications). Manuscripts in process that I know of are
those by Greta Gaard, Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the
Greens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, forthcoming); and
Christine Cuomo (on ecofeminist ethics). For a sampling of the
periodical literature on ecofeminism, see Carol Adams and Karen
 Warren, “Feminism and the Environment: A Selected Bibliography,”
American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and
Philosophy 90(3) (Fall 1991): 148–57. A popular interest in
ecofeminism is indicated by special issues of The Utne Reader 36
(November/December 1989) and Ms. 2(2) (1991); the sporadic,
uneven column on ecofeminism in Ms.; as well as the growing interest
in ecofeminism evinced by trade publishers (Beacon, Harper
& Row, Vintage, etc.). The word “ecofeminism” became a
Library of Congress subject heading around 1992.
8. The most thorough historian of ecofeminism to date is Carolyn
Merchant. See her section entitled “Ecofeminism,” in Radical
Ecology: The Search for A Livable World (New York: Routledge,
1992), pp. 183–210, and Earthcare: Women and the Environment
(New York: Routledge, 1995), especially the chapters “Earthcare:
Women and the American Environmental Movement” (pp. 139–166)
and “Conclusion: Partnership Ethics: Earthcare for a New
Millennium” (pp. 209–224). Other accounts of ecofeminism’s
beginnings and development can be found in Ynestra King, “The Eco-
Feminist Imperative,” in Caldecott and Leland, eds., Reclaim the
Earth, pp. 12–16, and “Ecological Feminism” Z Magazine 1(7/8)
(1988): 124–27; Charlene Spretnak, “Ecofeminism_ Our Roots and
Flowering,” in Diamond and Orenstein, Reweaving the World, pp. 3–
14; Braidotti et al., “Ecofeminism_ Challenges and Contradictions,” in
Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development, pp. 161–168;
and Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, “Ecofeminism_ Toward Global
Justice and Planetary Health,” Society and Nature, 2(1) (1993): 1–35.
Many of these accounts (except for King’s) start with the coining of
the word “ecofeminism” in 1974 by Françoise d’Eaubonne and cite her
Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1974), though Braidotti
cites “Feminism or Death?” in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de
Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 64–67. Aside from the
1980 essay cited above, which does not explicitly mention
ecofeminism, d’Eaubonne’s work was not available in English
translation until 1994, in an essay translated by Ruth Hottel as “The
Time for Ecofeminism,” in Carolyn Merchant, ed., Key Concepts in
Critical Theory’: Ecology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,
1994), pp. 174–97. Though undoubtedly d’Eaubonne’s 1974
formulation was an early use of the term, since her work was not
available in English translation until 1994, the notion of her authorship
of the term appears to have been introduced by Karen Warren in
“Toward an Ecofeminist Ethic,” Studies in the Humanities 15 (1988):
140–56; after that, D’Eaubonne appears as the coiner of the word in
most accounts. Since d’Eaubonne’s formulation enters histories of U.S.
ecofeminism well after the word comes to signify a set of interlocking
concerns about the status of women and degradation of the
environment articulated by feminist antimilitarist activists in 1980, I
am inclined to give Ynestra King the credit for the invention of the
word in its U.S. context. Ariel Salleh comments that the delay in
translating d’Eaubonne to English signifies the U.S. imperialist context
of the production of feminist knowledge, while centering d’Eaubonne
as the founder of ecofeminism in turn closes off possible nonWestern
origins for the word. She states that “the term ‘ecofeminism’ (was)
spontaneously appearing across several continents in the 1970s” but
for “politico-economic reasons …, ecofeminists working from more
visible niches in the dominant English-speaking culture have tended to
 get their views broadcast first.” See Salleh’s book review of Vandana
Shiva’s Staying Alive, Hypatia 6(1) (1991): 206.
9. My thanks to Ann Megisikwe (Ann Filemyr) (who, along with
Marjaree Chimera, edited W.E.B) for telling me about the newsletter
and providing me with copies. Another important ecofeminist
newsletter was E. V. E. (Ecofeminist Visions Emerging) published in
NYC by Cathleen and Colleen McGuire from 1991–1993. The
newsletter I edit, The Ecofeminist Newsletter, was a similar effort.
Back issues (1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1996), are available
from Noël Sturgeon, Women’s Studies, Washington State University,
Pullman, WA, 99164-4007, USA. Because of the widespread,
grassroots, and decentralized nature of the early period of
ecofeminism’s development, it is extremely difficult to track down
materials documenting the movement. It is very likely that there were
many more groups and publications than I name in this section.
10. See Spretnak, “Our Roots and Flowering,” for a fuller list of
organizers; also see Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural
Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 161.
11. Ynestra King, “Where the Spiritual and Political Come Together,”
Women For Life on Earth (Winter 1984): 4. King has given different
figures in “What Is Ecofeminism?” The Nation (December 12, 1987):
730, claiming 800 attendees and 200 workshops. I am inclined to stick
to the description dated closer to the conference itself.
12. CCHW is presently an important group in the environmental justice
movement.
13. Other speakers were Ynestra King and Catherine Carlotti. I am citing
speakers whose speeches I have copies of, but there were many more. I
 thank Riley Dunlap for lending me his archive on Women and Life on
Earth.
14. Tidings (May 1981): 1–16.
15. Anna Gyorgy, “Evaluating Eco-Feminism West Coast,” Tidings (May
1981): 14.
16. Women for Life on Earth (Winter 1984): 58–59.
17. The Unity Statement, including its original illustrations depicting
women of all races and ages, has been reprinted in Lynne Jones, ed.,
Keeping the Peace (London: Women’s Press, 1983), pp. 42–43. For
descriptions of the action, see Ynestra King. “All is Connectedness,”
in Keeping the Peace, pp. 40–63, and Rhoda Linton and Michele
Whitham, “With Mourning, Rage, Empowerment and Defiance: The
1981 Women’s Pentagon Action,” Socialist Review 12(3/4) (1982):
11–36
18. For a discussion of the complex political agenda of the WPA, see T. V.
Reed, “Dramatic Ecofeminism_ The Women’s Pentagon Action as
Theater and Theory,” in Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary
Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), pp. 120–141. In particular, the
WPA actions were criticized for the “essentialism” of their rhetoric
connecting women and nature. See Ellen Willis’s columns in The
Village Voice 25(25) (June 18–24, 1980): 28 and 25(29) (July 16–22,
1980): 34. Additionally, and more relevant to my argument in chapter
3, many feminist activists of color identified the feminist antimilitarist
movement as a white-dominated movement.
19. Particularly Griffin’s Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
(New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
20. Especially as the editor of The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays
on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement (New
York: Anchor Books, 1982).
21. An important ecofeminist theorist, King has usefully collected many of
her classic essays in What is Ecofeminism? (New York: Ecofeminist
Resources, 1990), available from Ecofeminist Resources, c/o Women’s
Studies Program, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH 45387 for U.S.
$3.50.
22. See Judith McDaniel, ed., Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and
Nonviolence (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1982), for several
early formulations of the connections between feminism and
environmentalism stemming from feminist antimilitarism. Note the
reworking of this title in Diamond and Orenstein’s explicitly
ecofeminist anthology, Reweaving the World.
23. Anonymous, Tidings (May 1981): 14.
24. See Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein’s description of the
conference and its importance; “Ecofeminism_ Weaving the Worlds
Together,” Feminist Studies 14 (Summer 1988): 368–70. There have
been a number of important ecofeminist conferences since.
25. Greta Gaard’s essay, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” thus promises to
break new and exciting ground when it is published (Hypatia,
forthcoming). In this essay, she notes that “the May 1994 special issue
of the Canadian journal UnderCurrents is the first to address the topic
of ‘Queer Nature.’” Gaard goes on (in n. 1) to note that though several
of the essays in this special issue initiate an exploration of a “queer
ecofeminism,” none of them specifically develop connections between
queer theory and ecofeminism, which is the purpose of her essay.
26. This position is especially common in the ecofeminist analyses that
operate within the political and academic arena called “Women,
Environment, and Development.”
27. For a detailed description of the different theories useful to
ecofeminism, see Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, “Global Justice and
Planet Health,” Society and Nature, 2(1) (1993): 1–35.
28. Gwyn Kirk, “Blood, Bones, and Connective Tissue: Grassroots
Women Resist Ecological Destruction,” paper presented at the
National Women Studies Association, Austin, June 1992; Giovanna Di
Chiro, “Defining Environmental Justice: Women’s Voices and
Grassroots Politics,” Socialist Review 22(4) (October-December
1992): 93–130.
29. I am thinking here especially of feminist analyses that were not
explicitly ecofeminist in that they were oriented toward arguments that
the nature/culture split produced social injustices, but without being
concerned about environmental problems. See Sherry Ortner, “Is
Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Michelle Z. Rosaldo and
Louise Lamphere, Woman, Culture and Society (Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford, 1974), pp. 7–88. Ortner’s article is often used as a basis for
ecofeminist arguments or lumped together with ecofeminists by critics
of ecofeminism. An especially useful analysis of the way in which a
nature/culture dualism operates to produce sexism in Marxist and
pyschoanalytic theories is Hilary Klein, “Marxism, Pyschoanalysis and
Mother Nature,” in Feminist Studies 15(2) (1989): 255–78.
30. Greta Gaard’s forthcoming book on ecofeminism and the U.S. Greens
will do some of this work. If I were to tell this story, I would focus on
the intervention of the Ecofeminist Caucus at the Green Gathering at
Eugene, Oregon, in 1989. For ecofeminist interventions into animal
 liberation, see the work of Marti Kheel, Carol Adams, and Deborah
Slicer. Complex relations between ecofeminism and the animal rights
movement are also suggested by Carol Adams’s story in the
introduction to Ecofeminism and the Sacred, in which she expresses
her initial doubts about the word “ecofeminist,” as well as the debate
within the journal Feminists for Animal Rights about whether to
change the name of the journal to Ecofeminists for Animal Rights.
31. Murray Bookchin, “Looking for Common Ground,” in Steve Chase,
ed., Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and
Dave Foreman (Boston: South End Press, 1991), p. 27.
32. Murray Bookchin, “Open Letter to the Ecology Movement,” in Toward
an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), reprinted
in Andrew Dobson, ed., The Green Reader (San Francisco: Mercury
Books, 1991), p. 60.
33. Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution, pp. 58–91; and
Noël Sturgeon, “Direct Theory and Political Action: The Political
Theory of the U.S. Nonviolent Direct Action Movement,” Ph.D.
dissertation, History of Consciousness Program, University of
California, Santa Cruz, March 1991, passim.
34. Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in Post-
Scarcity 7 Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 63.
35. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State, trans. Eleanor Leacock (New York: International Publishers,
1972).
36. Murray Bookchin, “The Concept of Social Ecology,” originally
published in CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1981): 15–22; reprinted in
Merchant, Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology: 152—-162. The
first quote here is p. 153, the footnote is p. 162, n. 1.
37. Published in 1982 by Cheshire Books, the first four chapters of
Ecology and Freedom were written in 1972. A revised edition with a
substantial new introduction was published in 1991 by Black Rose
Books in Montreal (all references here will be to this revised edition).
The reworking and, even more, the amount of nonreworking of this
text marks it as the most important statement of Bookchin’s views,
though he is a prolific writer. That he has returned to this text as a
place both to reissue his early formulations and to qualify some of
their implications indicates the importance he places on the book.
38. Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, p. 75–77.
39. Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, p. 79.
40. Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, p. 83.
41. Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, p. 83.
42. Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, p. 120–121.
43. Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, p. 305.
44. See on this point Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, p.
15.
45. See Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution; and Margot
Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (New York: Beacon Press, 1986).
46. My account of the conflict within ISE over feminism, feminist
spirituality, ecofeminism, and social ecology is based on interviews
with Ynestra King and Chaia Heller in June 1995, as well as the
published pieces I cite throughout this section.
47. King, Starhawk, and Adler’s accounts of feminist spirituality’s role in
radical political action will be dealt with in more detail in chapter 4.
48. See Chaia Heller, “Down to the Body, Down to Earth: Toward a Social
Ecofeminism,” in Andrew Light, The Environmental Materialist
Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, forthcoming).
49. Heller, rather than rejecting spiritually, reframes it in terms of the
‘erotic.’ As she has said: “I prefer to use the term ‘eros’ rather than the
term ‘spirituality,’ which is derived from the latin term ‘espiritus,’
implying an external, non-physical activating principle such as the
breath, which was thought to be required to animate an otherwise
passive, inert body. The term ‘eros,’ in contrast, transcends a binary
opposition between spirit and matter by referring to the attraction and
connection between bodies. If ‘spirituality’ indicates a connection
among people and to the earth, and the meaning that derives from
those connections, then ‘eros,’ in its sexual and non-sexual form,
might be a more integrative and dialectical term.” Personal
communication from Chaia Heller, November 1996. See Chaia Heller,
The Revolution That Dances: From a Politics of Desire Toward a
Desirable Politics (Littleton, CO: Aigis Press, forthcoming).
50. Kick It Over (special supplement) (Winter 1987): 2A-4A.
51. Green Perspectives 11 (October 1988): 1–8.
52. Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press,
1991): 5.
53. Greta Gaard, in a review of Biehl’s book in the Spring 1992 issue of
Women and Environments, (pp. 20–21), credits Biehl with bringing up
important concerns, notably the rornanticization of “prehistory and the
Neolithic Goddess,” the biologistic rationale for the woman-nature
connection, and the emphasis on personal transformation rather than
social transformation in works by Riane Eisler and Charlene Spretnak.
But she faults Biehl for ignoring important ecofeminists, her
“unprofessional tone and … occasional lapses in scholarship,” her
definition of patriarchy as “limited to sexism alone,” and her “return to
appeals for ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationalism’,”(p. 21).
54. A claim made by Charlene Spretnak in a letter criticizing Biehl that
was circulated among radical environmentalist circles. Spretnak also
emphatically denies valuing personal transformation above collective
political action (contrary to Gaard’s opinion cited above), and cites her
activity in the U.S. Greens as proof of her commitment to social and
political change rather than personal change alone. I published this
letter in The Ecofeminist Newsletter 4(1) (Summer 1993): 3–4
(available from the Women’s Studies Program, Washington State
University, Pullman, WA, 99164–4007).
55. Douglas Buege, “Rethinking Again,” in Karen J. Warren, ed.,
Ecological Feminism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 60.
56. It remains a contradiction that Bookchin could seem so open to many
parts of a feminist analysis and that he could remain so supportive of
ecofeminists like Heller, at the same time that he engages in such
public, often vitrolic, attacks on an ecofeminism defined only as
essentialist feminist spirituality. I will speculate here that one
motivation may be his wish to distinguish his reliance on the notion of
nonhierarchical “organic” societies as a model for the utopian
“ecological” society from the romanticized prehistoric, Neolithic, and
purportedly matricentric societies that function as ideals for some
versions of feminist spirituality. Much of what Biehl says about the
dangers of such idealization could be applied to Bookchin’s use of the
organic society, particularly given the universalistic, generalized
portrayal which he constructs. Shelagh Young, in a relatively positive
review of Biehl’s book, also notes “an unnerving similarity between
Biehl’s enthusiastic espousal of Bookchin’s theory and the work of
ecofeminist writers,” in the depiction of “organic” societies. Shelagh
Young, in Feminist Review 48 (Autumn 1994): 130.
57. For a number of recent examinations of the connection, see Carol
Adams, ed., Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum
Press, 1993). Two theorists who have consistently connected
ecofeminism and feminist spirituality, in ways that avoid many of the
problems Biehl focusses on, are Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Green
Paradise Lost; and Rosemary Radford Ruether, from her New Woman,
New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation to her recent
Gaia and God: Toward an Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing.
58. Karen Warren “A Feminist Philosophical Perspective on Ecofeminist
Spiritualities,” in Adams, ed., Ecofeminism and the Sacred, pp. 119–
32, comes closest to acknowledging the tension between the two. She
starts her essay: “Ecofeminists disagree about the nature and place of
spirituality in ecofeminist politics and practice” (p. 119). But she is
wary of taking up this debate directly. “My goal is modest,” she writes.
“I do not discuss the particular positions which have been advanced in
the ecofeminist debate over spirituality … consequently I do not
resolve that debate…. I simply attempt to offer a feminist
philosophical perspective on how one might think about ecofeminist
spiritualities such that one captures and extends important ecofeminist
insights about the twin dominations of women and nature in
ecofeminist philosophy” (p. 121). Ecofeminists have felt more
comfortable criticizing the connection between ecofeminism and
feminist spirituality, especially Goddess worship, when it is made by
men. See Ynestra King’s critique of Kirkpatrick Sale in The Nation
(December 12, 1987): 702, 730–31; and Deborah Sheer’s critique of
Michael Zimmerman in “Is There an Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology
‘Debate’?” Environmental Ethics 17 (Summer 1995): 151–69.
59. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, pp. 15–16.
60. An exception to this would be Joni Seager, who, although she prefers
the designation feminist environmentalist over ecofeminist, is centrally
concerned with the connections between bureacracy, government,
corporations, sexism, and environmental degradation. However, this
critique does not lead Seager to explicitly advocate anarchism. See
Seager, Earth Follies: Goming to Feminist Terms With the Global
Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1993).
61. Warwick Fox distinguished the two and argues for the use of
“ecocentric” rather than “biocentric” in “The Deep Ecology-
Ecoferninism Debate and Its Parallels,” Environmental Ethics 11
(Spring 1989): 5–25, pg. 7–8.
62. But see the debate between Kirkpatrick Sale, Murray Bookchin, and
Ynestra King in The Nation in late 1987 and early 1988, as an example
of the triangulation becoming manifest.
63. Val Plumwood is an exception to these characterizations. She has paid
a great deal of attention to the conflict between all three positions,
treating them all as worthy of consideration. See Plumwood, “The
Ecopolitics Debate and the Politics of Nature,” in Warren, ed.,
Ecological Feminism pp. 64–87; and some of the same material in
Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, pp. 13–18 and
chapters 6 and 7.
64. The following articles concern themselves primarily with conflicts
between deep ecology and ecofeminism. There are others not in this
list that, in the context of arguments about other subjects, mention or
briefly join in this debate. Ariel Kay Salleh, “Deeper Than Deep
Ecology: The Eco-Feminist Connection,” Environmental Ethics 6
(Winter 1984): 340–45; Marti Kheel, “The Liberation of Nature: A
Circular Affair,” Environmental Ethics (Summer 1985): 135–49;
Donald Davis, “Ecosophy: The Seduction of Sophia,” Environmental
Ethics 8 (1986): 151–62; Alan Wittbecker, “Deep Anthropology,
Ecology, and Human Order,” Environmental Ethics 8 (1986): 268–70;
Michael E. Zimmerman, “Feminism, Deep Ecology, and
Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Ethics 9 (Spring 1987): 21–44;
Jim Cheney, “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology,” Environmental Ethics
9 (Summer 1987): 115–45; Ynestra King, “What is Ecofeminism?”
The Nation (December 12, 1987): 702, 730–31; Warwick Fox, “The
Deep Ecology-Ecofeminism Debate and Its Parallels,”; Jim Cheney,
“The Neo-Stoicism of Radical Environmentalism,” Environmental
Ethics 11 (Winter 1989): 293–325; Marti Kheel, “Ecofeminism and
Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference,” in Diamond
and Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World, pp. 127–37; Michael E.
Zimmerman, “Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism_ The Emerging
Dialogue,” in Diamond and Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World, pp.
138–54; Val Plumwood, “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism,
Environmental Philosophy and the Critique of Rationalism,” Hypatia 6
(Spring 1991): 3–27; Robert Sessions, “Deep Ecology versus
Ecofeminism_ Healthy Differences or Incompatible Philosophies?”
Hypatia 6 (Spring 1991): 90–107; Ariel Salleh, “The
Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate: A Reply to Patriarchal Reason,”
Environmental Ethics 14 (Fall 1992): 195–216; Ariel Salleh, “Class,
Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology
Debate,” Environmental Ethics 15 (Fall 1993): 225–44; Val
Plumwood, “The EcoPolitics Debate,” in Warren, ed. Ecological
Feminism, pp. 64–87; Christine J. Cuomo, “Ecofeminism, Deep
Ecology, and Human Population,” in Warren, ed., Ecological
Feminism, pp. 88–105; Deane Curtin, “Dogen, Deep Ecology, and the
 Ecological Self,” Environmental Ethics 16 (Summer 1994): 195–213;
and Deborah Slicer, “Is There an Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology
‘Debate’?” Environmental Ethics 17 (Summer 1995): 151–69.
65. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology
Movement: A Summary,” in Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue, eds.,
The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology (Berkeley,
CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995): 3–10, p. 3.
66. George Sessions, “Preface,” in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century:
Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New
Environmentalism (Boston: Shambala, 1995), p. ix. Since the two
anthologies I’ve just cited are both recent and intended as
comprehensive introductions, I will rely on them as portrayals of deep
ecology as a movement. As such, it is interesting to note the way in
which Sessions’s title claims deep ecology as “the new
environmentalism,” excluding other environmentalist positions from
legitimate consideration. I will discuss this tendency of deep ecology
to subsume other environmentalisms at several points in this section.
67. Drengson and Inoue, The Deep Ecology Movement, p. xx.
68. Drengson and Inoue, The Deep Ecology Movement, p. xxiv.
69. Note the imperative exclamation mark that Naess uses to indicate a
normative statement containing a moral imperative to act; this form is
copied by Earth First!, which always used the exclamation point in its
name. I have not been able to establish whether this was an explicit
mirroring of Naess.
70. All quotes in the paragraph from Naess, “The Deep Ecological
Movement,” p. 80.
71. Warwick Fox, “Transpersonal Ecology and the Varieties of
Identification,” in Drengson and Inoue, The Deep Ecology Movement,
 pp. 136–154.
72. Salleh, “Deeper Than Deep Ecology,” p. 341.
73. See Christine J. Cuomo, “Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology, and Human
Population,” for a complex articulation of the ecofeminist critique of
deep ecology’s stand on population reduction.
74. Salleh, “Deeper Than Deep Ecology,” p. 344.
75. Salleh, “Deeper Than Deep Ecology,” p. 342.
76. Salleh, “Deeper Than Deep Ecology,” p. 340.
77. Salleh, “The Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate,” p. 203.
78. Salleh, “The Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate,” pp. 208–209.
79. Salleh, “The Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology’ Debate,” pp. 213–14.
80. Marti Kheel, “The Liberation of Nature,” p. 138. It is important to note
that Kheel’s work is specifically a feminist intervention into the
construction of a political and philosophical position called “animal
liberation.” If I had space, I would examine Kheel’s work and the work
of Carol Adams and Deborah Slicer as important variants of
ecofeminism developed to critique the masculinist tendencies in
animal liberation. As such, their work exhibits particular identifying
qualities in the same way that ecofeminism within social ecology, deep
ecology, and Earth First! may be seen to develop its own brand of
feminist argument.
81. Kheel, “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology,” p. 129.
82. Ynestra King, “What is Ecofeminism,” The Nation (December 12,
1987): 702.
83. King, “What is Ecofeminism,” p. 730.
84. Cheney, “Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology,” p. 116.
85. Cheney, “Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology,” p. 121.
86. Cheney, “Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology,” pp. 126–27.
 87. Cheney, “Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology,” p. 122.
88. Cheney, “Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology,” pp. 123–24.
89. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections,” pp. 4–5.
90. Fox, “The Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism Debate and Its Parallels.”
91. Warren, “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism,” p. 145,
n. 37.
92. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” pp. 18–20.
93. See her account of the relationship between Western colonialist ideas
of the human and the rational, the near extinction of aboriginal
Tasmanians, and the decimation of the Australian and New Zealand
populations of fur seals and right whales in “The Ecopolitics Debate
and the Politics of Nature,” in Warren, Ecological Feminism, pp. 75–
77.
94. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature p. 173.
95. See both “Nature, Self and Gender,” and “Deep Ecology and the
Denial of Difference,” in Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of
Nature, pp. 165–89.
96. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, p. 178.
97. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, p. 196.
98. Slicer, “Is There An Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology ‘Debate’?” p. 151.
99. Slicer, “Is There An Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology ‘Debate’?” p. 153.
Since I have this experience with Fox’s essay as well, I heartily concur
with Sheer’s statement.
100. Slicer, “Is There An Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology ‘Debate’?” p. 163.
101. Slicer, “Is There An Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology ‘Debate’?” p. 154, n.
7.
102. I am not impugning the individuals who were positioned here as
outside interrogators, but those who set up the debate without
 ecofeminist participation.
103. I have heard that there was a sixth member of the party, a woman who
has been involved in mainstream Arizona politics and thus has wished
to go unacknowledged as a founder of Earth First!, or at least as being
present at the founding of the radical organization. I have been unable
to verify this information, but none of the histories of Earth First! refer
to the presence of this woman. If she was there, it is interesting that her
presence is excluded, leaving intact the mythology of the Earth First!
founders as men alone in the desert. If she was not, it is interesting that
this rumor circulates, a surreptitious undermining of the masculinist
birth of Earth First! Thanks to Paul Hirt for bringing this story to my
attention.
104. Edward Abbey, The Monkey-Wrench Gang (New York: Avon, 1975).
105. For accounts of Earth First!’s founding and subsequent development, I
am relying primarily on Rik Scarce, EcoWarriors: Understanding the
Radical Environmental Movement (Chicago: Noble Press, 1990); and
Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the
Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990). I thank Rik
Scarce for many illuminating conversations about Earth First! and the
debates within the movement.
106. From “Earth Night Action,” by Mike Roselle and Darryl Cherney,
copyright 1990, from the tape Timber by Darryl Cherney with George
Shook and Judi Bari. The song counterposes Earth First! Earth Night
Actions to the 1990 Earth Day celebrations, widely seen by radical
environmentalists as representing the sellout of environmentalism to
corporate “green” capitalism. As the first verse goes: “Now Earth Day
1990 was Dennis Hayes’s vision/But instead of keeping us together it
only caused division/He said turn down your thermostat and recycle
 toilet paper/And as long as they contribute don’t confront the corporate
rapers.” From the liner notes to Timber.
107. Drawn by Canyon Frog in June 1987, this image appeared as the The
Earth First! Journal cover on August 1, 1988, entitled “The Cornpleet
Radical Environmentalist.” It is reprinted in Joni Seager, Earth
Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental
Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 228.
108. Seager, Earth Follies, p. 227.
109. Scarce, Eco-Warriors, p. 90. Seager could have easily made this point
herself, given her acute analysis of the production of sexism within
patriarchal institutional structures such as the media.
110. Scarce, Eco-Waniors, p. 81.
111. Judi Bari, “The Feminization of Earth First!” Ms. (May/June 1992):
84.
112. According to Bari, “three-quarters of the leadership” was made up of
women. Bari, “The Feminization of Earth First!,” p. 85.
113. See Sturgeon, “Direct Theory and Political Action: The Nonviolent
Direct Action Movement, 1976–1987”; and Epstein, Political Protest
and Cultural Revolution.
114. The Earth First! journal (November 1, 1988): 5.
115. See letter from Sher Pierson, Earth First! Journal, (December 21,
1988): 9, and letter from Sequoia, Earth First! Journal (February 2,
1989): 5.
116. Howie Wolke, “The Grizzly Den,” Earth First! Journal (November 1,
1988): 28. This editorial was not in direct response to Bari’s report on
the California Rendezvous, but in reaction to previous comments made
by Earth Firstiers arguing for connections to be made between racism,
sexism, and classism to environmental destruction.
117. Dolores La Chappelle, “No, I’m Not an Eco-Feminist: A Few Words
in Defense of Men,” The Earth First! journal (March 21, 1989): 31.
118. Loose Hip Circles, “Riotous Rendezvous Remembered,” The Earth
First! Journal (August 1, 1989): 19.
119. Miss Ann Thropy, “Population and AIDs,” The Earth First! Journal
(May 1, 1987): 32, and “Miss Ann Thropy Responds to ‘Alien-
Nation’,” The Earth First! Journal (December 22, 1987): 17.
120. Dave Foreman and Nancy Morton, “Good Luck Darlin’. It’s Been
Great,” The Earth First! Journal (September 22, 1990): 5.
121. Howie Wolke, “FOCUS On Wilderness,” The Earth First! Journal
(September 22, 1990): 7.
122. Bill Devall, “Maybe the Movement Is Leaving Me,” The Earth First!
Journal (September 22, 1990): 6.
123. Judi Bari, “Expand Earth First!,” in The Earth First! Journal
(September 22, 1990): 5. Reprinted as “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” in
Judi Bari, Timber Wars (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994),
pp. 55–59.
124. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) is a very old
anarchist labor organization, mostly defunct. But a small chapter of
IWW worked in coalition with Redwood Summer organizers. Seeds of
Peace was an affinity group formed out of the nonviolent directaction
movement that became expert at feeding large numbers of people in an
action, and maintained an organization available for this service to
many different radical political groups.
125. Accounts of the bombing and the letter from The Lord’s Avenger can
be found in The Earth First! Journal EXTRA (circa June 1990), as
well as Bari, Timber Wars, and Bari, “The Feminization of Earth
First!” pp. 84–85.
126. A civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland Police was filed
in 1991. Those wishing to contribute to legal costs can make tax-
deductible donations to Redwood Summer Justice Fund, P.O. Box
14720, Santa Rosa, CA, 95402, USA.
127. A useful overview of the diversity and commonalities of ecofeminists,
Gaard’s video will also be discussed in chapter 6. Greta Gaard,
Ecofeminism Now! (Medusa Productions, 1996), VHS, 37 minutes,
available for $15 plus shipping from Dr. Greta Gaard, Department of
English, 420 Humanities Building, University of Minnesota, Duluth,
MN, 55812. Note the reappearance of the exclamatory imperative!
128. Bari, in Gaard, Ecofeminism Now!
129. Simon “De Beaulivar” Zapotes, “Fucking With Mother Nature: A
Critique of Humor, Art, and Eco-Pornography,” The Earth First!
Journal (May 1, 1991): 32–33.
130. Greta Gaard is, at this writing, finishing her book Ecological Politics:
Ecofeminists and the Greens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
forthcoming), which will deal more closely than I have with
ecofeminism in both the U.S. Greens and in the animal liberation
movement. See also her video, Thinking Green: Ecofeminists and The
Greens (Medusa Productions 1994), VHS, 35 minutes, available for
$15 plus shipping from Dr. Greta Gaard, Department of English, 420
Humanities Building, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN, 55812.
2 Ecofeminist Anti Militarism And
Strategic Essentialisms
DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-3

In this chapter, I want to present one of ecofeminism’s early manifestations,

in the antimilitarist movement, in ways that include its being an
intervention into radical environmentalisms, but that also explore the
development of ecofeminism as a process of coalescing different
movements. I suggest that this coalescence is implicated in various
essentialist elements of antimilitarist ecofeminisms. I will closely examine
the ways in which early ecofeminists constructed and connected “women”
and “nature.” 1 I assume and refer to a current critique of ecofeminist
essentialism and address the political dangers of using such symbols as
“Mother Nature,” which may reinforce patriarchal assumptions about the
more “natural” status of women. I also examine the other danger of
essentialist rhetorics: the ways in which essentialist formulations obscure
important differences among women (of race, of class, of nationality, etc.).
However, as I stated in the Introduction, I want to move beyond the usual
critique of essentialism by insisting that the frequency of such essentialist
symbols and language must be explained as well as resisted. In this chapter
I argue that these essentialist moments are part of creating a strategic
political identification between “women” and “nature.”
Antimilitarist ecofeminists in the 1980s were attempting to create unity
between very different kinds of women and to connect radical analyses
from a number of disparate, though related, social movements. They were
also, as discussed in the last chapter, creating a feminist critique of sexism
in environmentalism and attempting to fashion new feminist political spaces
for an environmentalist activist politics. In addition, they were attempting to
solidify connections between feminism(s) and nonviolent direct action. All
of these goals are implicated in the production of particular essentialist
notions of women as more peaceful, more nurturing, and closer to nature
then men.
Drawing my examples from feminist antimilitarist actions that I
characterize as early ecofeminism, I argue that radically democratic
movement structures, such as coalitions, networks, affinity groups, and
consensus process decision making, may have served to destabilize
essentialist formulations in early ecofeminism. I hope that this grounded
analysis of the uses of “essentialism” in a feminist movement will serve
more generally as an example for the theoretical assessment of feminist
activism by feminist scholars. As I have already mentioned, because I have
been both an activist in and a scholar of the feminist antimilitarist direct
action movement, I have always been struck by the way in which women in
the peace movement of the 1980s—particularly in those actions organized
by and for women—have appeared as the quintessentialists against whom
feminism must be protected. I remind the reader that this does not mean that
I do not think that the characterization and criticism of feminist
antimilitarism as essentialist is unjustified. But here I want to offer a
different perspective on the essentialist formulations of antimilitarist
feminism, or early ecofeminism.
I intend to explore the uses of essentialist formulations for feminist peace
activism and at the same time point to the ways in which radically
democratic movements constantly revise and contest political identities. I
will try to mitigate what I see as a prevailing reductionist account of the
essentialism of feminist peace activism in the 1980s by examining
contradictions, fractures, and debates within the movement’s discursive
practices, using as examples writings by Ynestra King in the early to mid-
1980s, as well as several debates concerning the definition of “women” in
several feminist peace actions during this time period.

The Anti Militarist Nonviolent Direct Action

Movement
Let me begin by being specific about what I mean by the “direct action
movement,” because I do make a distinction between this movement and
the “peace movement.” 2 This distinction is important to my argument,
because my contention here is that the specific political practices of the
direct action movement destabilized but did not prevent essentialist
formulations of political identities. In my work, the “direct action
movement” refers to a series of “actions” engaged in by groups that
organize themselves in a decentralized, nonhierarchical manner (frequently
in small groups called “affinity groups”), which use a participatory,
democratic, decision-making process (usually called “consensus process”)
and which prefer direct action to institutionalized, electoral, or interest-
group politics. Frequently, such groups are involved in civil disobedience,
that is, the principled breaking of the law in the process of political protest.
Using this definition, I include in the direct action movement the actions
organized by and for women that have been often singled out for their
essentialism 3 and that have been claimed as early manifestations of
ecofeminism, such as: the Women’s Pentagon Actions of 1980 and 1981;
the Seneca Falls Women’s Peace Encampment, the Puget Sound Womens
Peace Camp (both begun in 1983); and the Mother’s Day Actions at the
Nevada Test Site in 1987 and 1988. This form of organization and practice
has also been used by lesbian and gay activists, homeless activists, and
activists involved in a myriad of other issues.
Whatever an action’s particular target, the movement’s goals were argued
for in terms of a political vision that synthesized different branches of
radical politics. The politics, and practice, of the direct action movement
aspired to be feminist, participatory democratic, antiracist, anticapitalist,
antiheterosexist, environmentalist, and anti-imperialist, as well as opposed
to ageism, disability prejudice, and sometimes speciesism. 4 However, the
movement’s politics and organizational structures were continually
contested, and thus explicitly argued for as well as against, in the internal
debates that repeatedly took place over the use of affinity groups, consensus
process, and nonviolence. Conversely, the use of these structures, which
require broad participation, meant that people in the movement were
consistently exposed to many different life experiences and political
analyses. Thus, participants in the movement who might not totally
subscribe to all aspects of the movement’s politics were nevertheless
significantly exposed to them. I repeatedly observed during my study of this
movement that the openness and diversity of the movement’s politics
existed in tension with the universalist, essentialist formulations of a great
deal of the movement’s rhetoric. Now I will turn more directly to an
examination of this contradiction.

Ecofeminism and Essentialism in the Writings of

Ynestra King
As a theoretical and political position intimately linked to the direct action
movement, ecofeminism has been most completely formulated by Ynestra
King. King was one of the founders of the Conference on Women and Life
on Earth, subtitled Eco-feminism in the Eighties, which took place at
Amherst, Massachusetts, in March of 1980; she was also a primary
organizer of the Women’s Pentagon Actions in 1980 and 1981. Besides
teaching at several colleges in New England and New York, King has
regularly taught ecofeminism and related subjects at the summer Institute
for Social Ecology in Vermont. Her writings on ecofeminism have been
included in important ecofeminist anthologies and are widely cited as
examples of ecofeminist theory. King was a featured speaker and outspoken
participant at the Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature, Theory
conference at USC in March 1987, and she was a cofounder of the
WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute, which I discuss in chapter 3. King
has also been involved in a debate between deep ecologists and
ecofeminists carried on in the letters sections of The Nation and the UTNE
Reader. Thus King has prominently figured in the promulgation of
ecofeminism as a position on the American Left that is deeply rooted in the
politics and practice of the direct action movement. 5
An analysis of King’s writings shows the changing complexities of her
position on “essentialist ecofeminism,” that is, whether women are
inherently peaceful and akin to nature, while men are inherently violent and
on the side of a destructive culture. One of her first published pieces, a
description of the Women’s Pentagon Actions, describes what motivated her
to begin organizing the conference that preceded these actions:
[As a graduate student] I was trying to work out the thought behind the coming together of
feminism and ecology, and my intuition that these are and should be connected. The nuclear
power plant at Three Mile Island [in] Pennsylvania melted down as I completed the exam
process, alternating between the typewriter and the television, listening to male technocrats
talk about slamming rods into the core to stop the reaction, referring to the runaway nuke as
a “her” who needed to be “cooled down.” I argued with my feminist friends about whether
nukes (power and weapons) were really “feminist issues.” I knew that it was time for me to
become politically active again, as I imagined millions of women all over the planet “taking
the toys away from the boys.” I decided to begin talking seriously to other feminists in New
 England who shared my ecological perspective, about getting women together to talk about
our fears for our own lives and the life of the Earth and what we could do together…. We
were from different movements, feminist, lesbian, disarmament, anti-nuclear, ecology, and
now after Three Mile Island we were ready to make a major commitment to bring our
communities together to resist male violence against the living world. 6

This quotation demonstrates several elements that enter into King’s early
understanding of ecofeminism. First, the conversation among feminists that
results in the Women and Life on Earth Conference and the WPA actions is
stimulated by a fear that the Earth, and life itself, is threatened by nuclear
technologies that she represents as “male.” 7 Second, she must argue with
“other feminists” about whether ecological issues are legitimately feminist
issues. Third, the conference is made up of women who come from
“different movements,” although I think that many people would not have
been able to distinguish as neatly as King does between the “feminist,
lesbian, disarmament, anti-nuclear, ecology” participants. Finally, she
implies that all of these women would characterize the main threat to be
countered as “male violence against the living world.”
What these elements indicate to me is that King’s (and perhaps other
feminists’) early formulation of an “ecofeminist” position takes place in a
historical context of (1) real fear of ecological disaster (the accident at
Three Mile Island), (2) disagreement among feminists about what feminism
is, (3) a gathering together of women from various movement locations—
including movements of mixed gender—who wish to work together as
women, and (4) the use of a common rhetoric that depicts “male violence”
as a threat to women and the world. That this common rhetoric seeks to
overcome the disagreement among feminists over feminism itself and to
facilitate and justify the collective action of women from different political
locations seems clear; the connection made by this rhetoric to the very
concrete dangers of nuclear technologies provides an impelling reason for
women to want to act together against them. On the other hand, this rhetoric
becomes too easily a dichotomous opposition between “men” (inherently
violent) and “women” (inherently on the side of life), quite clear in the
language King uses in this article.
The other danger of this rhetoric is that it obscures the complexity of the
political analysis developed by the women organizing the WPA actions
(which arose out of the Conference on Women and Life on Earth organized
after Three Mile Island). Committed to a democratic process because of
their backgrounds in various left movements, the women who met to
organize the WPA had to begin by a collective defining of their goals and
politics. As King writes:
Somehow the Women’s Pentagon Action had to reflect our feminist principles and process.
And we began to talk about what these principles were. We talked about connections
between violence against women and the rape of the earth. We talked about racism and
American imperialism. We heard from women about the effect of military spending on the
human services upon which women depend. We connected the masculinist mentality and
nuclear bombs. Lesbian oppression and reproductive freedom were also issues that
concerned us. We reflected on the election of Ronald Reagan and what that would mean to
us. And we talked about how we might do our action with ritual politics and theatre and
images…. We were defining feminist resistance. 8

That this list of issues greatly widens the definition of feminism as the
struggle against sexism is clear and proved to be disturbing to several
observers. Writing in June of 1980, while the organizing for the WPA was
just beginning, Ellen Willis launched a blistering attack against
“ecofeminism” for the “insistence of some antinuclear activists that this
issue should be the priority for women”—indeed, that this should be an
issue around which women should organize as women. For Willis, for
women to organize around issues that were not specifically “feminist”
meant implicitly that they must organize as cultural feminists, raising
immediately the dangers of “essentialism.” “From a feminist perspective,”
Willis states with all the authority of her long association with feminism,
“the only good reason for women to organize separately from men is to
fight sexism. Otherwise women’s political organizations simply reinforce
female segregation and further the idea that certain activities and interests
are inherently feminine.” 9 While these dangers are properly noted, Willis
never entertains the notion that perhaps women-organized direct actions
were, to some extent, aimed at sexism within the environmental and
antinuclear movements, as I’ve argued in chapter 1. Beyond this, she does
not consider other reasons women might want to organize separately from
men in these movements: for instance, to provide a location for women to
engage in feminist consciousness-raising in the context of their other
political concerns. Nor does she consider the possibility of expanding the
definition of feminism or of using feminist analyses to understand issues
not (yet) defined as aspects of sexism. 10
In fact, the impetus for having women-only actions like the Women’s
Pentagon Actions, the Seneca Falls Women’s Peace Encampment, and the
Puget Sound Women’s Peace Camp seems to have been partly to more fully
mobilize feminists in separatist communities, partly to establish militarism
as a feminist issue, and partly to provide, in Donna Warnock’s words, a
“safe space to explore new possiblities because we didn’t have to interpret
sexism, or explain or argue over feminist issues. (Though that happened
some, of course. But the nature of it was different because we knew
everyone was basically supportive.)” 11 In other words, for some at this
time, there was a need for feminists to organize autonomously from men,
away from the strain of being, as Warnock says, “on the defensive or having
to prove ourselves” and at the same time without giving up their political
priorities. 12
 Neither does Willis’s criticism of ecofeminism take into account the
appropriateness of linking feminism to antimilitarism in the historical
context of Reaganism, in which the growth of militarism was inextricably
linked to an antifeminist backlash, reflected in the masculinism of the
Reagan administration’s public rhetoric. 13 Thus, as strong as Willis’s
critique of the essentialism of ecofeminism was, and remains, there is a way
in which it pales besides the attempt to link numerous radical political
analyses that is evidenced in the “Unity Statement,” the manifesto produced
for the WPA in 1980 that served as the public statement of the goals of the
action. 14 First drafted by Grace Paley, the “Unity Statement” was subject to
innumerable revisions and arguments about its contents and language,
resulting in a collectively produced document to which hundreds of women
from very different class, race, and political backgrounds had contributed.
15 The Statement is incredibly comprehensive, connecting a myriad of
issues from nuclear weapons; to cuts in domestic services; to urban decay;
to the racism manifested in the draft, South Africa, and the women’s
movement; to the destruction of Native American lands; to the lack of good
and available health care, child care, and education; to violence against
women; to the imprisonment of the poor and people of color as criminals; to
underemployment as well as unemployment; to comparative worth; to
nuclear power; to environmental degradation; to U.S. support of “juntas” in
El Salvador and Guatemala; to the growth of the New Right as manifested
in the Family Protection Act, the opposition to the ERA, and the Human
Life Amendment; to imperialism; to the growth of multinational
corporations; to homophobia; to discrimination against the disabled; to
ageism; to reproductive rights. And it does this in language that is relatively
simple and jargon-free. In its complex weaving of a number of issues into a
coherent left political position, it most closely resembles the Port Huron
Statement, except for two important differences: It is both a feminist and an
environmentalist statement, and it is, amazingly, only four columns of
typescript, fitting on one leaflet as opposed to the sixty pages of the Port
Huron Statement. This means, of course, that the connection it makes
between radical issues is more of a list than an analysis, but as such it also
signals its production in an ongoing and unfinished process of collective
theorizing rather than as one political thinker’s production of a “finished”
analysis that presents itself as having figured out all the answers. It is clear
that the participatory democratic process used to produce the “Unity
Statement” undercut the universalizing, essentializing rhetoric employed by
organizers such as King through its close detailing of the numerous axes of
power (racism, classism, etc.) that position women in very different
material and political locations.
Ynestra King’s reaction to criticisms such as Ellen Willis’s can be found
in her 1981 article published in the special Heresies issue on feminism and
ecology, the appearance of which was a signal of the growing feminist
interest in the connections between sexism and environmental issues. In this
article, King distinguishes her position both from that of Willis, whom she
places in the camp of “rational-materialist” (or sometimes “socialist”)
feminism, and from Susan Griffin and Mary Daly, who as “radical cultural
feminists” posit a “metaphysical-feminist naturalism.” The problem with
these positions, King argues, is that “gender identity is neither fully natural
nor fully cultural.” 16 Women, she argues, are located in a marginal position
in relation to the conventional dichotomy between nature and culture, being
at once constructed by patriarchal ideology as more “natural” beings than
men, and acknowledged as (the lesser) half of a human race that is to be
distinguished from nature because of its ability to reason. Speaking from
this position of ambiguity between nature and culture, King writes,
feminists can place themselves outside of the culture/nature dichotomy, a
crucial move for the possibility of critiquing and resisting a patriarchal and
capitalist culture built upon the destruction and domination of nature.
Yet, to maintain this position of “critical otherness,” women must engage
in a cultural and political practice, according to King, that is separate from
men and has “roots in traditional women’s ways of being in the world.”
Here King, through her demand that feminism “insist that we remember our
origins in nature” seems to forget her earlier claim that ecofeminism must
go beyond the dualism of “radical-cultural feminism” or “rational-
materialist feminism.” “The ecology question,” King states,
weights the historic feminist debate in the direction of traditional female values over the
overly rational, combative male way of being in the world. Rationalist feminism is the Trojan
horse of the women’s movement. Its piece-of-the-action mentality conceals a capitulation to
a culture bent on the betrayal of nature. In that sense it is both misogynist and anti-
ecological. Denying biology, espousing androgny, and valuing what men have done over
what we have done are all forms of self-hatred which threaten to derail the teleology of the
feminist challenge to this violent civilization. 17

Aside from the ironically “combative” tone of this statement, King here
retreats from a promising attempt to go beyond the limitations of either an
essentialist or constructionist position. In this statement, the terms
“traditional female values,” “biology,” and “nature” are unproblematically
opposed to a “combative male way of being,” which represents “culture”
and a “violent civilization.” But note that this slip into essentialism occurs
right after her argument for a “separate [from men] cultural and political
activity so that we can imagine, theorize or envision from the vantage point
of critical otherness.” 18 The question of whether feminist political practice
should be based on women’s similarity to or women’s difference from men
is at issue here; her opponent at this juncture seems to be a liberal feminism
that seeks equality with men in terms set by the capitalist political
institutional system. King opts for the vantage of women’s difference from
men for theoretical and strategic reasons and, in doing so, lapses into an
“essentialist” position, irrational on her own terms.
It is the need to speak from a standpoint of “critical otherness” or, in
other words, claiming the right to constitute meaning from women’s
location within an oppressive system, that leads King to use essentialist
language. Additionally, what kind of political action feminists should
involve themselves in is at stake here: extra-institutional, perhaps separatist,
actions or interest-group lobbying within the framework of the political
bureaucracy. But a contradiction repeatedly appears between the
essentialism that arises in the context of justifying separatist feminist direct
actions and the wide-ranging, integrative political analysis promulgated
through the process of these actions.
King’s later published work reflects a more consistent approach to the
problem of the dualism of culture/nature (and related
constructionist/essentialist positions), but her emphasis on direct action as a
description of ecofeminist political practice retains a tension between
feminist separatism and a synthetic radical politics that ranges beyond
“strictly feminist” concerns. In her 1983 article, 19 King more carefully
locates ecofeminism as a “third direction,” not severing the connection
between woman and nature (like socialist feminists) nor reinforcing it (a
position she acknowledges is taken by “many feminists [who] call
themselves ecofeminists”). 20 Instead, ecofeminism should
recognize that although the nature/culture opposition is a product of culture, we can,
nonetheless, consciously choose not to sever the woman/nature connections by joining male
culture. Rather, we can use it as a vantage point for creating a different kind of culture and
politics that would integrate intuitive/spiritual and rational forms of knowledge, embracing
both science and magic insofar as they enable us to transform the nature/culture distinction
itself and to envision and create a free, ecological society. 21
In this article, King outlines four ecofeminist principles: (1) the subjugation
of women and the subjugation of nature are dialectically related; (2)
hierarchy justifies domination and must be resisted on all levels, including
within ecofeminist political practice; (3) diversity must be maintained, for
ecological and political reasons, thus domination based on class, race,
nationality, sexuality, and various forms of privilege as well as the
destruction of whole species and ecosystems must be resisted; and (4)
dualistic thinking, particularly distinctions between culture and nature,
supports all kinds of domination. The deconstructive and oppositional
practice that supports these principles is “antimilitarist direct action.” This
assertion is supported by an analysis of militarism, which constructs it as
the repository of the structures of domination that produce and perpetuate
sexism, racism, imperialism, environmental destruction, and classism.
Similarly to the politics of the “Unity Statement,” ecofeminism here is
described as a politics that can make “connections” between various radical
positions and analyses. In particular, the principles of radical democracy
and diversity require a constant re-evaluation of any attempt at a fixed
definition of women.
At the heart of this politics, for King, is direct action, but of a particular
kind: actions organized by and for women. “The politics being created by
these actions draw on women’s culture: embodying what is best in women’s
life-oriented socialization, building on women’s differences, organizing anti-
hierarchically in small groups in visually and emotionally imaginative
ways, and seeking an integration of issues. These actions exemplify
ecofeminism.” 22
If “these actions” (here King is referring to the WPA, the women’s action
at the Bohemian Grove in 1981, and Greenham Common in 1982)
“exemplify ecofeminism,” this does not mean that ecofeminism as King
presents it is an uncontested political position, or even widely understood as
an appropriate label within the direct action movement. That King knows
this is clear in her acknowledgement of the other ecofeminists in her
footnote cited above, but also in her consistent attempt to define
ecofeminism in such a way that it could possibly appeal to both “cultural
feminists” and “socialist feminists.” At the same time, she wants to justify
to other antimilitarist activists the appropriateness of women organizing
separately from men and the importance of a feminist analysis to a
integrative left politics.
What happens in her argument at this point is that she sometimes
conflates ecofeminism and the participatory democratic politics of the direct
action movement, which has been a mixed-gender movement while
claiming feminism as one of its political positions. Thus, the reader is left
with the impression that she is arguing that feminists, or women, are
inherently nonviolent, antihierarchical, and always prefer a decentralized
politics of direct action; or that antimilitarist direct action is the special
provenance of feminist separatists.
These motivations and complexities occur again in King’s response to
Kirkpatrick Sale’s article on “Ecofeminism” in The Nation. Here King
specifically attacks Sale for characterizing ecofeminism in such a way that
essentialist elements predominate, specifically Sale’s emphasis on “goddess
cultures” and “earth-based spirituality” as “hallmarks” of ecofeminism. 23

King complains that this creates the “impression of [ecofeminism as] a

sentimentalizing religion of earth mothers.” 24 On the other hand, King
distances herself from a totally “constructivist” position by criticizing “ex-
Marxist academic postmodernists [who] reject subject, history, and human
agency.” Instead, King offers ecofeminism as a position that “shares the
project of other feminisms, which seek to draw on women’s unarticulated
(up until now) life experience to reconstitute the subject, and history, and a
nondomineering agency rather than totally discard these modern (and
problematic) concepts.” 25 In addition, King uses her critique of Sale’s
article to point up the sexism inherent in left environmentalism, specifically
“bioregionalism” and “deep ecology.” Finally, King maintains that the true
“hallmarks” of ecofeminism are a multivalent left politics based on a
critique of domination (which includes both the domination of people and
of nature) and the practice of direct action. 26
Throughout her writings, King’s formulation of ecofeminism is a
political intervention with several complexly intertwined goals. First, she
wants to overcome oppositions between feminists who identify with
constructivist positions and essentialist positions. Second, she attempts to
destabilize easy essentialist assumptions within the direct action movement
by insisting that women are a part of culture and can construct their own
definition through collective political action. Third, she provides a
standpoint from which to criticize sexist environmentalists and practitioners
of direct action, and an argument that justifies women organizing separately
from men if they wish. And finally, she argues for the “decentralized,”
“antihierarchical” practice of direct action as the praxis of a politics able to
synthesize various radical political positions, though she frequently
conflates this practice with “feminism.” It is in the third and fourth areas
that “essentialist” formulations most often characterize King’s arguments;
otherwise, she is often consciously anti-essentialist. In sum, King’s
essentialism is tactical and unstable, one could even say “positional,”
employed when arguing for the need for women to organize on their own
terms and for the importance of a feminist analysis within antimilitarist and
environmentalist politics.
Feminist Direct Actions and the “Moral Mother”
In 1983, in the context of an antimilitarist movement that claimed feminism
as one of its elements, and international resistance to the intention of the
United States to deploy the Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe, many
women all over the world organized as “women” to fight militarism. Much
of this antimilitarist feminist organizing employed essentialist rhetoric,
evidenced by what Micaela di Leonardo has called the “Moral Mother”
position: “nurturant, compassionate, and politically correct—the sovereign,
instinctive spokeswoman for all that is living and vulnerable … [the] Moral
Mother represents the vision of women as innately pacifist, and men as
innately warmongering.” 27 While I do not directly dispute di Leonardo’s
characterization, in every feminist antimilitarist action I have studied (from
1976 to 1988), I have found evidence of significant internal debate around
essentialist definitions of “women.” I will try to give some examples of
these debates here.
Certainly it is the case that recurrent features of the direct action
movement have been symbols and language that make uncritical
connections between women, nature, and mothering: the use of Mother’s
Day for women’s antimilitarist actions, an analysis of militarism that
connects it with male violence against women and the “rape” of the earth;
the prominence of feminist pagans, the witches that weave webs; and,
within the movement, the frequent parallels, or even equations, made
between feminism and nonviolence, feminism and antihierarchical politics,
and feminism and environmentalism.
Di Leonardo’s critique is directed at this visible manifestation of a
feminism that argues against war because it is a male construction, and
argues for peace because it is seen as a womans way. She suggests, rightly I
think, that any short-term benefits of the extensive use of the Moral Mother
argument don’t by themselves outweigh the dangers of this rhetoric
potentially reinscribing women into a sexist stereotype of feminine virtue
and passivity. Still, I think that her account (which I use here as
representative of other accounts) is problematic.
First, the Moral Mother imagery, though “popular and ubiquitous,” was
not as central to the movement as the multivalent radical politics I have
already described. In fact, accounts like di Leonardo’s tend to use a
definition of antimilitarist feminism limited to the maternalism they
critique. Besides the symbolic discourse concerning women as natural
peacemakers, the feminism of the nonviolent direct action movement was
manifested in other ways as well: for instance, women and men participated
equally, in most cases, in decision making, organizing, and support tasks. In
addition, feminist antimilitarism is one key historical link between the
second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 70s and contemporary feminist
activism. A majority of direct actionists have been women, comprised of
many different kinds of feminists and many women who would not identify
themselves as feminists. Many of the feminists in the movement tended to
be young and had been affected by the struggles of older feminists in the
universities, in women’s centers and crisis shelters, in the secondary
schools, and in the work place. The direct action movement may well have
been their first experience of working collectively with other women apart
from men, and perhaps apart from the dominance of older feminists. The
experience of acting politically with other women, using techniques in
decision making and political analyses developed from the early second-
wave feminist movement, made the direct action movement an important
arena for feminist consciousness-raising and, during the 1980s, one of the
few existing outside of universities.
 Second, women’s actions were frequently the focus of much debate over
the meaning of “feminism,” and the participatory democratic practice of
these actions consistently destabilized any one definition of “women” or
“mothers.” An example of such a debate, or the nature of feminist discourse
in the movement, is recounted in “Agreeing to Disagree” from We Are
Ordinary Women, a book about the Puget Sound Women’s Peace Camp.
Formed in solidarity with the women’s peace camps in Europe (such as
Greenham Common) and other American camps (such as the one at Seneca
Falls in upstate New York), the Puget Sound Peace Camp lasted for a full
year (1983–1984) outside the Boeing Corporation’s weapons plant in
western Washington. 28
In this one incident, similar to thousands of others in women’s actions of
the time, the Puget Sound Peace Camp women decided to leaflet the
pornography district in Seattle as part of an attempt to link militarism and
violence against women. In preparing for this action, two leaflets were
independently produced, each analyzing pornography in different ways: one
prominently featured an exhortation to “stop violence” and asserted that
“pornography is violence.” The graphics on this leaflet were of flowers and
plants. The other leaflet argued that a military build-up that deprived
women of needed social services could only occur in a society in which
violence against women was tolerated and women’s worth was cheapened.
This leaflet argued that violent pornography contributed to the societal
devaluation of women. There were no graphics on this leaflet; on the
bottom-right corner it said “labor donated.” Thus the first pamphlet could
be read as promulgating an essentialist analysis of pornography as an
expression of innate male violence directed at women as victims; while the
second pamphlet could be read as a materialist analysis of a historically
situated relationship between pornography and sexism. Because the
presumption in the camp was that consensus must be reached on actions
engaged in by affinity groups, the differences in style and content between
the two leaflets caused a heated conflict over which one should represent
the Camp. After a prolonged discussion, which ranged over all of the ways
to conceptualize the connections between sexism and militarism, the peace
campers decided to distribute both leaflets. According to the narrators of
this incident, “It became clear that many women felt their individual
expression was being masked by the ‘correct’ political line that the Camp
wanted to put out.” 29 The book does not say, however, which leaflet
represented that “correct” line.
Incidents that occurred during the early organizing for the Mother’s Day
Action at the Nevada Test Site in 1987 can serve as further examples of the
way in which the structures of the movement led to debates over the
meaning of feminism and the subject categories “women” or “mothers.”
Although the Mother’s Day Action was to be a “women’s action,” some of
the women who originally conceived of it did not want to, as they put it,
“exclude” men. So their compromise was that the action was to be
organized by women, but men would be “welcome to participate.” Quite
reasonably, given the decentralized nature of the affinity group structure
and the requirements of consensus process for participatory decision
making, this language was interpreted very differently in different parts of
the country and among different communities of women. In many parts of
Northern California, this compromise wording was interpreted (after some
debate) to mean that only women would organize and make decisions prior
to the actual action; once affinity groups were formed, of course, men
would participate in decisions within affinity groups of mixed gender. In
other areas, this compromise was interpreted to mean that men could make
initial organizing decisions equally with women. In a very few areas, men
were actually the sole organizers for this “women’s action” until affinity
groups were formed. Thus, the notion of a “women’s action” meant
different things to different participants, despite the overarching rhetoric of
maternalism embedded in the notion of a Mother’s Day action.
In another example from the early organizing period, women organizers
in Santa Cruz (including myself at the time) became concerned that the
emphasis on Mother’s Day would be construed to exclude women who
weren’t mothers. So the Santa Cruz organizing group (most of whom were
nonmothers) proposed that the action be called “the Mothers and Others
Action.” This was very enthusiastically received at the national organizing
level in Las Vegas; but it wasn’t until weeks later that the Santa Cruz group
realized that the women in Las Vegas understood “Mothers and Others” to
mean “women and men” rather than women who were and weren’t mothers.
30 Even though this understanding conflated women and mothers, a number
of men who participated in the action were interested in claiming their
status as “mothers”: one affinity group, half of which were men, arrived at
the site all wearing pillows under large T-shirts, pregnant with meaning; and
many men enthusiastically volunteered for child-care duties during the
action.
I recount these examples to show that a closer look at the discursive
practices of the early ecofeminist actions reveals that the organizational
structures of the nonviolent direct action movement, which allowed for a
great deal of autonomy within collective actions and required a lot of
(perhaps too much!) discussion and participation, constantly destabilized
any fixed notions of feminism or of what women should be. This means
that it was very difficult for that movement to sustain a particular analysis,
or to control the meanings produced in actions, or to strategize over a long
campaign of actions. But its other result is that political meanings and
identities were constructed in an open and flexible way, available to the
interpretation of diverse participants.

Opposmonal Consciousness and Essentialist

Discourse
There are several difficulties with the prevailing (but, I contend, reductive)
description of feminist antimilitarism, or early ecofeminism, as “radical” or
“cultural” feminism as long as this is a code for “essentialist.” As I hope I
have shown, such a description obscures the contested nature of the
movement’s feminism. It also does not give an accurate picture of the
diversity of women and feminisms within the movement. In practice, the
movement managed, in both mixed-gender and women-only actions, to
have as participants people diverse in almost every respect, with the
reservations about racial diversity noted above (see especially n.4, this
chapter). Reductive descriptions of the feminism of the direct action
movement, and by extension any other political movement, are
unintentionally damaging to these movements, because they obscure their
politics for those people who might be their most helpful critics, powerful
allies, or potential participants. Such reductive characterizations may
discourage feminists of anti-essentialist persuasions from participating in a
movement and thereby further destabilize essentialist discourse.
Further, in rightly pointing out the dangers of symbolic codes that
uncritically bring together women and nature, mothering and peace, a
critique of the dangers of essentialism too easily substitutes for an analysis
of antimilitarist ecofeminism as a discourse of resistance specific to its
historical and ideological context. For instance, when di Leonardo
characterizes the feminism of the peace movement as “radical feminist,”
she conflates it with the “social feminism” of the nineteenth century. As a
result, she cannot adequately analyze the material and historical basis for
the symbolic codes used by feminists in the contemporary movement. As
she herself realizes, she leaves unexplained the persistence of such imagery,
even though she several times asks the question.
I can only indicate the outlines of a historical analysis of antimilitarist
ecofeminism here. The early ecofeminist analysis of the direct action
movement, which connected violence against women, militarism, and
ecological destruction, begins to be widely articulated in 1980. At this time,
partly through a backlash against feminism, a New Right administration
was installed that used patriarchal ideology to justify a huge military build-
up and an economic restructuring from which women, particularly single
mothers and women of color, suffered a great deal. In this context, early
ecofeminism can be seen as an “oppositional consciousness” or a
“positional feminism,” a tactical politics of identity that provides a way of
knowing and naming the existing complex relations between oppression,
resistance, and identity.
Moral Mother rhetoric and imagery in the antimiliarist direct action
movement frequently stemmed from the participation of women who joined
the movement because they were concerned for their children and their
children’s children in a nuclear age, or they were women who easily
thought of themselves as one day becoming mothers, accepting the burdens
of the reproductive function in a patriarchal society. Having joined the
movement on these terms, they found themselves working collectively
(though not necessarily without considerable debate) with women who were
witches, lesbians, radicals, socialists, and (generally white) women who
spoke out against racism (many of whom were also mothers). Thus the
language of motherhood provided a kind of salve to the divisions among
women (and feminists) in the movement, or, seen another way, a glue that
resulted in the adhesion of different kinds of women to each other. Beyond
this, mothering itself is an “ideological seam” 31 in contemporary society;
the oppositional consciousness of the movement deployed various images
of “mothers” (men as mothers, grandmothers, lesbian mothers, Mother
Earth, etc.) in an attempt to replace the Reaganesque image of the
militarized white mother of two who willingly supports the sacrifice of
“her” men and children in war and in nuclear industries.
In this case, early ecofeminism struggled to move women from being a
fulcrum of militarist ideology to a position of resistance to militarism, to
which women are particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal society (though
they are not exempt from complicity in militarism). 32 The symbolic
discourse of webs, witches, and rituals of exorcism outside the gates of
military facilities can be understood, as Donna Haraway has pointed out, as
a specific critique of the fatal intertwining of postindustrial technology,
capitalism, militarism, and commodity culture. 33 The magic of witches in
the direct action movement opposes the “magical” characteristics of a
nuclear technology that maintains the balance between life and death
through arcane, secret operations known only to the initiated. The rituals of
paganism that celebrate nature, life, and sexuality take place in the wastes
of irradiated lands and in the face of technologies of death justified by a
New Right ideology of patriarchal “family values,” including chastity,
obedience, monogamous heterosexuality, and unquestioning patriotism.
Early ecofeminism was specifically constructed to challenge the
articulations supporting the hegemonic bloc we now call the “Reagan-Bush
years.” In other words, I am suggesting that many of the elements of the
Moral Mother rhetoric rejected by anti-essentialist feminists can be
analyzed as useful parts of a theory of resistance. In addition, this
constructed identity serves as a method of deconstructing specific
formulations of power in the 1980s. The theory embedded in the practice of
antimilitarist feminism is thus akin to poststructuralist feminist theories,
which are portrayed as antithetical to “essentialist” antimilitarist feminism.
In chapter 5, I will similarly posit that essentialist ecofeminist rhetoric
aimed at constructing an international movement is engaged in a similar
deconstruction of a new hegemonic bloc, which I call “globalizing
environmentalisms.”
Earlier, I’ve referred to the two dangers of essentialist formulations of
feminist discourse: that positing universal female characteristics obscures
differences among women, and that essentialist discourse reinscribes
women into patriarchal ideology. I have tried to show so far that while the
dangers of essentialism that arise out of use of Moral Mother imagery and
some other ecofeminist arguments are real and should be addressed, within
and without the movement, the democratic practices of the movement
tended to deconstruct universal descriptions of women, feminism, or
mothers. Ultimately, the identity constructed by women in the antimilitarist
direct action movement was not simply an essentialist one (i.e., based on
beliefs about women’s innate natures) but a result of negotiation and
agreements necessary for collective action, a political identity that was not
singular but the “we” of a movement. As an expression of solidarity based
on common beliefs and goals worked out through an ongoing process of
discussion and debate, such an identity was also a tool of analysis for an
antimilitarist theory of resistance. Differences between women were not
simply obscured, but reconstructed as a flexible analysis of the different
kinds of oppression women were subjected to. Despite these promising
aspects, these actions remained predominantly white women’s actions;
while antiracist in theory, they remained segregated in practice. In the next
chapter, I will examine an attempt by some of these feminist antimilitarist
activists to overcome this segregation, and in chapter 4, I analyze reasons
for the persistence of such racial segregation.
But what about the danger of women becoming reinscribed into
patriarchal discourse? Again, this was a serious risk of much of the
movement’s rhetoric and practice. But I think it is important to point out
that the mainstream press and the people who lived in the communities in
which these actions have taken place rarely perceived women in the
movement as “traditional” wives, daughters, and mothers. Frequently it was
the women-only actions, or the women’s groups within mixed actions, that
received the worst press, as the media was faced with women behaving in
an aggressive and outrageous fashion, staining the walls of military and
corporate buildings with their blood, living together happily without men,
and going to jail. Gay-baiting, in particular, was and still is a common
reaction to women’s actions. It is ironic that where feminist observers see
dangerous essentialists, patriarchal observers see dangerous lesbians. 34

During actions at the Diablo nuclear power plant and the Livermore
Laboratories, the Feminist Cluster (a grouping of women-only affinity
groups) had the reputation of being the most militant in their actions,
consistently stretching the definition of nonviolence beyond the comfort of
other participants. Even at the Mother’s Day Action in 1987, which was one
of the milder manifestations of feminist antimilitarism, the local headline
the next day read: “‘Mothers’ Protest,” with quotation marks around
“Mothers,” as if the reporter had great doubts that there were any real
Mothers there.

Notes
1. Parts of this chapter are based on research I did for my dissertation.
See Noël Sturgeon, “Direct Theory and Political Action: The U.S.
 Nonviolent Direct Action Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, University
of California, Santa Cruz, March 1991.
2. While there is a wealth of scattered materials published on various
aspects of the antimilitarist direct action movement, there is very little
that treats it as a whole movement. See Barbara Epstein, Political
Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the
1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and
Sturgeon, “Theorizing Movements: Direct Action and Direct Theory,”
in Marcy Darnovsky, Barbara Epstein, and Richard Flacks, eds.,
Cultural Politics and Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple
University, 1994), pp. 35–51.
3. “I have met scores of young feminists drawn to actions like the
Women’s Peace Encampment and to groups like Women for a Non-
Nuclear Future by their belief that the maternal love women have for
their children can unlock the gates of imperialist oppression. I have
great respect for the self-affirming pride of these women, but I also …
fear that their effect is to reflect and reproduce dominant cultural
assumptions about women, which not only fail to represent the variety
in women’s lives but promote unrealistic expectations about ‘normal’
female behavior that most of us cannot satisfy.” Linda Alcoff,
“Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism_ The Identity’ Crisis in
Feminist Theory,” SIGNS 13 (Spring 1988): 413. Important articles
examining the essentialism of peace movement women are Micaela di
Leonardo, “Morals, Mothers, and Militarism_ Antimilitarism and
Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 11 (Fall 1985): 599–617; and
Johanna Brenner, “Beyond Flssentialism_ Feminist Theory and
Strategy in the Peace Movement,” in Mike Davis and Michael
Sprinker, eds., Reshaping the U.S. Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s
 (New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 93—113. Brenner, who has some direct
experience with peace movement actions, is far less reductive than di
Leonardo, whose critique I examine in detail later in this essay. See
also Kathy E. Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in
Feminist Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and
Epstein, Political Protest.
4. I have found that the particular characterization of this movement as
antiracist has very often surprised people who are not familiar with the
internal structure and analysis of the movement, since it most
participants tended to be white. Nevertheless, the movement’s
discourse and practice has been consciously antiracist both analytically
(for example, in making connections between the exploitation of
Native American uranium miners and nuclear power, or between the
rise of our military budget and the racial composition of our poor who
depend on social services) and in practice (for instance, the handbooks
almost all carry sections on racism and ways to cornbat it in organizing
and in decision-making processes). Further, most of the practices and
organizational structures of the movement were pioneered by people of
color in this country; there is nothing inherently white about civil
disobedience, for example, even if people of color have more to fear
from police than do white people. In certain actions, working
coalitions were set up between the direct action movement and
antimiliarist movements of people of color, for instance in the South
Pacific (the action at Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1983) and with
Native American activists (for example, at the Nevada Test Site, where
the Western Shoshone issue permits to activists “trespassing” onto the
Test Site). Much more of this kind of coalition building could have
been attempted by the movement, in my view. This does not mean that
 there wasn’t racism within the movement; anywhere there are white
people, there is racism to contend with, and the culture of the
movement was at times oppressively white. But it is a measure of
progress, I think, that a movement be considered, or consider itself,
antiracist without first requiring the presence of large numbers of
people of color. It seems appropriate, to me, for white people to take
responsibility for analyzing the connections between racism and
militarism, and not to leave this task up to the many peace activists of
color.
5. King’s published articles on ecofeminism include: “All is
Connectedness: Scenes from the Women’s Pentagon Action USA,” in
Lynne Jones, ed., Keeping the Peace, (London: Women’s Press
Limited, 1983), pp. 40–63; “Feminism and the Revolt of Nature,”
Heresies 13 (1981): 12–15; “Toward an Ecological Feminism and a
Feminist Ecology,” in Joan Rothschild, ed., Machina Ex Dea: Feminist
Perspectives on Technology, (New York: Pergamon, 1983), pp. 118–
129; “What is Ecofeminism?” The Nation (December 12, 1987): 702,
730–31; “Ecological Feminism,” Z Magazine 1(7/8) (1988): 124–27;
“The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology,” in Judith
Plant, ed., Healing the Wounds, (Santa Cruz, CA: New Society
Publishers, 1989), pp. 18–28; and “Healing the Wounds: Feminism,
Ecology, and the Nature/Culture Dualism,” in Irene Diamond and
Gloria Feman Ornstein eds., Reweaving the World: The Emergence of
Ecofeminism, (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), pp. 106–21.
6. King, “All is Connectedness,” pp. 40–41.
7. Interestingly, in the quote above King describes “male technocrats”
using masculinist language to define the nuke at Three Mile Island as
“female.” In this case, it seems, it is the nuclear technology that is
 represented as a female, rather than male, force, akin to uncontrollable
nature. On the masculinist discourse of “defense intellectuals,” which
may describe nuclear technologies as phallic objects as well as babies,
see Carol Cohn’s excellent article, “Sex and Death in the Rational
World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12 (Summer 1987): 687–718;
and H. Bruce Franklin, “Domesticating the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons in
Testament and the Fiction of Judith Merrill, Helen Clarkson, Kate
Wilhelm and Carol Amen,” paper given in the Gender and Nuclear
Weapons panel at the American Studies Association Conference,
Miami Beach, October 1988.
8. King, “All is Connectedness,” p. 44.
9. Ellen Willis, Village Voice 25(25) (June 18–24, 1980): 28. A second
part to this article appeared in the Voice 25(29) (July 16–22, 1980): 34.
10. I owe this point to T. V. Reed.
11. Donna Warnock, “Mobilizing Emotions: Organizing the Women’s
Pentagon Action,” Socialist Review 63–64 (May-August 1982): 37–47,
p. 37.
12. Warnock, “Mobilizing Emotions,” p. 38. Indeed, the largest direct
action mobilizations that preceded the Women’s Pentagon Actions in
the Northeast (where most of the organizers of the WPA were from)
were the Seabrook actions, in which feminism was a contested term,
though accorded a certain legitimacy from the beginning. See Anna
Gyorgy et al., No Nukes, (Boston: South Find Press, 1979), p. 388.
Indications of a controversy over feminism in the Seabrook actions
appear in accounts of the October 6, 1979, and May 24, 1980, actions
(personal interviews with Seabrook participants crystal and jackrabbit;
undated leaflet distributed by the Wandering Star affinity group,
personal possession). Yet the decentralized affinity group structures in
 these actions also allowed a certain autonomy to feminist participants.
Thus, Donna Warnock also says that “the groundwork for autonomous
feminist organizing had already been laid [before the WPA], especially
by the anti-nuclear movement.” “Mobilizing Emotions,” p. 38.
13. See Rosalind Petchesky, “Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of
the New Right,” Signs 7 (Summer 1981): 206–46; and Zillah
Eisenstein, “The Sexual Politics of the New Right: Understanding the
‘Crisis of Liberalism’ for the 1980s,” Signs 7 (Summer 1982): 567–88.
14. The “Unity Statement” is reprinted in King, “All is Connectedness,”
pp. 42–43, including the original graphics, which depict women of
different ages and races. A retyped version without graphics can be
found in Fight Back! Feminist Resistance to Male Violence
(Minneapolis: Cleis Press, 1981): 280.
15. Crace Paley, personal communication, February 1987. I am indebted
throughout my discussion of the WPA and the “Unity Statement” to
the incisive analysis by T. V. Reed in “Dramatic Ecofeminism_ The
Women’s Pentagon Action as Theater and Theory,” in Fifteen
Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American
Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California, 1992).
16. King, “Feminism and the Revolt of Nature” p. 13.
17. Ibid., p. 14.
18. Ibid.; King’s emphasis.
19. King, ‘Toward an Ecological Feminism and a Feminist Ecology.”
20. Ibid., p. 128, n 4.
21. Ibid., p. 123, King’s emphasis. This section, especially this first
sentence, is possibly the most quoted statement of King’s and plays a
special part in various efforts to produce a nonessentialist
ecofeminism. I’ll return to this point in chapter 6.
22. Ibid., p. 127; my emphases.
23. The Nation (December 12, 1987): 702.
24. Ibid., p. 731.
25. Ibid., p. 730.
26. King’s understanding of ecofeminism as resting on these elements is
shared by a second letter critiquing Sale’s article in this same issue of
The Nation, which agrees that ecofeminists share a “radical left-
libertarian and direct action-oriented approach.” Sharon Helsel and
John Ely, pp. 731–32. Helsel and Ely add a further characteristic: that
ecofeminists share a “dedicated opposition to the proliferation of
nuclear weapons,” a conclusion with which Ynestra King would
undoubtedly agree. This is the same Sharon Helsel that was a member
of the Surrogate Others.
27. Micaela di Leonardo, “Morals, Mothers, and Militarism,” p. 602.
28. Participants of the Puget Sound Women’s Peace Camp, We Are
Ordinary Women: A Chronicle of the Puget Sound Women’s Peace
Camp (Seattle: Seal Press, 1985).
29. We Are Ordinary Women, p. 78.
30. A version of this story is recounted by Donna Haraway in “The
Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d
Others,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler,
eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 295–337. My
version of the story predates Haraway’s, originating from my
dissertation and my essay, “Post-structuralism Feminism,
Ecofeminism, and Radical Feminism Revisited,” presented to the
National Women’s Studies Association Meeting in 1989; she drew on
her memory of my work as well as her own experience in the action in
 relating her typically rich rendition (personal communication, Donna
Haraway, March 1991).
31. The term is Janice Radway’s. Her definition is “those points of
intersection between the discourse and practices that together
constitute individual subjects… in particular ways.” F>om
“Identifying Ideological Seams: Mass Culture, Analytical Method, and
Political Practice,” Communications 9 (1986): 110.
32. For an excellent discussion of the complicity of women in the
construction of militarism, see Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become
You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (Boston: South Find Press,
1983).
33. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81.
34. See Judith McDaniel, “One Summer at Seneca,” Heresies 5 (1985): 6–
10; and Louise Krasniewicz, Nuclear Summer: The Clash of
Communities at the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1992). A fascinating analysis of the media’s
construction of women at Greenham Common as “deviant” can be
found in Alison Young, Femininity in Dissent (New York: Routledge,
1990).
3 Womanearth Feminist Peace
Institute and the Race for Parity
DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-4

The story of WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute illustrates both the

serious antiracist efforts of some ecofeminists as well as particular problems
with a U.S. discourse on race that is prevalent inside and outside of the
movement. As noted in the previous chapters, ecofeminism has been
primarily a white women’s political location, and yet it is a movement that
thinks of itself as antiracist. As I will discuss at greater length in the next
chapter, many environmental activists who are women of color don’t want
to identify as “ecofeminist,” as they see ecofeminism as not concerned in
important ways with racism or with the issues central to environmental
activists of color. In this chapter, I wish to explore a serious attempt to
overcome barriers between white women and women of color within an
ecofeminist organization during the period when ecofeminism was
becoming an identifiable political location. My analysis here locates some
of these barriers in the history of U.S. social movements and the antiracist
discourses they have generated, some of the barriers within the particular
form of ecofeminism constructed in the late 1980s, and some of the barriers
in structural U.S. racism.
As I have said, despite the racialized divide between those who would or
would not identify as an ecofeminist, antiracist analyses consistently appear
in ecofeminist literature, and racism almost always counts as a factor in
ecofeminist assessments of the causes and consequences of environmental
problems. These antiracist analyses display the qualities of their origins.
Political discourses in opposition to U.S. racism have followed particular
histories constructed in the context of particular “racial formations.” 1 Thus,
it is no surprise to find U.S. ecofeminism using discourses of racial
difference embedded in its historical context, especially the contexts of the
social movements that have influenced it.
Ecofeminism moves beyond early second-wave radical feminist
discourse, which presented racism and sexism as analogous, speaking of
“women” and “blacks” in ways that made women of color invisible and that
prevented the analysis of the “double jeopardy” of racism and sexism. 2
Indeed, beginning in 1979, early ecofeminism was most interested in
establishing the interconnections between various forms of discrimination
and oppression rather than ranking them or seeing them as separate forces
affecting distinct kinds of individuals. Despite this greater complexity, early
ecofeminist discourses of racial difference follow a course of development
patterned on the broader context of U.S. feminist and antiracist oppositional
culture. Perhaps stemming directly from the personal evolution of white
feminist civil rights activists into feminist antimilitarists, 3 race appears in
early ecofeminist analyses defined primarily as a dichotomy: white and
black. During the mid-1980s, when women from a variety of racial/ethnic
backgrounds finally were able to make visible a thoroughgoing critique of
the racism of white feminists, the binary conception of race shifted to white
and nonwhite, or white women and women of color. It is in this context that
the organization called WomanEarth was formed. However, I am examining
it from of a very different political context, one in which there are
widespread critiques of binary notions of racial difference and a preference
for the deployment of multiple notions of racial difference. Thus, my
analysis is informed by an antiracist discourse not available in the same
way for the organizers of WomanEarth. I want to keep sight of the fact that
the same shift in anti-racist discourses that produces my analysis will also
have affected the members of WomanEarth, and thus their positions today
may well be very different from their positions as I characterize them here.

The Story of Womanearth

Begun in 1985, WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute was founded with the
intention to establish an ecofeminist educational center, at first in the form
of a summer institute, that would produce theory, conduct research, teach
classes, publish an ecofeminist newsletter or journal, and support political
activities of various kinds. Another conception of the project involved the
creation of ecofeminist “locals,” each with their own community project,
connected in a national network by WomanEarth. At the heart of
WomanEarth was the idea that it would confront racism head-on—that
antiracism would be central to its definition, unlike previous versions of
ecofeminist political action. Following the advice of African American
feminist Barbara Smith, WomanEarth was founded on the principle of racial
parity: that is, there would always be an equal number of white women and
women of color within the organization, particularly within its decision-
making structures. The core members of WomanEarth, sometimes called
“Circle One,” were eight women. Four of them were women of color:
Rachel Bagby (African American), Papusa Molina (Mexicana), Rachel
Sierra (Chicana), and Luisah Teish (African American). Four were white
women: Gwyn Kirk, Ynestra King, Margie Mayman, and Starhawk. 4
WomanEarth organized a successful ecofeminist conference based on
racial parity in 1986 at Hampshire College, but it disbanded after a period
of disorganization and false starts from 1987 to 1989. Despite this short and
conflicted history, WomanEarth influenced the formation of U.S.
ecofeminism by broadening the notion of ecofeminist politics at a crucial
time and by publicizing ecofeminism as an antiracist political location. In
this chapter, I will tell the story of WomanEarth’s efforts, concentrating on
the way in which racial parity operated to shape the organization’s goals,
practice, and understanding of racism within an ecofeminist context. While
this history is interesting in itself as a piece of the development of
ecofeminism that has until now remained largely unknown, I am most
interested in analyzing the organization in terms of what it can tell us about
the practice of feminist antiracist social movements, particularly those that
are predominantly white. I begin by tracing the history of the organization
in some detail and then analyze specific areas in order to explore the
political lessons of the experience: the implications of racial parity as a
principle of operation, and the effects of WomanEarth’s identification as an
ecofeminist organization.
Before I begin tell the story of WomanEarth, however, I would like to
reflect briefly on the problems involved in reconstructing the history of a
movement organization. This story is indebted to the women involved in
WomanEarth, who have been very generous with their time and trusting of
my good intentions in gathering this information. Though I will use the
information I have gathered to attribute positions, intentions, actions, and
opinions to different people involved, I want to caution that this is my story,
my interpretation, constructed out of weaving together the words of
separate testimonies about events that in some cases are almost ten years
distant from the time of the interviews. I did attempt to give my
interviewees some control over what I could attribute to them personally,
but ultimately they had no control over the context in which I place their
words and the rhetorical methods by which I give them the specific
meaning they will have here. 5
 I think it is important to understand the achievements, struggles, and
debates that made up the experience called WomanEarth, but I worry over
the inevitable decontextualization of my account from the personal
relationships, the day-to-day contexts of collective work, the hopes and
fears that went into the experience. Recovering the histories of feminist
organizations is crucial to putting together strategies for feminist futures,
and I remain convinced that WomanEarth is a very important part of
feminist and ecofeminist history, which, if lost or unexamined, would
impoverish us. Yet I am acutely cognizant that the analysis I engage in here
is both advantaged and disadvantaged by hindsight. In addition, my account
is influenced by my outsider status, my ability to take a disinvested position
in relation to the very personal and individual attempts required to make a
particular political organization work and survive. I am very much aware
that should another analyst turn her attention to organizing efforts I have
been involved in, particularly in the same time period, she would find
similar flaws to those I find here. None of the problems encountered by
WomanEarth are unusual for radical, grassroots organizations. Finally, my
interest in specific aspects of the organization over others inevitably skews
the narrative. In particular, my interest in the construction of difference puts
a spotlight on conflict within the organization, emphasizing it over
agreement, friendship, political solidarity, and play. In some recognition of
these problems, I will try to note uncertainties and the possibilities of
multiple interpretations as I proceed. Though my account, organized as it is
toward object lessons for the future, is inevitably long on critique and short
on approbation, I came away from my research with a great respect for each
one of the participants. I recognize that their aspirations were so high that
the disappointments encountered were particularly sharp. My purpose here
is not to increase or to revive that past pain (though I think I cannot avoid
doing so) but to honor each woman’s effort by offering the experience as an
important place to learn about constructing better and more effective
feminist politics. I raise these issues not just for the sake of the members of
WomanEarth, but as a methodological caveat for the study of movements
generally. A greater degree of reflexivity on the part of researchers should
lead to greater understanding of the choices and intentions of activists.

A Feminist Peace Institute

The impetus for WomanEarth came from Ynestra King and Starhawk. King
reports being motivated by two main desires. First, she wanted to create an
institution that sustained the kind of decentralized, action-oriented feminist
antimilitarist politics she had been engaged in. The challenge was to
develop some stable means of movement building and at the same time not
undermine the democratic, participatory nature of the politics. She wanted
to “grapple with some of the questions of insitutionalizing a kind of politics
which were so anti-institutional.” 6 She felt it was important to continue to
do political work based on the interconnections identified by activists in
these actions between patriarchy, militarism, social justice, and ecology—
the position that, beginning in the early 1980s, began to be called
“ecofeminism.” By 1984, with the reelection of Reagan, the feeling in
progressive circles was one of retrenchment, of the need to solidify
oppositional efforts for the long haul. Having taught in the Institute for
Social Ecology’s summer program for several years, King thought that what
was needed was an ecofeminist educational institution that could provide
resources for ecofeminist action, engage in networking, and support
research on relevant issues. This vision was shared in important ways by
Starhawk, who had taught in several alternative educational institutions and
wanted to create one that was focused on the connections between feminist
politics and spirituality.
King and Starhawk’s second aim was to create an ecofeminist institution
that was antiracist as a central part of its definition. King, in particular, took
seriously the critiques of the Women and Life on Earth conference and the
Women’s Pentagon Actions as being too much about white women and
white women’s issues, focusing on the critique of the essentialism of these
actions that pointed out the racist effects of their rhetorics. The argument
that these essentialist rhetorics reinscribed women into patriarchal
stereotypes apparently had less importance for her. From her perspective,
the network of Women and Life on Earth, which had been the basis for the
organization of the Women’s Pentagon Actions, had later “come apart
because of racism.” 7 Despite good intentions, the network had not dealt
with the problem of its appeal to white women over women of color, a
characteristic evident from its inception in the Women and Life on Earth:
Ecofeminism in the 1980s conference held at Amherst. As a result, all of
the actions organized by the network had been primarily white women’s
actions, even though racism had been identified as a problem all along in
the movement’s analyses of militarism.
To overcome this problem, King recognized, “somehow we had to
address from the beginning the problem of racism.” King argued that there
were two responses to the criticism of early ecofeminist politics as racist.
One was to say that “people organized politics and actions to their own
communities, and this is a racially segregated society, and … coalitions
were the appropriate response to racism. But the other alternative was … to
have a multi-racial organization.” To do this, King realized, the organization
would have to have the input of people of color from its inception. The
effort would need to avoid at all costs “anything that could be called
‘outreach’… [which is] really in a way a whole racist construction. It still
has the white elitist center, and you have the periphery, and we’re going to
reach out to the others’.” Instead, King wanted the ideas and issues central
to the new organization to be formed by women of color from the outset. As
we will see, these two goals of King’s—forming an ecofeminist educational
institute and making antiracism central to ecofeminism—turned out to be in
considerable conflict: not because they are logically or necessarily
incompatible, but because of the specific history of WomanEarth. It turned
out to be not so easy to “start from the beginning” and at the same time
construct an organization with a particular place within a developing social
movement history.
King’s antiracist strategy was deeply influenced by Barbara Deming, a
lesbian-feminist, antiracist activist, and pacifist who was a strong role
model for feminist antimilitarists of the time. During Deming’s last illness,
she and King discussed the importance of forming interracial organizations.
Deming suggested that King talk with Barbara Smith, an African American
lesbian-feminist, writer, publisher, and pacifist activist, about how to do
this. In fact, according to King, Deming “gave me something to take to
[Smith], which I had to take, so that was a way to make sure that we
connected.” In early 1986, King talked to Smith about wanting to form an
interracial organization that would bring together feminist, social justice,
spiritual, antimilitarist and ecological concerns. Smith then suggested to
King the principle of racial parity upon which WomanEarth was based, and
indeed made racial parity the condition of her involvement in the early
stages of such an organization. Smith agreed to contact other women of
color who might be interested in the project, and was responsible for the
initial participation of Papusa Molina, a Mexican feminist attending
graduate school in the United States; Luisah Teish, an African American
feminist and Oshun priestess; and Chandra Mohanty, an Asian Indian
feminist theorist (who participated only in one or two meetings). Teish and
Molina went on to become core members of WomanEarth. Though Smith
was involved only in two or three early meetings of the organization, her
influence in the form of the principle of racial parity was crucial to the
shape of WomanEarth.
King was sensitive to the dangers of asking women of color to come into
a project that had been initiated by white women, but her conversations
with Smith came after a considerable amount of planning, discussion and
fundraising had gone into the creation of a “Feminist Peace Institute.”
Ynestra King and Starhawk had discussed the idea of a new ecofeminist
organization with an educational focus on several occasions from 1984 to
1985. During this period of time, they had worked together on drafting a
proposal for an institute that would begin in 1986 with a summer program
of courses on ecology, feminist peace politics, and feminist spiritualty, and
they used this proposal to seek funding for their idea.
In preparation for the UN Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985,
Starhawk worked with a white U.S. woman (whom I will call by the
pseudonym “Camille Daney”) who was very interested in international
feminism and antimilitarism; Daney was the primary organizer and
financial supporter of the Nairobi Peace Tent, a place where women at the
UN conference gathered for workshops and discussions about the relation
between women’s issues and peace issues. King had also participated in the
Peace Tent, and was impressed with Daney’s commitment to both personal
involvement in and financial support of the political issues she cared about.
After discussions with Starhawk and King, Daney became the primary
funder of the Feminist Peace Institute, and contributed a large amount of
money for the start-up of the organization. She continued these large
contributions up until the Hampshire conference, after which she ceased to
fund WomanEarth, for reasons which I will discuss later. 8 By December of
1985, Daney’s money enabled King to start an office (in space provided by
the War Resisters League) in New York, and to pay Gwyn Kirk (a white
British feminist who had been active in Greenham Common) some money
to work on the Institute. During the last months of 1985 and the first of
1986, King and Kirk looked over a number of possibilities for summer
venues for the academic program, sought possible faculty, investigated the
mechanics of nonprofit incorporation, applied for fiscal sponsorship from
the A. J. Muste Memorial Institute (under whose auspices the War Resisters
League operated), and acquired letterhead and an address stamp. 9 Several
meetings had also been held in New York during this time involving Grace
Paley (a white feminist writer and activist), Ann Snitow (a white feminist
activist and scholar), and several other white feminists.
Meanwhile, as a representative of the Feminist Peace Institute, Starhawk
was engaged in what were to be successful negotiations with Antioch West
to obtain college credit for student participation in the program planned for
the summer of 1986. 10 Sometime in the middle of February, the work had
increased to the point that Margie Mayman, a white New Zealander who
knew King from feminist antimilitarist actions, was hired part-time as an
office manager. During this period, Starhawk and King met a number of
times with Daney, whose support was enthusiastic.
According to many of my interviewees, Daney was most interested in an
organization that promoted an international feminist focus on spirituality,
the environment, and antimilitarism. For her, the question of U.S. racism
was secondary, or at the very least equal, to the problem of creating
international diversity within an ecofeminist organization. This tension
between the desire for a focus on international diversity and the requirement
of racial parity defined in terms of U.S. racial categories was most apparent
in the early stages of the organization’s existence. In what I think of as the
“preracial parity phase,” from 1984 to the first meeting with Barbara Smith
in March of 1986, the idea of a Feminist Peace Institute was focused on the
formation of an educational “think-tank,” and the creation of a diverse
constituency for the institute was thought of more often in terms of
international diversity than of racial diversity. In what has been called by
the participants “WomanEarth I,” the period of time from the first meetings
with Barbara Smith to the gathering of fifty women at Hampshire College
in August of 1986, resolving this tension between definitions of diversity
and implementing the principle of racial parity was the primary work. The
remaining life of the organization, from September 1986 until August 1989,
when the office was moved to the Bay Area and efforts were focused on
publicizing WomanEarth as a model of antiracist ecofeminism, was called
“WomanEarth II.” As it turned out, the process of working through the
implications of operating on racial parity that consumed the efforts of both
WomanEarth I and II also radically changed the original conception of the
organization as an ecofeminist educational institute.

Womanearth I
As King began to work with Barbara Smith to build in the participation of
women of color, the previous history of her and Starhawk’s efforts to start a
Feminist Peace Institute began to recede into the background. 11 The initial
discussions about forming WomanEarth as a feminist organization based on
racial parity, were held in New York in early 1986 and were attended by
several women, including Barbara Smith, Chandra Mohanty, 12 Marta
Benavides 13 , Luisah Teish, Papusa Molina, Margie Mayman, Ynestra
King, Gwyn Kirk, and the funder, Camille Daney. 14 At these meetings, the
discussion ranged across several issues: the need for a revitalization of
feminist politics, differing visions of feminist education, the necessity of
local work on global issues, the complexity of racial and personal identities,
and the importance of racial parity. 15 After these meetings, both Smith and
Mohanty ceased to be actively involved (though Smith apparently consulted
with King occasionally in the months before the conference).
The reasons given by others for Smith’s lack of continued participation
vary. (I found no similar interest in the lack of continued participation by
Chandra Mohanty or Marta Benavides; clearly, this has to do with the
symbolic importance of Smith as the initiator of racial parity.) King
attributed Smith’s leaving primarily to her busy schedule as the publisher of
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, whose activity increased greatly
during this period. Both King and Mayman also indicated that the emphasis
on pagan feminist spirituality in the early meetings (which habitually began
and concluded with rituals from non-Christian traditions, usually led by
Starhawk or Teish) was not to Smith’s liking. King felt that Smith’s
becoming a nonparticipant was a defining moment within the organization
in terms of the definition of feminist spirituality. She says, “There was some
question, I think, about how spirituality was going to be constructed … and
rather than have those differences out within WomanEarth, certain people
just sort of pulled back and left, [so that] what might be called earth-based
spirituality people really defined the thing.” Molina, on the other hand,
recounted a moment of conscious discussion among the women of color
about their participation. “After the meeting, the four of us (Smith,
Mohanty, Teish, and Molina) 16 got together and discussed it and we
decided not to be involved, that the white women weren’t serious about
wanting to include our analysis of the issues, but that they just wanted to be
politically correct.” 17 At the same time, Molina continued, the operative
critique of white feminist organizations by women of color at that historical
moment stressed the lack of effort of these organizations to be inclusive.
Here women of color were specifically being asked to participate and on
terms that they had set. It would have seemed strange not to agree. As
Molina put it: “We had asked for that. We decided that I should stay
because I had the most experience in coalitions with white women, and
Teish should stay because she had experience [Molina doesn’t identify what
kind: with white women? with nontraditional spirituality?].”
Two things are interesting to note here. First, although King portrays the
issue of spirituality as settled in this moment, in fact, as we will see,
differences about spirituality had just gone underground. Second, according
to Molina’s account, the operative problem here was the racism of the white
women. For Molina, this is partially evidenced by the use of particular
kinds of spirituality: “I had some problems with the way [spirituality] was
constructed, for instance with the way Native American spirituality was
used by the white women.” Yet one of the most committed practitioners of
“unconventional” spirituality was the African American Teish, and the other
two women of color who became part of the core group, Bagby and Rachel
Sierra, were both interested and involved with similar traditions of
alternative feminist spiritualities. I will return to the complexities of this
conflation of differences about spirituality with differences of racialized
perspectives later in this chapter.
The next meeting was on April 17–20, at Daney’s home in the
Southwest, where a group of women met and began to discuss the
interconnection of the issues that WomanEarth would address. At this
meeting Luisah Teish came up with the name “WomanEarth” through a
chant used in a ritual. From then on, the name of the organization was
“WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute,” most often referred to simply as
“WomanEarth.” Almost all of the women who made up the core group of
WomanEarth, or what came to be called “Circle One,” were present, except
Starhawk: King, Kirk, Mayman, Bagby, Teish, Molina, and Daney had been
in previous meetings, and Teish had invited Rachel Sierra, a Chicana
feminist with a history of Saul Alinskystyle grassroots activism in poor
people’s movements. The meeting began with presentations on issue areas
that were felt to be connected by the politics of the participants: “ecology,
spirituality, global feminism, women of color, and strategies for confronting
state power.” The next day it was decided that these would be the five
organizing themes for the August gathering being planned, with two small
but significant changes. The area called “women of color” was called
“isms” (to indicate a greater scope of examining several kinds of
inequalities besides those based on race) and the area “strategies for
confronting state power” became “activism.” 18 These five themes stayed
relatively constant for the August gathering, with some interesting
reformulations that I will discuss later. Racial parity does not appear here as
an issue area; rather, it was thought of as an operating principle. Notably,
these issue areas were not much different from those King and Starhawk
had outlined in the original proposal for the Feminist Peace Institute in
1984, which shows the organization’s continuity with the political tradition
of feminist antimilitarism that inspired that proposal.
Over the next two days of the April meeting, the group laid some
important foundations. They discussed “lesbian visibility” and
“unconventional spirituality,” and decided “the core group would be limited
to lesbians and non-homophobic straight women. In the wider meetings
there should be a commitment to education and to making all women
comfortable.” They also agreed that “the same understanding applies to the
issue of unconventional spirituality. A majority opinion asserted that it
would not be possible for women who were anti-ritual to participate in the
core group.” The language here is interesting, and connotates neither an
entirely unanimous nor an openly challenged decision (“a majority opinion
asserted”). Perhaps this language is an unconscious reflection of the
feelings of the writer of the minutes, Margie Mayman, who on the one hand
was not, as hired help, entirely an equal participant in her view, and who on
the other hand was somewhat skeptical about the particular form of
“unconventional spirituality” in use. 19
The group agreed to meet again in May to make final plans, but went on
to discuss the general shape of the August meeting: that it would be a “peer
conference—no teachers, no students”; that money for childcare would be
provided and not just limited to on-site child care; that disability access
should be available; that each woman would invite five other women; and
that participation would be by invitation only to ensure parity. 20 In this
meeting, parity was described as “a mix of race, class, age, and
geographical location within the U.S. and internationally.” 21 This is very
different from the assumptions operative after this meeting, in which racial
parity for the August gathering was discussed only in terms of an equal
balance between women of color and white women. Similarly, the issue
area called “isms” in the April meeting, which addressed numerous kinds of
inequalities, was called “Race, Class and Ethnicity” at the August
gathering, even though the paragraph describing it referred to “racism,
classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination.” 22
This shifting in the meaning of parity demonstrates the tension in the
April meeting between a conception of parity as being primarily about
racial diversity (defined in terms of U.S. racial categories), and a
conception of diversity defined more broadly, with a special emphasis on
“international” diversity. Interestingly, it was possible to define the
identities of the participants in both ways. As Gywn Kirk pointed out to me,
they could be seen either as a group of white women and women of color,
or as a group of women divided in different ways by national background.
Kirk was British, Mayman was a New Zealander, and Molina was Mexican.
23 But even previous to this April meeting, these “international” (the term
as used in WomanEarth meant “non-U.S.”) women had been identified as
either “white” or “of color.” This identification was felt to be somewhat
externally imposed but accepted for Mayman and Kirk, both of whom
expressed a willingness to be responsible for their white privilege within a
U.S. context, a willingness that partially arose out of their experience of a
specific form of white racism existing in their home countries. At the same
time, they both felt some inauthenticity in their placement as “white”
defined by the particularities of a U.S. historical context they did not share.
Mayman’s experience was formed by the central racial opposition in New
Zealand between European colonizers and indigenous people. Kirk felt that
there were nuances in the way different women of color related to her as a
British white woman; she indicated that this left some room for her,
particularly in her relations with the African American women, that King,
as a U.S. southern white woman, did not have. Teish mentioned this
difference too in relation to Kirk, but downplayed it as only as a difference
in that “her [Kirk’s] experience is Caribbean blacks in England rather than
American blacks in America.” King, on the other hand, felt that her
experience growing up in Selma, Alabama, during the civil rights
movement gave her a particular connection to antiracist work in the U.S.
not shared by the other “white” women.
These nuances in the “white” women’s racialized identities were not
openly articulated at the time, but surfaced in the interviews as I asked
WomanEarth members to consider the question of how they came to define
“diversity” as “racial” rather than “international.” Nuances in the racialized
identities of the “women of color” were also an undercurrent. These
nuances had to do with the conflation of race and class in U.S. culture.
Molina seemed to feel no ambivalence about her identity as a “woman of
color” even as she portrayed it as fully externally imposed. As she explains
in another context, despite her upbringing as a member of a privileged,
wealthy, liberal Mexican elite, when she came to the United States, “I
suddenly became a ‘woman of color’…. Suddenly I was a second-class
citizen.” 24 However, Rachel Sierra, at least, did not perceive Molina’s
status as a “woman of color” with the same felicity, feeling that her upper-
class status made such an identity questionable. Seeing Molina as
“international” may have eased this ambivalence for Sierra, had the
definition of parity as being about international diversity prevailed over the
definition of parity as being about U.S. racial diversity.
As the contradictions between these two understandings of “parity”
became apparent, a confrontation occurred between Rachel Sierra and the
funder, Camille Daney. Sierra knew both Teish and Molina and had
responded enthusiastically to the invitation to the April meeting. She was
drawn primarily by the commitment to racial parity (understood by her in
terms of U.S. racial categories) and secondarily by the idea of exploring the
connection between her spirituality and her political action. Unaware up to
this point in the April meeting that the white woman to whom everyone
listened so respectfully was the sole funding source for the incipient
organization, Sierra found her frustration growing. “She was talking about
Nairobi and her involvement with the Peace Tent, and then she was talking
about global poverty. And what was frustrating to me was that she was
talking as though this kind of poverty could never exist in this country.” 25
When Daney, coming back from a break in the meeting, announced that she
had, on her own, invited a woman she knew to join them, a woman she
described as an upper-class, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed South American,
Sierra immediately objected. She pointed out that the balance of white
women to women of color was already less than parity (assuming the
ongoing participation of Starhawk, who had been unable to come to this
meeting), and she said that she felt that the collective process promised to
the group had been violated by such individual action. Note that though
Sierra voices her concern about Daney’s involvement in terms of her
avoidance of class issues in the U.S., it is her deployment of the category of
racial difference within the context of racial parity that is used to object to
Daney’s participation.
In the course of this argument, a second confrontation occurred between
Daney and Luisah Teish. Teish was sensitive to the inequality within Circle
One engendered by the group’s dependence on one participant’s money. At
one point, she remembers “dramatizing how I felt about it, sort of ‘I thought
we were equals here, but Miz Ann you want me to,’ just to let it be known
… that I felt at that point that the idea of equality among the steering
committee [she means Circle One] had broken down.” 26 Her reference to
Daney as “Miz Ann” recalled the legacy of slave-holding for U.S. white
women, historicizing the unacceptable nature of racialized power
imbalances for Teish. Molina also remembers Daney’s participation as an
issue, because her presence imbalanced racial parity within Circle One. At
the same time, just adding another woman of color to balance Daney’s
participation wouldn’t have eased the situation, because, according to
Molina, “we would have needed a woman of color who had the kind of
money [Daney] had. She would have had to have ownership of the project
in the same way.” Note here that the sense of parity imbalance voiced here
by Molina is not about race, but class inequality. Stung by these
confrontations, Daney left the meeting in anger (only then was Sierra
informed of her role in the group).
These confrontations had important repercussions for WomanEarth. First,
the resolution of the conflict had the effect of resolving the tension between
the conception of the group as having a focus on international diversity and
it being focused on the problems of U.S. racism. From then on, the latter
conception of racial parity between U.S. white women and U.S. women of
color prevailed. It was also the first test of the seriousness of racial parity as
an underlying principle. While Daney had less insistence on this principle,
it was crucial for the participation of the women of color; Teish, Molina,
Bagby, and Sierra all emphasized to me that the idea of racial parity was the
primary reason they had agreed to participate. Though they were all
interested in the combination of ecology, feminism, and spirituality, racial
parity was a basic condition for their commitment to WomanEarth. Thus,
Daney’s more flexible notion of parity, one that decentered race, needed to
be challenged. After these confrontations, according to King, “the women
of color said that if she [Daney] was going to continue to participate in the
group then they weren’t going to participate.” Under these circumstances,
King, Kirk, and Starhawk all clearly took the position that racial parity was
more important than international diversity, and that the collective process
was only properly supported by sticking to racial parity as strictly as
possible (which meant that the existing make-up of Circle One, which
included Daney, would be in imbalance). The risk of alienating their funder
over this issue must have been felt particularly strongly by these three
women, who at this point had put in years of work on the idea of a Feminist
Peace Institute and who had considerable political and personal investment
(especially King and Starhawk) in the notion of continuing and shaping
ecofeminism as a political location. But since the amount of previous work
had been somewhat downplayed to give the women of color the sense that
they were in on the ground floor of the project, the amount of risk and
change in the original conception of the project that existed at this moment
went unacknowledged by all involved.
To King, this moment of ultimatum concerning Daney’s direct
participation was important, because it allayed remaining suspicions on the
part of the women of color about the strength of King’s antiracist politics.
She says, “That was a sort of baptism by fire for the women of color, that I
was really just willing, because I was, [to] just quit the project or have it not
go on rather than take [Daney’s] side against them, even though that was
where the bread was buttered. You know, I had no problem with really
seeing that the integrity of the project [required this], because she just kept
trying to say to me that it was just these particular women that were
problematic and that was why we’re having all these difficulties, why don’t
we get some other women…. And I said, well people are who they are.”
But, as I have pointed out above in discussing the different possibilities of
naming people’s identities, people are also who they need to be at a
particular moment. Thus, the resolution of the debate with the funder
solidified the racial identities of the Circle One members as well as the
notion of the importance of racial parity.
The other important effect of these confrontations was that Daney ceased
to actively participate in WomanEarth meetings, and her financial support
became uncertain. This was not a surprising outcome. After all, Daney was
paying for WomanEarth to become a viable organization, and her vision
was being discounted. According to Mayman, “She had done the Peace
Tent at Nairobi, and I think she saw it as more like that … and yet here were
these uppity women of color who were shaping the agenda…. She was
upset by confrontations about race issues.” In King’s estimation, Daney,
who had just returned from many years living outside of the United States,
had no experience with the ongoing critiques by feminists of color of the
racism of white feminists. King notes, “She had given substantial amounts
of money to Chicana and poor organizing in Texas and other places … so
it’s not to say that she was without knowledge or concern totally, but she
had not really been embedded in the political context … out of which I felt,
and other people as well, that somehow taking on the issues of racism …
was really the next stage of feminism in general and ecofeminism in
particular…. She really didn’t know a lot of what had been going on with
U.S. white movements and women of color movements and the critiques of
feminism.” King’s statement here indicates the way in which the notion of
racial parity belongs to a particular moment in the history of U.S. feminism.
After these confrontations, Daney’s commitment to supporting the
organization was relatively tenuous. She decided not to participate in future
meetings, but to continue funding WomanEarth up to the Hampshire
conference. Daney made it clear, however, that after the conference future
funding was unlikely. Despite her disappointment in the definition of
diversity within WomanEarth, she kept to her promise, and indeed
supported the group generously throughout the time of organizing for and
conducting the conference. Mayman, however, remembers that her financial
support required constant negotiation by King, and generated considerable
uncertainty about when and whether the group would have the money to
accomplish the activities that were being planned.
At the same time, the large amount of money that was provided
determined crucial aspects of WomanEarth. Wanting to be an organization
based on racial parity, it achieved its particular version of this through being
able to bring together a racially diverse group that was also geographically
far-flung. Teish, Sierra, Mayman, King, and Kirk all remarked on the
unusual circumstance of having enough money to provide air fare to Circle
One members to enable them to meet together, although even with this
support, meetings were hard to arrange for members with very busy
schedules. The money also supported a central office in New York, initially
staffed by King, who hired first Kirk and then Mayman and then, two
months away from the August conference, Molina. Thus an organization
that intended to operate democratically under the principle of racial parity,
in fact, given its geographically distant membership, operated for most of
the preconference time period with a central office staffed entirely by white
women.
At a meeting of Circle One in Connecticut held May 26–30, 1986,
attended by Bagby, Kirk, King, Mayman, Molina, Sierra, Starhawk, and
Teish, this situation was discussed. It was understood to be quite
problematic, because the agenda of the organization was to a great extent
controlled by the day-to-day decisions in the office. The decision was made
at the Connecticut meeting to ease the parity imbalance somewhat by hiring
Molina for the summer preceding the conference. More than that could not
be done, because the other members of the group had responsibilities that
prevented them from participating in the office any more than by occasional
long-distance consulting. From Mayman’s perspective, Molina’s hire did
not entirely resolve the problem, because what was needed was “somebody
to have the same level of power Ynestra had, in terms of shaping the
agenda.” While relations with Daney were more generally understood to be
problematic because of the group’s dependence on her funding, a less
openly articulated perception existed that since King made the decisions
about the spending of the money once it had arrived, she could be seen as
exercising undue financial influence. After Molina’s arrival, additional
friction in the office was caused by inequalities in pay: King (who carried
the title of director from the earlier, preracial, parity phase, and which only
had meaning in terms of the need for legal incorporation), as someone who
was giving most of her time to the organization, was paid the most; Kirk
and Molina less than King but the same as each other; and Mayman the
least. Note that these differences in pay were not racially distributed, but
related to the kind and amount of work done by each staff member.
The meeting of Circle One in Connecticut in May 1986 was otherwise
focused on getting geared up for the conference. Whatever criticism may
exist of WomanEarth’s process and achievements, it should be recognized
that the time frame of this effort was quite challenging. From the time that
the date for the gathering was finally set at the April meeting in the
Southwest to the time of the conference in August was a mere four months.
Primarily because of the geographical distance between the participants, the
real nitty-gritty work planning the conference did not occur until after the
May meeting in Connecticut. Adding to the tensions, it was unclear at the
May meeting whether the funder would come through with all of the money
she had promised, thus leaving the group uncertain even at that late date
about crucial aspects of the upcoming conference: for example, size,
availability of scholarships, or number of days that could be afforded. That
WomanEarth managed to put together any conference at all under these
circumstances speaks to the commitment and hard work of the participants.
At this May meeting, feeling the pressure of such a short preparation time,
financial uncertainties, and the number of differences between group
members that were yet to be worked out, Rachel Sierra expressed doubts
about having the conference so soon and suggested postponement.
A number of conflicts erupted during this meeting, one of which
concerned the use of “unconventional” spiritual ritual in the group. Sierra
reported that when Molina questioned whether ritual practices were always
appropriate, Starhawk perceived this as an attack on witches in general.
Mayman, for her part, challenged the way in which Starhawk and Teish
were perceived as the spiritual leaders within the group. Her understanding
of feminist spirituality involved a deep critique of hierarchy within
patriarchal, traditional religions. On the other hand, Teish’s practice of
feminist African-centered spirituality involved respect and recognition of
the greater knowledge and spiritual power of elders and priestesses. These
controversies were resolved with a determination to respect different
spiritual traditions within the group, but at the same time affirming that
“Starhawk and Teish have been asked into Circle One as ritual leaders
among other things.” 27 Sierra, however, did not feel that the problem had
been solved. Though perhaps more comfortable with pagan spirituality than
Molina or Mayman, she felt the use of spiritual ritual within the group
stifled criticism. “One of the things it did is it kept us from being honest
with each other, because I feel as though in the guise of wanting to respect
all the different traditions, and wanting to share each other’s traditions, that
some part of us was also shut down, because it wasn’t nice. Here we’re
doing something communing with the earth and then we’re going to yell at
each other? So I think that really was a stunting thing.” One result of this
conflict can be seen in the invitational letter for the conference, which
carries a paragraph warning that “rituals from women- and earth-centered
traditions (Native American, African, and European) will be part of the
meeting. We ask that women come in a spirit of openness, willing to enter
into some experiences which may be unfamiliar, so that together we may
push back the boundaries of our knowledge and power towards a vital,
peaceful world.” 28
Another conflict centered on the decision-making process used by the
group. Though many members had been trying to work together for at least
five months, the only specific discussion of process I found in my research
was found in the papers. It was a discussion recalled by none of my
interviewees, which shows the lack of stress on the question of decision-
making process. 29 Coming from similar backgrounds in the feminist
antimilitarist direct action movements, Starhawk, King, Kirk, and Mayman
perhaps needed little discussion of the assumption that consensus-process
decision making would be used or the reasons why it was preferred over
other forms. Yet none of these more experienced practitioners of consensus
process (and, in Starhawk’s case, a teacher and theorist of the practice) felt
it necessary to use the formal version of consensus developed within the
antimilitarist movement to produce a consciously egalitarian operation of
decision-making power. While the invitational letter to the April 17–20
meeting contained a description of some of the formal roles for a consensus
decision-making process (facilitator, time-keeper, and “vibes-watcher”) as
well as some of the procedures (opening exercise, agenda formation,
rotation of roles), these were not identified as part of a specific decision-
making practice, with a specific history within U.S. antimilitarist politics.
Nor did other meetings continue the use of these formal consensus decision-
making structures, as far as I could discern.
Thus, by the time of the May meeting, the participants were used to the
assumption that decisions were collective as much as possible, and that they
took place after a great deal of discussion, but there was no apparent
consciousness of these procedures as a choice of decision-making
possibilities, or that there could be a more formal, thought-out method of
proceeding that was being elided by informality. Some participants were in
fact uncomfortable with the informal consensus process already in use.
Teish, for instance, says that “tediously and fastidiously we discussed
everything. Within the steering committee we were really reaching for
absolute consensus, to the point that after WomanEarth I remember putting
a lot of space between me and other people when they would talk about
consensus. I would say it left me in a funny space because my response to it
was actually to give up power, which is not like me. Usually I’m the one
who’s saying if you’ve got power use it and use it wisely, don’t never give it
up.” She also remarks that “it made me feel that there really were things
that I didn’t mind not voting on.”
Despite the informal assumption of a collective and egalitarian decision-
making process, there were inequalities in decision-making power, mostly
stemming from King and Starhawk’s previous work on the project, their
relation to the funder, and King’s day-to-day financial responsibility. For
example, the decision-making issue at the May meeting was brought up by
the announcement that Starhawk had managed to secure Antioch West
credit not just for a “summer program” put on by WomanEarth, but for a
“year-long program” as well, the details of which seemed to be fairly
worked out. To be affiliated with Antioch’s Women’s Studies Program,
courses would follow the five thematic areas of the August conference and
would take place in the day and evening over three quarters at both the B.A.
and M.A. level. Community as well as student participation would be
encouraged. A half-time faculty position would be available for the first
year, and it was agreed by the group that this be taken by Starhawk, who
already was teaching at Antioch West. 30
Since much of this plan had begun in the preracial parity phase of the
Feminist Peace Institute, the amount of decisions that had been made
already came as a surprise to some members of WomanEarth. Questions
about Starhawk’s ability to make individual decisions about the relationship
between Antioch and WomanEarth were raised. Finally, it was made clear
that “Starhawk had gone ahead … at the request of the Institute at the
January meeting,” in other words, that she had been authorized at a time
before most of the present participants had joined. This led to a general
discussion of decision making, who could decide whether WomanEarth
would make political endorsements, and when and where an individual
asked to speak publicly as a representative of WomanEarth needed to give
the organization a portion of her speaking fees.
Another difference aired during this meeting was the participants’ varied
understandings of the importance of accreditation for educational
experience, and indeed of the goal of a radical educational institution at all.
Molina, deploying an Althusserian analysis of education as an apparatus of
the production of state ideology, expressed doubts about the aim of any
formal educational aspect within WomanEarth. Teish was concerned that
life experience be given as much weight as academic experience. King, in
response to some of these concerns, identified three foci that WomanEarth
presently displayed, all of which were “educational” in different ways: the
institute (either the summer program for the future or the Antioch year-long
program, which allowed credit for life experience); a peer think-tank (for
which the August gathering would be a model); and resourcing and
networking the movement (a process envisioned to assist political activism
directly). 31 This summary seemed to resolve the differences around the
issue of forming an organization focused on education.
Despite these conflicts and Sierra’s doubts, the group agreed to continue
working toward the conference in August. Considerable work had already
been done and the money that had been promised, though not yet in their
hands, had been earmarked for the conference, not any other projects. They
each agreed to invite at least four or five women from their own
“communities of reference” (Bagby’s term), keeping the goal of racial
parity for the conference in mind. The five thematic areas for the
conference, already identified at the April meeting, were developed, and
presentations were done again at this meeting on every area except “global
feminism.” In the absence of Daney, none of the participants had prepared
for this section.
Some time was spent on discussing the need for fund-raising to ease their
dependence on one source. They also discussed the need for scholarship
money. To achieve racial parity at the conference, it was not enough to
simply state it as a purpose of the gathering or as an important principle of
operation. The group agreed to provide economic compensation for the loss
of working days and the costs of child care for women who needed these
things in order to attend the conference. Of the women who were being
thought of as conference participants, there was considerable overlap
between the categories of working-class or poor women, mothers, and
women of color. But economic compensation for attending the conference
was provided mostly to women of color, even though many of the white
participants were activists or members of low-paying professions, because
the white women, already interested in the subject of the August gathering,
did not require as much convincing to attend. As Rachel Bagby wrote: “it
took many calls … much coaxing … to convince the few women-of-color
on the list to agree to come to Amherst that summer. Over and over came
the questions. Why should we go there? Take a whole week off from work?
What’s the purpose?” 32 Economic compensation, as well as the emphasis
on racial parity, was required to have the participation of women of color.
As Teish said: “If you are inviting this woman to come spend X number of
days discussing this and these are days when she would ordinarily be at
work earning money to support her family, she can’t just jump up and do
that unless you are going to support her, and that is one of the things we
talked about and that is one of the things we did. For women with children
we had to be sure that child care was provided and those that had to bring
their kids with them would be able to do that and that’s always a class and
race issue…. It was more difficult to [get women of color to participate] and
required more than just saying, ‘Oh, come on, let’s have a feminist chat.’ …
It’s got to be more concrete.” The concreteness of WomanEarth’s approach
to racial parity was thus made possible by the large amount of money that
had been provided for the conference. It is clear as well that there was
significant conflation between thinking about racial parity and thinking
about class parity.
After the Connecticut meeting, organizing for the conference intensified.
On June 27, an invitational letter describing the conference went out to
selected possible participants. This letter, written primarily by King, was the
first place where the name, goals, and politics of the organization were
concretely specified for public viewing. In some important ways, this letter
drew on the original proposal for the Feminist Peace Institute written by
King and Starhawk. Most reminiscent of that earlier proposal, in this
mailing the conference was named “Reconstituting Feminist Peace
Politics.” This location of WomanEarth’s political position and aims was
quite accurate, considering its genesis in the feminist antimilitarist
movement. But it came as a surprise to Sierra, in particular. In response to
the mailing, she wrote a long letter to Circle One expressing her doubts
about the mailing and various organizational dynamics she had witnessed at
a staff meeting just after the Connecticut meeting. A number of issues were
raised by Sierra about this mailing. One was an issue of process: because of
the pressures of time, the letter had not been passed out to the group as a
whole before it was made public. The other was the locating the purpose of
WomanEarth as “reconstituting feminist peace politics.”
 Sierra explained her surprise by recounting a revelation she had
experienced during the time the group was together in Connecticut. The
passage, because it points up the difficulty of overcoming past movement
segregation, is worth quoting at length.
It was the evening most of us (Teish and Rachel B. weren’t around, as I recall) were sitting
outside in the screened-in porch. Star, Ynestra, and Gwyn were talking about various peace
conferences/gatherings and some of the women they all seemed to know. It “hit me” for the
first time, that the Feminist Peace Institute had its roots in the peace movement. I remember
thinking, “Aha! Us colored girls are really just guests at the white girls’ tea party.” Call me
slow, naive, or stupid, but I really hadn’t understood the foundation of the Institute until then.
Please understand that at the time the observation was just that: an observation. By the end of
the week, I was confident that we were committed to facilitating the creation of a “new”
reality, understanding that WomanEarth would have to be radically different from our parent
movements.
Then I got the mailing. Now I feel the need to say to all of you very clearly: I am not in the
market for a movement. My commitment to the struggles of poor people, especially people
of color, cannot and will not take a “back seat” to another movement. My own quandary for
the last 2–3 years has been because my soul longs for a way to expand the scope, meaning,
and effort of that work, as well as the results. For the most part, poor people aren’t winning
the kinds of victories that add up to meaningful systemic change, but then, neither are
workers, women, third world countries/peoples, environmentalists, peace groups, etc. To me,
that means we must define and do our work differently—ALL of us. To characterize the
August gathering as a time to “re-evaluate and reconstitute the feminist peace movement” is
so limited. It also presumes that all of us are prepared to forsake our respective movements in
favor of jumping on this particular bandwagon. I, for one, am not.

Sierra, as a scholar of social movements and a long-term activist, had a

sophisticated understanding of the need to move from separate movements
to an integrated analysis of oppression and exploitation. To do this, she
argued, it was necessary not just to work through personal differences, but
to reconstruct a new movement based on a “new reality.” In the letter, she
went on to say:
I have no interest in reconstituting any of the traditional movements. As long as we think of
things in isolation from one another (i.e., peace movement, workers’ movement, poor
 people’s movement, feminist peace movements) we are actively contributing to the view of
the world (white, male reality) that requires winners and losers, oppression, racism, and
exploitation. I believe … that the “we” of all those movements can create a new reality.
That’s what I thought WomanEarth was exploring. And so, my friends, while a potential
funding source may need to think we are merely trying to “provide resources and create
educational settings where women from all racial and socio-economic backgrounds can meet
to broaden their understanding of peace politics” [here Sierra is quoting from the mailing],
the women we’re inviting to the August gathering deserved a lot more. 33

Sierra was particularly concerned that this language was not going to appeal
to some of the women she wanted to invite. Her letter generated a number
of phone calls and letters among the group, and King took responsibility for
the error of sending the letter out without proper consultation under the
press of time and difficulty of long-distance consultation (a situation that,
with our present-day use of email and faxes, might not occur). Sierra agreed
to continue on to August, if Molina could be delegated to make phone calls
directly to the women of color receiving this letter in order to mitigate the
appearance that this event was only about “reconstituting peace politics.”
Though King realized her mistake in characterizing the August event this
way, at the same time it was imperative for her to establish WomanEarth as
a continuation of feminist antimilitarism. To understand this, it is important
to recall that this was before ecofeminism has its own identity, separate
from feminist antimilitarism (a separate identity that continues to be
important to those ecofeminists who see the origins of their politics in other
movements, such as animal liberation or sustainable development). Later in
this chapter, I will discuss in more detail the conflict within the group
around the naming of their politics as “feminist peace politics.”
During this period of preparation, the pitfalls of the isolation of the office
and the daily work from the rest of the group became clear. Personality
clashes within the office hampered the work. Besides the differences in the
way people were paid, there were also differences in the kind of work
people in Circle One did. In the summer before the conference, the burden
of the “workie-work” (in King’s words) was accomplished by the four paid
staff in the office. Just before the conference and during the conference, this
unequal division of labor shifted, with the “go-fer” work (in Sierra’s words)
falling on Sierra, Kirk, and Mayman. The latter took this with a certain
equanimity; since she was the only one of the group hired specifically to do
“secretarial” work, the menial nature of her labor was accepted by her (and
the others) as appropriate. As she said in her interview, “I felt hired as a
sympathetic sort of person, but clearly … most of these people were known
for what they were doing, and I wasn’t.” None of the members of
WomanEarth, including Mayman, seemed to recognize the disparity
between treating Mayman as “hired help,” on the one hand, and seeing her
as an equal participant when it came to assessing racial parity, on the other.
Even given the existing cleavages and debates within Circle One, the
group by this time had developed some strong internal ties and a gutsy,
intimate, and open style of relating to each other. In the interviews, Teish,
Sierra, Bagby, and King all mention the way in which they felt comfortable
airing differences within the group, even though there were different senses
of whether these differences achieved proper resolution. Only Molina
seemed to feel, at least retrospectively, that the group wasn’t willing to
openly deal with clashes and disagreements. King and Teish both talk about
the pleasure of jokes, the discussions of food, and the personal stories that
were told; King mentions that within the core group “culturally in some
ways we were sort of hippiesh, really … I mean we’d have all these fights
and then we’d have these funny conversations and it would turn out that all
of our mothers disapproved of us, and we would talk in these different
ethnic vernaculars about what pejorative things they said—‘why don’t you
get married and have proper lives’—because we were all sort of counter-
cultural in that way … and [we all] sort of appreciated the aesthetic flair of
food and clothes and things.”
The gathering at Hampshire from August 17 to 23, 1986, was the
culmination of months of hard work and a lot of careful thinking. The
participants were varied in a number of unusual ways for a women’s event
in the U.S. in 1986. Between seventy and eighty women were invited, and
fifty-five ended up attending. Importantly for WomanEarth, racial parity
was clearly achieved, with twenty-two of the participants falling into the
category “white women,” and twenty-three falling into the category
“women of color.” According to a roster of the participants, the great
majority of the latter were African American women; there were two
Chicanas and two Latinas, four Native Americans, and one Asian woman.
A few of these self-named identities crossed categories: one listed her
racial/ethnic status as “Black/Cherokee,” another as “Black/Panama.” Eight
women were listed as “Jewish,” though in assessing racial parity they were
counted as white. 34 The roster also recorded the theme areas of interest to
each participant. “Action” (that is, political action) appeared for twenty-
two, “spirituality” for twelve, “isms” for fifteen, “ecology” for five, and
“global feminism” for four. 35 The participants included teachers (some
listed as “teachers,” others as “professors”—sometimes with disciplinary
identifications such as history, sociology, feminist ethics, religion), dancers,
writers, midwives, lawyers, artists, singers, gardeners, carpenters,
organizers, day-care and social workers, mediators, therapists, rape-crisis
shelter workers, one Democratic Party politician, one witch, one priestess,
one masseuse, two graduate students, and one philanthropist. 36
The deliberate manner of creating racial parity went against the usual free
and open practice of oppositional events of the period, and WomanEarth
came in for some criticism by some members of the feminist antimilitarist
community for its methods. In fact, to achieve racial parity, several white
antimilitarist activists had to be “disinvited,” in some cases resulting in their
long-term resentment of King in particular, who had originally invited some
of them. Bagby, in her article on the conference, refers to this problem in a
particularly challenging way: “Story has it that responses to the controlled
access to WomanEarth I by some white women active in the peace and
ecology movements was fiery. ‘We don’t do things that way,’ some said. Or,
‘that’s a good idea, but, of course I’ll be able to come no matter what,
right?’ The women catching that fire, also white, also active in those
movements, were both shocked and equal to the responses. Why this fear
and anger in response to an experiment? What are you feeling as you read
this paragraph?” 37
Despite the complaints from those not allowed to participate, those that
did attend were appreciative of the framework of the gathering. By all
accounts, it was a lively and politically engaged group, and the event was
“overfull,” in Mayman’s words. The five days of the conference had been
organized around the five theme areas of “Global Feminism and
Militarism_ the World at War,” “Spirituality, Healing and Sexuality: the
Power of the Whole Person,” “Race, Class and Ethnicity: Crossing the
Barriers,” “Ecology: Making Living Connections”, and “Frontiers of Public
Action: Strategies for a Feminist Peace Politics.” The plan was that each
day would begin with a roundtable for the entire conference, involving a
presentation and discussion on that day’s theme area. A lunch break would
be followed by workshops on both the theme areas and topics organized by
participants. Since this was to be a meeting of peers, some effort was made
to generate workshops by participants sharing their own interests and skills.
Dinner was to be followed by a general assembly, and the evening would
end with various music, performances, and rituals provided by the
participants.
Participants were also gathered into small groups, each including one
member of Circle One and identified by a particular color (red, silver,
indigo, orange, purple, and yellow). These small groups were called “color
clans,” but also “discussion groups” and “affinity groups.” The color clans
were structured by racial parity and met for an hour each day, discussing
general visions for the organization and issues that arose during the
conference. At the end of the conference they reported back to the gathering
as a whole.
The conference, by all accounts, was infused with excitement about the
chance to work under the rare condition of racial parity and the approach of
interconnecting various political agendas in those circumstances. The
decision to make the conference a peer experience was also unusual and
enthusiastically supported by the participants. This egalitarian approach led
to the carefully imagined agenda quickly being altered by the empowered
participants, who decided a number of times to proceed in different
directions than had been planned. A round of personal introductions, for
instance, took up much of the first day’s program. It was clearly important
to the participants to know each other and to appreciate different skills and
political interests. Another important time the agenda was derailed is
recounted by Rachel Bagby in her article, “A Power of Numbers.” 38

Despite, or because of, racial parity, tensions between some white women
and some women of color were apparent, and the suggestion was made to
address them by running the Wednesday session on “Race, Class, and
Ethnicity” as an “antiracism” workshop for the whole group. Mary Arnold,
an African American woman who was part of the Women Against Racism
group in Iowa City, began the workshop by dividing the participants into
white women and women of color. Each group faced the other. Then each
woman made two statements: about what she loved about herself, and about
what she never wanted to hear again from women in the other category.
Strict confidentiality governed what was said during this process, but by all
accounts it was both painful and joyful, and altogether a very powerful
experience. Another independent undertaking of the participants was the
formation of a lesbian caucus, who met alongside the color clans and like
them made a report to the conference as a whole on the last day.
In general, the conference was unusual in its deliberate achievement of
racial parity. This did not mean that conflicts around racial difference did
not break out, but unlike other women’s gatherings during the 1980s, this
conflict neither went underground nor disrupted the entire work of the
gathering. 39 Still, other kinds of conflict rocked the gathering at different
points: an argument about whether two of the participants were “real”
Native Americans; a row between a Jewish American woman and a
Palestinian woman over the Israeli-Palestinian struggle; the rejection of the
vegetarian menu of the conference by some African American women, who
went into town to get meat to eat; debates about the use of ritual and what
could be properly called feminist spirituality; conflict between lesbians and
homophobic women; and differences in ideas about appropriate and
effective radical political strategies.
Despite all this, the conference participants, in their reports on the last
day, indicated the importance of addressing the interconnections of the five
theme areas in the context of an organization based on racial parity. They
seemed to agree with Teish’s statement to me that the effort of WomanEarth
was powerful and visionary, an effort perhaps made before its time. The
color clans and the lesbian caucus made many suggestions for ways to
continue and expand WomanEarth’s work. Offers were made to take on
tasks and responsibilities, even to replace core group members who were
clearly showing signs of exhaustion. But it wasn’t possible to take this
energy and turn it into concrete results. Kirk, speaking during this last day,
stated that the core group had “quite a lot of unfinished business … if it
sounds like we are kind of holding back [and] don’t have a clear way of
proceeding to the next moment it is because there are a number of things we
need to evaluate among ourselves.” 40 What is apparent as well is that in the
rush to plan the conference, and in the desire to leave the participants room
to join or influence WomanEarth, no future structure had been imagined
into which new participants could be integrated. And, of course, all of the
Circle One participants knew that future funding at the rate they had
previously enjoyed was coming to an end.
For the core group, the ending of the conference was chaotic. Originally
the plan was that Circle One participants would stay several days after the
conference to evaluate it and lay plans for the future. However, they were
exhausted and relations were strained from the numerous confrontations
that had occurred during the conference. In addition, Sierra had to leave
with one of her invitees whose husband had died of a heart attack on the
way to the airport to pick her up, and Bagby was dealing with the death of
her grandmother the week before. They were not able to meet again until
the end of September, when they gathered at Rachel Sierra’s house in
Oakland, CA. At this meeting seven members of Circle One (minus
Mayman, whose employment had officially ended after the conference)
aired their personal resentments stemming from arguments and actions
during the conference, and evaluated their effort. Two members of Circle
One ended their participation here: Teish, relatively amiably with support
from the others, and Molina, less amiably. It was also felt to be important
by all concerned, including King, to decenter King’s role in the organization
in the future. The decision was made to move the office to the West Coast
in order to shift the immediate support network and daily work away from
New York. The group also agreed to try a more collective form of
directorship, one that followed the principle of racial parity. Rachel Bagby
and Gwyn Kirk agreed to “co-hub” the organization, with Kirk moving to
the Bay Area, where Bagby lived, for the following summer. This
manifestation of WomanEarth, to symbolize the break with some of the
previous problems encountered, was called WomanEarth II.

WomanEarth II
WomanEarth II was marked by two opposing tendencies. One was the
growing interest in ecofeminism across the country during this period. The
product of a number of forces, that interest became focused on WomanEarth
to some extent because of reports of the August gathering, and because of
public appearances by high-profile members like Starhawk, King, and
Teish. This momentum was intensified by the presence of King, Starhawk,
Kirk, and Bagby as members of WomanEarth at the March 1987
Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature, Theory conference held at the
University of Southern California. Armed with their fresh understandings of
the importance of analyzing racism and of including women of color on
their own terms, both King and Starhawk rose at different times to intervene
in moments of white arrogance and presumption during this conference.
The name of WomanEarth was invoked a number of times as an ecofeminist
organization centered on antiracism, and flyers inviting membership in the
organization were available to conference participants.
The USC conference brought ecofeminism wide publicity and confirmed
its place as a oppositional political location in the United States. Articles on
the USC conference appeared in numerous places, and WomanEarth was
sometimes mentioned in them. 41 The results of this publicity were “close to
2,000 requests for more information” from WomanEarth in the year
following the USC conference, often containing “news of actions, letter
campaigns, conferences, and educational programs on a variety of ecology
and peace-related issues” felt by the submitters to be related to
“ecofeminism.” 42 According to Bagby, “so many women were interested, it
was astounding.” Two other results were Bagby’s article on the August
1986 gathering, which appeared in the first important anthology explicitly
designated “ecofeminist,” Judith Plant’s Healing the Wounds: The Promise
of Ecofeminism; and Lindsy Van Gelder’s article on “ecofeminism” in Ms.,
in which WomanEarth was prominently featured. Both were published in
1989.
The other momentum apparent in WomanEarth II was in an opposite
direction from this outpouring of interest, publicity, and support. Bagby,
though working hard on a number of aspects of WomanEarth, was
terrifically overburdened with responsibilities during this period of her life.
At the meeting in September 1986, when she offered to take on the position
of “hubbing” the organization with Kirk, she remembers someone saying,
“But Rachel, you’ve got three jobs!” In hindsight, she said, taking on “co-
hubbing” at this time was a “archetypical super-colored woman thing to
do.” She began the project chronically overextended, and matters only
worsened as time went on. She and Kirk worked well together, according to
both of their accounts. But around September, after the USC conference,
Kirk returned to work in Boston, and there wasn’t enough money to bring
them together on a regular basis, let alone hire a full-time staff person. This
situation continued for two years, from the spring of 1987 to the spring of
1989, at the same time that tremendous growth in ecofeminism was taking
place. During these two years, Kirk and Bagby put together at least one
issue of a newsletter (called WomanEarth Review; it was never sent out), a
bibiliography, and a grant proposal, entitled “From the Earth to the World:
Voices of Ecofeminism.” But they were unable to get enough money to
reconvene a new group of women to work as a core group. At the same
time, a number of women, primarily white women who were active in
constructing the politics of ecofeminism, were very interested in
participating in a new Circle One: Irene Diamond (white coorganizer of the
USC conference), Susan Griffin (white author of Women and Nature, at this
point widely seen as a founding ecofeminist text), Marti Kheel (white writer
and cofounder of Feminists for Animal Rights), and Charlene Spretnak
(white activist in the U.S. Greens and author of The Politics of Women’s
Spirituality, also now seen as a founding ecofeminist text). With the help of
some of these women’s connections, a grant proposal finally did garner
enough money to bring elements of the old and new Circle One together on
May 5–8, 1989, at Starhawk’s house in San Francisco. 43
Though taking place with great optimism about a revitalization of
WomanEarth, this meeting turned out to be almost its last event, though the
organization struggled on until August 1989. Of the original members of
Circle One, Starhawk, King, Bagby, Kirk, and Sierra were present. Also in
attendance were new people, including Irene Diamond, Susan Griffin, Marti
Kheel, Margo Adair (a white grassroots activist based in the Bay Area),
Sharon (or Shea) Howell (a white grassroots activist and scholar based in
Michigan), Victoria Bomberry (a Native American feminist based in
Northern California), Tia Wagner (an African American activist), and
Deeanne Davis (a community organizer, Davis was identified by Sierra as
“biracial” but in a flyer describing the San Francisco meeting as “African
American”). Comparing the accounts of this meeting, it is apparent that
another African American woman was also present, but I have been unable
to identify her.
The meeting began with a potluck dinner on Friday night and was
expected to continue into Saturday. However, the problem of racial
imbalance occupied the whole of Friday night’s meeting. At first Shea
Howell and Margo Adair and then Marti Kheel and Susan Griffin
volunteered to leave to help restore the racial balance. With their absences,
the meeting on Saturday thus proceeded on the basis of racial parity. The
Friday night discussion was variously described. Rachel Bagby commented:
“I had an appreciation for struggle after that meeting.” The writer of a flyer
describing the meeting characterized this process as “unrushed,
unpressured, inclusive, and revealing of deep feelings about the dynamics
of power relations and tokenism and about personal commitment.” 44
On Saturday, the participants made up a three-year plan for WomanEarth,
and decided to turn over the “co-hubbing” responsibilities to Margo Adair
and Rachel Sierra; a few weeks later, they received the computer, files, and
other WomanEarth materials from Rachel Bagby at a meeting also attended
by Victoria Bomberry and Charlene Spretnak. A long letter written by
Sierra summarizing the two meetings and detailing the plans for the future
was sent to all participants. Though enthusiasm for the project appeared
high at both of these meetings and in Sierra’s letter, a series of personal
crises in Sierra’s life derailed the momentum gained through these
meetings. The last WomanEarth document I have seen is dated August 10,
1989. It is a letter from Ynestra King to the participants of a meeting Sierra
was planning to hold, detailing some of the history of the organization and
the challenges facing it at that time. She mentions four pressing needs: a
clear definition of parity in broader terms that would allow, for instance,
decisions about which white women were included; an agreed-upon
political analysis and statement of purpose; a consensus on organizational
structure and decision-making procedures; and stable and unconditional
sources of money. Near the end of the letter, her writing is interrupted by a
telephone call from Rachel Sierra, who called to tell her that she could no
longer “co-hub” WomanEarth. King ends the letter with great sadness,
emphasizing the need for secure financial support for feminist
organizations, and with a “fervent wish … that you find it in you and
among you to continue.” Despite King’s hope, this did not happen. With
Sierra unable to continue, two possibilities remained: Margo Adair stood
ready to take on WomanEarth, 45 and it also would have been possible to
return the responsibility to King, who still had a large personal investment
in the project. Neither of these possibilities could be seriously considered,
however. Under the requirements of racial parity (and given the past history
of WomanEarth), it was unthinkable to have the organization facilitated
solely by a white woman. Ironically, in the middle of a historical moment in
which ecofeminism was flourishing, WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute
was ending.
In the remainder of this chapter I will explore some conclusions garnered
from this complex history of an organization identified as ecofeminist and
focused on antiracism as its principal work. I hope that this analysis will
enable others to respect and continue the work of the WomanEarth
members by taking seriously the political possibilities it represented. I want
to focus on a couple of areas. First, I will draw some conclusions about the
notion of racial parity and the peculiar effects of the binary conception of
racial difference that undergird that notion. Second, I will explore the
definition of Woman-Earth as “ecofeminist,”and its ties to feminist
antimilitarism.
The Race for Parity
In the interviews I’ve conducted with WomanEarth members, it was
emphasized that there were many reasons why the organization didn’t
continue besides difficulties with questions of race. Lack of funding after
the conference, the geographical dispersal of the members, the amount of
resources and energy depleted by organizing the Hampshire conference, and
poor delegation of responsibility were probably the most important factors
in WomanEarth’s demise. But there were indeed problems in accomplishing
the goal of racial equality within the organization that racial parity was
supposed to achieve. Meetings were difficult enough to arrange on a limited
budget with a farflung membership; but when they did occur, a great deal of
time was occupied with sorting out issues stemming from racial difference.
Some of the members I talked to expressed the sense that the agenda of
WomanEarth was constantly shifting because of the attempt to construct an
organization based on racial parity. 46 This did not at all mean, for them,
that antiracist work was not properly on the political agenda, but that the
need to constantly address racial differences within the group meant that
organizing efforts, in the words of Kirk, “unraveled at the same time (they)
were put together … nothing could be assumed.” For all members, there
was clearly a great deal of pain associated with the memory of these
discussions, as well as a sense of having learned a great deal.
The women in WomanEarth were on the whole powerful, experienced
feminists with long histories of activism and antiracist work. Why did they
run into so much difficulty operating under the requirement of racial parity?
One answer is that working in coalition, as Bernice Johnson Reagon has
pointed out, 47 is difficult, painful work and cannot be expected to be
otherwise. Taking this to heart means understanding that the difficulties
experienced in WomanEarth were a sign that its members were practicing
serious antiracist politics.
But I would like to suggest that another factor increasing the difficulty
could be the way in which racial difference was defined by WomanEarth: in
terms of white women and women of color. This dualistic conception of
race gave the women involved only two choices of racial subjectivity, and
thus impoverished the conversations among the members, continually
returning them to only one axis (white and nonwhite) along which to
conceive of the social construction of race and the operations of racism. In
addition, it obscured the clear consideration of other extant differences
operative in different ways of working, different political investments, and
different personal expectations. The focus on difference, and on difference
of one kind, pointed continually to identities, not structural processes.
When binary rather than multiple subject positions are emphasized,
racialized identities appear to inhere only in the nonwhite women.
Emphasizing multiple and overlapping subject categories, in contrast,
points to the creation of subjectivities in part by the intersection of broad
social structural factors such as racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism.
Such a theoretical approach, more understood as necessary today than it
was for the members of WomanEarth, allows people to complicate their
identities beyond simple racial categories. This process points to the way in
which it is racism that insists on the binary conceptualization of “white”
and “nonwhite.”
Antiracist work, according to a dualistic way of thinking, can only be
done with those who are “raced.” Thus, antiracist practice appears to be
appropriately conducted between differently raced individuals, rather than a
practice that targets the consequences of U.S. racism. In this way, a dualistic
conception of race leads white people to believe that the best way to work
against racism is to find some way to get people of color to join white
organizations. It does not lead white people to examine the way in which
they are “raced” themselves, that is, the way in which they are carriers of
racial identities constructed by structural racism. It does not present these
structures as problems for their own lives, but for the lives of others.
Additionally, this dualistic conception of race does not encourage
discussions of the different ways in which U.S. racism affects various
“women of color.” A nuanced, historical analysis of how racism is
reproduced and maintained is thus difficult to achieve. “Women of color,”
as Chela Sandoval, among others, has argued, must be seen as a “tactical
subjectivity,” an “oppositional consciousness” of a social movement formed
from the ongoing political and strategic negotiations for and against power
carried on within feminist and antiracist circles. 48 As an oppositional
category, it is useful inasmuch as it is understood not to be an essential
category. That is, “women of color” are not in some biological or
unchangeable way alike. They share a struggle against racism because U.S.
racism allows only two racial categories of importance: “white” and
“nonwhite.”
To fully understand and resist U.S. racism, however, dualistic
conceptualizations must be resisted and the flexibility and historical
variation of racism must be fully confronted. For example, I’ve mentioned
at the beginning of this chapter that it is possible to trace a historical
transition from racial discourses within social movements that emphasized a
division between “white and black” to racial discourses focusing on “white
people and people of color.” One of the problems of the earlier discourse
was the emphasis on African American experience over the experience of
other racialized U.S. groups. But the retention of a dualistic frame allows
the dominance of African American experience to slide back in. Especially
in the late 1980s, the use of the category “women of color” does not
preclude the metonymical dynamic in which African American women
stand in for the whole of “women of color,” as, for instance, in their
predominance in the make-up of WomanEarth’s August 1986 gathering.
It is certainly the case that because U.S. racism operates through the
construction of dualistic categories, people who are able to occupy the
category “white” are significantly privileged over people who occupy the
category “nonwhite.” It is a truism nowadays to say that this situation is
what antiracist politics must address. But what is not often seen is the
danger of allowing that analysis to justify the importation of these
categories, unchallenged, into antiracist work.
To understand my point here, let’s look at the way in which racial parity
as a dualistic operating principle designed to resist racism ends up
replicating its structures. What Sandoval does not emphasize, although it is
implied by her work, is the way in which the political construction of the
category “women of color” reflects and maintains the processes of the
construction of the category “white women.” As the marked category in a
binary antiracist discourse, white is defined as “not of color,” as lacking,
from the point of view of “women of color”; yet the category “white”
nevertheless continues to operate within a context of racial privilege and
power. While “women of color” is a political coalition masquerading as an
identity, “white women” retains its shape as a monolithic “personal”
identity. This accounts for the ease with which Molina appropriated the
identity of “woman of color,” consciously seeing it as both imposed by the
structures of U.S. racism and as chosen for the purposes of political alliance
and placement within the U.S. women’s movement. Kirk and Mayman, on
the other hand, were more uneasily placed within the category “white
women,” made to account personally for a U.S. racist history they did not
share. Though, like Molina, both of them accepted this identity for political
reasons (in their case, through a political analysis of the need to take
responsibility for the personal privileges they gained through their
placement within structural power relations), such an analysis could not be
openly articulated within the framework of racial parity as an antiracist
discourse. Critiques they may have generated of the particular, specific
nature of “whiteness” in a U.S. context stemming from their experience as
“international” women were unavailable as long as the binary nature of
racial parity constructed their status as “white women” to be of a personal,
fixed nature.
Ironically for the members of WomanEarth, trying to achieve racial
parity using a dualistic conception of race insured that white women, as
one-half of the oppositional pairing, retained a dominant position within the
organization. Simply from a numerical point of view, giving an entire half
of WomanEarth to white women increased their numbers (assuming they
occupy one political position on a racial continuum) relative to different
racial categories within “women of color” (i.e., African American, Chicana,
Native American, Asian American, and all the racial pluralities subsumed
under these categories). Further, since they are defined by the concept of
“white” as unproblematically unified, bereft of history and cultural
complexity, a “given” racial location, white women can more easily occupy
this position without the kind of historical and critical analysis that would
uncover its instability. 49 What is lost to ecofeminism by the unproblematic
use of a dualistic conception of racial difference is the kind of nuanced,
complex analysis of power found in theories of simultaneous oppressions,
which present racial identity as a problem, as both an achieved and
compulsory political location. 50 My earlier point about the binary form of
the antiracist discourse in WomanEarth preventing the possibility of Kirk
and Mayman articulating their “white” identity as an achieved and
compulsory identity, which may have enriched the analysis of racism within
the organization, is an example of the way in which white identity becomes
presented as immutable. Also fixed by a dualistic conception of racial
parity, “women of color” were located on the other side of the racial divide
together, forced to minimize their differences and ironically solidify the
racist category “nonwhite” as an antiracist political strategy. For example,
the need to present themselves as one category prevented the women of
color in WomanEarth from presenting an analysis of class differences that
divided them or from articulating differences in extant kinds of feminist
spirituality.
Finally, the conceptualization of racial parity as a dualism precluded an
analysis of power that identifies the intersections of multiple forms of
domination, discrimination, oppression, and privilege. My interviews with
WomanEarth members showed clearly that the emphasis on racial parity
served to obscure or trivialize many other differences that turned out to
have almost equal force in the meetings and at the conference: differences
in religious or spiritual orientation, sexual orientation, economic privilege,
national backgrounds, and go forth. One reason for the detail of my
narrative about the history of WomanEarth is to show that these nonracial
differences would often arise with great force, unanticipated because of the
focus on racial differences. Or, just as problematically, these differences
would be retranslated into “racial” differences, and thus left unanalyzed.
There are a number of means by which a variety of differences were
conflated into racial differences. One was the assumption that the white
women and the women of color were interchangeable representatives of
their groups, thus obscuring differences between members of each group.
An example of this is the idea that Molina’s presence in the New York
office would solve the problem of the lack of broad participation in
decision-making because Molina could “represent” the women of color.
The problem of not seeing dissimilarities among the women of color or the
white women was exacerbated by the frequency of understanding a
particular difference (i.e., sexual orientation or political analysis) as a racial
difference. A relatively trivial example can be given here: there was
concern expressed by some of the African American women at the August
gathering that there were cats allowed around the food. Several
interviewees saw this as a racial difference, as something that African
American women (in this case standing in for all of the “women of color”)
minded while white women did not. Another case of “mistaken identity”
was the previously mentioned perception on the part of some women of
color that “unconventional” spiritual practice was a “white thing,” when in
fact many of the women of color within Circle One and at the August
gathering were practitioners of or sympathizers with alternative feminist
spiritualities. Even more seriously, perhaps, sexual orientation was
perceived by some participants in the August conference, as well as some
members of Circle One, as a racial difference. Despite the presence of
several lesbians of color, many of the women of color and white women
presumed that the only lesbians at the August gathering were white.
Similarly, a class analysis wasn’t articulated in the group except insofar
as class and race were conflated. This led to questions of inauthenticity
around racial identification, e.g., Molina’s upper-class background
undermining her legitimacy as a representative of U.S. women of color.
Comments by Margo Adair made in discussing whether Rachel Bagby,
whose activism Adair saw as centered primarily in white university
communities, had the equivalent organizing experience as Rachel Sierra,
who Adair saw as being involved in “all people of color contexts,” also
point up the need to analyze the conflation of race and class. To Adair,
organizing in a university context meant organizing in a white context
(because the university was by definition middle class) whether or not
Bagby was African American. While race and class are conflated by the
intersections of racism and classism in this country, there is still a need in
oppositional discourses to analyze their separate effects in order to
disentangle the knot created by unequal power relations. The lack of a class
analysis as a separate mode of understanding inequalities made the effects
of Mayman’s position as a “wage laborer” invisible to the members of
WomanEarth.
Examining the history of WomanEarth, it is obvious that the structure of
racial parity provided a way to talk about conflict between women of color
and white women. This is most clearly evidenced by the speak-out on racial
identity at the August gathering, which ended up being a very positive
experience. But the structure of racial parity did not allow for conflict
stemming from other differences. In particular, it could not frame how to
resolve conflict within, rather than between the two racialized groups nor
within categories that confused these racialized boundaries. Examples of
these abound. For instance, Sierra ruefully remarked about the August
gathering that the “colored girls get together and they fight,” a comment
that references what Teish called the “great Native American debate,” that
is, the argument over which of the Native Americans present were “real”
Indians. Another example was the argument at the August gathering within
the lesbian caucus between lesbians who were out and lesbians who were
not. Among the reasons for these struggles was the effort behind
WomanEarth to combine a number of social movement approaches, to
produce a multivalent politics, and to do so not in the form of a coalition
but in a single movement. The emphasis on racial parity took precedence
over the other difficulties inherent in the admirable attempt to create a
movement location that combined a number of internally contested political
positions. This meant that the conflicts between and within these positions
could not be resolved.

Defining Ecofeminism
The history of WomanEarth shows clearly the close link for many between
feminist antimilitarism of the late 1970s and early 1980s to ecofeminism in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. What’s interesting to look at in this history,
however, are its different meanings for white women and women of color.
WomanEarth was an attempt to overcome previous racial segregation
between white feminist antimilitarists and feminists of color who also saw
the threads running through militarism, sexism, racism, classism,
heterosexism, and environmental destruction. In addition, the women of
color drawn to WomanEarth tended on the whole to be interested in bridges
between feminist politics and feminist spirituality as well. The analysis was
shared; the nuances and emphases may have differed. But the past
movement experience was not shared. This is why the members of the
organization who were women of color were excited about the political
project of WomanEarth, but uniformly rejected the label “ecofeminist.” 51

For them, “ecofeminism” meant a white movement.

The sense that “ecofeminism,” or “feminist peace politics,” meant a
white movement was accurate not only because historically this has been
true of feminist antimilitarism but also because it described the specific
genesis of WomanEarth as a project initiated by King and Starhawk,
supported in its beginnings by a white funder who emphasized not racial
diversity but rather international diversity. Despite King’s sensitivity to the
dangers of “adding on” women of color to a white project, and the
considerable risks she and Starhawk took to recast the conceptualization of
the project in order to “bring the women of color in on the ground floor,”
the organization was never able to avoid the consequences of this history.
And indeed, given the importance of King and Starhawk to the
development of ecofeminism as a political location in the United States, this
difficulty is not surprising. The irony here is that WomanEarth was an
important effort to derail the “white-only” development of ecofeminism. It
served as a consequential example to other ecofeminists of the possibility
and need for interracial ecofeminist organizations. Establishing
WomanEarth as outside ecofeminism in a serious way would have
prevented it from serving an antiracist function within ecofeminism. King,
in particular, became torn between the desire to locate WomanEarth within
a developing tradition called “ecofeminism,” and the need to present it to
the women of color as a “new” effort. One can view this as self-
aggrandizing, or one can view it as a useful intervention into the “white-
only” environment of ecofeminism. The importance of this can be seen
particularly in the effect of the existence of WomanEarth on the 1987 USC
ecofeminist conference. Here, WomanEarth served to broaden the notion of
what constituted the purview of ecofeminism, stressing the need for active
inclusion of women of color and of analyzing internal racism within the
movement. The fact that WomanEarth did not have any concrete antiracist
ecofeminist political projects made this intervention almost entirely a
symbolic one and one that benefited white ecofeminists far more than the
women of color who were their potential allies.
Ultimately, the focus on racial parity became a goal for the organization
rather than just an operating principle, obscuring other possibilities, like
concrete, localized political actions. Racial parity resulted in antiracist work
taking place between individuals (not entirely a useless practice) to the
detriment of a focus on environmental and feminist problems caused or
exacerbated by structural racism. Both a historical perspective of the
variable ways in which racism has operated, and a focus on the
consequences of racism rather than raced individuals, would put white
ecofeminists in a position to form coalitions with the movement against
environmental racism, which grounds its analysis on both of these elements,
but which does not often include an analysis of sexism along with its
analysis of the intersections of racism and environmental exploitation. 52
WomanEarth’s effort to work on the principle of racial parity was based
on a binary antiracist discourse common to the feminist movement in the
1980s. Thus, the racial essentialism of its presuppositions (conceiving of
women of color and white women as two essentially different and
homogenous groups), was part of a strategic antiracist feminist intervention
into early ecofeminism. It was one attempt to undermine the gender
essentialism of claiming universal status for a maternalist conception of
women, a notion that was prevalent (though unstable) in the feminist
antimilitarist movement that was one important origin of U.S. ecofeminism.
In the previous chapter, I argued that judging the gender essentialism in
early ecofeminism without taking into account its strategic purposes
prevents us from adequately analyzing feminist antimilitarism as an
oppositional discourse and practice. Similarly, evaluating the racial
essentialism imbedded in WomanEarth’s notion of racial parity must also
involve taking into account its strategic attempt to counter racism in early
ecofeminism, racism partially produced by feminist antimilitarism’s
reliance on certain gender essentialisms that erased difference within the
category “women.” These moments of essentialism, these ecofeminist
natures, are historically contingent, contradictory and contested. They
remain politically important even when they have particular political costs.
Notes
1. The term is Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s, Racial Formations in
the United States (New York: Routledge, 1988).
2. The term “double jeopardy” used to describe the intersection of racism
and sexism for black women is Frances Beale’s, in “Double Jeopardy:
To Be Black and Female,” in Robin Morgan ed., Sisterhood is
Powerful, (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 340–53.
3. The representative figure here is Barbara Deming, a lesbian-feminist
whose career as a nonviolent activist spanned the civil rights
movement through feminist antimilitarism to early ecofeminism.
Indeed, as will be discussed shortly, Deming had a direct influence on
the shape of WomanEarth. Interview with Ynestra King, November
1993.
4. My information about WomanEarth comes from literature I received
from the group during 1987–1989: two articles, Rachel Bagby, “A
Power of Numbers” from Judith Plant, ed., Healing the Wounds: The
Promise of Ecofeminism (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989),
91–95, and Lindsy Van Gelder, “It’s Not Nice to Mess With Mother
Nature,” Ms. (January–February 1989): 60–63; papers shared with me
through the generosity of Margie Mayman, Starhawk, and Margo
Adair; and interviews with Margo Adair, Rachel Bagby, Ynestra King,
Gwyn Kirk, Margie Mayman, Papusa Molina, Rachel Sierra,
Starhawk, and Luisah Tëish from 1991–1995. Margo Adair is a white
leftist feminist activist and the author of Working Inside Out: Tools for
Change (n.p.: Wingbow, 1984). Her involvement with WomanEarth
was relatively peripheral, coming only at its last moments. Rachel
Bagby is an African American educator, lawyer, and feminist. She has
been the coordinator of African American Studies as well as the
associate director of the Martin Luther King Papers at Stanford. She is
a performance artist and singer with a history of ecological activism.
Besides the piece cited above, see her “Daughters of Growing Things,”
in Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World:
The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books,
1990), pp. 231–48. Also see the interview with her in Penny
Rosenwasser, Visionary Voices: Women on Power (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute, 1992), pp. 71–82. Ynestra King’s work and activism I’ve
described in the last chapter; she is a white southern feminist based in
New York. Gwyn Kirk is a white British feminist activist and scholar
trained in sociology. She was involved in the feminist antimilitarist
action at Greenham Common, particularly in developing connections
between the Greenham women and women’s antinuclear activism in
the South Pacific. During the period of WomanEarth’s formation she
lived in New York, and then moved out to the West Coast for a
summer to “co-hub” WomanEarth with Rachel Bagby. Kirk has taught
Women’s Studies at Rutgers and Antioch University, and her present
scholarship is on grassroots urban movements. Margie Mayman is a
white New Zealand feminist and an ordained Presbyterian minister
who at the time of our interview was doing further theological studies
at Union Theological Seminary. Papusa Molina is a Mexican feminist
who has lived and worked in the United States since 1981. She was a
founder of the Women Against Racism Committee in Iowa City, about
which she writes in “Recognizing, Accepting and Celebrating Our
Differences,” in Gloria Anzaldúa ed., Haciendo Caras: Making Face,
Making Soul (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), pp. 326–31. She has
also been the director of the Women’s Center at the University of
Iowa. At the time of our interview, she was teaching Women’s Studies
 at Hamilton College. See her interview in Penny Rosenwasser,
Visionary Voices, pp. 1–10. Rachel Sierra is a Chicana feminist based
in the San Francisco Bay Area who has been a long-time organizer in
grassroots movements of poor urban residents, especially those of
color. Starhawk’s work as an antinuclear activist, political theorist, and
witch I’ve described in chapter 1; a white Jewish woman, she is also
based in the Bay Area. Luisah Teish is an African American feminist,
dancer, storyteller, and activist, who teaches and practices African-
based spiritualities as an Oshun priestess. She lives in the San
Francisco Bay Area, and has written about the connections between
African, especially Yoruba, spiritual practices and politics in
Jambalaya (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1985).
5. Most of the interviews were conducted face-to-face, some over the
phone. In every case but one, the interviewee signed a consent form,
agreeing to the following process. After the interview, I transcribed it
and indicated the portions of the interview I might quote (except for
Starhawk, whose interview did not come out on tape—for her input, I
relied on my notes of the interview and large amounts of archival
material she kindly lent me). I then sent the transcription back to the
interviewee. Within an agreed-upon time, the interviewee could
withhold permission for quoting specific material, or edit or
contextualize the material as she wished. If I received no response
within the time period, the agreement was that I could assume
permission to use the material as transcribed. The exception to this
process is Gywn Kirk, with whom I’ve had several informal
conversations as well as two approximately formal interviews; one
with both Kirk and King together at the Women, Environment, and
Grassroots Conference at Barnard in April 1991, and the other with
 Kirk alone at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in
June 1992. However, none of these interviews was transcribed in order
to be read by Kirk. Thus my attributions of information to Kirk must
be seen as more tentative than information attributed to others.
Nevertheless, Kirk’s viewpoints on WomanEarth have been very
influential to my thinking about the organization. I started from her
remarks, and her care in thinking about the successes and failures of
the organization provided me with a model of a feminist researcher.
6. Interview with Ynestra King, November 9, 1993. All information and
quotes attributed to King in this chapter are from this interview unless
otherwise identified.
7. This sentence is attributed to King at several places in the
WomanEarth papers I have.
8. According to Margie Mayman, who was hired to manage the
WomanEarth office in New York, the amount was well over $40,000
(from interview with Margie Mayman, November 10, 1993; all
information and quotes attributed to Mayman in this chapter are from
this interview unless otherwise identified). This was a very large
amount of money for a small radical political organization, especially
one with no previous existence and thus no track record. I’ve decided
to keep the identity of this donor anonymous, calling her “Camille
Daney,” since her contributions to radical causes are ongoing and since
I have not interviewed her directly for this project. I have, however,
identified her racial location since it is important to understanding the
events that followed.
9. The detail in this summary comes from a report made to Daney by
Kirk and King on December 12, 1985. From papers provided to me by
Starhawk.
10. Letter from King to Ani Mander, Director of Women’s Studies at
Antioch West. From papers provided to me by Starhawk.
11. In saying this, I am not implying that King and Starhawk deliberately
obscured the fact that they had begun work on the organization. Early
meetings often began with a rendition of the history of their efforts,
and late material produced by WomanEarth invoked their status as the
initiators of the organization. But as I will discuss later, it is also true
that several of the women of color did not seem aware until the period
around the August 1986 conference that the conception of the institute
was tied so closely to the kind of feminist peace politics that King and
Starhawk had been involved in—in other words, ecofeminism.
12. Chandra Talpade Mohanty is an Indian feminist scholar who has taught
in the United States for many years; she is the editor, along with Ann
Russo and Lourdes Torres, of Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1991) and the author of two important essays in that book,
“Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism” (pp. 1–50) and “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship
and Colonial Discourses (pp. 51–81).
13. Marta Benavides is a Salvadoran feminist activist who at the time was
living in Mexico.
14. It seems likely that there at least were two initial New York meetings
with Barbara Smith, one at King’s apartment and one at Grace Paley’s
house on March 8, 1986. I have the minutes of that meeting, from the
papers provided to me by Starhawk. Given the amount of time that had
elapsed between these meetings and my interviews, memories of these
meetings were unclear. Kings account refers to more than one meeting
but doesn’t clearly differentiate the two. Molina only refers to one
 meeting, but her account in terms of participants and subject matter is
very different from King’s. In Molina’s account, Rachel Bagby is
absent, though she clearly attended the March 8 meeting. Smith, in the
minutes of the March 8 meeting, refers to a meeting at which she was
the only woman of color. Mayman, who was at the March 8th meeting
and was hired in mid-February, remembers not being able to attend
one meeting because of parity imbalance. As a result of this
uncertainty, I don’t try to distinguish between meetings in this early
period.
15. Details from the minutes of the March 8, 1986, meeting that were sent
out to all participants. From papers provided to me by Starhawk.
16. If these four were the only women of color involved, this meeting was
either not the March 8 meeting, or Marta Benavides was not counted
as a “woman of color.”
17. Interview with Papusa Molina, February 26, 1995. All information or
quotes attributed to Molina in this chapter are from this interview
unless otherwise specified.
18. From the minutes of the April 17–20 meeting, from papers provided to
me by Starhawk and Mayman. There was apparently an earlier
meeting at the funder’s home in the Southwest, which was more
loosely structured around the idea of WomanEarth. This meeting was
attended by about twenty or so women, including at least King, Teish,
and Kirk from the Circle One group, but also a number of other
women, many of whom were “international” feminist activists who
were invited by the funder. Teish remembers Paula Gunn Allen, Elena
Featherstone, Asoka Banderage, Merlin Stone, Jacqui Alexander,
Marta Benavides, and Uzuri Amini. I have no minutes of that meeting
 and none of my interviewees have clear recollections of it. I
concentrate here on the April 17–20 meeting.
19. Mayman expresses her skepticism about the use of “unconventional
spirituality” in her interview in ways that will be referred to later in the
chapter. Her sense of herself as “hired help” (in my words, not hers) is
also indicated several times in the interview, as well as corroborated by
other interviewees who sometimes hesitated about including her in
Circle One. On the other hand, her participation definitely counted in
terms of assessing racial parity; she was always seen as one of the four
white participants balanced by the four women of color. As I discuss
later, this indicates the lack of a class analysis in the group. The idea
that the language in the minutes reflected her ambivalent feelings,
however, is entirely my speculation.
20. It is interesting that, according to all of the interviewees, the question
of male participation in WomanEarth was never brought up, except in
the context of talking about who would be students in the year-long
Antioch program. That the women-only nature of the core group in
WomanEarth was not even an issue, was a taken for granted mode of
operation, is an artifact of the period. The separatism of many early
white women’s movement’s group was felt to be a barrier to women of
color who wanted to address sexism in ways that did not isolate them
from men of color and their mutual struggle against racism. But
WomanEarth’s formation took place after feminists of color had
identified a need to work together in all-women’s groups as well. For
instance, the Combahee River Collective, whose “manifesto” is
immensely influential, argues for the necessity of women of color
organizing without male involvement in certain situations. Barbara
Smith’s involvement in both Combahee and WomanEarth is symbolic
 of the elimination of this barrier. But there still may have been
different nuances in the attitude toward female separatist organization
among members of Circle One. The minutes of the March 1986
meeting record a comment by Barbara Smith about the problem of
“some feminists never talking about family”; Bagby also comments in
her interview about her need to work in both mixed and single-sex
groups.
21. From the minutes of the April 17–20 meeting.
22. From the flyer “Reconsituting Feminist Peace Politics,” which went
out with the invitational letter describing the August gathering on June
21, 1986. From papers provided to me by Starhawk and Mayman.
23. Interview with Gwyn Kirk, June 1992. I did not take complete notes
during this interview and thus cannot directly quote Kirk.
24. Molina, in “On the Cutting Edge,” interview with Penny Rosenwasser,
in Visionary Voices, p. 2.
25. Interview with Rachel Sierra, October 12, 1993. All information or
quotes attributed to Sierra in this chapter come from this interview
unless otherwise specified.
26. Interview with Luisah Teish, October 9, 1993. All information or
quotes attributed to Teish in this chapter come from this interview
unless otherwise specified.
27. From the minutes of the meeting of May 26–30, 1986, Litchfield,
Connecticut; from the papers of Starhawk.
28. Invitational letter from WomanEarth, dated June 27, 1986, apparently
written primarily by King; from the papers of Starhawk and Mayman.
Spirituality is the only issue identified in this letter as a possible source
of conflict stemming from cultural or political difference, other than
the overarching concern with racial difference. As will be discussed
 shortly, this did turn out to be the only area of conflict. That it was the
only one identified by the WomanEarth members at this point is
interesting.
29. I asked all of the interviewees about what kind of process was used in
WomanEarth and whether there was conflict over this issue.
30. From minutes of the May 26–30 meeting in Connecticut.
31. In this section, I am paraphrasing Molina, Teish, and King’s already
paraphrased words from the minutes of the May meeting.
32. Bagby, in “A Power of Numbers,” p. 93.
33. The above quotes are from Sierra’s letter to the other members of
Circle One, dated July 11, 1986; from papers provided to me by
Starhawk.
34. From the roster of the August gathering; from papers provided to me
by Margie Mayman. The roster records names, addresses, phone
numbers, racial/ethnic identification, areas of interest defined in terms
of the five theme areas of the conference, and skill/profession of each
participant. As far as I can ascertain, the roster is a fairly accurate
rendering of those in attendance, but according to the accounts of the
conference in the interviews, it is not absolutely complete. Some
women perhaps attended at the last minute, and their names were not
recorded on this roster. This did not upset the parity balance, however.
35. Some participants were put in two issue areas, some did not have any
marked.
36. Some participants were listed in more than one of these categories.
37. Bagby, in “A Power of Numbers,” p. 93. Her emphasis.
38. In Plant, Healing the Wounds.
39. As opposed to numerous feminist gatherings that have been wracked
by racial conflict. To name just two examples, the National Women’s
 Studies Association meetings in 1981 and 1990, the latter almost
bringing about the end of the organization. (Interestingly, the walk-out
of many of the women of color during the 1990 NWSA conference
was instigated by Papusa Molina, among others.)
40. These details on the evaluation during the last day and the quote from
Kirk come from “Reports From the Color Clans on FPI [Feminist
Peace Institute]” from Starhawk’s papers, and “Report of the Lesbian
Caucus” from Mayman’s papers.
41. See Van Gelder, “It’s Not Nice to Mess.”
42. These quotes are from “From Earth to the World: Voices of
Ecofeminism, A Think-Tank Proposal Submitted by WomanEarth
Institute [sic],” most likely written by Bagby and Kirk sometime in
1988 to raise money for a meeting to reconstitute Circle One. From
Starhawk’s papers. Because of its fund-raising purpose, the figures on
the inquiries may be somewhat inflated.
43. I have not been able to ascertain if it is the same proposal I cite above.
44. From a WomanEarth flyer which was distributed at the 1989 Greens
Conference in Eugene, Oregon, most likely written by Irene Diamond.
45. Interview with Margo Adair, October 6, 1993. All quotes and
information attributed to Adair in this chapter are from this interview
unless otherwise specified.
46. A sense expressed by King, Kirk, Sierra, Molina, and Bagby.
47. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in
Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New
York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), pp. 356–69.
48. See Chéla Sandoval, “Feminism and Racism_ A Report on the 1981
National Women’s Studies Association Conference,” in Gloria
Anzaldúa, ed., Haciendo Caras, pp. 55–71, and “U.S. Third World
 Feminism_ The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in
the Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 1–24.
49. For two useful examples of analyses of the construction of “whiteness”
which question the unity of the category, see Biddy Martin and
Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s discussion of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s
autobiographical essay in “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do
With It?” in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 191–212; and Ruth
Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of
Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
50. For a few examples of this theorization of the politics of racial identity,
see Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective
Statement,” in Smith, ed., Home Girls, pp. 272–82; Gloria Anzaldúua,
Borderlands/1,a Frontera: The New Metiza (San Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987) (which, by the way, is considered by some
to be an ecofeminist text); and Sandra Harding, “Reinventing
Ourselves as Other: More New Agents of History and Knowledge,” in
Linda S. Kaufmann, ed., American Feminist Thought at Century’s End
(Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1993).
51. One of my interview questions was “Do you identify yourself as an
ecofeminist?” Bagby, Teish, Sierra, and Molina all refused this
identification, in most cases explicitly mentioning as a reason their
sense of ecofeminism as a white-identified movement. Adair sees the
white-identified tradition of ecofeminism as one reason for Sierra’s
reluctance to continue “hubbing” the organization, though Sierra
herself does not include this in her reasons. Of the white members of
Circle One, only King and Starhawk answered this question positively
and immediately, both providing me instantly with complex definitions
 of ecofeminism. Kirk had a qualified sense of herself as an
ecofeminist, wanting to distinguish herself from essentialist and
nonactivist elements of ecofeminism. Mayman saw herself as a
feminist, not specifically an ecofeminist.
52. For examples of analyses arising from the movement against
environmental racism, see Benjamin F. Chavis and Charles Lee, Toxic
Wastes and Race in the United States (New York: United Church of
Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1987); Robert D. Bullard,
Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality (San
Francisco: Westview, 1990); Robert D. Bullard, ed., Confronting
Environmental Racism_ Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South
End Press, 1993); Al Gedick, ed., The New Resource Wars: Native and
Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations (Boston:
South End Press, 1993); Richard Hofrichter, ed., Toxic Struggles: The
Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice (Philadelphia: New
Society Publishers, 1993); Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism_ Toxic Waste
and the Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994); Robert Higgins, “Race, Pollution, and the
Mastery of Nature,” Environmental Ethics 16:3 (Fall 1994): 251–64;
Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicana
Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona, 1996);
and the journal Race, Poverty and the Environment.
4 The Nature Of Race
Indigenous Women and White Goddesses
DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-5

While WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute was focused on U.S. racism in

binary terms that tend to emphasize white and African American relations,
there is another set of ecofeminist discourses about racial difference
operative in the same time period (the latter half of the 1980s) that center on
the idealization of “indigenous” women as symbolic representatives of
ecofeminism. By putting indigenous in quotes here, I am pointing to the
conflation of three ecofeminist discourses on racial difference that partake
of the same form and function: that of creating an image of “the ultimate
ecofeminists” as idealized tribal peoples. These three discourses of racial
difference are those about Native American women, about Third World
women (in which certain Asian Indian women tend to stand in as
generalized Third World women), and about pre-Christian European pagan
women. I will argue that the conflation of these three categories into a
symbolic indigeneity is ironically a form of antiracist discourse that, like
the binary discourse in WomanEarth of white women and women of color,
ends up, despite good intentions, reconstituting white privilege. One way
this occurs is through the racial essentialism of the idea of the indigenous,
which erases all difference between and within the categories “Native
American” and “Third World” and constitutes them as racialized Others to a
white Self that is Western, modern, and industrialized. Though these first
two categories contain within them many different kinds of women, white
ecofeminism in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been most concerned
with those women in these categories that are involved in cultural and
economic practices, usually that of subsistence agriculture or hunting and
gathering, that are seen as “sustainable” and “ecological.” These practices
are often defined as ecological for ecofeminists (and other U.S. radical
environmentalists) simply by contrasting them to industrialized,
commodity-based economic practices (which are, through this move, also
essentialized as always already anti-ecological as well as “white”).
The logic of this preference for indigenous cultures is deeply implanted
in ecofeminist theory. The ecofeminist critique of the hierarchical dualism
of culture/nature at the heart of Western science and ideology therefore
privileges those cultural and economic arrangements that are seen not to
divide culture from nature, and that do not think of culture as superior to a
degraded, inferior nature. This pervasive, and in many respects persuasive,
critique of Western Enlightenment rationalism directs ecofeminists to non-
Western cultures for examples of ecofeminist politics, culture, and
economy. Further, in line with ecofeminist analyses of the interdependent
relation between Western culture/nature dualism and sexism, such
“indigenous” cultures are seen as possible examples of more feminist
societies. The term “indigenous” thus primarily signals for many white U.S.
ecofeminists the extent that these cultures are nonindustrialized and
therefore, from this perspective, more ecological; secondarily, it symbolizes
the extent to which these cultures may be more egalitarian in their gender
relations. 1
I am critical of this logic on a number of grounds. The cultural
imperialism embedded in this discourse of racial difference has been
criticized by others besides myself, including other white ecofeminists.
While the connection between Western culture/nature dualism and Western
sexism is convincing, the mutual support of these two ideological systems
is not, as Huey-li Li points out, universal or necessary. Li argues that
several cultures, notably Chinese culture, have seen the coexistence of
sexism and nondualistic understandings of the relation between culture and
nature for centuries. 2 Furthermore, as Donna Haraway has pointed out,
nondualistic philosophies of the relationship between culture and nature can
still construct hierarchies of status and merit that may include the debasing
of animals and other entities in “nature” in relation to humans. In arguments
that prefer the organic, the nondualistic, she says, “there is little or no
analysis of the historical and textual forms of power and violence built into
‘holist,’ ‘non-western’ frameworks.” 3 Similarly, the ecofeminist reliance
on the idea that nature-based spirituality reflects more ecological societies
leads to the debatable assumption that certain “indigenous” spiritualities
(Native American, Hindu, ancient European Goddess religions, paganism,
and witchcraft) also promote feminist social and economic relationships. 4
Besides these critiques of the valorization of indigenous women, I am also
interested in the ways in which this ecofeminist discourse maintains certain
notions of white identity, the kinds of ecological solutions this discourse
offers and obscures, and the relation of this discourse to an ebbing of
distinctively white ecofeminist activism. Once again, I am not interested in
critiquing ecofeminist racial and gender essentalisms simply as theoretical
problems, but in seeing their strategic effects in particular historical
circumstances.

Healing and Reweaving Ecofeminisms

I begin this chapter with a focus on two ecofeminist stereotypical
formulations: those of Native American culture and those of Asian Indian
women’s activism. In both cases, I argue that white ecofeminist discourses
of racial difference implicitly attempt to resolve three contradictions. One is
the apparent contradiction of being an antiracist movement that is
predominantly white, stemming from the segregated history of social
movements from which ecofeminism arises and the binary antiracist
discourses it inherits, which, as we saw in the last chapter, tend to result in a
focus on racial identities rather than racist social structures. The second
contradiction is the coexistence of an ecofeminist critique of the patriarchal
connection between women and nature with the deep desire for a
nonpatriarchal version of that connection. This contradiction was mentioned
in chapter 1, where I discussed it as one source of repeated gender
essentialism within ecofeminism (by “gender essentialism,” I mean
arguments that unproblematically connect “women” with “nature,”
assuming a universal, essential feminine identity constructed out of
biological femaleness that exists cross-culturally and across racial and class
structures), such as arguing that women are “naturally” environmentalists.
Here, I argue (as I did in relation to the binary discourse of racial parity
employed by WomanEarth) that certain discourses about idealized Native
American and Asian Indian women are racial essentialisms that attempt to
avoid the problem of gender essentialism (by “racial essentialism,” I mean
conceptions of group difference based on generalized “racial” or “cultural”
attributes that produce notions of universalized, ahistorical, innate group
characteristics). The third contradiction, ever more apparent in the early
1990s, is the continued orientation of ecofeminism toward radical politics
while experiencing a growing separation from localized, issue-oriented
direct action. I argue that part of the reason for this is the prevalence of the
ecofeminist discourse of indigenous women as the “ultimate ecofeminists,”
a discourse that, ironically, means to point in one metaphorical turn to the
antiracist, nonessentialist, and activist imperatives of ecofeminist theory.
 To give a few examples of this discourse, I will use as representative
artifacts of U.S. ecofeminism two anthologies, Healing the Wounds: The
Promise of Ecofeminism, edited by Judith Plant and published by New
Society Publishers in 1989 (hereafter Healing); and Reweaving the World:
The Emergence of Ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria
Orenstein, published by Sierra Club Books in 1990 (hereafter Reweaving). I
chose these books because they illustrate, in different ways, the problems I
want to examine, and because they are a significant part of the historical
narrative I construct throughout this book. While there are many other
important ecofeminist books published after 1990, including four other
important ecofeminist anthologies, 5 Healing and Reweaving play a crucial
role in the development of U.S. ecofeminism as a political position. They
have been criticized, I think often unfairly, for their gender essentialism, but
here I am most concerned with certain kinds of racial essentialisms, tropes
that are less apparent but still present in the later three anthologies. The two
anthologies under examination here establish ecofeminism as a political
location independent of the feminist antimilitarist movement with which
early ecofeminism was so closely identified. They grow out of the same
historical and cultural context as WomanEarth (the late 1980s, the ebbing of
antimilitarist direct action with the ending of the Cold War, and widespread
critiques of feminist racism and feminist essentialism) and with a similar
sense of the necessity of antiracism to an ecofeminist project. These books,
however, in contrast to WomanEarth, are aimed at producing a theoretical
base for ecofeminist activism rather than an ecofeminist activist
organization itself. At the time of their publication, these books were the
most prominent representatives of the diversity within ecofeminism, the
many voices constructing the position.
 They are not identical, however. Healing is a collection of articles put
together by one author, an attempt to stake out the territory of ecofeminism
as a new radical environmentalism. Published in 1989, it represents a white
ecofeminism beginning to grapple with the problems of how to articulate a
white ecofeminist antiracism. Reweaving, on the other hand, is the product
of the Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature, Theory conference held at
USC in 1987, and is edited by the two conference organizers. Given the
multiplicity of perspectives represented at this lively and contentious event,
Reweaving has much less of a single voice, more divergent analyses and
subjects, and more attention to multiple axes of difference than Healing.
This distinction is represented on the back covers of the volumes; where
Healing has a picture of its editor, Judith Plant, Reweaving features two lists
of its contributors, advertising its multiple voices. The slightly different
historical locations of the two anthologies can be read in their subtitles:
Healing, put together at the outset of the construction of ecofeminism as a
location independent of feminist antimilitarism, is subtitled “The Promise
of Ecofeminism”; Reweaving, located more firmly in a sense of an already
existing “ecofeminist movement,” is subtitled “The Emergence of
Ecofeminism.” Both anthologies, however, focus on antiracism as a crucial
aspect of ecofeminist theorizing, and aim to represent ecofeminism as a
political location both containing and promoting racial diversity. 6
However, this diversity is articulated in some problematic ways. Unlike
WomanEarth, these anthologies are not explicitly organized around a binary
notion of racial difference; rather, they rely on a notion of ecological
diversity as an analogy for cultural diversity. Contained as it is within an
image of a system-in-balance (the ecosystem), racial and cultural difference
is represented in this kind of antiracist discourse as nondisruptive,
complementary, and ultimately, in a nonracist world, meaningless as
difference. For example, Judith Plant’s introduction to Healing states that
“giving up patriarchy with all its deadly privileges … means valuing
diversity above all else.” Yet, a few lines later, she imagines that in the
context of local communities organizing for global change, “Differences—
if not useful in the defense of the local community—fall off as unimportant.
Thus, on the front lines are people of different cultures, colors, ages, sexes,
and political persuasions. Here is power-from-within expressing itself—the
power to find unity in diversity.” 7 I am sympathetic to the political vision
behind this rhetoric of difference as healthy diversity, but it too easily
ignores the power relations that in many cases are productive of unequal
differences or even difference itself. For example, should class difference
be a valued part of a utopian society based on respecting differences?
However much a notion of cultural diversity might be preferable to our
present system of racial segregation and inequality, a binary division
between possible racial identifications operates underneath this notion of
cultural diversity in U.S. ecofeminism. This is the division between
“indigenous” and “Western.” The maintenance of this binary conception is
in fact an exercise of racial privilege in defining difference.
The categories of indigenous versus Western are continually
(reconstructed by the repetition of references to three forms of “indigenous”
women: Native American women, Asian Indian women, and prehistoric
European pagan women. All three categories are always counterposed to
the Western industrial system, which destroys nature and oppresses women.
African American women also make appearances within these volumes, as
authors and as referents, but they don’t carry the symbolic charge of the
“indigenous,” and thus references to them are rare. This distinguishes the
discourse of the indigenous versus Western from the binary discourse of
white women versus women of color used by WomanEarth, in which
African American women’s voices predominated. It is important to note
that there are essays in both books that do not contain references to these
three kinds of “tribal” women, and those that do sometimes complicate
them in ways that confound the duality of “indigenous/Western.” But the
overall effect is one in which this binary, racialized division defines the
ecofeminist approach articulated by these anthologies.
In the continual appearance of this binarism, we can see a reappearance
of the tension experienced by WomanEarth between definitions of diversity
that stress U.S. racial divisions and those that stress “Western” versus “non-
Western,” or “international,” difference. This tension is resolved by these
anthologies through deploying a notion of the indigenous that is
“nonWestern” and also subject to U.S. racism, an ecofeminist imaginary
which conflates the situation of Native American women and Third World
women and thus can be used, in Plant’s words, “to define a truly
international movement.” 8 The binary sense of this racialized difference is
particularly apparent insofar as the economic, cultural, and spiritual
practices of indigenous women are presented as available for use by white,
Western, urbanized, and industrialized women.

Naturalizing the Natives

I want to look first at the representation in these two anthologies of the
relation of Native American women to an ecofeminist movement that so far
had had predominantly white participants. 9 This is not to make invisible all
of the feminist environmental activists who are Native Americans. On the
contrary, my point is precisely that “ecofeminism” is not a designation
automatically accepted by environmentalist activists who are women, nor
by feminists who are concerned about the environment. 10 A few Native
American women have been willing to be identified with ecofeminist
activism and theory. 11 It is important to note, however, that my
interrogation of the relation between white ecofeminism and Native
American women environmentalists is not intended to argue that such an
incorporation within ecofeminism would be an advantage to Native
American women; rather, I stage this dialogue in order to examine the
barriers white ecofeminists have constructed between their movement and
the movement for environmental justice and against environmental racism,
of which Native American women have been an important part. 12
Healing has twenty-seven articles, whose authors’ racial identifications
are as follows: two Native American, one African American, four Asian
Indian, twenty European American/Canadian. Reweaving contains twenty-
six authors: one Native American, three African American, one Asian
Indian, and twenty-one European American/Canadian. 13 Again, the fact
that European American/Canadian women are the most represented authors
is not necessarily problematic in itself. Ecofeminism has been primarily a
white women’s political identification and, as I’ve said throughout this
book, it does not necessarily follow that the movement cannot be antiracist
because it has mostly white participants. But Native American cultures,
their rituals, beliefs, and practices (but not, as one would expect, their
specific activist struggles), are frequently referenced so that their voices are
silenced even while they are idealized.
This is much more the case with the earlier book, Healing, whose cover
art, a piece called “Captive Maiden” by Susan Point, features a female
figure in a near-fetal position, enclosed with the moon in a circle
surrounded by traditional Haida (Northwest Coast Indian) motifs. It is
interesting that the cover of Reweaving repeats this figure of the woman
with the moon, in a form very like the “captive maiden.” In the picture on
the cover of Reweaving, however, this woman, her head upturned to gaze at
the moon, her arms clasped around her knees, is in a tree, in contrast to
being surrounded with Haida totem figures as she is in Healing. The Native
American referent in the cover art of Reweaving is thus more indirect,
contextually referring to the essay within by Paula Gunn Allen (a Native
American writer), “The Woman I Love is a Planet, the Planet I Love is a
Tree.” Allen’s essay is the most direct deployment of a Native American
perspective for ecofeminist use within Reweaving, which has far fewer
examples of this rhetorical move than Healing. Thus the more indirect
reference to Native American cultures symbolizes the lessening of the
reliance on this connection in the later book. But why should Native
American cultures be such an influential referent for ecofeminism at this
historical juncture?
Native American cultures appear so often in these ecofeminist writings
because they represent ecological societies that in some instances can also
make claims to relative equality between men and women. 14 The
combination seems to be ecofeminist by definition. Further, imagining that
Native American women embody the “special relation” between women
and nature at the same time that they are portrayed as representing
nonpatriarchal cultures achieves an apparent resolution to one of the major
contradictions within ecofeminism, which I identified at the start of the
book. It is not necessary to make essentialist, biologically determinist
arguments about the connection between women and nature in the case of
Native American women; rather, their cultural traditions and their economic
practices can be seen as making positive connections between nature and
the feminine, as well as nature and the masculine. For the most part, Native
American tribes have practiced a nonexploitative use of natural resources,
and Native American women are often equal partners with men in the
construction and maintenance of harmonious relationships between people,
soil, animals, trees, wind, water, fire and plants. The figure of the Native
American woman as the “ultimate ecofeminist” mediates, for white
ecofeminists, the conflict between the critique of the patriarchal connection
between women and nature and the desire for a nonpatriarchal version of
that very connection by representing a living, materially grounded example
of such a relationship with nature. 15 Thus, a form of racial essentialism is
used in part to avoid the appearance of a form of gender essentialism.
But, as for other environmental activists who are women, there has been
some resistance among Native American women to the identification of
“ecofeminist.” This resistance, for Native American women in particular,
stems from three factors: a critical stance toward white separatist feminism,
a critique of New Age spirituality’s use of Native American religious
practices, and a suspicion of white environmentalism’s reification of
wilderness. To the extent that U.S. ecofeminism has imported into its
political location problematic aspects of all three of these related
movements (separatist white feminism, New Age spirituality, and white
environmentalism), Native American women are understandably reluctant
to accede to an ecofeminist desire to incorporate them.
One perception among Native American women is that the emphasis on
the masculinism of the social and ideological systems involved in
environmental destruction implies an essentialist division between women
and men, which is problematic for those resisting racism as well as sexism.
When I asked Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabeg feminist and environmental
activist, if she called herself an ecofeminist, she said that while she was
glad there was an ecofeminist movement developing, she thought of her
activism as stemming from her acculturation as a member of her people. 16
Marie Wilson, a Gitksan woman who is interviewed in Healing, expresses a
similar distance from ecofeminism_ “When I read about ecofeminism I find
that the attitudes towards women and the feelings inside myself are quite
different. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s as if women are separate. Though I
agree with the analysis, the differences must be because of where I come
from. In my mind, when I speak about women, I speak about humanity
because there is equality in the Gitksan belief: the human is one species
broken into two necessary parts, and they are equal.” 17 Such articulations
point to different racialized histories of sexism and of feminism. White
ecofeminism’s legacy of a racist and classist feminism—which could
unproblematically argue for the “maleness” of oppressive structures without
analyzing the negative consequences for poor men or men of color—bears
strange fruit in the unwillingness of some Native American women (or for
that matter, some working-class white women) to identify as a “feminist” of
any kind. To the extent that ecofeminist theory identifies the intersection of
sexism and environmental degradation as a result of “male” thinking rather
than a particularity of white, Western, patriarchal capitalist social structures,
ecofeminists participate in a kind of separatist feminism that has, since the
late 1960s, been identified as a form of racism. 18 Though this kind of
gender essentialism is not often apparent in the two anthologies under
consideration, it has been one strand within ecofeminism. 19
Another uneasiness expressed by Native American women concerns the
use of their spirituality within ecofeminism, which results from the
intersection of ecofeminism with New Age feminist spirituality. Though
this is only one strand within ecofeminism, the use of Native American
rituals and the symbolic positioning of Native American women as white
ecofeminists’s spiritual teachers comes close to what Andy Smith, a
Cherokee woman, has characterized as “spiritual abuse.” 20 Smith has
argued that the use of Native American spirituality in the New Age
movement, without a concomitant willingness to get to know Native
American communities and become allies of Native American political
struggles, constitutes an appropriative silencing of Native Americans.
Furthermore, generalizing Native American spirituality to apply it to white
ecofeminist concerns violates the very embeddedness in land and tribe that
attracts white ecofeminists. As Smith says: “Indian religions are
community-based, not proselytizing religions. For this reason, there is no
one Indian religion.” 21 As we saw in the chapter on WomanEarth,
ecofeminism’s connection with “alternative,” nature-based feminist
spiritualities can be construed as a problem, and acts in some instances as a
barrier to forming alliances with Native American women in particular.
Ecofeminists in these two anthologies are not unaware of this. In
Healing, Judith Plant, in particular, warns against the problem of “stealing”
Native American rituals. Her essay, “The Circle is Gathering,” goes out of
its way to honor the embeddedness in a particular landscape and the cultural
particularity of the Native American tribe that is her intentional
community’s neighbor, demonstrating that friendship, respect for cultural
difference, and lived, daily alliance is the only basis for nonexploitative
political relationships between white people and Native Americans. Her
approach is a model for a productive political alliance. Yet, despite her
concern and her sophistication, her book is particularly reliant on Native
American religious rituals as examples of ecofeminist practice. 22
Given that there are these problems in claiming Native American women
as ecofeminists, does this mean that ecofeminism cannot learn from the
Native American concept of nature, and perhaps in some cases from its
examples of more equal relationships between women and men? Why
shouldn’t ecofeminists, as long as they participate in Native American
movements and treat Native American culture with respect, continue to
point to the more ecological cosmology, economic practices, and equal
social relationships developed by some Native Americans? Can
ecofeminists use Native American philosophy and practice as resources for
constructing theory and creating strategies for action?
The problem here lies in the characterization of indigenous people as the
“ultimate ecologists,” to use Calvin Martin’s phrase. 23 This is a common
feature of European American environmentalism, 24 and one of the legacies
of that movement to ecofeminists. Certainly, many Native American
conceptions of nature seem to lend themselves to environmentalism, in that
they generally don’t make adversarial distinctions between humans and
animals, or humans and nature. The sense that life involves constant change
within a balanced system and that the interdependence of all living and
nonliving beings constitutes the environment seems to be, especially in
comparison to Western beliefs, to be not only more ecological, but (at least
potentially) more feminist. But there are several problems with the
valorization of Native American conceptualizations of nature, with
conceiving them as, in Dolores LaChapelle’s phrase, “ecosystem cultures.”
25

First, the idea that it is possible to borrow from Native American culture
without practicing a Native American way of life once again does not
respect the way in which Native American concepts of nature are embedded
in Native American cultural practice. Greta Gaard gives three examples of
how borrowing seemingly “ecological” practices from Native Americans
not only is a form of cultural imperialism but also may backfire when
placed within the white Western cultural context: a justification for eating
meat based on Native American hunting practices, the use of the image of
Mother Earth, and copying Native American religious practices. 26
Second, seeing Native Americans as “ultimate ecologists” conceptualizes
them as closer to nature similar to ways some ecofeminists analyze as being
negative for women. To me, these problems are amusingly brought home by
a remark made by an unnamed Native American man to Judith Plant: “You
and us, we’re different, but we’re sort of the same, too. You want to learn to
live off this place, we can already do this. You value the salmon, we value
the salmon. You don’t trust the government, neither do we. Not all Indian
people are like us. Not all white people are like you. We’re the natives and
you’re the naturals.” At which point, according to Plant, “He roared with
laughter.” 27 This distinction between “natives” and “naturals” is very
telling. A “native” is primarily identified with a very specific and fixed area
of land; a “natural” must have a pre-existing distinction between culture and
nature, and perhaps civilization and primitivism, in order to “return” to
“nature.” As Plant observes, “There’s a strong attraction that ‘civilized’
people often experience toward tribal people. Sometimes it even feels like a
longing to belong—even though we were brought up to believe that these
peoples are inferior to civilized society. Yet to be civilized means to control
and regulate all that is natural.” 28 As long as ecofeminists rely on notions
of Native Americans as more naturally ecological, they will find access to
Native American cultural practices only through a logic of rejecting culture
for nature, in which Native Americans are nature. Ironically, this theoretical
move contains within it notions of separation between the two concepts,
which are radically different from much Native American philosophy. In
presenting Native Americans as more “natural,” ecofeminists simply invert
the Western valuation of nature in relation to culture without undermining
the dualism.
A third problem lies in the dehistoricizing and stereotypical results of the
ecofeminist idealization of Native American culture. As the man in Plant’s
article says: “Not all Indians are like us. Not all white people are like you.”
Discussions of Native Americans as the “ultimate ecologists” tend to
generalize across tribal cultures and obscure the specific problems and
varied solutions that occupy Indian struggles for cultural survival.
Valorization of the ecological and feminist elements of Native American
culture reinvigorates a “noble savage” stereotype, which, as the flip side of
the “bad Indian” stereotype, has a dangerous history in this country. And,
what happens when Native Americans choose strategies that go against
ecofeminist political theory and practice? Will they then become “bad
Indians” instead of “noble savages”? Marie Wilson expresses this fear when
she says: “I have had the awful feeling that when we are finished dealing
with the courts and our land claims, we will then have to battle the
environmentalists and they will not understand why. I feel quite sick at this
prospect because the environmentalists want these beautiful places kept in a
state of perfection…. In a way this is like denying that life is happening
constantly in these wild places, that change is always occurring. Human life
must be there too. Humans have requirements and they are going to have to
use some of the life in these places.” 29 The idealization of the “indigenous”
as more ecological creates conditions in which, once again, dominant U.S.
white cultural values (this time, ecological ones) can be imposed on Native
Americans. In this case the sanctity of the “wilderness” could serve as a
justification for restrictions on Native Americans based on U.S.
environmentalism.
Fourth, the return of the “noble savage” creates a conceptual paradox in
which ecological and feminist solutions are seen to reside only in tribal and
hunting and gathering societies, in which attempts are made to use Native
American culture as a natural resource for ecofeminism, or, indeed, for
radical environmentalism. The stereotyping of Indian culture prevents
knowledge and analysis of the changes in Native American tribal cultures,
of how they have been both resistant and accommodating to the dominant
European American culture. Plus, the “noble savage” stereotype brings with
it the myth of the “vanished Indian.” In other words, without allowing for
change, for agency in conditions of cultural transformation, Native
American cultures will only be seen as either pure or extinct, as either
premodern or assimilated. The “ecological” tribal cultures held up for
imitation are thus either characterized as disappearing or as preserved in
some ideal state. Such an idealization prevents white ecofeminists from
really hearing what Native American women think are serious issues in
their communities, what changes they are trying to resist or to have control
over.
Finally, a stumbling block is created for ecofeminists trying to imagine
solutions to the complexity of contemporary ecological problems. If the
only way we can live as ecofeminists is to “return” to a hunting and
gathering culture, we cannot begin to inspire people to take action now not
only in “indigenous” locations but also in the middle of their urban,
industrialized, global—that is, “civilized”—environments. Seeing Native
Americans as a part of “culture,” indeed, as a part of a contested and
fractured U.S. culture, allows white ecofeminists to honor Native American
practices and rhetoric in terms of being their own strategies for cultural
survival, involving a series of choices within particularized contexts, rather
than an eternal fount of resources on the other side of a divide between
culture and nature. Refusing to essentialize nature as only the wild, the
place where “civilization” is not found, would allow for white ecofeminist
action in their own material locations which are likely to include urban
Native Americans as well as those living in more traditional contexts.

Indians of the East

Similar problems exist in white ecofeminist discourses that promote
subsistence agricultural practices and selected activist politics by Third
World women as examples of ecofeminism at work. Both anthologies
position themselves to include “women in the Third World” as exemplars of
ecofeminist activism, in an essentializing move similar to what Chandra
Mohanty calls “constructing the Third World difference.” 30 The discourse
about Third World women in these books reduces all women in this
category to rural village women engaged in subsistence farming or food
gathering. In both texts, however, it is Asian Indian women (particularly
village Indian women of the Chipko, “tree-hugging,” movement in Uttar
Pradesh, northern India) who stand in for Third World women as a whole.
The breakdown of the authors in these two anthologies demonstrates this
particular problem; remember that Asian Indian authors were represented in
equal or greater numbers to Native American or African American authors,
and they are the only Third World authors. The presence of Asian Indian
authors as equivalent to the presence of U.S. women of color does two
things: (1) the Asian Indian authors are implicitly relied upon to construct
racial diversity within the volumes, and (2) they represent all Third World
women. 31 This is especially true for Healing. Once again, as we saw in the
chapter on WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute, a tension exists between
dealing with U.S. racism and with Western neocolonialism.
But why do Asian Indian women serve as the models of Third World
women at this particular juncture? For one thing, the combination of
developed feminist and environmentalist Indian movements has meant a
high profile for women’s resistance to a number of environmental problems
in India. Thus, Healing contains several articles by Asian Indian authors
dealing specifically with Asian Indian women’s environmental struggles. Of
these struggles, the most frequently referred to is the Chipko movement (the
effort by villagers in the Gharwal hills to save village forests from logging
for commercial, rather than subsistence, use), though other women’s
activism is also covered. Besides Vandana Shiva’s piece, which I’ll discuss
shortly, Pamela Philipose writes about the Chipko movement as well as
Indian women’s victimization and resistance to the toxic gas release at
Bhopal and women’s part in struggles against industrialized fishing in
Southern India. 32 And in addition to a brief mention of Chipko at the end
of her article, Rhada Bhatt writes of women’s activism against the selling of
alcohol in several villages, women’s protection of village forests in
numerous locations, and women’s participation in the land-gift movement.
33 Corrine Kumar D’Souza’s article does not examine specific activist
examples; rather, it offers the metaphor of “the South” as a method of
breaking up the dualistic, linear models of “the East” and “the West.” For
D’Souza, “the South” is the equivalence of activism, feminism, and
anticolonialism_ “The South as movements for change in the Third Worlds;
the South as the women’s movements, wherever the movements exist; the
South as the development of new frameworks, seeking a new language to
describe what it perceives, rupturing the existing theoretical categories,
breaking the mind constructs, challenging the one, real, objective, reality.”
34 With such broad claims, D’Souza wants to point to a wide canvas of
Third World activism as sources of inspiration for ecofeminism.
But it is the Chipko movement rather than other possible examples of
Indian women’s activism which quickly attains talismanic status in
ecofeminist writings of this period, 35 and references to it are threaded
throughout the two anthologies. It is not that other kinds of activism are not
examined; the two books, especially Reweaving, are rich with various kinds
of “ecofeminist” activism, such as Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt
Movement in Kenya, in which rural women are involved in a program of
tree-planting to resist desertification and malnutrition. 36 But the story of
the Green Belt movement is not elaborated in these anthologies as Chipko
is, and the image of women planting trees is not made to carry the same
symbolic force as the image of women “hugging” trees. Chipko reappears
consistently, often as the only “Third World” example in an article. For
instance, Joanna Macy, in her article in Healing, says she sees an
“ecological self” in “her sisters of the Chipko” as well as members of
Greenpeace. 37 Petra Kelly, in her Preface to Healing, identifies as “global
sisters” the women of Greenham Common, the Western Shoshone women
resisting nuclear testing in Nevada, the Pacific Islander women who suffer
from nuclear testing fallout, women in the Krim region in then-Soviet
Russia who protested a new nuclear power plant, and the Chipko. 38 Irene
Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, in their introduction to Reweaving, note that
there were many inspirations for Western ecofeminists (including ancient
European Goddess worship and Native American philosophy) that led to a
“diverse array of innovative practices” and “new forms of political
resistance” including, oddly, Chipko along with “women’s peace camps.”
Here, perhaps through a grammatical slip, Chipko is claimed as a Western
political practice. 39 Carolyn Merchant, in her essay in Reweaving, claims
that support for “Chipco” (sic) is a hallmark of “socialist feminists” (with
whom Merchant identifies) rather than “radical ecofeminists.” And Ynestra
King, in her essay in Reweaving, uses Chipko to support her statement that
“women have been at the forefront of every historical, political movement
to reclaim the Earth.” 40 To explain this frequent use of Chipko in
ecofeminist writings of this time period, we need to look at the writings of
Vandana Shiva.
In 1988, a year before the publication of Healing, Vandana Shiva, an
Indian theoretical physicist turned environmentalist researcher, published
her book, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Survival in India. This book
analyzed the failure of the Green Revolution in the Third World,
particularly its negative effects on rural women, as a symptom of the
patriarchal capitalist project of development, which she calls
“maldevelopment.” Shiva’s analysis was extremely influential for U.S.
ecofeminists. She combined the environmentalist and feminist analysis of
Westernized development policies persuasively and passionately. She also
connected her analysis to elements of feminist spirituality and the
valorization of “indigeneity.” For Shiva, the “death of the feminine
principle,” which was seen to keep Indian culture in balance with nature,
was a necessary part of the project of “maldevelopment.” By “death of the
feminine principle,” Shiva means not some notion of matriarchy nor even
Goddess worship, but the idea of gender complementarity in sexual
divisions of labor and equality-in-difference she claims existed in
precolonial Indian subsistence cultures that were more ecological than those
of Western patriarchal capitalism. In crucial ways, then, her argument
parallels those of U.S. ecofeminists who look to a prehistoric European past
or Native American tribal cultures for the existence of “ultimate
ecofeminists.” The importance of this inflection of Shiva’s argument for
ecofeminism in this period is demonstrated by the reprinting of almost
exactly the same article she wrote for Healing in Reweaving; in the latter
book she is the only representative of “Third World” women’s
environmental struggles. 41 Shiva thus holds an important place in the
development of U.S. ecofeminism at this particular juncture, at a time when
it is just beginning to address Western colonialism’s relation to sexism and
environmental problems. This historical progression can be seen in the
narration of ecofeminism’s beginnings and development created in Judith
Plant’s bibliographic history at the end of Healing, where Plant traces the
beginnings of ecofeminism in the feminist antimilitarist movement, notes
its early theoretical development in Merchant’s The Death of Nature and
Griffin’s Woman and Nature, mentions the impact of feminist spirituality
(much in evidence during this period, as I will discuss more fully below),
and finally ends with Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive, which, for Plant,
“confirms that this movement for life on earth is not limited to the western
world, to the privileged.” 42
Shiva offers the story of the Chipko movement as an example of women
reclaiming the “feminine principle” in resistance to patriarchal capitalist
development. Thus, she authorizes the use of this movement as an exemplar
for U.S. ecofeminists eager to add to their parallel analyses her theory of the
relationship of Western colonialism to both environmental degradation and
sexism in the Third World. The Chipko become a symbolic center of a
discourse about Third World women that paints them as “natural
environmentalists” or “ultimate ecofeminists,” reducing them to an
idealized peasant woman who is integrated into “nature” through her daily,
lived activities of food gathering and preparation, child rearing, and support
of village communities. Once again, the stress on the material, lived,
grounded, cultural, and social character of the Third World woman’s
integration into and care of “nature” is a racial essentialism designed to
avoid the gender essentialism of claiming all women to be biologically in
sympathy with nature.
Vandana Shiva’s influence on U. S. ecofeminism and her problematic
shoring up of this particular story of the relation between “indigenous”
women and environmental struggles has been criticized on several fronts. In
particular, the racial essentialism of U.S. ecofeminism’s celebration of the
“indigenous” Third World woman and Vandana Shiva’s support of this
position were addressed in 1991 by Brinda Rao, in 1992 by Bina Agarwal,
and in 1993 by Cecile Jackson. 43 In each case, these critics identify
problems with the circulation of a particular interpretation of the Chipko as
an “ecofeminist” movement, showing that it can be variously interpreted as
a peasant or populist movement, or as an environmental movement that is
not necessarily feminist.
In their critiques of the ecofeminist use of the “Third World woman” or
the Asian Indian subsistence farmer as an “ultimate ecofeminist,” none of
these critics deny the growing burden on peasant women stemming from
the intersection of various environmental problems with gendered divisions
of labor and inequalities of power. “Since women in rural societies,” writes
Rao, “are primarily responsible for providing fuel, fodder and water for
their households, lack of access to these resources increases both their
already heavy workloads as well as their impoverishment.” 44 All three
reject the idea that this means either that these women are naturally
environmentalists or feminists. They all urge consideration of the
historically variable, gendered, classed, and socially complex relationships
between household forms, property relations, technology, marital customs,
and environmental specificities. Without such careful examination, no
positive correlation can be assumed between women’s strategies for
survival and empowerment and environmentally sound practices. As Cecile
Jackson points out: “There is a need, then, to unpack the idea that women’s
‘responsibilities’ make them environmentally friendly. The responsibility to
provide firewood for cooking a meal may lead a woman, when faced with a
firewood shortage, to plant a tree but it may also lead her to pull up a
wooden fence and burn it, to argue for the purchase of a fuel efficient stove,
to insist on the purchase of charcoal, to delegate fuelwood collection to a
younger woman in the household or any number of alternative responses.”
45 The result of the kind of romanticized, reductive, colonialist and
essentialized view of “Third World” women in some ecofeminist discourses
may very well, in Jackson’s view, have negative implications for those
women, including support for the “widespread view that women should be
encouraged to remain in degraded rural environments, ‘participating’ in
conservation projects for the benefit of the community, posterity and
nature.” 46 Agarwal concludes that in its emphasis on “Third World”
women as an essentialist category, ecofeminist discourse does not take into
account questions of class differentiation, which would lead to more
concrete, transformative policies within development practice. “It is in its
failure to explicitly confront these political economy issues that the
ecofeminist analysis remains a critique without threat to the established
order.” 47
Thus we can see that the ecofeminist discourse of “Third World” women
as the “ultimate ecofeminists” encounters the same problems found in
ecofeminist discourses about Native American women. Third World women
are used as natural resources for white ecofeminists without respecting the
particularity of their lives and choices; they are reduced to a symbolic
generality; and they are seen as “closer to nature.” In addition, similar to the
effect of the use of Native American women in this discourse, ecological
and feminist solutions are seen to inhere in an idealized “indigeneity,” thus
raising the specter of the imposition of “ecological” imperatives on Third
World cultures by Western neocolonialist projects. In the next chapter, I will
take up the question of the effect of these ecofeminist discourses within an
international arena and explore the possibility of their strategic nature in the
context of globalizing environmentalisms.
Besides the same kinds of idealization operative in ecofeminist
discourses about Native American women, painting “indigenous” Third
World women as another version of “ultimate ecofeminists” carries its own
specific consequences for U.S. ecofeminism, where the use of non-U.S.
ecofeminists to represent “racial diversity” tends to side-step questions of
the specific interaction between U.S. racism and environmental problems.
Looking to nonWestern “indigenous” peoples for examples of feminist
environmental resistance obscures the environmental activism of U.S.
people of color, many of whom are women. Additionally, discourses of
international “indigeneity” obscure class relations within the U.S., which
operate to identify and disparage “racialized” groups like Native
Americans. Their poverty is implicitly seen as part of their “sustainable”
ecological practices, equal to the “ecosystem” cultures of rural women in
the Third World, rather than the result of the specific interaction between
racism and classism in the U.S.

White Indians, Celtic Goddesses, and White

Identity
There is a third category of “indigenous women” that operates alongside
Native American women and Asian Indian women: the category of
European tribal women, the prehistoric pagan cultures, the “white Indians”
of an imagined (and researched!) European past. 48 In this category, as in
that of Third World women, a particular culture dominates these
representations: European (including Celtic and Greek) pagan or nature-
based spiritual practices. The appearances of these traditions as referents for
an ecofeminist imaginary is pervasive in the two ecofeminist anthologies I
examine here. I describe these referents here not to present all of these
articles as equally problematic, but to show the pervasiveness of the use of
these traditions in ecofeminist work. In Healing, we find a Celtic origin
myth referencing Native American origin myths; 49 a guide for worship of
the Goddess-as-tree, which derives from Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, and
Druidic practices; 50 a discussion of the holism of “ancient prepatriarchal
myths and religions” such as those found in pre-Minoan Crete; 51 an essay
on Neopaganism that claims as its practitioners diverse groups such as
“feminist goddess worshipers, Celtic revivalist witches, creators of Greek,
Egyptian, Norse and Druid revivals, various forms of Shamanism, and
assorted other Pagan religious experiments;” 52 a piece on a number of
earth-based spiritualities but particularly the usefulness to ecofeminism of
the “pre-Christian Goddess-worshipping religions of Europe” called
Witchcraft; 53 and an essay working from Buddhist ideas toward
ecofeminist spirituality. 54 In Reweaving, we have writing on ecofeminism’s
beginnings that identifies the “Goddess in her many guises” as one “path
into ecofeminism;” 55 an essay exploring the “prehistoric,” “Paleolithic”
worship of the “Great Goddess” as the “beginnings of Western culture;” 56 a
treatment of the myth of Demeter and Persephone as an ecofeminist
parable; 57 a reflection on what a Wiccan perspective, from the “old pre-
Christian Goddess religion of Europe,” can add to our understanding of
activist politics; 58 a juxtaposition of deep ecology and ecofeminism that
describes the latter as analyzing the source of environmental problems and
sexism as the defeat of prehistoric European Goddess-worshipping cultures;
59 an ecofeminist analysis of birth that refers to the reverence for birth in
Paleolithic cultures; 60 and celebration of the “ugliness” of poverty and
homelessness as a sign of “Hecate/Kali.” 61
Coexisting with these essays we have of discussions of feminist
spirituality’s relation to ecofeminism that do not reference a tradition of
“tribalism” for white ecofeminism 62 and two pieces that critique forms of
white earth-based spirituality that draw on “tribalism” as resources. 63 The
frequency of the references to the European Goddess-worshipping tradition
is a primary source of repeated criticism of ecofeminism as essentialist by
critics as diverse as Janet Biehl and Donna Haraway. I will not expand on
those critiques here, but rather ask: what is the strategic effect of the
deployment of Celtic goddesses and European paganism in the context of
ecofeminism at the end of the 1980s?
Explorations into oppositional forms of spirituality that reject the
patriarchal heritage of Judeo-Christianity are long-standing feminist
projects, and are extremely diverse, ranging from a feminist revisioning of
mainstream religions to the creation of new forms of spiritual practice.
Ecofeminists, like feminists, take numerous and conflicting positions in
relation to the role of spirituality in feminist politics. As Carol Adams
writes in her introduction to Ecofeminism and the Sacred:
As women protest, analyze, reform, and envision, there has been no one perspective on the
place of spirituality in ecofeminism. Some ecofeminists act from specific religious traditions;
others have seen themselves as rebelling against these traditions. For some, the spiritual
aspect of ecofeminism is integrally a part of their ecofeminism. For others, spirituality is
thought to derail the ecofeminist engagement with social conditions and political decisions
that tolerate environmental exploitation, encourage unbridled consumerism, and fail to rein
in military spending. 64

Despite this diversity, it makes a great deal of sense, given their concern
with refusing the culture/nature split that informs dominant religions, that
ecofeminists would be especially interested in pagan traditions, which do
not recognize such a split. For those ecofeminists for whom religious life is
important, these traditions would be the most fruitful sources of inspiration.
The spiritual practice of these feminist reworkings of pagan traditions has
been an important source of personal strength, community cohesion, and
oppositional modes of political action.
However, to explain the frequency of the references to European pagan
traditions at the particular historical moment of the two anthologies under
consideration, it is important to recognize the effects of the critique of the
cultural imperialism of some white feminist uses of “Tribal” traditions. 65 It
is clear that an initial motive of white ecofeminists (besides the rejection of
patriarchal religion and the culture/nature split it relies upon) for their
interest in tribal traditions is an antiracist desire to honor those who have
been traditionally degraded and exploited. As Catherine Keller puts it,
“Perhaps we—White women—can only begin to regain the wisdom and
power of relation as we move into contact with non-White, nonpatriarchal,
and nonmodern modes of connection with the physical world.” 66 But the
stance of this form of antiracism ironically still maintains white privilege
insofar as it sees women of color, and “nonmodern” women, as natural
resources for the betterment of white people. The critique of such attitudes
leveled by Native Americans against New Age and feminist spirituality was
heard with more and more force by the late 1980s. 67 In response, some
white ecofeminists searching to reconcile the usefulness of nature-based
spirituality as an analysis and a practice with their desire to combat racism
sought a solution in turning to their “own” (that is, European) nature-based
religious traditions. This, in fact, is a solution often recommended by
Native Americans to white people who wish to learn from tribal cultures
that eschew nature/culture dualism and employ nature-based spiritualities.
When Judith Plant asks her what white people who wanted to learn from
Native American traditions should do, Marie Wilson says: “Each of us
springs from some original beginning. It would be uncomfortable for me to
attempt to go to Africa and take up their tribal practices, though I could
understand the purpose…. You will have to go back to your own history, as
many Gitksan have had to do.” 68 The shift in antiracist discourses that
creates an imperative for white women to look to their own cultures for
spiritual resources is one explanation, perhaps, for the lessening of
references to Native American women in the later Reweaving compared to
the earlier Healing, while the emphasis on the Celtic goddess increases.
This antiracist justification for the development of a white “tribal”
spirituality appears in Margot Adler’s article in Healing and in both of
Starhawk’s articles in these anthologies. What’s more, both of these authors
implicitly recognize a connection between the antiracist motives of
deploying European pagan traditions and the construction of the pagan
tradition rather than simply the recovery of a tradition. Adler says, for
instance, “Since most Neopagans are white, they often look toward Europe,
just as Alex Haley looked to Africa. Neopagans are searching among these
traditions and creating new religions—in the same way that members of the
Society of Creative Anachronism are re-creating the Middle Ages—not as
they were, but as they would like them to be.” 69 Starhawk writes: “Of
course, I cannot speak for all earth-based traditions or for any except my
own—and even there I speak out of a tradition, not for it…. Today’s
Witches are mostly urban people living in the mobile, fragmented,
technological modern world…. Rather than using our skills, such as they
are, to preserve a traditional community, we are faced with the task of
reshaping western culture.” 70
The deployment of Celtic Goddesses in ecofeminist discourse, especially
when done with some sense of the constructedness of the pagan “tradition,”
is thus partly intended as an antiracist discourse. But it is also one that tries
to retain the connection between “indigenous women” and the “ultimate
ecofeminists” by seeing as the only appropriate resource for ecofeminism
that part of the European American tradition that is “tribal.” But is this
really U.S. white women’s “tradition”? What other kinds of political,
ecological, feminist traditions might they look to, ones that would not retain
the effect of maintaining white identity as “industrialized” and women of
color as “tribal,” or which sees ecofeminist resources only in the past?
There are a number of examples of U.S. white women’s resistance,
construction of communities, and ecological efforts which could be
suggested; for instance, white women’s activism in civil rights movements
or the tradition of women’s nature writing, illustrating, landscape design,
and natural science traced complexly by Vera Norwood. 71 But what is also
sought by ecofeminism are traditions that are spiritual and “holistic,” i.e.
avoid nature/culture and rational/spiritual dualism. However, as ecofeminist
critics of deep ecologists point out, there are many pitfalls in holism. Here
we can see that ecofeminist deployment of the privileging of the “holistic”
and the “indigenous” in the texts we’ve examined is strategic. When
arguing against a dualistic, patriarchal, exploitative, Western concept of
nature and of woman, some ecofeminists may argue for holistic,
nondualistic conceptions, which may lead them to the valorization of the
“indigenous.” When arguing against a holistic, abstract, nondualistic, and
masculinist deep ecological conception of the relation between Self and
Nature, some ecofeminists may argue for contextual, fractured,
nonuniversalistic, and pluralistic ideas of self-in-relation. How can we sort
out this contradiction?
If white ecofeminists were to stop ideologically separating nature from
culture, they wouldn’t become tribal peoples—rather, they would be
challenged to creatively deal with the politics of their daily technologies,
their cyborg natures. 72 White ecofeminists would have to start imagining
nature as including the urban and constructed landscapes in which many
people live (including Native American and Third World women). Both
Rao and Jackson suggest that ecofeminist racial essentialisms that construct
“indigenous” women as the “ultimate ecofeminists” include a concomitant
essentializing of nature. As Rao notes: “Lurking behind most of these
otherwise well-informed studies is a static conception of marginal people,
on the one hand, and an equally unchanging conception of their
environment, on the other. Peasants are therefore seen as inextricably tied to
the land, rural women to their families or households, and tribals to their
forests.” 73 Jackson, in a more reductive but still useful fashion, states:
“Ecofeminists do not see nature and environment as culturally constructed
but as biological facts. Yet nature is a product of culture…. The meaning of
nature is dependent on historically and culturally specific understandings,
which reflect gender differences as well as other social divisions.” 74 Elly
Haney, in an interesting essay entitled “Towards a White Feminist
Ecological Ethic,” has argued that the legacy of the dominant notion of
“nature” employed in American culture is not just gendered, or dualistic,
but raced as well. Haney points out that the ecological imagination that
thinks of wilderness as a resource for spirituality and purity is “rooted in the
same racist legacy” that saw nature, Native Americans, and African
American slaves as resources for “civilization.” 75 She urges ecofeminists to
critically examine their identification of “an ecological approach as similar
to Native American attitudes to nature,” since such an approach may be
“much more indebted to the white experience on this continent then the
indigenous one. It may have value for us today, and it is certainly an
eloquent heritage, but we should carefully examine it for what it can and
can not offer.” 76 These comments point to the advantages for ecofeminism
of rejecting essentialist notions of “nature” as well as of “women” and
“racial difference,” and thus producing incisive analyses of the way in
which “nature” provides a mutable cultural substance for the rearranging of
social and economic power relations. Yet an ecofeminist analysis need not
concur with the radical social constructionism of Jackson’s position, where
in seeing “nature as the product of culture,” the elements that make up our
commonsense notion of “nature” (plants, animals, weather, soil, etc.) lose
their material and historical specificity. Instead, we can follow an analyis
such as Donna Haraway’s or Elizabeth Bird’s, in which “nature” is seen as
an only imperfectly knowable actor in a complex, constantly negotiated
relationship with human beings and technologies. 77 Solutions to
environmental problems must be able to be imagined into the future rather
than relegated to some idealized past. Ironically, an excellent resource for
this kind of imagining of new relationships, which eschews both the divide
of “culture” and “nature” and an idealized “indigeneity,” is the Pagan
imagination deployed by Starhawk in her science fiction utopian/dystopian
novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. 78 Respecting the integrity of subordinated
cultures, articulated away from the search for a utopian past, rejecting
essentialist notions of nature, and grounded in political action, a new form
of feminist paganism, given its popular appeal, may well serve a radical
political alliance.
Whether or not an analysis locates itself within feminist paganism, such a
de-essentializing of nature as well as race and women, generating new
analyses of the ideological uses of nature as at once raced and gendered as
well as materialist investigations of various human/environment
interactions, may put ecofeminists in a better position to ally themselves
with antiracist environmental movements that are concentrated on urban
problems. At present, the problem with the preference for “indigeneity” in
ecofeminist discourse and its concomitant stress on nonindustrialized
ecological solutions is a barrier between white ecofeminists and
environmental justice activists. Women in the environmental justice
movement are in a multitude of class and race locations that cut across the
“industrial” and the “tribal,” concerned about the effects of structural
racism on the material conditions of postindustrial society, not just those
effects that construct racial identities. Definitions of environmental
problems by this movement include a conception of “environment” that
does not depend on a notion of unchanging, “original” nature. 79 These
movements are also locations with connections to “white” traditions of
resistance in the United States—indeed, to multiracial and antiracist
traditions of struggle and resistance. 80 Ecofeminists could join in an
envisioning of activist strategies that could provide the basis for an effective
coalition politics, not just between white ecofeminists and Native American
and Third World women environmentalists, but also across a multitude of
differences that divide women. As this book argues throughout, this may
mean generating new “essentialisms,” 81 new “ecofeminist natures,” based
on the creation of new collective identities within social movement
contexts. But, if my argument here has any merit, these new essentialisms
could also be destabilized by political action within a context of coalition
politics and ongoing democratic alliances.
Given the problems with the discourse of “indigeniety,” of Native
American women, Chipko activists and Celtic goddesses as the “ultimate
ecofeminists,” attempts to construct an antiracist ecofeminist position in the
late 1980s foundered within a U.S. context in which there are few extant
political arenas for multiracial, cross-class alliances. In the internationalist
arena of development politics, however, the institutionalized space of the
U.N. provided opportunities for an ecofeminist discourse that promoted the
environmental expertise of Third World women. It is to this arena that I will
now turn.

Notes
1. The construction of a category of “indigeniety” is not only politically
useful within a U.S. national context. On the creation of new forms of
 the “indigenous” as a political strategy within transnational political
arenas, see Dorothy Hodgson, “The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity, and
‘Development’: Images, Interventions, and the Reconfiguration of
Maasai Identities, 1916–1993,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of
Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1995; and “Critical
Interventions: The Politics of Studying ‘Indigenous Development’,”
conference paper presented at the American Anthropological
Association meeting in Washington, D.C. (November 1995).
2. Huey-li Li, “A Cross-Cultural Critique of Ecofeminism,” in Greta
Gaard ed., Ecofeminism_ Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 272–94.
3. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the
World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 257. I was
reminded of this section of Haraway’s book by Stacy Alaimo, “Cyborg
and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental
Feminism,” Feminist Studies 20(1) (Spring 1994): 133–52, esp. p. 135.
4. Janet Biehl, as discussed in chapter 1, critiques not only the
assumption that nature-based spiritualities are more feminist, but the
assumption that ancient Goddess religions were even “nature-based,”
let alone that they promoted more ecological ways of living. Biehl,
Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminism Politics (Boston: South
End Press, 1991).
5. I am thinking of Greta Gaard, ed., Ecofeminism_ Women, Animals,
Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Carol Adams,
ed. Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum Press, 1993);
Karen Warren, ed., Ecological Feminism (New York: Routledge,
1994), and Karen Warren, ed., Ecofeminism_ Women, Gulture, Nature
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). I am not saying that
 these anthologies are completely free of the problematic rhetorical and
theoretical moves I examine in this chapter, but they are far less prone
to them, an indication of the changing and self-critiquing
characteristics of U.S. ecofeminism. My focus on these two early
anthologies is part of my construction of a particular genealogical
narrative about U.S. ecofeminism.
6. I am indebted to Ilene Rose Feinrnan for helping me think through the
differences between these two books.
7. Judith Plant, “Toward a New World: Introduction,” Healing the
Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism (Philadelphia: New Society,
1989) (hereafter Healing), p. 3–4. Karen Warren once corrected my
own use of the term “unity in diversity,” saying that she preferred
“solidarity in diversity,” because it avoided the problem of reducing
difference to sameness and pointed to the active and contested
construction of political coalitions which must be engaged in previous
to any sense of political solidarity, let alone “unity.” Warren, personal
communication, fall 1994.
8. Plant, “Toward a New World,” p. 4.
9. Portions of this section, together with portions of the chapter on
WomanEarth, are published together as “The Nature of Race:
Discourses of Racial Difference in Ecofeminism,” in Karen J. Warren,
ed., Ecofeminism_ Women, Nature Culture. I thank Karen Warren and
anonymous readers for Indiana University Press for their insightful
comments.
10. A number of feminist environmentalists have refused the term
“ecofeminism” because of its essentialist practitioners. I’ll discuss this
issue in chapter 6.
11. An example is Paula Gunn Allen, whose essay is included in
Reweaving the World.
12. Twice during presentations of this portion of my work, audience
members asked why I was arguing that Native American women
should identify themselves as ecofeminists. This is not my goal, and I
thank those questioners for pointing out my need to clarify this point.
One of those questioners was Ilene Feinman; the other was an
anonymous woman at the 1993 American Studies Association
meeting.
13. It must be noted that I’ve established the racial/ethnic identities of
these authors in a very unsystematic way: through paying attention to
self-identifications and comparing other writings of these authors. I
fully expect to have made several errors in this process, and 1
apologize in advance for them. I thank Elizabeth Carlassare for
pointing out the necessity of specifying European Canadian authors
and not simply European American, which I had used ethnocentrically
in an earlier version of this chapter.
14. There is a debate over whether Native American tribal cultures are all
more egalitarian in their gender relations than white American
cultures. The debate is complicated by the effort to show, in some
cases, not egalitarian relations as much as matriarchal relations. I in
any case, it seems clear that different tribes have different kinds of
gender relations, and that in all cases they have been affected by the
imposition of white U.S. gender roles, in different ways, at different
historical periods.
15. This characterization of Native American culture, generalized across
tribal difference, is not entirely a creation of ecofeminist discourse but,
as a multitude of examples could show, is sometimes a self-
 presentation of Native Americans themselves. This brings up an
important question about the automatic quality of the present critique
of essentialist discourse: When is a racial essentialism not racist?
When it is a self-presentation designed to intervene in racist political
and economic structures; then, it may be an “oppositional
consciousness.” For this reason, white critics of racial essentialism
frequently direct their critiques at white purveyors of the discourse,
very rarely at people of color, though there may be plenty of internal
critiques of racial essentialisms by theorists of color. I’ve made a
similar point about the strategic nature of some essentialisms in
chapter 2, in discussing gender essentialism in ecofeminist discourse
as an “oppositional consciousness.”
16. Winona LaDuke, personal communication, during a question-and-
answer period for her lecture, “The Legacy of Columbus: What It
Means for Women and the Environment,” Washington State
University, 1992. The tendency for women environmental activists of
color to identify their politics as stemming from community
membership rather than their gender and the implications of this for a
redefinition of “motherist” or “maternalist” politics is discussed by
Giovanna Di Chiro in “Defining Environmental Justice: Women’s
Voices and Grassroots Politics,” in Socialist Review 22(4) (October-
December 1992): 93–130.
17. Marie Wilson, “Wings of the Eagle: A Conversation with Marie
Wilson,” in Plant, Healing, p. 212.
18. Of course, there are other reasons for a reluctance to identify as a
feminist in the late 1980s to early 1990s that have more to do with a
backlash against feminism than with anything feminists themselves did
(see Susan Faludi, Backlash [New York: Crown Books, 1991]). But
 here I am concentrating on the effect of a certain gender essentialism
imbedded in early radical and liberal feminist arguments about the
oppression of “women” by “men” that, without a concomitant analysis
of race and class oppression, alienated those women who could not
afford, in their struggles against racism and classism, to entertain the
notions of essentialized difference or separation between women and
men that sometimes accompanied such feminist analyses. Another
factor in the reluctance to identify with feminism for some women of
color is the racial essentialism involved in various racial liberation
movements in this country (black nationalisms, Brown Power and Red
Power movements, etc.). This is an issue that I must, for interests of
space, leave out of my analysis. But it is an important background for
the argument I make in this book.
19. For instance, in Andreé Collard with Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the
Wild: Man’s Violence Against Animals and the Earth (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988).
20. Andy Smith, “For All Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life,” Ms.
(November-December 1991): 44–45; reprinted in Carol Adams, ed.,
Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum Press, 1993).
21. Smith, p. 44. Greta Gaard also argues that using portions of Native
American philosophy, spirituality, and culture outside of the context of
Native American life is a form of imperialism on the part of
ecofeminists. See Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Native American
Cultures: Pushing the Limits of Cultural Imperialism?” in Gaard,
Ecofeminism, pp. 295–314.
22. Right before an account of an Indian offering Plant’s nonnative
community the experience of a sweat lodge, Plant states: “It would be
very typical of the ‘taking’ attitude of western society to think that
 Indian ways, traditions and rituals could simply be transferred to non-
native people. But this would be stealing, once again. … Indian people
can, if they are willing, act as guides, as teachers, as wise elders, for
people who are trying to make a home for themselves beyond the
suburban bungalow.” See “The Circle is Gathering,” in Healing, p.
245. Plant also questions Marie Wilson a number of times on this
topic, especially when and where white people can become students of
Native Americans. See “Wings of the Eagle,” esp., pp. 216–18. But her
inclusion of the story “The Give and the lake,” an account of a vision-
quest by a white student of a Native American woman shaman, as well
as numerous internal references to Native American cultures in other
articles in the anthology, works against her own warnings. Reweaving
is far better on this issue. It is interesting that the strongest statements
against this form of cultural imperialism come from Ynestra King, and
her reference to Luisah Teish to demonstrate the necessity of honoring
the integrity of particular traditions points to the possibility that this
lesson, or at least a strong reinforcement of it, was learned from King’s
WomanEarth experience.
23. For two interesting treatments of the problems that inhere in this
characterization of Native Americans, see Calvin Martin, “The
American Indian as Miscast Ecologist,” in Robert C. Schultz and T.
Donald Hughes, eds., Ecological Consciousness (University Press of
America, 1981): 136–148; and Tom Regan, “Environmental Ethics and
the Ambiguity of the Native American’s Relationship with Nature,” in
All That Dwell Therein: Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 206–239.1 thank
Jude Todd for bringing these articles to my attention.
24. See Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and
Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” in Environmental
Ethics 11(1) (Spring 1989): 71–83. Though Guha is concerned mostly
about the use of Eastern, rather than Native American, traditions
within Western environmentalism, he points out the prevalence of the
idea that “at the level of material and spiritual practice ‘primal’
peoples subordinated themselves to the integrity of the biotic universe
they inhabited” (p. 76). More pertinent to my point above, he argues
that these tendencies within radical environmentalism (here he means
deep ecology) are characteristic of the entire tradition of U.S.
environmentalism.
25. Dolores LaChapelle, “Sacred Land, Sacred Sex,” in Plant, Healing, pp.
155–67.
26. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Native American Cultures,” pp. 295–314.
27. Plant, “The Circle is Gathering,” p. 250.
28. Plant, “The Circle is Gathering,” p. 245.
29. Marie Wilson, “The Wings of the Eagle,” in Healing, p. 217. I’ll give
one example here of the kind of conflict that can arise between Native
American struggles for cultural survival and ecofeminist tenets. During
the Ecofeminist Colloquium at the Institute for Social Ecology in July
1994, Greta Gaard told a story about being torn between her support of
Native American fishing rights in the upper Michigan peninsula and
being opposed to the slaughter of fish. Though she did support the
Native American struggle financially, she did not otherwise actively
support it. She did not reconcile her difficulties with the situation, but
accepted it as a cultural contradiction. In this case, Gaard shows an
awareness of the problem identified by Wilson and an understanding
 of the irreconcilability of political positions in a context of cultural
difference operating within unequal power relations.
30. Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses,” in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes
Torres eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): pp. 51–80.
31. In a similar vein, the make-up of participants in the World Women’s
Congress for a Healthy Planet in Miami, 1992 (organized primarily by
white U.S. women and discussed in the next chapter) can be analyzed
to show the far greater numbers of “international” (i.e., non-U.S.)
women compared to U.S. women of color. I’ll examine the this
conference in more detail in the next chapter.
32. Pamela Philipose, “Women Act: Women and Environmental Protection
in India,” in Plant, Healing, pp. 67–75.
33. Rhada Bhatt, “Lakshmi Ashram_ A Gandhian Perspective in the
Himalayan Foothills,” in Plant, Healing, pp. 168–73.
34. Corrine Kumar D’Souza, “A New Movement, a New Hope: East
Wind, West Wind, and the Wind from the South,” in Plant, Healing, p.
36.
35. I will stick to the two anthologies I am examining in this chapter, but
evidence of this talismanic quality of the Chipko movement could be
found in numerous other ecofeminist writings, particularly in this time
period of the late 1980s and early 1990s. See for example, Irene
Diamond, Fertile Ground: Women, Earth, and the Limits of Control
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), which, in the context of a complex,
provocative, and important critique of mainstream feminism, relies
extensively on a discourse of “indigeneity” that presents Third World
women as “ultimate ecofeminists.”
36. See Aubrey Wallace, “Sowing Seeds of Hope: Wangari Maathai,
Kenya,” in David Gancher, ed., Eco-Heroes: Twelve Tales of
Environmental Victory (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1993), pp. 1–
22.
37. Joanna Macy, “Awakening to the Ecological Self,” in Plant, Healing,
p. 201.
38. Petra Kelly, “Foreword: Linking Arms, Dear Sisters, Brings Hope!” in
Plant, Healing the Wounds, p. ix.
39. Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, “Introduction,” in Reweaving the
World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Books,
1990), p. xi.
40. King, “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the
Nature/Culture Dualism,” in Diamond and Orenstein, Reweaving, p.
118. Note the way the title of Kings essay refers back to the earlier
anthology, in which she also had an essay.
41. Vandana Shiva’s article in Healing is entitled “Development, Ecology,
and Women,” pp. 80–95; her article in Reweaving is entitled
“Development as a Project of Western Patriarchy,” pp. 189–200. The
changes between the two texts are minor.
42. Judith Plant, “Recommended Reading,” in Healing, p. 256.
43. Brinda Rao, “Dominant Constructions of Women and Nature in Social
Science Literature,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Pamphlet 2 (New
York: Guilford Publications, 1991); Bina Agarwal, “The Gender and
Environment Debate: Lessons from India,” Feminist Studies 18(1)
(Spring 1992): 119–58; Cecile Jackson, “Women/Nature or
Gender/History? A Critique of Ecofeminist ‘Development’,” Journal
of Peasant Studies 20(3) (April 1993): 389–419. I thank Donna
 Haraway for providing me with a copy of Rao’s essay and Bruce
Robbins for pointing me to Jackson’s essay.
44. Rao, “Dominant Constructions,” p. 2. In almost exactly the same
language, Agarwal writes: “poor peasant and tribal women have
typically been responsible for fetching fuel and fodder and in hill and
tribal communities have also been the main cultivators. They are thus
likely to be affected adversely in quite specific ways by environmental
degradation” (p. 126).
45. Jackson, “Women/Nature or Gender/History?” p. 412.
46. Jackson, “Women/Nature or Gender/I listory?” p. 413.
47. Agarwal, “The Gender and Environment Debate,” p. 153
48. An incomplete list of the important scholarship on the roots of white
feminist paganism, Wicca, and Goddess-worship, would include
Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Dial Press, 1976);
Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist
Reader in Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1979);
Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Green Paradise Lost (Wellesley, MA:
Roundtable Press, 1979); Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of
the Ancient Religions of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1979); Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of
Women’s Spirituality (New York: Doubleday, 1982); Carol Christ,
Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); Raine Eisler, The Chalice
and the Blade (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); Marie
Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1989); Rosemary Radford Reuther, Gaia and God:
Towards an Ecofeminist Theology ofFlarth Healing (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1992). This list draws attention to the close
 involvement of many of these scholars of feminist spirituality with
ecofeminism, given the connection I’ve identified between paganism
and the ecofeminist critique of the patriarchal Western culture/nature
split. Another thing to note is the widespread popular draw of this
literature indicated by the investment made by a large trade publisher
like Harper & Row in the subject. The popular attraction of
feminist pagan spirituality coupled with the deep suspicion of this
literature among feminist academics is another example of the kind of
split between academia and activism that I’ve traced in this book.
Indeed, as I’ve indicated earlier, academic feminist critiques of
ecofeminism are often generated by feminism spirituality’s connection
to it. Since I do not see this connection as automatic or uncontested
within ecofeminism, I have in this book tended to downplay it. Yet
another tactic could be taken, which evaluates the popular response to
feminist spirituality in the more sympathetic terms that I have used in
evaluating ecofeminism as strategically deployed. I thank Greta Gaard
for pushing me to clarify many of the points I make in this section on
“White Indians, Celtic Goddesses and White Identity.”
49. Anne Cameron, “First Mother and the Rainbow Children,” in Plants,
Healing, pp. 54–66.
50. Deena Metzger, “Invoking the Grove,” in Plant, Healing, pp. 118–126.
51. Charlene Spretnak, “Toward an Ecofeminist Spirituality,” in Plant,
Healing, p. 127.
52. Margot Adler, “The Juice and the Mystery,” in Plant, Healing, p. 152.
53. Starhawk, “Feminist, Earth-based Spirituality and Ecofeminism,” in
Plant, Healing, p. 175.
54. Joanna Macy, “Awakening to the Ecological Self,” in Plant, Healing,
pp. 201–211.
55. Charlene Spretnak, “Ecofeminism_ Our Roots and Flowering,” in
Diamond and Orenstein, Reweaving, p. 5.
56. Riane Eisler, “The Gaia Tradition and the Partnership Future: An
Ecofeminist Manifesto,” in Diamond and Orenstein, Reweaving, pp.
23–34.
57. Mara Lynn Keller, “The Elusinian Mysteries: Ancient Nature Religion
of Demeter and Persephone,” in Diamond and Orenstein, Reweaving,
pp. 41–52.
58. Starhawk, “Power, Authority and Mystery: Earth-based Spirituality
and Ecofeminism,” in Diamond and Orenstein, Reweaving, p. 74. This
essay is a significantly different piece, though with some of the same
elements, from her similarly titled essay in Healing.
59. Michael Zimmerman, “Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism_ The
Emerging Dialogue,” in Diamond and Orenstein, Reweaving, pp. 138–
154. The inclusion of the essay and Zimmerman’s description of
ecofeminism is controversial. See Deborah Slicer, “Is There an
Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology ‘Debate’?” Environmental Ethics 17
(Summer 1995): 151–69.
60. Arisika Razak, “Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth,” in Diamond
and Orenstein, Reweaving, pp. 172.
61. Irene Javors, “The Goddess in the Metropolis: Reflections on the
Sacred in an Urban Setting,” in Diamond and Orenstein, Reweaving,
pp. 211–14. Lest readers think my quick summary of this essay is
inaccurate, a further quote from this essay may be more persuasive:
“In urban centers, Hecate/Kali teaches us that we heal ourselves and
become whole when we reunite with the cycles of nature. She show us
that what we most fear in external reality—isolation, poverty, disease,
loss of control, ugliness, death—are but the shadows and demons of
 those aspects of our inner worlds that are ruled by ego” (p. 214). This
is near the end of an essay where Javors finds a mentally ill man eating
a donut on the subway, a homeless man asking for money, and a
homeless woman who hangs out on a streetcorner to be “holy ones.”
The idea that poverty, homelessness, and social isolation are part of
“the cycles of nature” is a particularly egregious example of the way
essentialist feminist spirituality can be used to mask white middle-
class privilege.
62. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Toward an Ecological-Feminist
Theology of Nature,” in Plant, Healing, pp. 145–50 and Carol P.
Christ, “Rethinking Theology and Nature,” in Diamond and Orenstein,
Reweaving, pp. 58–69.
63. Judith Plant warns against the appropriation of Native American
culture in “The Circle is Gathering” in Healing, mentioned above. The
other essay, also mentioned above in this context, is Ynestra King’s
“Healing the Wounds” in Reweaving. King’s critique of certain forms
of feminist spirituality is more complex, dealing with issues beyond
the exploitation of Native American culture.
64. Carol Adams, “Introduction,” in Carol Adams, ed. Ecofeminism and
the Sacred (New York: Continuum Press, 1993), p. 4.
65. Carol Adams uses the word “Tribal,” capitalized, to designate Native
American spiritual traditions. See Adams, “Introduction,” Ecofeminism
and the Sacred, pp. 1–9.
66. Catherine Keller, “Women Against Wasting the World: Notes on
Eschatology and Ecology,”p. 258.
67. One way of judging the prevalence of this critique by 1991 is its
mainstreaming. Andy Smith’s important article on the subject was
circulated in unpublished form at the 1990 National Women Studies
 Association meeting (see Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Native American
Cultures”) and then was published in Ms. in 1991. But the critique
becomes even more mainstream with Sherman Alexie’s “White Men
Can’t Drum,” in the New York Times Magazine, October 4, 1992, pp.
30–31, which critiqued the men’s movement for its exploitation of
Native American religious rituals. For another mainstream example,
see George Synder, “Indians Protest Rip-off Spirituality,” in the San
Francisco Chronicle, December 25, 1995, pp. A1, A10.
68. Marie Wilson, “Wings of the Eagle,” in Plant, Healing, quotes taken
from pp. 216, 218. A number of other Native Americans have had this
response to white desire to use their traditions. An especially
thoughtful and revealing response to this problem is Lakota Harden’s
“Wiconi/Survival,” in Penny Rossenwasser, ed., Visionary Voices:
Women on Power (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1991), pp. 217–32, esp.
pp. 228–31.
69. Margot Adler, “The Juice and the Mystery,” in Plant, Healing, p. 151.
70. Starhawk, “Feminist, Earth-based Spirituality and Ecofeminism,” pp.
175–76.
71. Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993).
72. Using the “cyborg” as a useful and implicitly ecofeminist identity is
advocated by Donna Haraway. See “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81. I will have more to say about “cyborg
ecofeminism” in chapter 6.
73. Rao, “Dominant Constructions,” p. 18. By “well-informed studies,”
Rao is referring not specifically to ecofeminist writings, but to women,
 environment, and development studies. As I show in the next chapter,
she includes Shiva’s work among these, and through this connection
identifies these studies with “eco-feminism.”
74. Jackson, “Women/Nature,” pp. 396–97.
75. Elly Haney, “Towards a White Feminist Ecological Ethic,” Journal of
Feminist Studies in Religion 9 (1–2) (Spring/Fall 1993): 75–93, p. 86.
76. Haney, “Towards a White Feminist Fxological Ethic,” p. 87.
77. See Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerated Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and
Paula Treichler, with Linda Baughman and John Wise, eds., Cultural
Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 295–337; and Elizabeth
Bird, “The Social Construction of Nature: Theoretical Approaches to
the History of Environmental Problems,” Environmental Review 11(4)
(Winter 1987): 255–64.
78. The Fifth Sacred Thing (New York: Bantam, 1993) explores a
multiracial, ecofeminist future culture. Haraway finds comparable
resources in some feminist science fiction, among which Starhawk’s
novel could be placed.
79. See Robert Gottlieb, “Reconstructing Environmentalism_ Complex
Movements, Diverse Roots,” Environmental History Review (Winter
1993): 1–19.
80. See Monika Maendler, “The Conception of the Environment in the
Environmental Justice Movement,” M.A. thesis, American Studies
Program, Washington State University, (Spring 1997), and Laura
Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice (Tuscon, AZ:
University of Arizona, 1996).
81. For instance, the environmental justice movement may be another
locale for a feminist intervention into a male-dominated
environmentalism. Though the environmental justice movement is a
place where many women environmentalists are active and are leaders,
as the movement context congeals and gains public notice, it may be
experiencing a turn toward increasing male dominance, in a process
Joni Seager identifies as involving the patriarchal nature of
professionalization. See her chapter on “The Ecology Establishment,”
in Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global
Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 167–221.
5 Ecofeminist Natures And
Transnational Environmental Politics
DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-6

In previous chapters, I have argued that a tension exists between ecofeminist

definitions of diversity that privilege differences based on U.S. racial
categories, and notions of diversity based on “international” difference. In
this chapter, I will decenter the U.S. context in order to consider the
deployment of ecofeminist conceptions of race and gender within a
transnational context. I want to ask about their political results within a
particular historical, disciplinary, and political context in the early 1990s in
order to explore the conditions under which “strategic essentialisms”
operate, and to generate ways of assessing their effects. I will start by
sketching two interrelated contexts. One is the field of development studies,
which, from 1970 to 1990, had experienced shifts from “development” to
“women in development” to “women, environment, and development.” The
second context is a phenomenon I will call the “globalization of
environmentalism,” or the hegemonic contests over the meaning and use of
“environmentalism” within a post-Cold War transnational political arena.
Finally, I will look at a specific example of the deployment of an implicitly
ecofeminist discourse as a mobilizing tool by an organization called WEDO,
or Women’s Environment and Development Organization, which was
founded in 1990 to orchestrate a “women’s voice” within UN deliberations
over the intersection between environment and development. What I want to
show here is the way in which “ecofeminism,” rather than being a fixed
group of movement actors or organizations, or even a set of circumscribed
theories or analyses, is a political intervention into dominant development
discourses that, by the end of the 1980s, were tied to a hegemonic
environmental discourse. What ecofeminism allows in this context is a
feminist intervention into changing development discourses as well as a
location within which coalitions between southern and northern feminists
can take place.
Let’s begin by briefly outlining some of the more local as opposed to
global problems with a U.S. ecofeminist discourse of racial and cultural
diversity that privileges “international” difference instead of U.S. racial
categories of difference. Within U.S. ecofeminist organizations, conferences,
and writings, because the non-U.S. women who are used to construct
“international” diversity within ecofeminism are often either of a privileged
class in their home countries or are reductively constituted as “indigenous”
women, “internationalism,” as a U.S.-based discourse of cultural diversity,
often elides important differences of class, caste, education, language, or
culture that may be very pertinent within the home countries of non-U.S.
women. Approaches that focus on questions of the specific interaction
between U.S. racism and environmental problems are consistently displaced
by the use of non-U.S. women to represent “diversity.” And in conflating
U.S. racism with U.S. neo-colonialism, U.S. ecofeminists are impeded in
offering a politically relevant, materially grounded analysis of the interaction
between the two in the creation of environmental problems, whether they are
seen as “local” or “global.” In the U.S. context, critiques of ecofeminist
essentialisms of race and gender that posit “indigenous” women as having a
privileged standpoint in relation to environmentalism can be problematic.
Nevertheless, as I argue in this chapter, under specific historical conditions,
ecofeminism has been an important international political location at the
intersection of environmentalism and feminism, which has become a
globalized space for political demands by women in many countries who
might not otherwise have had a voice or an opportunity to create coalitions.

Essentializing Ecofeminists
As we saw in the last chapter, critics such as Bina Agarwal, Cecile Jackson,
and Brinda Rao have pointed out problems with the production of an
“internationalist” ecofeminist movement. Primarily, their critique is focused
on an essentialist discourse (which, contrary to their portrayal, is not
singularly of ecofeminist origin) that sees symbolic “indigenous” women as
the primary victims of the interaction between environmental problems and
sexism as well as the inspirational sources of activist resistance to these
problems. 1 It is important to note that although this is a discourse that can
be found within ecofeminism—perhaps especially within a certain time
period, as detailed in the last chapter—it is neither solely ecofeminist nor
unchallenged within ecofeminism.
These latter points are not widely understood. Instead, ecofeminism often
serves as a straw-woman for a critique of a broader Western
environmentalist discourse (in which, as we have seen, some ecofeminists
are complicit through a complicated effort intended to construct an
antiracist, anti-essentialist ecofeminism) about indigenous peoples as the
“ultimate ecologists.” However, given its status as a straw-woman in these
debates, ecofeminism is clearly not the singular object of this critique;
indeed, for Jackson and Agarwal, ecofeminism is a synecdochic figure for a
discourse within development studies called “women, environment, and
development,” or WED. That is, these critics see a growing relationship
between essentialist theories of women’s stake in environmentalism (which
they call “ecofeminism”) and contemporary analyses within development
studies of environmental problems and their solutions. For Jackson in
particular, the main target is development discourses about women and the
environment, even though most of her theoretical critique is directed against
ecofeminism. This rhetorical move unfairly reduces ecofeminism entirely to
an essentialist discourse and abstracts it from its historical and political
context. For instance, Jackson writes: “How are ecofeminist ideas reflected
in development literature and practice? … [I]t is taken as self-evident that
harm to nature equals harm to women because of the pervasive perception
that women are closer to nature. … The linkage of ‘women’ and
environment is either simply assumed or asserted and used to prescribe
actions to mobilise women for conservation.” 2 This portrayal of
ecofeminism as positing women as “closer” to nature is contradicted by
many ecofeminist writers, as we have seen. For instance, Ynestra King,
Karen Warren, Carolyn Merchant, and others, posit women’s relation to the
environment as socially constructed and/or arising out of historical,
materialist conditions; further, these writers see women’s environmental
mobilization as arising out of women’s political agency rather than their
essential similarity to nature. Rao, writing a little earlier than either Jackson
or Agarwal, similarly locates problems of essentialism in what she sees,
from her historical position, as an “emergent” set of studies (she does not
immediately identify ecofeminist work in this category) concerned with the
effects of a process she calls “capitalization of nature”: i.e., “colonial and
capitalist practices, and the so-called development schemes sponsored by
international organizations like the World Bank.” 3 These studies, Rao
claims, whether they are dealing with women as victims of the capitalization
of nature or as heroic environmental activists, “… are based on almost
identical conceptions of … the proximity of women to nature.” 4 Note that
Rao identifies specifically political conceptions of indigenous women-as-
victims and therefore women-as-activists as the moment when essentialist
notions are constructed. 5 Whether the close relationship between women
and nature is seen as biologically based or produced from women’s material
location in socially produced divisions of labor, Rao argues that these
conceptions “perpetuate an essentialist construction of women and tribals
based on nostalgic presuppositions of how they might have existed in some
distant past.” 6 Having sculpted this approach from “emergent” development
discourses, Rao then identifies it with “eco-feminism” by using Shiva’s work
as representative of this position. 7 Here again, a reductionist move results in
tagging all ecofeminism with the label “essentialist.”
A much fairer rendition of the relationship between ecofeminism and
development discourse—one that includes the internal contests within
ecofeminism over essentialist notions of the relationship between women
and nature—is given by Melissa Leach. Leach notes three strands within
development discourse dealing with women and the environment: an
ahistorical emphasis on women as the sole managers of natural resources; an
ecofeminist argument about the negative consequences of western
conceptions of women and nature (conceptions that conflate and devalue
them); and “feminist analyses of the effects of capitalist accumulation on
women and the environment” that, unlike the first approach, are both
materialist and historical. 8 What is an improvement over some of the other
accounts is Leach’s attention to the debate within ecofeminism over how to
characterize the relationship between “women” and “nature.” Unlike
Jackson and Rao, she notes that there are “two rather different strands of
ecofeminism which must be distinguished”: one makes essentialist
(sometimes biological) arguments, and the other analyzes various
ideological constructs of women and nature as historically and culturally
located. 9 The second she finds potentially very useful for understanding the
processes of “development.” Agarwal also notes that there are both
essentialist and anti-essentialist versions of ecofeminism, but she then goes
on to insist that ecofeminism posits “‘woman’ as a unitary category and fails
to differentiate among women by class, race, ethnicity, and so on. It thus
ignores forms of domination other than gender which also impinge critically
on women’s position.” 10 Though she allows in a footnote that Ynestra King,
in her later work, does not do this, she leaves out numerous ecofeminist
arguments that argue for attention to racism, classism, and other forms of
domination, as we have seen in previous chapters.
A common aspect, then, of these straw-woman accounts of ecofeminism
in development discourse is that they rarely deal with the full diversity of
ecofeminist positions and writers. Oddities of attribution and labeling thus
occur frequently, and, interestingly for the discussion in this chapter, they are
often centered on Vandana Shiva’s work. For instance, Leach relies heavily
on Sherry Ortner’s classic essay, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to
Culture?” as an example of an essentialist ecofeminist position. This is
peculiar, since ecofeminism postdates Ortner’s 1974 essay by a good deal;
while some ecofeminist theorists have used Ortner’s arguments, many do
not, including many with “essentialist” positions. 11 Leach also counts Shiva
in both the “ecofeminist” strand of discourse within development studies and
in the “feminist analyses of the effects of capitalist accumulation on women
and the environment” strand, which she counterposes to “ecofeminism.”
Rao, as we have seen, uses Shiva’s self-labeling as an ecofeminist to tag
“emergent discourses” about the “capitalization of nature” as essentialist. As
I will argue throughout this chapter, I think this difficulty in fixing a
definition of essentialist ecofeminism, or of ecofeminism as a whole, or of
Shiva’s work in particular, lies in the fact that ecofeminism in development
discourse is not so much an immutable set of theoretical positions as it is a
political intervention that continually shifts its discourse in relation to its
negotiation with dominant forces in development politics.
What none of these accounts captures is the various political positioning
within development studies and international political structures allowed by
the ambiguity of the “ecofeminist” position. I do not want to ignore or
dispute the dangers of essentialist notions of women, indigenous peoples,
cultures, or nature, which critics like those I’ve discussed above have
analyzed so well. Rather, I wish to point to the positive potential for
ecofeminism as a strategic discourse within a particular historical moment in
international politics. The “discourse of indigeneity”—when coupled with
claims about women’s stake in environmentalism, which I have identified as
a problematic element in U.S. ecofeminism in the late 1980s and early ’90s
—as an international political discourse rather than a theoretical tool, 12

opens up some possibilities. First, it creates a space within which southern

women are authorized as experts. Second, as discussed in the last chapter,
the feminist and antiracist intentions of most ecofeminists exist in tension
with their desire to positively revalue nature, women, and indigenous
peoples. This contradiction produces opportunities not just to concur with
but also debate those essentialist notions of women and nature that already
may be circulating within masculinist development discourse, particularly if
southern feminist environmentalists are included in coalitions. Finally,
ecofeminism inserts feminist demands and analyses within a hegemonic
discourse of globalizing environmentalisms at an important historical
moment and to do so, it must at least momentarily posit a political
collectivity called “women.” This is a level of analysis not available in the
criticisms of Agarwal, Jackson, and Rao. Leach, though not situated at this
level, does note that “when policy-oriented discussions incorporate
ecofeminist ideas they often mix [essentialist and anti-essentialist variants]
uncritically,” 13 but she does not identify that mix as an opportunity for a
strategic notion of ecofeminism that can be inserted into dominant political
discourses and that contains the seeds of destablization of its own (and the
dominant discourse’s) essentialism.

Ecofeminism in Development
A less reductive story is told of the interweaving of ecofeminism and
development discourse approaches by several books on women and
development. 14 From this angle, we can see another origin story for
ecofeminism_ as an international movement rather than a U.S. movement. In
her review of the literature on “gender, environment, and development”
(note the use of gender instead of women; I will return to this linguistic shift
in a moment), Heleen van den Hombergh offers a chronology of the
construction of the field, entitled “List of Important Events.” I reproduce it
here as Figure 1, as it provides a sketch locating some of the texts and events
that I will examine in this chapter. I read van den Hombergh’s list as a
mapping of intersections between feminism and development that produces
an intermingling of “ecofeminism” and “women in development,” which in
turn produces, variously, the disciplinary, policy-oriented locations “women,
environment, and development” or “gender, environment, and
development.”
Figure 1Van Den Hombergh'S “List Of Important Events”

Source: Heleen van den Hombergh, Gender, Environment, and

Development: A Guide to the Literature (Utrecht: International Books,
1993), p. 11.
1. As Peter Taylor and Frederick Buttel explain, “The [Limits to Growth]
study was funded by the Club of Rome, an elite group of Western
businessmen, government leaders, and scientists, and was conducted by
system dynamics (SD) modelers at MIT. The predictions from World 3, a SD
model of the world's population, industry and resources were for population
and economic collapse unless universal (coordinated, global-level) no-
growth or steady-state policies were immediately established.” Peter J.
Taylor and Frederick II. Buttel, “How Do We Know We Have Global
Environmental Problems? Science and the Globalization of Environmental
Discourse,” Geoforum 23(3) (1992): 405–16,407.
2. IUCN stands for International Union for the Conservation of Natural
Resources (based in Gland); UNEP for United Nations Environmental
Programme (based in Nairobi, but a UN agency for environmental
protection); and WWF for World Wildlife Fund (based in Geneva).
3. WCED stands for World Commission on Environment and
Development and is also known as the “Brundtland Commission” because it
was chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway.
4. NGO stands for “Non-Governmental Organizations” and includes any
group or organization not formally representing a government which has
membership in the UN. NGOs vary from formalized, government sanctioned
entities to alternative, oppositional, and grassroots organizations.
This map of the connections between the issues of women, development,
and the environment makes linear a history in which discourses concerning
these three issues were brought together in an uneven, contradictory, and
contested process of negotiation over the production of knowledge, the
distribution of resources, and the moral underpinnings of various policies
and practices within an international political arena. To make this point, one
could imagine van den Hombergh’s “List of Important Events” as two tables,
one tracing the development of international feminism, the other focused on
environmental landmarks.
Such an alternative mapping, however, would not adequately capture the
complex, ongoing intertwining of these two areas of concern. Sorting out
U.S. ecofeminism’s part in this complicated process is a difficult task, but it
is clear to me that the kind of antiracist desire that produces the discourse of
“indigenous ecofeminists” that I’ve critiqued in the last chapter has its
counterpart internationally in environmental feminist efforts to refigure
“development” as “sustainable development,” and then “sustainable
livelihood,” within a process in which the categories of “indigenous
peoples” and “women” come to have a good deal of discursive, political, and
moral weight.
To unravel this history, we need to start acronymically, with a tale of WID
in conflict with GAD, WED becoming GED, UNEP organizing SWAGSD
which influences the FLS, which begats WEDO which intervenes in
UNCED; a story that interweaves international and internally contested
movements of environmentalism and feminism with the machinery of UN
bureaucracies, state structures and multinational corporate interests. 15
WID, or “women in development,” is the name for a shift in development
studies and policies in the early 1970s from women being invisible or
appearing only as housewives and mothers, relegated to a privatized notion
of reproduction, to seeing them as producers and economic actors, especially
in the area of agriculture. This shift was brought on by the publication of
Ester Boserup’s 1970 book, Women’s Role in Economic Development, which
argued, influentially, that women were crucial to agricultural and commodity
production in peasant Third World societies, and thus that development
policies that failed to include them or to study their roles were doomed to
failure. Boserup’s goal was to use development efforts to increase gender
equity in Third World societies, as part and parcel of the process of
modernization. 16 Her approach, which did not challenge the foundational
ideas of development itself (that modernization, Western-style, was a good
and inevitable thing, and that Western experts should be the leaders in
constructing development policy and Third World people the recipients),
was crucial in producing new studies of Third World women’s productive
roles. However, the resulting policy programs did not often stress the need
for gender equity. Rather, women were subjects for research which was
aimed at creating more “efficient” and “effective” development policies, and
their work was seen as an important resource for the success of development
projects, even when those policies benefited men far more than women. 17
Indeed, as Leach points out, essentialist notions of nature and women,
especially poor and rural Third World women, were common in WID
discourse before “ecofeminism” became a player within development
politics. 18 Nevertheless, WID was an important location for an internal
contest between feminist notions of equality and empowerment and the
desire of First World development agencies to craft policies that would
successfully export Western products and practices to Third World countries.
In practice, WID policies often provided poor women in the Third World
with substantial opportunities compared to the previous male-oriented
development paradigm. 19
Indeed, the WID paradigm was intimately intertwined with the growth of
an international feminist movement, thus bringing international feminism
into close contest and negotiation with Western multinational and state
powers. The WID approach became initially institutionalized in the
“development bureaucracy” in the North. 20 In 1975, the first UN conference
on Women and Development was held in Mexico City. Though the growing
legitimacy of WID was not the only impetus behind this conference, it
certainly was an important factor in convincing the UN’s international
policymakers that a conference on women was needed; this is reflected in
the title of the conference. By this time, in Sabine Häusler’s words, WID
“was a more or less respected area of study; the number of publications on
women and development topics has increased steadily ever since. Women
and men sociologists and anthropologists, as well as a slowly increasing
number of women development professionals in technical fields… from both
North and South, moved into the field of development work.” 21
Coinciding with the Mexico City conference on women, southern women
began to be heard more effectively, often as researchers themselves within
the field of WID, at the same time as the approach became increasingly
influential in development studies. During the Decade for Women, which
was initiated by the 1975 conference, both northern and southern feminists
began the process of constructing an international feminist movement, in
which development policies—especially those that exploited the South by
the North—were bones of contention for southern feminists, who accused
northern feminists of ethnocentrism and of being tools of Western
neocolonialism. In the 1980s, during a period of worsening conditions for
women worldwide caused by the “debt crisis,” 22 southern feminists were
organizing to influence the international political processes surrounding the
UN apparatus that had grown up around women as political and economic
subjects. In 1984, an organization called “Development with Women for a
New Era,” or DAWN, was created. DAWN critiqued the WID approach for
its acceptance of the “Western development model” and its failure to focus
on the empowerment of women as a primary goal. 23 In Nairobi in 1985,
during the Second UN Conference on Women, which culminated the Decade
for Women, the parallel Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Forum
involved numerous lively discussions of the need for approaches such as
DAWN’s. 24
Many other southern analysts urged WID scholars to alter their approach
from one in which women were simply “added on” to existing analyses to
one in which gender relations, rather than women as essentialized objects of
study, were the focus. This outlook, which aimed to contextualize cultural
specificities through—and illuminate power inequities within—gendered
relationships as manifested in household forms, marital customs, and
gendered patterns of land ownership and use was called GAD, or gender and
development. Thus the shift from “women” to “gender” was meant to de-
essentialize theoretical understandings of women’s roles in their various
societies and to reintroduce the feminist imperative of changing unequal
gender relations along with promoting “development.” 25
Concurrent with the rise of WID was a growing interest in environmental
questions as part of development studies which also included a focus on
women—in part because of the new stress on women’s management of
natural resources through their productive roles, and in part because of an
early link made between environmental problems and population growth.
Häusler notes, for example, that the “oil crisis” of the 1970s spurred
development experts to look closely at the use of firewood by peasant Third
World societies for energy. Since, within the WID paradigm, it was clear that
women were the primary fuel gatherers and consumers of firewood, a link
was quickly made between women, environmental degradation, southern
population growth (a major obsession of the “Limits to Growth” report) and
poverty. As Häusler comments: “A powerful image emerged of poor people
in the South, with too many children, using too much fuel; the poor were
seen to have no choice but to destroy their own environment.” 26 As a result,
as Western consciousness of environmental questions such as resource use,
energy production, desertification, and pollution increased during the 1970s,
Third World rural women became scapegoats within development planning.
The responsibility for population growth and environmental problems was
thus placed on poor Third World women rather than on Western
industrialized nations that consume most of the world’s resources. These
assumptions about Third World women’s responsibility for dangerous levels
of population growth and misguided environmental resource use, widespread
in influential reports such as “Limits to Growth,” have been a major target of
attacks both by southern and northern feminists.
 Several events, including those found on van den Hombergh’s timeline in
Figure 1, served to embed the relation between environment, women, and
development both within development politics and within international
feminism as they interacted during the late 1970s to early ’90s. One could
offer many examples of how the two streams of research, policy formation,
and movement struggle focused on women and on the environment are not
separate but rather interactive from the start. In van den Hombergh’s list of
events, important environmental paradigms are referenced by the “Limits to
Growth” report (the problem of possible scarcity brought on by population
growth coupled with resource use) and the Brundtland Commission’s “Our
Common Future” (which sketches the need for “sustainable development”).
Both of these paradigms were challenged by feminist demands to
reconceptualize women as having agency and needing power in
environmental decisions. The feminist agenda became not only to make
women’s stake in these issues visible but also to promote women’s economic
and political empowerment. At the first major international conference on
the environment, in 1972 at Stockholm, during the parallel NGO meeting,
Sunderlal Bahuguna, a male Indian activist, presented Chipko women as
exemplars of community-based, sustainable environmental practices.
Because, as Häusler writes, “women had emerged as the main actors in this
movement it was concluded that rural women understood that it was in their
own interests to protect the environment.” 27 The Chipko movement was
inserted into the international political context at a moment when the
environment became a major agenda item, and in Bahuguna’s version,
Chipko represented a southern challenge to the notion that Third World
women are problematic environmentally; instead, he presented them as
natural environmentalists. It is this opening that was later seized by
ecofeminists such as Shiva, who pushed the Chipko to represent women not
just as natural environmentalists, but women as active, political agents with
expert knowledge about the environment. Thus, “ecofeminism,” in the late
1980s, entered the international context by attaching earlier feminist efforts
to transform WID to a newer environmentalist paradigm, which, as I will
discuss shortly, was becoming at the time a hegemonic global formation. In
this context, “ecofeminism” means this feminist intervention into
environmentalism more than it represents a set of new, independent
theoretical arguments.
While this “ecofeminist” position thus has political relevance and
effectiveness within a political context at a particular time, it also runs the
risk of dovetailing with older WID assumptions about women as “natural
resources.” There was concern that ecofeminist arguments (such as Shiva’s)
defining women as environmental managers and activists would be
translated into development policies that required women to be the primary
laborers in conservation schemes that may or may not have benefited them
directly. Many progressive development scholars critiqued these arguments
as essentialist, though such essentialism had existed as well in older WID
discourse. 28 In a pattern similar to the move from WID to GAD, a focus on
women, environment, and development, or WED (which could also be seen
as the “ecofeminist” moment), has been recently been challenged by GED,
or gender, environment and development, a position that pays attention to
the nuances of gender relations in households, property rights, labor
relations, and kinship systems, all of which determine a differential
relationship between women and their environments dependent on age,
marital status, and many other factors. GED scholars argue that these
nuances must be taken into account in policy planning, and that assumptions
of women’s natural tendency to protect the environment are deeply
misguided. It is this debate with which our critics, Agarwal, Jackson, Leach
and Rao, are concerned. But rather than see the recurrence of essentialist
moments in development discourses on women being part of an ongoing
process of political struggle stimulated by feminist interventions, these
scholars critique “ecofeminism” instead.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the insertion of feminist demands into
development policy in the period when it became concerned with the
environment (in other words, the “ecofeminist” moment) provided particular
political and working links between Western feminists and southern
feminists. In this political context, “the environment” served feminists as a
medium for the connection of critiques of militarism, capitalism, and
neocolonialism—similar to the way “militarism” functioned in the 1970s
and ’80s. Positioning women as environmental activists was one moment in
a dialectical process of negotiation between dominant interests in
development policies and feminist efforts to insert women’s concerns into an
international arena. While it is important to critique the limits of such
ecofeminist interventions, it is equally important to see the way in which
these analytic linkages can operate as “two-way streets” between southern
and northern feminist activists. 29 This is particularly the case when
ecofeminist arguments, as Leach pointed out, contain a tension between
essentialist and anti-essentialist analyses, giving an opening for debates
around operative definitions of “women” and “nature” that open the door for
more nuanced analyses.
The argument that women have a stake in environmentalist politics
became an especially important strategic position within an international
context of what I call “globalizing environmentalisms.” I will give a more
specific example of such “ecofeminist” positioning when I examine WEDO.
But first I want to make a few points about the status of environmentalism
within global political discourses at the end of the Cold War.
How do we explain the apparent convergence between the approaches of
women, environment, and development discourse within development
studies and certain strands of ecofeminist discourse? As another example of
a feminist intervention into a masculinist environmentalist discourse, but in
this case, one embedded in ongoing contests within a process I will call the
“globalization of environmentalism.”

Ecofeminism and Globalizing Environmentalisms

Without disputing the accuracy of those critiques (especially when it comes
to the need to produce feminist scholarship as a basis for effective,
empowering policies) that identify the essentialism of the “ecofeminist”
discourses deployed in the women, environment, and development arena, I
want to take a brief look at the wider context of this deployment. An
examination of the context of “globalizing environmentalisms” during the
end of the 1980s and beginning of the ’90s sheds light on the importance of
a deployment of ecofeminist rhetoric for the construction of an international
feminist movement.
Environmental problems, it has been pointed out frequently, do not honor
fixed spatial areas, whether they be defined as national areas or spaces of
private property. 30 This characteristic of environmental problems has been,
at different moments, the source of environmentalist claims for the need for
a new global cooperation as well as a deep pessimism about the possibilities
of solving environmental crises. The optimism of the global
environmentalists has a negative side, however, and that is the use that can
be made of the “universalizing” momentum of environmentalism by forces
of technocratic, exploitative, neocolonialist, neocapitalist political
economies. Southern environmentalists, like Guha, have thus critiqued the
ways in which consciousness of these environmental problems are “global”
in another sense, that is, tools for colonialist projects of northern exploitation
of southern peoples and lands. 31
In a perceptive article, entitled “How Do We Know We Have Global
Environmental Problems?” Peter Taylor and Frederick Buttel sketch the
growing influence of the characterization of environmental problems as
“global.” They identify two ways of talking about environmental problems
as global that they call the “technocratic” and the “moral.” Though in some
ways these discourses may seem opposed, since the “moral,” or Green,
discourse is putatively ranged against the scientistic, economically driven
discourse of the “technocratic,” Taylor and Buttel claim that there is a
convergence between the two in that they propose a unitary human concern
that avoids consideration of the varied material and political sources of
environmental problems. They thus point out the possibility that the two
discourses may operate together, imposing a dominant discourse which
assumes the “sameness” of people, in order to achieve particularistic goals
(i.e., those of multinational corporations, or Western elites). The idea that
environmental problems are global and require global solutions, then,
supports “either a moral response—everyone must change to avert
catastrophe!—or a technocratic response—only a superintending agency
able to analyze the system as a whole can direct the changes needed. There
is no paradox here—moral and technocratic responses are alike in attempting
to bypass the political terrain in which different groups experience problems
differently and act accordingly.” 32 Note that this objection to the
“globalization of environmentalisms” parallels the ecofeminist objections to
the philosophical “holism” of deep ecologists discussed in chapter 1.
Taylor and Buttel locate the origin of the trend toward describing
environmental problems as global as a specifically U.S. convergence
between the scientific understanding of environmental problems and the
environmentalist (“moral”) response to them; indeed, at one point they cite
the “long hot summer of 1988 in the United States” as one stimulus to the
use of “global climate models.” 33 But they also suggest another impetus to
the globalization of environmentalism_
 The rise of global-change-led international environmentalism occurred during a significant
shift of the political center of gravity of the industrial world toward neo-conservative regimes.
Modern environmentalism has accommodated itself surprisingly readily to the free-market
resurgence. While international environmental groups yet reserve the right to criticize the
World Bank and related institutions about the environmental destruction that results from
particular projects or types of projects… environmental groups have generally worked with
the Bank/IMF in a surprisingly harmonious manner in implementing
conservation/preservation policies and programs in the Third World. There is a key
coincidence of interest… the Bank and IMF gain legitimacy in the eyes of the citizens and
political officialdoms of the advanced (increasingly “green”-oriented) countries by helping to
implement environmental and conservation policies, while the implied threat of Bank or IMF
termination of bridging, adjustment and project loans is useful in securing developing country
compliance with environmental initiatives. Given this relationship, most environmental
organizations have been disinclined to take on the world debt crisis, the net South-North
capital drain, and the international monetary order as being fundamental contributors to
environmental degradation. 34

Whatever the exceptions that could be taken to Taylor and Buttel’s depiction
of environmental organizations here, it is important to note that they are not
positing a conspiracy but rather a convergence of particularly enunciated
concerns that illuminate the contours of a specific conjuncture (one I am
calling here “globalizing environmentalisms”) within a hegemonic struggle
for dominance. And we could enumerate the political struggles engaged in
this conjuncture and identify them in multiple ways: between North and
South, between class formations, between racial/ethnic groups, between
genders, and so forth. Instead of this multiplicity, these struggles take place
within internationalized versions of “environmentalism.” What strikes me in
Taylor and Buttel’s historicizing of this hegemonic shift is something they
don’t mention: the relation of the “ending” of the Cold War in the late 1980s
to the appearance of global environmentalisms as a discursive tool within
these political struggles. Like the discourse of democracy as a worldwide
good, environmentalism similarly turns out to be a two-edged sword.
 I will expand on the implications of this point briefly. The modern U.S.
rhetoric promoting democracy within an internationalist political arena can
be seen first as an antifascist and then as an anticommunist rhetoric,
generated during World War II as a justification for U.S. military
involvement and then refined after the war as a bulwark against the critique
of capitalism. Democracy moves from being an oppositional labor-
movement goal to being a statist rhetorical tool in the anticommunist
repertoire, with the deployment of the rhetoric of “saving the world for
democracy” used to further capitalist, imperialist projects. Like this
discourse of global democracy, dominant environmentalist discourse makes
similar claims about “universal human conditions,” similarly reduced to
individualist solutions (for instance, individual recycling, which, like voting
as a solution to social inequality, is a form of liberal rather than radical
discourse), similarly eviscerated of a critique of corporate agency in either
the production of inequalities or environmental problems. As Gaile
McGregor comments: “The globalization process is inherent simply in the
fact that we all speak the same ‘language’ of capitalism,” and
environmentalism is particularly deployed in this context. 35 Anna Tsing
makes a similar point when she writes about environmentalism in the 1990s
becoming a “leading edge of global civil society. In contrast to social
ecologists working for social and economic equity, civil society
environmentalists build their message on political equality. Since political
equality in the 1990s is understood as a concomitant to the spread of
markets, it becomes identified with the acceptance of social and economic
inequity in the name of democracy.” 36 Tsing goes on to describe the way
environmentalism as a “strategic universalism” came to “seem a defining
feature of the new transnational Europe.” Since it could be argued that
environmental activism on both sides of the Berlin Wall was partly
responsible for its fall, “one could look to environmentalism for the coming
together of the message of science, as universal principles, and the message
of universal human rights in the necessity of democracy to preserve the
world’s health. Furthermore, environmentalism was advanced by the kinds
of transnational and global organizations that could make ignorant and
uncooperative states, with their entrenched local cultures of power, see the
truth of these universals.” 37
Further evidence of the way in which globalizing environmentalism is
being used to replace Cold War rhetoric about global democracy is the way
in which environmentalism is being grafted onto the “lost” project of
militarism, which was centrally supported by “global democracy” discourse
during the Cold War period. For example, two recent New York Times
articles specifically describe the way in which environmental problems have
become the focus of new U.S. military endeavors. One article describes the
growing U.S. military identification of environmental problems as the new
threats to “national security” because of the way they result in “political
instability.” 38 The other describes the new use of spy satellites for
identifying environmental problems, thus justifying the defense
appropriation of money for these technologies. 39 The popularity of Fred
Kaplan’s construction of a connection between environmental disasters and
the threatening “chaos” within African nations displays the way in which
older Cold War forms of U.S. racist and Western colonialist fears about the
“barbarity” of the Third World are transformed into a concern with
environmental disaster that unleashes new forms of “savagery.” 40 Kaplan
makes clear that, like the hegemonic discourse about democracy, the
hegemonic discourse of global environmentalism can also be used to impose
unjust conditions on the poor and the colonized, who are often represented in
this discourse as part of the environmental threat. In some ways, the
development of southern environmentalism is a strategy precisely to resist
these uses of global environmentalism, in recognition that the environment is
now an important terrain of transnational political struggle. 41
Besides and within southern environmentalism, there have been feminist
analyses that have critiqued this kind of hegemonic discourse. Like the
feminist discourses which renamed “anticommunism” “militarism,” these
newer and related oppositional discourses identify “global
environmentalism” as another project of “patriarchal capitalist
maldevelopment.” 42 In both discursive moves, the oppositional
accomplishment is to point out the sexism of the appeal to a generic
mankind and humanity and to uncover, instead of universality, the
connections between sexism, racism, imperialism, classism, and, in both
discourses, environmental exploitation. One example of this kind of
deconstruction is the feminist analysis of Joni Seager, where she identifies
the patriarchal characteristics of governments, militaries, and corporations as
one of the main factors in their continuing responsibility for environmental
destruction. 43 Another example of a feminist challenge to hegemonic
discourses about development, democracy, and the environment is WEDO,
which we will examine in a moment. It is important to note the continuity in
these projects between a feminist critique of militarism and a feminist
critique of environmental problems; both oppositional discourses are aimed
at deconstructing the universalism of hegemonic discourses of either the
Cold War or of global environmentalism, and at showing their
interconnections. In the process of this deconstructiong, these oppositional
feminist and ecofeminist discourses often construct their own “strategic
universalisms,” particularly through claims to be representing “women” as a
unity. As Tsing says: “What is global essentialism good for? It is good, it
seems, for arguing with other global essentialisms.” 44 I will now give a
more specific example of this process of constructing “strategic
universalisms”: the organization WEDO, which, in the middle of this
transition from the Cold War to globalizing environmentalisms, constructs a
recognizably ecofeminist intervention with a universalist bent.

Women Mothering Earth: Women's Environment

and Development Organization
In some ways, WEDO is an ironic figure in this book; I use it to illuminate
ecofeminism despite its refusal of the term. Like many of the grassroots
women’s activists who reject the label ecofeminist, WEDO avoids the name
(but for different reasons) even while arguing for women’s environmental
action in “ecofeminist” terms. WEDO makes close connections between
feminism, women’s movements, and environmental activism and has several
prominent ecofeminists in leadership positions. As was true for WomanEarth
Feminist Peace Institute, the cofounders of WEDO came from a background
of feminist antimilitarism. Yet, unlike WomanEarth, WEDO embraces
political action other than direct action, directed toward traditional kinds of
institutional change, in this case primarily within the UN. In particular,
WEDO shies away from any connection between feminist spirituality and
environmental politics. Further, unlike WomanEarth’s focus on U.S. racism,
WEDO’s attempt to create an organization that models diversity defined that
diversity as primarily, though not exclusively, international.
WEDO was founded by two white U.S. women, Mim Kelber (activist and
writer) and Bella Abzug (a former Democratic Congresswoman from New
York). Both had been founders of Women Strike for Peace and active in the
second-wave women’s movement. 45 After Bella Abzug left the U.S.
Congress, Kelber and Abzug formed the Women’s USA Fund, Inc., 46 which
supported various subgroups, including one called the Women’s Foreign
Policy Council, “which was aimed specifically at getting equal participation
of women in decision-making, related to women’s rights, peace, and
security.” 47 Basically, the organization performed a networking function,
printing a directory of U.S. women involved in foreign policy issues and
international affairs in 1987. In 1988, Kelber and Abzug became more
centered on the environment, moving easily from their previous concerns
with nuclear disarmament to a more generalized concern with
environmentalism. As Kelber puts it: “We began to realize in talking about
the security of the earth, you’re really talking about literally saving the earth
from these man-made threats to the health of the planet.” Inspired by the Gro
Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future,” and concerned about the lack of
women in policymaking positions in the national and international
institutions concerned with the global environment, Abzug and Kelber
organized a briefing on the state of environmental problems worldwide for
prominent women in the U.S. Congress and women’s political organizations.
The organizing for this briefing brought Abzug and Kelber in touch with a
number of women environmentalists from the Third World, as well as
women working on environmental issues within UN agencies. During this
process, Kelber met Joan Martin Brown, a staff member of the United
Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and head of a women’s
environmental network called WorldWIDE, which had published an
international directory of women environmentalists and researchers. Kelber
says that at this point (around 1989), “I began to realize the link between
environmental protection, development issues, poverty, and property issues,”
and she and Abzug became committed to engaging these issues as
interconnected. Brown told Kelber about a conference UNEP was
organizing, in connection with the preparations for the upcoming United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development, called The Global
Assembly of Women and the Environment, in which women from all over
the world were going to be brought together to illustrate environmental
“success stories.” In line with the image of women as resources for
environmental programs, which was prominent in the WID development
discourse at that time, the success stories were meant to demonstrate various
alternative technologies and environmental practices developed by women in
their communities, but not necessarily to generate influence on UNCED at
the governmental, policymaking level. Brown suggested to Kelber that the
Women’s Foreign Policy Council might organize another conference at the
same time, which would be more confrontational, more politically
challenging, and more policy oriented; one that would deal, as Kelber put it,
“with the larger issues.”
Kelber and Abzug took up this project, which became the World Women’s
Congress for a Healthy Planet, held in Miami in 1991. In 1990, to prepare
for this effort, Abzug and Keller brought together a fifty-member committee,
called the International Policy Action Committee (IPAC), which decided on
the name Women’s Environment and Development Organization for the
entity organizing the conference and chose ten cochairs to direct WEDO. A
serious effort was made to create international diversity in both IPAC and
WEDO; the cochairs were Bella Abzug (United States), Peggy Antrobus
(Barbados), Thais Corral (Brazil), María Eugenia de Cotter (Costa Rica),
Elin Enge (Norway), Farkhonda Hassan (Egypt), Wangari Maathai (Kenya),
Chief Bisi Ogounleye (Nigeria), Vandana Shiva (India), and Marilyn Waring
(New Zealand). These women were already active in development politics,
promoting the perspectives of southern women (Peggy Antrobus, one of the
founders of DAWN; Thais Corral, information officer for DAWN; and Chief
Bisi Ogunleye, a vice president of the Forum of African Voluntary
Development Organizations); environmental sustainability (Elin Enge,
director of the Norwegian Forum for Environment and Development; and
Wangari Maathai, founder of the Kenyan Green Belt Movement); and
international feminism (Marilyn Waring, who had been the Executive
Director of the Sisterhood is Global Institute; and Farkhonda Hassan, chair
of the Executive Committee of the Gender, Science, and Development
Program at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Toronto). All, therefore,
demonstrated long-term commitments to the intersections of the issues of
development, environment, and feminism. Some were also connected with
an explicit ecofeminist perspective (especially Shiva, through her inclusion
in and authorship of ecofeminist publications; and Thais Corral, who is an
editor of Eco-Femina, a radio program broadcast throughout Brazil and
sponsored by UNIFEM). 48
The World Women’s Congress For a Healthy Planet brought together
“1,500 women from 83 countries, with about one-third coming from
developing nations.” 49 An important feature of the conference was that it
took the form of a tribunal: in front of five judges (Justices Desiree Bernard
of Guyana, Elizabeth Evatt of Australia, Sujata V. Manahar of India, Effie
Owuor of Kenya, and Margareta Wadstein of Sweden), “witnesses” gave
testimony over three days. The topics of each day were “Towards Earth
Charter ’92: Developing a Code of Ethics with a Women’s Dimension”;
“Saving Natural Systems: Environment and Positive Development”; and
“Science, Technology and Population.” The witnesses, experts on their
topics from a wide variety of countries, gave their testimony before the
assembly of 1,500 women, many of whom were women brought as part of
the “success stories” conference organized earlier by UNEP, and thus often
part of grassroots efforts in their communities. 50 Other attendees at the
conference were women who were part of environmentalist and feminist
movements and organizations from around the world.
The format of a tribunal created a powerful experience. As each speaker
gave evidence of the costs of development policies and environmental
degradation for women in her country, the sense of injustice and outrage
mounted. One reporter summarized some of the “horror stories”:
 In a Malaysian village, where a Japanese consortium sold radioactive waste as “fertilizer” for
home gardens and window-boxes, children are now dying of leukemia.
In the Marshall Islands, women whose bodies are poisoned with radioactive fallout are giving
birth to “jellyfish babies—living blobs of flesh with no limbs, eyes or brains.”
From famine-stricken Ethopia came news that the country, once 60 per cent covered with
forests, has only 3 per cent left.
In the snow of the Himalyan mountain peaks, scientists have found soot from Kuwait’s
burning oil wells.
From Tibet came an urgent plea for help in stopping the suspected Chinese dumping of
nuclear waste into Tibet headwaters, “threatening the seven great rivers of Asia.”
From the Argentine Andes, an indigenous woman whose soft, musical voice riveted the
audience, said: “Sisters, as I speak to you, the blasts from oil exploration are rocking my
mountain…”
From Bhopal to Chernobyl to the “Triangle of Death” in heavily polluted Eastern Europe,
women report birth abnormalities and high levels of sickness among children.
On a coral atoll in the Pacific, where, according to Marilyn Waring, “the French still insist that
their nuclear testing has no effect on the food chain,” women hang fresh fish like laundry on a
line. They eat only those that flies land on; the others are discarded as too contaminated even
for flies.” 51

The testimony during the conference covered topics such as “Poverty,

Maldevelopment, and the Misallocation of Resources”; “Consumer Power”;
“Food Security”; “Interdependence or Dependency: Trade, Debt, and Aid
Relations Between Nations and Regions”; “Earth’s Refugees: The Causes of
Uprootedness and Global Homelessness”; “Ethical Considerations of
Nuclear Power and Weapons, and Other Threats to Public Health and the
Environment”; “The Appropriation of Tribal Lands by the U.S.
Government”; “Biotechnology and Biogenetics”; “Cooking to Climate
Change: Energy Needs, Sources, and Alternatives”; “Population Policies,
Family Planning, and Sexual Politics”; and “People’s Rights, Participation
and Resources, Decisions and Actions for Sustainable Development with
Justice and Equity.” 52
In organizing the conference, as I have said before, WEDO wanted to
generate a diversity defined by international, rather than U.S. racial
difference. As a result, most of the U.S. women attending were white
women, 53 and representation was distributed by world region rather than by
racial difference within the United States. Though the conference opened
with a “Traditional Call of Welcome” from “Indigenous Women of Florida,”
the only other featured speakers who were U.S. women of color were Faye
Wattleton (president of Planned Parenthood at the time) and Winona
LaDuke, Anishinaabeg feminist activist. LaDuke, as we saw in chapter 4,
has expressed ambivalence about seeing herself as part of ecofeminist—or
white U.S. feminist environmentalist—movements. 54 After LaDuke’s name
in the initial program it says “Invited,” as though marking her ambivalence.
Asked about the relative invisibility of U.S. women of color in the
conference, Mim Kelber explained that WEDO had raised money
specifically to bring women from the Third World, including in their number
the women brought to the earlier UNEP conference. This combination of
funding accounted for the high number of Third World women participants,
one-third of the conference attendees. However, a specific effort to bring
Asian American, Latino American, and African American women to the
conference did not result in significant funding. Kelber says:
We tried, but we couldn’t get enough funding for it… funders like to fund activities in other
countries, but not so much in this country. And I think it’s a constant issue for us in the
international environment and development movement. They [funders] tend to count it
[diversity] in North/South terms and I don’t think there’s enough emphasis on class
differences. I think it’s very important for us to recognize that we have a lot of poor people in
this country and a lot of illiterate people and a lot of people in great need who are being
exploited by the same global economic forces that are exploiting these other countries … our
Third World within our borders…. [W]e really ought to organize a reverse solidarity
campaign, that women in other nations should be expressing solidarity with women in the
U.S. who are under such severe attack right now by the right wing. 55

Though U.S. women of color were more or less invisible within the World
Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet in terms of featured speakers or the
overall number of participants, there was a caucus of Women of Color of
North America at the conference. This caucus made efforts in particular
ways analytically separate from some of the other problems discussed by the
conference to raise the visibility of the effects of U.S. racism, and, more
specifically “environmental racism.” This caucus’s statement was published
in the conference proceedings along with those of other caucuses, which
otherwise were organized by geographic region with two specific
exceptions, Women of the South and the International Indigenous Women’s
Caucus. 56 In this way the geographic categories that WEDO used to
organize the conference were disrupted by three interventions: one centered
on U.S. racism, one on Western colonialism, and one challenging the first
two by identifying indigeniety as an independent identity, occupied by
members of the “Fourth World.” Thus, U.S. racism and Western colonialism
were tagged as structuring inequalities and promoting suffering along the
lines of three notions of difference separate from geographic regional
difference: “nonwhite,” “underdeveloped,” and “indigenous.” The formation
of these caucuses created a situation in which each process of identity
formation within the conference—by gender, by nationality, by relation to
colonialism, by race—was thereby destabilized.
Interestingly, given our discussion in chapter 4 of the deployment of the
“indigenous ecofeminist” in close relation to feminist pagan spirituality, the
statement of the International Indigenous Women’s Caucus is entirely
devoted to promoting a spiritual relation to the earth that promotes the
wellbeing of human and of non-human nature. “As indigenous people our
lives are intertwined with the natural world,” the statement begins, and adds:
“Today we face the destruction of the human spirit and the consequent
destruction of the natural world. … The true challenge of human beings is to
place our full attention upon ways in which we can live upon Mother Earth
in a manner consistent with natural law and in peace, harmony, and balance
with all living things.” 57
Clearly, the politics of the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet
intertwined feminist and environmentalist positions with a number of radical
analyses. This could be called an “ecofeminist” politics, similar to the
ecofeminism developed by such writers as Karen Warren, Val Plumwood,
and Ynestra King, but one grounded in an exploration of women’s daily
problems and material constraints and presented within a framework of
international diversity. Two things created coherence for the bringing
together of such different issues as women’s struggles with nuclear
contamination, the effects of imposition of debt dependence on poor nations,
and coercive population policies: an analysis of the interconnection of
multinational capitalism, sexism, colonialism, racism and environmental
exploitation and a rhetoric locating women as the primary victims of these
forces as well as the most effective political agents against them.
WEDO’s published materials construct a unity for women based on their
exclusion from male-dominated policymaking institutions worldwide, as
well as on their social roles as caretakers. At the beginning of the creation of
WEDO, in 1989, the organizers published a statement entitled “A
Declaration of Interdependence” (see Figure 2).
Source: Women’s Environment and Development Organization. Reprinted with permission.

Referencing the original Declaration of Independence, in a protest

tradition of reworking that document that goes back to the 1848 “Declaration
of Sentiments” of the nineteenth-century women’s movement, the
Declaration displays a perspective recognizably ecofeminist. Using one of
the favorite metaphors of antimilitarist feminism and ecofeminism—the web
—the Declaration argues that sexism and environmental degradation are
ideologically and materially linked: “It is our belief that man’s dominion
over nature parallels the subjugation of women in many societies, denying
them sovereignty over their lives and bodies. Until all societies truly value
women and the environment, their joint degradation will continue.” Further,
the Declaration insists that joining feminist and environmentalist
perspectives demands attention to diversity along several axes, as well as to
militarism, poverty, and political equality.
WEDO’s closeness to an ecofeminist perspective also can be seen in the
language of “Women’s Action Agenda 21,” which was the culmination of
the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet in November 1991. The
document was used as a manifesto for a feminist intervention into the
process of UNCED, held in Rio in June 1992. Its title referenced Agenda 21,
which was the document to be produced by the governmental bodies in Rio.
Before and during the period that women met at the Congress for a Healthy
Planet in Miami, other preparatory meetings to shape Agenda 21 were taking
place around the world under UN auspices. Bella Abzug had attended many
of these meetings, and, alarmed at the lack of participation or power of
women in these meetings, had in each case brought those women present
together in a “women’s caucus,” designed to articulate the collective needs
of women in relation to the environment and development issues being
discussed. This strategy, or “methodology,” as Abzug called it, helped to
provide WEDO with the personal contacts and sense of the issues that
became the basis for the Congress for a Healthy Planet. 58
The “Women’s Action Agenda 21” contained a list of specific demands
aimed at the governments participating in UNCED, organized around the
topics “Democratic Rights, Diversity and Solidarity”; “Code of
Environmental Ethics and Accountability”; “Women, Militarism and the
Environment”; “Foreign Debt and Trade”; “Women, Poverty, Land Rights,
Food Security and Credit”; “Women’s Rights, Population Policies and
Health”; “Biodiversity and Biotechnology”; “Nuclear Power and Alternative
Energy”; “Science and Technology Transfer”; “Women’s Consumer Power”;
and “Information and Education.” 59 It also issued deliberate challenges
calculated to address the lack of women’s power within the UN itself as well
as the UNCED. The document required that a “permanent gender-balanced
UN Commission on Environment and Development” be created; that the
imbalance of gender ratios in the UN staff, especially in agencies like UNEP,
be redressed; that donor countries increase their funding of UNIFEM (a UN
fund for providing resources for and research on women’s issues); and that
member nations send to UNCED gender-balanced delegations, which would
also include representatives of indigenous peoples and grassroots
organizations. The creation of a women’s “Agenda 21” at the Congress
required debate and agreement among the 1,500 women present (a process
managed through workshops on various issues, in which participants agreed
on language to be presented to the larger group). Thus, it is a statement
carrying a lot of weight, representing the strong coalitions built among
women from very different political and cultural locations, across national
borders.
Consolidated by a similar process of debate and agreement among diverse
women from around the world at Planeta Fêmea, or the Women’s Tent at the
Global Forum, the NGO alternative gathering at the UNCED meeting in Rio
in 1992 reworked the document for presentation to the official governmental
bodies. 60 In this context, the “Women’s Action Agenda 21” was used to
lobby for “women’s issues” to be included in the formal Agenda 21. Indeed,
this lobbying effort succeeded in getting specific mention of women’s issues
in terms of the political perspective of “Planeta Fêmea” in 33 of the 40-plus
chapters of “Agenda 21,” not counting the inclusion of a chapter specifically
addressing the importance of considering women as agents of environmental
change as well as the relation between sexism and environmental
degradation. This chapter, entitled “Global Action for Women Towards
Sustainable and Equitable Development,” incorporated the political
perspective fostered by WEDO organizers into the heart of the formal
government agreements and represented a significant feminist intervention
into development politics and the sphere of globalizing environmentalism. 61
The Preamble of the “Women’s Action Agenda 21” couches the diverse
issues discussed in the Congress for a Healthy Planet in language that
constructs women as activists on behalf of the environment through their
commitment to justice, equality, and nurturing. With a recognizably
ecofeminist voice, the Preamble argues for interconnections between various
political struggles, stating that “a healthy and sustainable environment is
contingent upon world peace, respect for human rights, participatory
democracy, the self-determination of peoples, respect for indigenous peoples
and their lands, cultures, and traditions, and the protection of all species.”
These things are connected for the writers of the Preamble, because “as long
as Nature and women are abused by a so-called ‘free-market’ ideology and
wrong concepts of ‘economic growth’ there can be no environmental
security.” 62 The correspondence is exact between WEDO’s arguments here,
representing all of the women at the conference, and ecofeminist
explorations of the consequences for the environment and for women of
how, in Western ideology, women have been equated with nature and both
have been devalued.
Despite the similiarity between the analysis and rhetoric of WEDO and
ecofeminist writing of the time, WEDO organizers gently shied away from
the label “ecofeminism.” Exploring this aspect through interviews with Mim
Kelber and Bella Abzug, I found that reluctance embedded in the the notion
of ecofeminism as a countercultural politics, or a politics based on feminist
spirituality, a politics less concerned with institutional politics and more with
philosophical argument or direct action. In addition, Kelber and Abzug both
expressed that ecofeminism, as they understood it, was about connections
between women and nature and was too much a single-issue movement,
unable to address the structural processes that produced women’s inequality
and environmental degradation. However, Kelber and Abzug did not display
a thorough knowledge of the complexity of some ecofeminist arguments.
For instance, when I pointed out to Kelber that, while WEDO did not use the
term “ecofeminist” to describe itself, still many people perceived the “World
Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet” as an ecofeminist conference, she
replied:
As you said, I’m not quite sure what the definition of ecofeminism is. The women’s
movement, including the feminist movement, has a lot of diversity and a lot of different
interpretations. There’s the whole spiritual group and the cultural group and then there are
those of us who come into it via the political project. So we tend to work in a different way.
Because there are two approaches, that is, that you create a counterculture, and that’s what you
do. And then there are others of us who feel that you have to try to make the system work for
all of us. It’s a reformist approach. I appreciate a lot of what women ecologists are doing and
writing [about], talking about alternate ways of living and alternate systems and so on, but
unless the global economy self-destructs, and that very well might happen, we have to deal
with how the global economy is operating. … But I would say that Bella’s and my approach
has been that you try to work with what’s real and change it. But we also understand that
women have all different kinds of feelings, different interpretations. And whatever they want
to do, it’s okay. They can all feed into this so that we can have a common meeting ground on
many issues. Our work styles may be different, but I think we all have this common goal of a
 healthy planet. And the core of it, and I guess Bella and I are very strong on this, is equality
for women in decision-making.

Kelber’s emphasis on a strategy of reform within existing political and

economic institutions is what led Greta Gaard to remark, after her attendance
to the Congress for a Healthy Planet, that WEDO was a “liberal ecofeminist”
organization (which, to her, “sounds like an oxymoron”). 63 Yet what
interests me here is that Kelber, while constructing ecofeminism as a
countercultural politics not interested in “reform,” nevertheless sees the
rhetoric WEDO employs as creating an umbrella under which many
different kinds of women and feminists can create a coalition. The idea that
“women all have the common goal of a healthy planet” reverberates within
much of WEDO’s literature, which relies upon the notion that women’s
equal participation in political decisions about policy will produce more
environmentally sound practices. As Abzug notes: “We do regard … a clean
environment, a healthy society, the preservation of the earth as being a very
fundamental thing for any society, and we feel that women particularly have
a very essential role to play.” 64
When asked about the manner in which this connection is made between
women’s empowerment and environmentalism, Abzug and Kelber
articulated two notions: first, that women’s particular social and material
labor means that environmental issues are important to them (through their
roles as mothers, health workers, and food producers); and second, that
women have a different sense of connection to nature than men (ironically,
the belief that they articulate as belonging to “single-issue” ecofeminism).
Often these notions come through in the course of their insistence that giving
women an equal say in governmental policymaking would make a
difference. On this point, Kelber remarks:
We keep saying we’re not romanticizing women and demonizing men, but I think growing up
female and growing up male is just different. It is different. I’m not talking about ability or
 brain size, or the right side of the brain or the left side of the brain. It’s different, it’s just an
absolutely different experience. Some women may be able to totally separate themselves from
the whole weight of tradition and social roles and so on, but for the majority of women in the
world certainly, they still bear the weight of the past.

And when asked about her reaction to some feminist criticism of the
connection ecofeminists have made between women and nature, for instance
in the Women’s Pentagon Actions, Abzug responds:
Some people think that the emphasis on ecofeminism, by ecofeminists, on the natural bond
between women and the earth is unacceptable to them. … I am basically not an ecofeminist
but the point is, I see, there is something that springs from the earth, there is a life, there is a
nurturing, there is a symbiotic sense of preserving, and I’ve often said that as long as
discrimination and degradation continue, [as long as] we continue degrading the earth, that we
are at the same time creating a discrimination against women. So I think there is a symbiotic
relationship.

Whatever the source of the connection made between women’s issues and
environmentalism, WEDO organizers clearly feel that an appeal to women
as a collectivity, to their similarities despite their differences, is an effective
organizing practice. Nevertheless, the politics underlying that appeal is one
that privileges the southern critique of Western versions of development, as
well as an interconnection between radical environmental, feminist,
antiracist, and anticapitalist analyses. For example, when asked why she
thought of environmental issues as women’s issues, Abzug replied: “I
always think every issue is a women’s issue. I come from that school of
thought… in fact, [when we had] a congress which we called a World
Congress for a Healthy Planet… we put together not only our views on
earth, air, soil and water, but our views of the total environment, the
environment of health, of human rights, of equal rights, of political rights, of
economic justice.” And again, in explaining why she does not want to
restrict herself to being defined as an “ecofeminist,” she says: “I am not just
an ecofeminist. Although we use some language which … brings us closer to
that posture than most people … if you read the Preamble of our ‘Women’s
Action Agenda 21,’ we do think there is a bond between the earth and
women. But we go much further than [ecofeminism], a much larger
definition … we are trying to include all kinds of people in our platforms of
action and in our activities.”
The rhetoric of WEDO thus moves between what might be called an
essentialist ecofeminism, calling upon women in their roles as mothers and
healers to take on environmentalist causes, and what might be called an anti-
essentialist ecofeminism, paying attention to difference within a framework
of analyzing the operations of political, economic, and social power. A
poster (Figure 3) that WEDO used in the early 1990s demonstrates some of
the tensions within its political rhetoric. Under a stunning image of the earth
seen from space are the words “It’s Time for Women to Mother Earth.” 65
The text of the poster says: “With every day that passes, a little more of our
world dies at the hands of pollution and neglect. But, as women, we can help
do something about it” [my emphasis]. The text goes on to mention
examples of women environmentalists active across the globe, such as Linda
Wallace Campbell, active in the African-American struggle against toxic
waste in Alabama; Wangari Maathai, of the Kenyan Green Belt Movement;
and Janet Gibson, who worked against the destruction of a barrier reef in
Belize. The emphasis in the rest of the poster’s text is on the need to bring
women into the policymaking institutions that make decisions on the
environment, rather than to take environmental action themselves. The
assumption is that women will make more environmentalist decisions. And
the assertion that “It’s Time for Women to Mother Earth,” while counting on
women’s maternalism, moves women from a symbolic, passive identity with
Mother Earth to a position as active, political agents. 66
Source: Women’s Environment and Development Organization. Reprinted with permission.

Notions of WEDO as a maternalist version of ecofeminism that sees

women only in essentialist ways are disturbed by watching WEDO’s
“methodology” in action. The strategy of forming Women’s Caucuses within
the UN preparatory meetings assumed that women have something in
common politically. But the emphasis within the Caucuses on women’s unity
was most often constructed on the idea of women’s exclusion from decision
making and power, rather than on essentialist notions of maternalism. The
practice of the Caucuses insured that many women heard about other
women’s political struggles in an atmosphere of coalition-forming and
respect. The chair of the Caucus for each meeting was rotated, giving each
region a chance to chair a meeting. During the Caucus, agreement was
sought on language that teams from the Caucus (formed mostly by members
of NGOs) would lobby to be included in the government documents agreed
upon at the UN meetings. WEDO provided members of the Caucus with the
government document previously produced, and participants in the Caucus
would try to agree upon language to amend these documents in directions
favoring women and other unrepresented peoples as well as other political
positions. If the Women’s Caucus’s lobbying efforts were successful, this
new language would become part of the policy document agreed upon by all
the member nations represented at the UN meetings. This “methodology”
was so successful at Rio that WEDO continued it beyond the 1992 UNCED
meeting that prompted its initial creation. WEDO was responsible for
organizing Women’s Caucuses before and during UN conferences on
population in Cairo, 1993; and on social development in Copenhagen, 1994.
Finally, WEDO also organized a caucus to provide a similar space for NGO
coalitions for the Fourth World Women’s Conference in Beijing, 1995; but
since this conference was about women, it didn’t make sense to call it a
“Women’s Caucus.” Instead, it was called a “Linkage Caucus,” a name that
more accurately described, to my mind, what happened in all the preceding
Women’s Caucuses: the linkage of issues rather than women.
In these ways, WEDO’s organizational format (not a binary construction
of difference but choosing multiply-located subjects for their involvement in
the issues WEDO has identified as important) destabilizes its essentialist
rhetoric about “Now It’s Time for Women to Mother Earth.” Despite the
admirable construction of a politics of connection between important vectors
of exploitation and injustice, and its success in influencing UN processes,
WEDO’s choice of the UN as its main focus of political action has obvious
limitations. While an important international political arena, the UN itself
has little or no enforcement capabilities to ensure that agreements made by
governments during various global summits will be carried out. Though
struggles over particular language in official transnational UN agreements
are fierce and involve serious political issues, they end up as textual
referents, often with their radical force significantly compromised by
pragmatic realities of successful lobbying, rather than concrete political or
economic practices.
Well aware of these limitations, though still committed to the practice of
lobbying within the UN, WEDO has concentrated its energies after the
Beijing conference on mobilizing women in their own countries to insist that
their governments comply with the international agreements on women,
environment, development and population. “We’ve had all these words on
equality,” Abzug says, “and now we want the music. Music is the action….
So we have been emphasizing the issue of implementation.” WEDO plans to
continue to create Women’s Caucuses in future UN summit meetings (such
as the Habitat Summit in Istanbul), but is also looking for ways to assist
local organizing around the issues of health, environment, feminist
population policies, and sustainable livelihood. One of the tools to further
local organizing that WEDO developed early in its existence was the
“Women for a Healthy Planet Community Report Card,” which provides a
framework and resources for community investigation and for publicizing
local environmental and health problems. The “Report Card” contains
guidelines on how to organize community organizations to create an “action
agenda” around the suggested areas of “Natural Environment,” “Political
Systems,” “Social Priorities,” and “Human Development.” 67
WEDO has also been asked and has considered setting up local chapters
of the organization, but when I talked to her in 1995, Abzug expressed doubt
that they had the resources to do this. Still, all of these varied efforts are
attempts by the organization to bring their political agenda into local arenas,
and national arenas, in which implementation of the U.N.-oriented efforts
can take place.
Another aspect to assessing the effects of international strategies appears
when attention is paid to the local and regional effects of the organizing
initiated by international environmental and feminist groups. An interesting
example of this process is reported by María Fernanda Espinosa, who as part
of her work with the Indigenous Organization of the Ecuadorian Amazon
(CONFENIAE) was asked to organize a Regional Workshop of Indigenous
Women in preparation for the World Women’s Conference in Beijing. 68
Noting that the “modified version of Agenda 21, considering specific
recommendations for women, was an attempt to reconcile the sustainable
development plan of action with the role and claims of women … to serve as
a general framework for the deliberations on women and environment,”
Espinoza points out that “instead of building conceptual, political and
operational connections between women, environment and development, the
document has [only] superficial addendums.” Indeed, Espinosa says, it could
be called “a gender addendum not a gender agenda.” 69
 Whereas at the international level, women’s issues were superficially
attended to, at the midlevel of the continental meeting called Encounter of
Indigenous Women of the Americas, Espinosa found that women’s issues
were subsumed to the “struggle of indigneous peoples, about indigenous
territorial and cultural rights, self-determination and bilingual education.” 70
While this articulation of indigenous politics would seem to include
indigeneous women’s issues, in fact, according to Espinosa, the statements
made by the participants at the Encounter revealed “the predominance of the
ethnic emphasis over gender and environmental concerns as well as an
implicit critique [of] western feminisms.” 71
Opposed to the international, continental, and national levels of
organizing, Espinosa offers the story of the small, localized gathering of
indigenous Amazonian women she was asked to organize by CONFENIAE.
This effort was very new; CONFANIAE, in its thirty years of existence, had
only paid attention to women as a special group when it was prompted to by
the organizing efforts for Beijing. 72 Her experience with the Regional
Workshop of Indigenous Women ran counter to these tendencies to subsume
women’s selfperception of their needs and issues. Espinosa arrived at the
gathering of forty-five Amazonian indigenous women, who were “local
leaders with scarce political experience and often very little formal
education,” 73 armed with paperwork to help the women construct their input
into the continental group and therefore to the Beijing conference, only to
have the women tell her they weren’t interested in the UN preparatory
process. They had never before been able to get together with others like
themselves without elites (even their own elites) present, and they wanted to
use the time to talk about how to help each other, to share information, and
to strategize about local issues. 74 The document they produced to carry up
to the international level was “based on personal testimonies and has a
narrative form.” Espinosa argues that
 This initial experience, in spite of coming more from external initiatives than from self-
generated political needs, is encouraging indigenous women to establish an intercultural and
intergenerational communication; to reflect about their needs and struggles; and think about
the skills and alternatives they have to develop in order to face the changes and aggressive
demands of the post-industrial world. Furthermore, this process may also contribute to the
democratization of indigenous organizations themselves. 75

Espinosa concludes from this experience,

Looking to the three conferences [Beijing, the continental Encounter for Indigenous Women,
and the local Regional Workshop], there is a disjuncture between the globalized discourse
about indigenous women generated in Beijing and local initiatives…. What Beijing
objectively did was to open spaces and opportunities for dialogue and communication at
different scales. The incorporation of indigenous women’s perspectives and political
leadership in global agendas can be seen as one of the effects of the internationalization of the
ethnic and gender debates.” 76

In his essay on the globalization of grassroots politics, Michael Peter Smith

points out that in social theory, the local is usually equated with “stasis” and
“personal identity,” while the global is characterized as the “site of dynamic
change, the decentering of meaning, and the fragmentation and
homogenization of culture—that is, the space of global caplitalism.” 77 In
contrast, he argues that a transnational grassroots politics has appeared,
which confuses these older notions of separate local and global spaces, and
which operates within particular transnational arenas. One example he offers
is a hearing of “Bay Area migrant women” to give testimony to the UN
Summit on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993. Like the conference
organized by WEDO in Miami and other gatherings like it, these activities
create new transnational political subjects, brought together as women, or as
members of other politically constructed subjectivities. They also create new
opportunities for dialogue and coalitions.
These political collectivities very well may be constructed by essentialist
discourses, but they are also collectivities built on hard-won unity across
radical differences. And they may serve the less powerful groups as well as
the powerful within the new collectivity. For instance, as I have argued in the
case of WEDO, “ecofeminist” discourses about women’s nurturing relation
to nature intervene within hegemonic processes in a context of globalizing
environmentalisms, and, through an organizational structure that emphasizes
equal participation among very differently located political actors, serve to
destabilize the essentialism of the rhetoric and produce valuable political
effects. Just the construction of these arenas creates new opportunities for
the less powerful to gain political leverage. Jane Jacob, in an essay critiquing
essentialist Western notions about Aboriginal women’s relationship to
environmental activism, makes a similar point: “In particular, there are
specific problems arising from the essentialized notions of Aboriginality and
woman that underpin radical environmentalisms and feminisms. Yet to read
these alliances only in terms of the reiteration of a politics of Western,
masculinist supremacy neglects the positive engagement indigenous women
may make with such ‘sympathizers’ in their efforts to verify and amplify
their struggles for land rights.” 78 The ecofeminist intervention into UN
processes creates a network, a space for debate, a mechanism not just for the
intervention of feminism, environmentalism, and anticolonial scholarship
into policymaking; but also for strategic coalitions to take place among
disempowered people and between privileged and underprivileged people in
one political collectivity. The practices and rhetoric of WEDO do not deal
sufficiently with questions of the relationship of U.S. racism to
environmental problems and to sexism. We still need organizational
frameworks that can deal with this intersection. And we need more ways to
intervene in globalizing environmentalisms besides the UN. But we also
need to keep in mind that, as in the contribution of the international feminist
antimilitarist movement to the end of the Cold War, we may need to tolerate
“essentialist” rhetoric that calls women from different locations to act
together against power.

Notes
1. Brinda Rao, “Dominant Constructions of Women and Nature in Social
Science Literature,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Pamphlet 2 (New
York: Guilford Publications, 1991), argues especially against the
“victimization” paradigm and the idea that “poor women and marginals
enjoyed a harmonious relationship with nature” (p. 18). Also see Bina
Agarwal, “The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India,”
Feminist Studies 18(1) (Spring 1992): 119–58; Cecile Jackson,
“Women/Nature or Gender/History? A Critique of Ecofeminist
‘Development’,” Journal of Peasant Studies 20(3) (April 1993): 389–
419.
2. Jackson, “Women/Nature,” p. 399.
3. Rao, “Dominant Constructions,” p. 12.
4. Rao, “Dominant Constructions,” p. 17.
5. As they are whenever a specific location in power relationships is made
to produce an automatic political consciousness and a world-historical
figure who is the carrier of the revolution (i.e., for class in Marxist
discourse, for race in black nationalist and other racially based
“revolutionary” discourses, for gender in “standpoint” feminist
discourses).
6. Rao, “Dominant Constructions,” p. 18.
7. Rao, “Dominant Constructions,” p. 17, p. 17, n. 11.
8. Melissa Leach, Rainforest Relations: Gender and Resource Use Among
the Mende of Gola, Sierra Leone (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1994), p. 23. Leach’s clearer and fairer identification
 of ecofeminism, than, say Rao’s, may in part be a reflection of the
clearer definition of ecofeminism as a location within development
discourse generated by the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy
Planet in November 1991. I will discuss this event below.
9. Leach, Rainforest Relations, p. 30.
10. Agarwal, “The Gender and Environment Debate,” p. 122.
11. Ortner’s essay can be found in M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, eds.,
Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1974), pp. 7–88.
12. I will take up this distinction, between “political practice” and
“theoretical tools,” more directly in the next chapter.
13. Leach, Rainforest Relations, p. 30.
14. I will take as examples here, in order of their publication: Irene
Dankelman and Joan Davidson, Women and Environment in the Third
World (London: Earthscan Publications, 1988); Heleen van den
Hombergh, Gender, Environment and Development: A Guide to the
Literature (Utrecht: International Books, 1993); Maria Mies and
Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London and New Jersey: Zed Books,
1993); Rosi Braidotti, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Haüsler, and Saski
Wieringa, Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development:
Towards a Theoretical Synthesis (London and Atlantic Highlands, New
Jersey: Zed Books, 1994); and Vandana Shiva, ed., Close To Home:
Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide
(Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994).
15. The history that follows is deeply indebted to Braidotti et al., Women,
the Environment, and Sustainable Development; and van den
Hombergh, Gender, Environment and Development.
16. Braidotti, et al., Women, the Environment, and Sustainable
Development, p. 78. The chapter I will reference in this section was
 written by Sabine Häusler.
17. For a description of one effort to harness women’s work to produce a
successful development project benefiting men, see Richard Schroeder,
“Shady Practice: Gender and the Political Ecology of Resource
Stabilization in Gambian Garden/Orchards,” Economic Geography
69(4) (1993): 349–65.
18. Leach, Rainforest Relations, p. 25.
19. As Richard Schroeder writes: “Judging from the inflow of capital
directed at gender equity oriented projects… it is clear that
ideologically motivated gender programming is highly lucrative turf in
The Gambia. The enactment of WID strategies in The Gambia
translated directly into hundreds of grants to women’s garden groups
for barbed wire, tools, hybrid seed and well-digging costs.” Schroeder,
“Co-opted Critiques: Gender, Environment and Development
Discourse,” conference paper presented at the American
Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, DC (November
1995), pp. 6–7.
20. Häusler, “Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development:
Emergence of the Theme and Different Views,” in Braidotti, et al,.
Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development, p. 80.
21. Häusler, “Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development,” in
Braidotti, et al., Women, the Environment, and Sustainable
Development, p. 80.
22. See van den Hombergh’s discussion in Gender, Environment, and
Development, pp. 58–60.
23. Häusler, “Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development,” in
Braidotti, et al., Women, the Environment, and Sustainable
Development, p. 81.
24. This was also the arena for the Women’s Peace Tent, mentioned in
chapter 3, in which Ynestra King, Starhawk, and the funder of
WomanEarth participated.
25. “The WID approach is associated with a concern to increase women’s
participation and benefits, thereby making development more effective.
Gender and Development represents a transition to ‘not only integrate
women into development, but look for the potential in development
initiatives to transform unequal social/gender relations and to empower
women’.” Häusler, “Women, the Environment, and Sustainable
Development,” quoting the Canadian Council for International
Cooperation in 1991, p. 82. Interestingly, this tension between
“women” and “gender” in the international context is the reverse of the
tension between the two terms in the context of U.S. women’s studies,
in which the prefix “women” signals a feminist intent, while the prefix
“gender” is controversial, feared by some as signalling a dilution of
feminist attention to women.
26. Häusler, “Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development,” p.
84.
27. Häusler, “Women, the Environment, and Sustainable Development,” p.
85.
28. Richard Schroeder, “Shady Practice.”
29. The notion of theories operating as “two-way” streets for
communication between subordinate groups or as new tools for
resistance to power, even when those theories may be part of a
dominating force, is complexly argued by Anna Tsing in
“Environmentalisms: Transitions as Translations,” in Joan Scott, Cora
Kaplan, and Debra Keates, eds., Transitions, Translations,
Environments: International Feminism in Contemporary Politics (New
York, Routledge, forthcoming).
30. This ability of environmental problems to challenge notions of “owned”
and limited space, whether defined by national boundaries or private
property relations, has long been an object of analytic interest.
31. Ramachanda Guha, “Radical Environmentalism and Preservation of
Wilderness: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11(1)
(1989): 71–83.
32. Peter J. Taylor and Frederick H. Buttell, “How Do We Know We Have
Global Environmental Problems: Science and the Globalization of
Environmental Discourse,” Geoforum 23(3) (1992): 405–16, p. 408.
33. Taylor and Buttel, “How Do We Know,” p. 409.
34. Taylor and Buttel, “How Do We Know,” p. 411–12.
35. Gaile McGregor, “Re constructing environment: A cross-cultural
perspective,” in Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 31(3)
(1994): 268–88, p. 269. She says: “Judging from the recent literature,
environmental thinking these days is so thoroughly transnationalized
that it makes communication studies look parochial” (p. 270). Given
McGregor’s interest in producing a “Canadian difference,” it’s
important to retain the Canadian form of the noncapitalization of her
article title. Americanized into all caps, the title would lose the double
entendre of “re constructing.”
36. Anna Tsing, “Environmentalism,” p. 11. I am quoting from the
conference paper of the same title, presented at the Transitions,
Environments, Translations: The Meanings of Feminism in
Contemporary Politics conference at the Institute for Research on
Women, Rutgers University and the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton University, April 1995, and forthcoming in Joan Scott, Cora
Kaplan, and Debra Keates, eds., Transitions, Translations,
Environments: International Feminism in Contemporary Politics (New
York: Routledge).
37. Tsing, “Environmentalism,” pp. 12–13. Ilene Rose Feinman’s “Brutal
Responsibilities and Second Class Citizens: Women Soldiers, Martial
Citizenship, and Feminist Antimilitarism” (Ph.D. dissertation, History
of Consciousness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz, Spring
1997) is a complex treatment of shifting feminist antimilitarist
discourses within a post-Cold War context that illuminates many issues
I touch on here.
38. Steven Greenhouse, “The Greening of American Diplomacy,” New
York Times (October 9, 1995), p. A4. I thank Marion Sturgeon for
bringing this article and the one following to my attention.
39. “American Spy Satellites Will Turn More Attention to Nature With End
of Cold War,” New York Times (November 27, 1995): Al, 6. See also
Richard Dreyfuss, “James Bond, Meet Captain Planet! The CIA is
Aiming at Environmental Command and Control,” Environmental
Magazine 6(1) (January 1995): 28.
40. Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly 273
(February 1994): 44–76, was an article that gained a great deal of
attention in U.S. policy-making circles.
41. Tsing’s story in this same article about the development of southern
environmentalism as both a strategy to resist Western neocolonialism
and as a tool in horizontal (Third World country versus Third World
country) political positionings is also important here.
42. Shiva’s term; see Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and
Development in India (London: Zed Books, 1988).
43. Joni Seager, Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global
Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1993).
44. Tsing, “Environmentalism,” p. 17.
45. My information about WEDO comes from Mim Kelber, “The Women’s
Environment and Development Organization,” Environment 36(8)
 (October 1994): 43–45; Carolyn Merchant, “Partnership Ethics:
Earthcare for a New Millennium,” in Earthcare: Women and the
Environment (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 209–24; various
WEDO documents; interviews with Mim Kelber (March 1995) and
Bella Abzug (May 1995); and participant observation of WEDO’s
activities in New York City at the March 1995 UN Preparatory
Meetings for the Fourth World Women’s Conference to be held in
Beijing. I am deeply grateful to Mim Kelber and Bella Abzug for their
time and frankness, and the WEDO staff for their assistance in
facilitating my participation in the PrepCom meetings and helping me
collect WEDO publications and documents.
46. The Women’s USA Fund, Inc., was founded by Bella Abzug, Mim
Kelber, Gloria Steinern, Patsy Mink, and Maxine Waters. Kelber, “The
Women’s Environment and Development Organization,” p. 43.
47. Mim Kelber interview, March 1995. All quotes attributed to Kelber in
what follows are from this interview unless otherwise specified.
48. See “Meet the Women Who Steer WEDO’s Course, Our Co-Chairs,” in
WEDO’s newsletter, News and Views 6(2) (September 1993), pp. 2–4.
49. Kelber, “The Women’s Environment and Development Organization,”
p. 43.
50. “Findings of the Tribunal,” in Official Report: World Women’s
Congress for a Healthy Planet (New York: WEDO, 1991), p. 2.
51. Michele Landsberg, “Overview,” in Official Report, pp. 2–3.
52. “Findings of the Tribunal,” in Official Report, pp. 8–9.
53. This conclusion is based on conversations with participants to the
conference, especially Amber Sverdrup, a reporter for The Ecofeminist
Newsletter, and Greta Gaard. See the special issue on the World
Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet, The Ecofeminism Newsletter
3(1) (Winter 1992), especially Amber Sverdrup, “Inspirational
 Messages, Inconsistent Practices” (p. 6) and Greta Gaard, “Finding a
Home in the World” (p. 7). Available from Noël Sturgeon, Women’s
Studies, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99163, USA.
54. Though she was interviewed as part of Greta Gaard’s video,
“Ecofeminism Now!”
55. Interestingly, the one funder who gave money to WEDO to bring U.S.
women of color to the Congress was the funder who had earlier
supported WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute, and who left because
U.S. racial diversity was stressed over international diversity. She also
funded the only project of WEDO’s that focused on U.S. women,
especially women of color: the Breast Cancer Project. Was this a lesson
learned from WomanEarth? Or simply an independent initiative of the
funder?
56. “Regional Caucus Reports,” in Official Report, pp. 26–35 (with inserted
unnumbered page). The caucuses were: African, European,
International Indigenous, Las Mujeres de América Latina y el Caribe,
Middle East, Asian, Pacific Region, Women of the South, and Women
of Color of North America.
57. “International Indigenous Women’s Caucus,” in Official Report, p. 30.
58. Mim Kelber interview, March 1995; Bella Abzug interview, May 1995.
59. “Women’s Action Agenda 21,” in Official Report, pp. 17–23.
60. For a description of “Planeta Fêmea,” see Carolyn Merchant,
“Partnership Ethics: Earthcare for a New Millennium,” in Earthcare.
See also the book published by organizers of Planeta Fêmea, Rosiska
Darcy de Oliveira and Thais Corral, Terra Femina (Rio de Janeiro: A
Joint Publication of Institute for Cultural Action [IDAC] and The
Network in Defense of Human Species [REDEH], 1992). This book
contains articles by Carolyn Merchant, Corrine Kumar D’Souza, Maia
Mies, Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira, Teresa Santa Clara Gomes, Thai
 Corral, and Vandana Shiva, and is closely identified with
“ecofeminism.”
61. See Agenda 21: An Easy Reference to the Specific Recommendations on
Women, (New York: UNIFEM, undated). Available from UNIFEM, 304
East 45th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY, 10017.
62. Preamble of “Women’s Action Agenda 21” in Official Report, p. 16.
63. Greta Gaard, personal communication, letter dated March 12, 1996, p.
6.
64. Bella Abzug interview, May 1995. All quotes from Abzug are from this
interview unless otherwise specified.
65. Poster available from WEDO, 845 Third Avenue, 15 Floor, New York,
NY, 10022. “It’s Time for Women to Mother Earth” was also the title of
Margarita Arias’s keynote speech at the “Congress for a Healthy
Planet.” From the initial “Program” for the Congress.
66. It is pertinent to note here that many ecofeminists have criticized and/or
complicated both the use of the image of the earth-seen-from-space (the
Whole Earth image) and the use of the idea of Mother Earth in
environmentalist rhetoric. See Yaakov Garb, “Perspective or Fiscape?
Ecofeminist Musings on Contemporary Earth Imagery,” in Irene
Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The
Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990), pp.
264–78; Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Native American Cultures,” in
Greta Gaard, ed., Ecofeminism_ Women, Animals, Nature, pp. 295–314,
esp. 301–305; and Marcy Darnovsky/Donna Haraway, “Overhauling
the Meaning Machines: An Interview with Donna Haraway,” Socialist
Review 21(2) (1991): 65–84, pp. 69–70.
67. From “Community Report Card,” available from WEDO, 845 Third
Avenue, 15th Floor, New York, NY, 10022; phone number: (212) 759–
7982; fax: 759–8647.
68. Maria Fernanda Espinosa, “Indigenous Women on Stage: New Agendas
and Political Processes Among Indigenous Women in the Ecuadorian
Amazon,” paper presented at the Feminist Generations Conference,
Bowling Green State University, February 1996.
69. Espinosa, “Indigenous Women on Stage,” p. 3.
70. Espinosa, “Indigenous Women on Stage,” p. 4.
71. Espinosa, “Indigenous Women on Stage,” p. 6.
72. Espinosa, “Indigenous Women on Stage,” p. 8.
73. Espinosa, “indigenous Women on Stage,” p. 10, n. 9.
74. I am paraphrasing the story Espinosa told as part of her presentation of
the paper to the Feminist Generations conference. This story is not in
the text of her paper.
75. Both preceding quotes from Espinosa, “Indigenous Women on Stage,”
p. 9.
76. Espinosa, “Indigenous Women on Stage,” p. 10. Another example of
the usefulness of “gender-sensitive NGOs” for local women in
sometimes surprising ways can be found in Bina Agarwal, “Gender,
Environment and Collective Action,” paper presented at the
Transitions, Environments, Translations: The Meanings of Feminism in
Contemporary Politics conference at the Institute for Research on
Women, Rutgers University, and the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton University, April 1995, and forthcoming in Joan Scott, Cora
Kaplan, and Debra Keates, eds., Transitions, Translations,
Environments: International Feminism in Contemporary Politics (New
York: Routledge).
77. Michael Peter Smith, “Can You Imagine? Transnational Migration and
the Globalization of Grassroots Politics,” Social Text 39 (Summer
1994): 15–33, p. 15.
78. Jane Jacobs, “Earth Honoring: Western Desires and Indigenous
Knowledges,” in Alison Blunt and Gilliam Rose, eds., Writing Women
and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York:
Guilford, 1994), pp. 169–96, p. 169.
6 What’s in a Name?
Ecofeminisms As/Ln Feminist Theory
DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-7

Some ecofeminists have argued that there is an “establishment feminist

backlash” against ecofeminism, resulting in a lack of ecofeminist writing in
prominent feminist journals such as SIGNS, as well as the invisibility of
ecofeminist theory in important academic feminist conferences and
anthologies. 1 In making this charge, Greta Gaard describes the role feminist
taxonomies take in what she sees as “establishment” feminism’s exclusion of
ecofeminism_
Certainly there are branches of thought within ecofeminism_ the branch that has received the
most attention to date is cultural ecofeminism. … What’s curious is that while liberal and
cultural feminism are popularly [that is, in the eyes of powerful academic feminists] thought
to be wrong (clearly, an assessment made from the standpoint of socialist feminism, which is
the current equivalent of establishment feminism), their proponents at least gain access to the
[feminist] press. Within ecofeminism, these two wrong branches are the ones that receive the
most press, and are then innocently or willfully taken to represent the whole tree, thereby
allowing establishment feminism to dismiss ecofeminism entirely. 2

Gaard goes on to tell a story about the rejection by SIGNS of a

commissioned piece on ecofeminism, which was then rejected in turn by the
NWSA Journal. Though I don’t know enough about the details of these
rejections to judge Gaard’s story on its own, I certainly can attest to
numerous occasions when, in presenting my work in academic feminist
contexts, I was assumed to be making “essentialist” and therefore useless
arguments just because I was writing about “ecofeminism.” But it has also
happened that the anti-essentialist aspects of my work have been objected to
by feminist audiences who expected and desired essentialist ways of
connecting women and nature. Dealing with my own objections to the
essentialism of some ecofeminist arguments, and the effects on my work of a
widespread assumption among my academic feminist peers that such
essentialisms permanently and thoroughly tarnish ecofeminism as a political
position, I have struggled with the question of whether I would want to
identify myself and my work as ecofeminist.
Why not ecofeminism? Why shouldn’t feminist theorists welcome a
political discourse that interrogates the equation of women with nature and
examines the political consequences of that equation not just for women but
for nature as well? Why don’t the many feminists exploring the gendered
representations of nature and the naturalized representations of women in
various cultural contexts call themselves “ecofeminists”? Why not extend
the longstanding feminist interest in patriarchal equations between “women”
and “nature” to a feminist consideration of their effects on the environment
as well as on women? What has the ecofeminist movement done or not done
to deserve its exclusion from certain feminist circles? I trust that, by this
point, readers of this book understand some of the problems with certain
kinds of ecofeminist discourses that essentialize women, people of color, and
nature, thereby making some ecofeminist arguments suspect. But by now, I
hope that readers are also convinced that such essentalist rhetoric is not
devoid of political usefulness nor the only kind of ecofeminist discourse;
and, in any case, is constantly and fairly easily destabilized, though not
eradicated.
But this still leaves the question: Why ecofeminism? Why not just call the
feminist analysis of the interaction between sexism and enviromental
problems “feminism”? I believe that “ecofeminism,” as a term, indicates a
double political intervention; of environmentalism into feminism and
feminism into environmentalism, that is as politically important as the
designations “socialist feminism” and “Black feminism” were previously.
Perhaps it is a name that will only be transiently useful within our history;
but the stakes in such a politics of naming are deeply embedded in a long
tradition within the development of U.S. feminism, and can be understood
better through an examination of the practice of typologizing feminisms. 3
In this chapter, a brief look at the genesis of diverse typologies of
feminism will bring us to an investigation of assorted efforts to typologize
ecofeminisms. I will examine various attempts to rename “ecofeminism” in
order to divest it of its essentialist connotations, and to carve out a
theoretical apparatus for a feminist critique of environmental problems that
does not make the essentialist move. In embarking on this investigation of
naming, renaming, and typologizing, I want to interrogate the anti-
essentialist tangent within feminist theory (and, by extension, ecofeminist
theory) that creates a division between feminist theory and feminist activist
practice, one that has demonized “cultural feminism.” Finally, I will end
with a set of suggestions for ecofeminist theory and ecofeminist practice.

Typologizing Feminisms
In a number of places in this book, I have noted that feminist critics have
created an ecofeminist straw-woman, rejecting it for constructing an
essentialism of race, gender, class, and/or nature. At the same time, I have
detailed the occurrence of ecofeminist essentialisms, ecofeminist natures, in
nearly every moment of ecofeminism’s history as a movement. I have argued
that these moments of essentialism are almost always strategic, unstable, and
contested—as long as the ecofeminist politics in question were aimed toward
inclusion of a variety of radical issues, and/or the organizational practice was
oriented toward bringing together women whose political subjectivities were
variously located, within a participatory democratic context in which
different voices could be heard. I have portrayed the process of radical
political movements as one in which the creation of collective political
subjects always already contains within it the germs of “essentialism”
(meaning here, the notion that subjectivities are seen as containing some
similar, universal, and/or inherent commonality) and hence the danger of
exclusionary practices. But I have also contended that as long as our political
organizations are radically democratic, and as long as we see political
opposition as a contested, historical, dynamic process, these “essentialisms”
of strategically created political identities will be constantly destabilized. 4
In this section, I want to suggest that the same inconstant process is true
for the political practice known as “feminist theorizing” within the academy.
To show this, I will briefly examine efforts to fix categories of feminism
artificially, to lift them out of the dynamic, conflicted, political process, for
(important, and perhaps necessary) analytic purposes. The main tool for
producing these fixed “objects of knowledge” (as Katie King calls them)
known as “feminist theory” is the practice of typologizing. As King argues,
the “object of knowledge” produced by typologies is a particular category of
feminist theory that is seen as the “best,” one that subsumes other categories
of feminist theory as well as the political, historically specific, process of
contestation in which feminist theorizing is embedded. The “best” feminist
theory is the “telos of this machine [the typology] producing identities and
processing literatures.” 5 King’s method of reading the political stakes in
typologizing practices is crucial to my analysis here.
My examination is prompted by ecofeminism being too easily, in these
typologies, relegated to the category “cultural feminism,” which, through an
earlier process of typologizing, was tagged with the essentialist label and
determined to be one of the “losers” of the competing kinds of feminist
theories. Since the “winner” of the typologizing process is most often a
brand of feminist theory closely associated with white academic feminist
theories, and the “losers” with certain kinds of activist, or popular,
feminisms, I am concerned with how this practice creates an artificial divide
between feminist theory and feminist practices. 6 I also argue that feminisms
of women of color are often made invisible by this process. Overall, I think
this practice is not attentive enough to historical complexities in the
formation and deployment of feminist analyses and theoretical practices. So
while it is useful for analyzing different feminist approaches theoretically, it
is a poor guide to understanding feminism as a social movement.
Typologizing feminism has a long history in the U.S. feminist movement.
7 Let me tell a story about this history, one that shifts our attention away
from the fine theoretical and analytical distinctions that are the useful
products of typologizing practices, to focus on the practice of taking various
feminist positionings out of their historical contexts and obscuring the
minute political contests that generate them. I wish I could tell a story about
the appearance of various feminisms with the same amount of detail as the
story I’ve just told about the appearance of various ecofeminisms: a story
that would emphasize the construction of political positions out of their
engagement with particular political contexts and conjunctures. However,
this is not the place, at the end of this book, to commence the history of U.S.
feminisms. 8 So I ask for indulgence at this point, to allow me to sketch the
outlines of such a story about U.S. feminisms, without filling in all of the
details but relying optimistically at numerous points on a reader’s own
knowledge of the history of U.S. feminism.
The task of analytically separating different kinds of feminisms was, in
the second-wave women’s movement in this country, embedded in political
struggles involving not just different feminist groups but also the
relationship of feminism to the existing nonfeminist left. Arising out of the
sixties’ movements, especially civil rights, student, and antiwar movements,
the women’s liberation movement contained within it ongoing debates over
radical political analyses, strategies, and tactics that made sense in wider
movement contexts. Thus, the early differences between groups of feminists
are often clarified in terms of their relationships with male New Left groups,
or in terms of specific political debates that had at the time special
resonance. Referencing them thus generates these difference out of
movement contexts themselves.
The earliest analytical division in the women’s liberation movement was
made between “radical” feminism (committed to structural change and
revolution) and “liberal” feminism (committed to reform within existing
political structures). But variants were quickly teased out of “radical”
feminism as well; for instance the categories “feminist” and “politico.” As Jo
Freeman describes it: “The original issue was whether the fledging women’s
liberation movement should remain a branch of the radical left movement or
become an independent women’s movement. Proponents of the two
positions became known as ‘politicos’ and ‘feminists,’ respectively, and
traded arguments about whether the enemy was ‘capitalism’ or male-
dominated social institutions.” 9 Note that the “feminist” grouping (which
later becomes tagged as essentialist) “cultural feminism,” is constructed
around the felt need to separate itself from the male-dominated white left,
similar to some of the ecofeminisms examined in chapter 1 that were aimed
at carving out an independent feminist position from male-dominated white
environmentalisms.
In the more academic typologizing that developed by distancing itself
from movement contexts and is first evident in Alison Jaggar’s ground-
breaking 1983 book, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, the “politicos”
evolve into two groups, “Marxist feminists” and “socialist feminists.” An
interesting aspect to the categories “radical,” “liberal,” and “socialist,” (also
found in Josephine Donovan’s 1985 Feminist Theory: The Intellectual
Traditions of American Feminism) 10 that dominate descriptions of second-
wave feminism, is the Cold War flavor of the discourse. I am sympathetic to
the difficulties of manageably describing contemporary feminism, but
“radical feminism” too often seemed to serve early typologizers of the
feminist movement as a catch-all category, like “Third World,” in which they
could safely stow away feminisms that did not fall under the superpower
category of “liberal” or “socialist.” Thus, some accounts of “radical
feminism” put together feminisms of women of color, lesbian separatists,
anarchists, and Shulamith Firestone, who often got top billing. For feminists
of color in particular, this categorical move made invisible their unique, and
varying, contributions to feminist practice and theorizing.
In these academic typologies, the two nonliberal feminist positions—
radical and socialist—are often distinguished in terms of divergent analyses
of the “root” cause of sexism (that is, early socialist feminism identified a
dual system of sex and class oppression; while radical feminism claimed sex
oppression). Many feminist typologizers include Marxist feminism, a variant
privileging class oppression as the root cause of other forms of domination.
But with what might be called, with a certain poignant humor, the world-
historical defeat of Marxism during the 1980s, the position seems
particularly anachronistic, though it retains a ghostly appearance in later
typologies built on Jaggar’s and Donovan’s.
Another new category generated out of these typologies is “cultural
feminism,” indicating a supposed preference for cultural strategies for
radical change (particularly in the formation of separatist “women’s
culture”) rather than institutional politics (the provenance of liberal
feminists) or theoretical understandings of the structural and economic
frameworks underpinning domination (the specialty of socialist feminism).
Jaggar’s 1983 typology does not use the label “cultural feminism,” but her
description of “radical feminism” incorporates many features of what later is
called “cultural feminism.” Donovan’s 1985 typology includes the categories
“cultural feminism” and “radical feminism,” but by “cultural feminism” she
means feminism of the nineteenth century, which distinguished itself from
liberal Enlightenment feminism by aiming for a “broader cultural
transformation.” 11 Her description of “radical feminism” tallies with
Jaggar’s.
In 1983, Alice Echols’s essay “The New Feminism of Yin and Yang”
identified a variant of feminism, for her most clearly exemplified by the
feminist antipornography movement, which, like Jaggar and Donovan’s
“radical feminism,” revalued “female” qualities through biologistic
arguments. 12 In 1984, Ellen Willis’s essay, “Radical Feminism and Feminist
Radicalism,” first used the term “cultural feminism” to describe the variant
identified by Echols, a feminism that “seized on the idea of women’s
oppression as the primary oppression.” 13 In later typologies, “cultural
feminism” and “radical feminism” often become conflated. 14
In this way, “cultural feminism” is the category that most firmly gets
tagged with the label “essentialist,” because its analysis tends to identify
“men” as the problem and “women” as the solution; in doing so, it elides
inequalities of race and class among the category “women” as well as
idealizes “feminine” qualities and values (note the similarity with essentialist
versions of ecofeminism, which turn up in places similarly motivated as the
“feminist” version of radical feminism to gain independence from male-
dominated left positions). In contrast, socialist feminism (notably, the
grouping that becomes most embedded in the academy), with its initial
attempt at dual systems theory (paying attention to gender and class
simultaneously) and becoming a complex analytic apparatus, slowly and
unevenly makes space for poststructuralist feminism, which, giving up the
idea of finding a “root cause” along the way, identifies the shared processes
(in language, in philosophy, in disciplinary practices of various kinds) of
multiple forms of domination, ultimately including (under pressure by
lesbian feminists and feminists of color) racism, classism, heterosexism, and
sexism as the most important forms of domination. By this description of the
relationship between socialist and poststructuralist feminism, I don’t mean to
imply that all socialist feminists are now poststructuralist feminists, but that
socialist feminism, with its emphasis on the social construction of gender
and the necessity to see multiple systems of domination in operation,
provided the foundation for a turn to poststructuralism. Thus, in more recent
efforts at typologizing, it is often poststructuralist feminism that wins the
categorical contest, over cultural, liberal, and socialist feminism. 15
Jo Freeman’s The Politics of Women’s Liberation (as well as her various
articles on the women’s movement), Ellen Willis’s essay mentioned above,
and Alice Echols’ book, Daring to Be Bad, are rare examples of accounts
that generate different feminist categories out of a movement history rather
than through textual analysis of feminist writings. Echols’s book is
particularly important in the process of cementing the label “essentialist”
onto cultural feminism. Her interest is in divesting early radical feminism of
the essentialist label by generating a separation between “cultural” and
“radical” feminists through a rearticulation of the old “feminist” versus
“politico” split. As Echols says about the genesis of her book:
A study of this sort seems to me especially important because radical feminism is so poorly
understood and so frequently conflated with cultural feminism. This conceptual confusion
arises in part because radical feminism was not monolithic and aspects of radical feminism did
anticipate cultural feminism But while cultural feminism did evolve from radical feminism it
nonetheless deviated from it in crucial respects. Most fundamentally, radical feminism was a
political movement dedicated to eliminating the sex-class system, whereas cultural feminism
was a countercultural movement aimed at reversing the cultural valuation of the male and the
devaluation of the female. In the terminology of today, radical feminists were typically social
constructionists who wanted to render gender irrelevant, while cultural feminists were
generally essentialists who sought to celebrate femaleness. 16
Reading this in the very early period of conceiving the project that became
this book, I felt a shock of recognition. Here, a political movement that is
complex and contradictory (radical feminism for Echols, ecofeminism for
me) has been rejected as essentialist (“in the terminology of today”) because
of reductive, ahistorical portrayals of the movement that conflate its social
constructionists with its essentialists. 17 And Echols’ solution is similar to
mine: to give an account that portrays the movement’s divisions, its strategic
calculations, its historical specificity, the fluidity of its members’ politics and
self-identifications. Nevertheless, according to the argument I make here—
that all movements contain both essentialist and anti-essentialist moments
within a process of political struggle in democratic organizational forms—
Echols’s distinction would also constitute a reductive characterization of
“cultural” feminism, thereby eliminating her differentiation between
“cultural” and “radical” feminism. This does not vitiate her fine analysis of
the problems encountered by early women’s liberation groups, but it points
to the difficulty of making typological distinctions stick once you look at the
actual complexities of movements.
Before I leave the subject of typologizing feminisms, I want to note two
common results of the practice: the invisibility of feminists of color, and the
creation of a divide between feminist theory and feminist activism. As I have
said above, many of these early typologies either leave feminists of color out
or subsume them under the category “radical feminist.” Only slowly, after
much criticism by feminists of color, do typologists begin to provide
accounts of the unique analysis, let alone the varieties of theories, produced
by feminists of color, who had from the beginning of the second-wave
women’s movement generated theories of multiple, simultaneous
oppressions of racism, classism, sexism, and, often, heterosexism. 18 An
illustration of this slow process is the changing categories in Alison Jaggar
and Paula Rothenberg’s textbook, Feminist Frameworks, which has had
three editions, in 1978, 1984, and 1993. 19 In the first edition, Jaggar and
Rothenberg identify four forms of feminist theory: liberal, Marxist, radical,
and socialist. Very few women of color are included in the book, and none
are used to illustrate a particular form of feminist theory. In the 1984 edition,
there are the same four kinds of feminist theory, with the addition of
“women of color.” In the 1993 edition, the original four forms of feminist
theory are joined by “multicultural feminism” and “global feminism,”
enacting categories that finally bring theories constructed by feminists of
color and Third World feminists fully into view, though still excluding them
from the supposedly “earlier” more entrenched forms: liberal,
radical/cultural, and socialist.
Katie King suggests that this pattern of white feminists’ omission,
subsumption, and dilatory recognition of theories by feminists of color is
part of the process of producing theory out of feminist “conversations,” or
the layering of debates between feminists situated in specific (and often
limited) cohorts, networks, and spaces (such as classrooms, conferences,
movement groups). Because these early typologies have been produced by
white academic feminists, she shows the manner in which their networks and
self-understandings construct the categories they use in particular ways that
organize out the intellectual production of feminists of color: “The
categories for inclusion [in the typology] skew, at the very least, the race and
class composition of their writers/theorists.” And this is not simply a matter
of intention, but the way in which feminist “‘theory’ and ‘theory-makers’ are
disciplinarily determined objects.” 20 The accusation of racism thus made
against these typologies has an ironic ring, since it is the charge of racism
that is produced as the motivation for the rejection of liberal feminism and
the characterization of cultural feminism as “essentialist” by socialist
feminists and poststructuralist feminists. Like the antiracist imperative
(which ironically is part of the construction of the 1980s ecofeminist
discourse of “indigenous women” that we examined in chapter 4), an
antiracist impulse (in response to critiques by feminists of color) similarly
generates an exclusionary practice by white academic feminist typologists.
These complaints by feminists of color about their exclusion from
“hegemonic feminism” have an echo in Gaard’s complaint about the
exclusion of ecofeminists from “establishment feminism.”
The label “hegemonic feminism” for what might be called the power elite
of academic feminist theorists is Chela Sandoval’s term, whose 1991
typology is explicitly a response to the standard categories of liberal, radical,
and socialist feminism organizing the theorizing of feminists of color out.
Sandoval examines the “four-phase history of consciousness consisting of
‘liberal’, ‘Marxist’, ‘radical/cultural,’ and ‘socialist’ feminisms, [which
Sandoval schematizes] as ‘women are the same as men,’ ‘women are
different from men’, ‘women are superior’ and the fourth catchall category,
‘women are a racially divided class.”’ She argues that feminists of color
have been systematically excluded from these categories, even when their
theorizing was the cause of the shifts from one feminism to the other: “I
contend that this comprehension of feminist consciousness is hegemonically
unified, framed, and buttressed with the result that the expression of a unique
form of U.S. third world feminism, active over the last thirty years, has
become invisible outside of its all-knowing logic.” 21
Instead of the standard feminist typology, Sandoval offers another map, a
“topography” rather than a “typology,” which is not necessarily about
feminist theories alone, but about forms of oppositional consciousness
possible not only in “struggles against gender domination, but [in] the
struggles against race, class, and cultural hierarchies which mark the
twentieth century in the United States.” 22 This schema replaces the four-part
traditional feminist typology with four categories of oppositional
consciousness: “equal rights” (in which a “subordinated group might argue
that their differences—for which they have been assigned inferior status—
are only in appearance, not reality” and members of that group aim for
integration with those in power); “revolutionary” (in which “the
subordinated group claim their differences from those in power and call for a
social transformation that will accommodate and legitimate those
differences”); “supremacism” (in which “not only do the oppressed claim
their differences, but they also assert that those very differences have
provided them access to a superior evolutionary level than those currently in
power” and thus justify their leadership over the powerful); and “separatism”
(in which the oppressed claim their differences, but do not aim for
integration, transformation or leadership, but rather a “form of political
resistance … organized to protect and nurture the differences that define it
through complete separation from the dominant social order”). 23 To these
four categories, which roughly recapitulate the categories of liberal,
Marxist/socialist, radical, and cultural feminism, Sandoval adds a fifth
category: “differential consciousness.” This category is unlike the others. It
“operates like the clutch of an automobile: the mechanism that permits the
driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission
of power.” 24 Though she places it in her “topography” as a fifth category,
she sees it as operating through the other categories, embodied by the
struggles of feminists of color within and outside of the white U.S. feminist
movement, changing each category’s emphasis from a fixed set of positions,
ideas, and analyses to a fluid set of tools, tactics, and approaches to be used
when the situation calls for them—in forming coalitions, resisting power,
and generating theories. In Sandoval’s words: “For analytic purposes I place
this mode of differential consciousness in the fifth position, even though it
functions as the medium through which the ‘equal rights,’ ‘revolutionary,’
‘supremacist,’ and ‘separatist’ modes of oppositional consciousness became
effectively transformed out of their hegemonic versions. Each is now
ideological and tactical weaponry for confronting the shifting currents of
power.” 25
“Differential consciousness,” as Sandoval describes it, is a form of mobile
political subjectivity, which she is well aware parallels postmodernist and
poststrucuralist theories of constructed, fluid subjectivities. But she claims
that the differential consciousness generated by “U.S. third world feminists”
predates that postmodernist turn, and additionally contains within it an
optimism and an experience with the form that allows it to operate more
effectively and always in opposition (rather than in possible complicity with)
postmodern forms of power. 26 Differential consciousness, in constantly
honing in on resistance to power relations rather than on constructing
theoretical purity, concentrates on the process of political action and theory
making, exploding categorical loyalties, and seeking coalitions, affinities,
and allies.
Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to
confidently commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month,
year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to the requisites
of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power’s formation require it; enough
grace to recognize alliances with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race,
gender, and class justice, when their readings of power call for alternative oppositional stands.
Within the realm of differential consciousness, oppositional ideological positions, unlike their
incarnations under hegemonic feminist comprehension, are tactics—not strategies. Self-
conscious agents of differential consciousness recognize one another as allies, country-women
and men of the same psychic terrain. As the clutch of a car provides the driver the ability to
shift gears, differential consciousness permits the practitioner to choose tactical positions, that
is, to self-consciously break and reform ties to ideology, activities which are imperative for the
pyschological and political practices that permit the achievement of coalition across
differences. Differential consciousness occurs within the only possible space where, in the
words of third world feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, “cross-cultural and cross-racial
loving” can take place, through the ability of the self to shift its identities in an activity she
calls “world-travelling.” 27
As Sandoval indicates in the above quote, “hegemonic feminist” taxonomies
do more than contruct racially exclusive categories of feminism; they also,
through their creation of “inferior” and “superior” kinds of feminism, make
activist alliances and coalitions difficult. Here we have come to the second
(and related) problem with dominant feminist taxonomies of liberal,
radical/cultural, socialist and now poststructuralist feminism_ they create a
division between feminist activism and feminist academic practice. This is
mainly achieved by relegating most feminist activism to the (putatively
inferior) category of radical/cultural feminism or liberal feminism and either
rejecting it as essentialist or locating it in a feminist past. Early feminist
“zap” actions, lesbian separatist creations of women’s businesses and
women’s self-help institutions, coalition politics engaged in by feminists of
color, anti-pornography demonstrations, and feminist antimilitarist direct
actions, have all been placed by white academic feminists into the
(essentialist) category of radical/cultural feminism. Organizing for the ERA,
lobbying for pro-choice legislation, gaining entrance into male-dominated
professional schools and businesses, and arguing for equal social security
and pension benefits for women, are all put under the category “liberal
feminism.” 28 In order to depict “socialist feminism” as a separate category
from radical or liberal feminism in 1983, Jaggar strips “politicos” from their
engagement with radical feminist activism_ she quotes a 1978 statement by
Margaret Page: “[Socialist feminism] is a commitment to the development of
an analysis and political practice, rather than to one that already exists.” 29
We can also see the exclusion of women of color and of activists in Ferree
and Hess’s 1985 book, Controversy and Coalition. Ferree and Hess
characterize socialist feminist political issues as “the feminization of
poverty,” “comparable worth,” “wages for housework,” and “international
perspectives,” but give examples of socialist feminist engagement with these
issues almost entirely in terms of their scholarship. 30 By contrast, political
actions and organizations concerned with working-class women and women
of color are examined in the section entitled “Sympathizers and Activists:
Problems of Mobilization,” which effectively segregates activism, women of
color, and working-class women from “socialist feminism.” The existence of
feminist activism is thus kept separate from the feminist theory with the
most promise in the authors’s eyes. As Ferree and Hess put it in a section
called “Realizing the Promise of Diversity”: “Despite many barriers [they do
not specify precisely the nature of these barriers] to the participation of
minority and working-class women, the New Feminist Movement today
embraces over two dozen organizations devoted to their concerns. Minority
and working-class women are active in all facets of the movement, but only
recently has an effort been made to integrate their needs and concerns into
the movement’s overall goals and strategies.” 31 Finally, Chris Weedon, for
whom “poststructuralist feminism” is the “winner” of the categorical contest,
barely mentions activism at all. In her chapter on “Feminist Critical
Practice,” she argues that poststructuralism’s contribution to feminism is a
feminist deconstructive and critical literary practice. She quite clearly
locates poststructuralist feminism in the academy, separate from other kinds
of feminist activism_ “For women active in the literary and educational
institutions the task of transformation may seem overwhelming. It is
important that we continue to be involved in and maintain supportive
strategic links with the wider feminist movement, claiming and using the
institutional power available to us but always with a view to subverting it
and making resistant discourses and subject positions much more widely
available.” 32 Though her discussion in this section pays rare attention to the
political effects of academic critical practice, since Weedon has begun her
book pointing out the limits of liberal feminism, the essentialism of radical
feminism, and the strengths of poststructuralist feminism, the resulting effect
is an impression that poststructuralist feminism is only of use in the
academy, and, further, that this political practice of academic
poststructuralist feminist literary criticism is the most useful to feminism.

Typologizing Ecofeminisms
Ecofeminists have been just as sensitive as Alice Echols or Chela Sandoval
to the dangers of feminist critics reducing their movement to its essentialist
practitioners or its essentialist moments; or to being organized out of
typologies of feminist theory. They have reacted in the tradition of feminist
scholarship by creating typologies of ecofeminism. These typologies have as
their common goal the production of a nonessentializing ecofeminist theory
as the “best” ecofeminism. 33 In this section, I will look at various efforts to
generate a nonessentializing ecofeminist theory by the creation of a new
name for such a position. I will look at the theoretical arguments used to
purify these new ecofeminism positions from essentialism and show that
none of them succeed in eliminating essentialism (especially particular
universalisms generated through the construction of unitary, coherent
categories) completely. I will also ask the question of ecofeminist
typologizers that I have asked of feminist typologizers above: Do their
typologies make ecofeminists of color invisible, and/or separate ecofeminist
theory from ecofeminist action?
The various ecofeminisms produced by ecofeminist typologies can be
mapped as follows. In Figure 4, under the column “Constructionist versus
Essentialist,” each author’s preferred theory is on the left, while the rejected
“essentialist” theory is on the right.
Figure 4Ecofeminist Typologies

All these ecofeminist typologies locate feminism as the birthplace of

ecofeminism, both explicitly in their origin stories and through their overlay
of hegemonic feminist typologies onto ecofeminism. Also note the many
efforts made to try to create a constructionist position for ecofeminism,
giving the lie to those who would create a straw-woman of essentialism to
characterize every ecofeminist theory. The last three categories, by Agarwal,
Seager, Alaimo, and Rocheleau, et al., are by authors who explicitly locate
themselves outside of ecofeminism; I have included them here as a
provocation, one I will discuss somewhat later in this chapter.
But before I examine these typologies more closely, I would like to
introduce Kathy Ferguson’s analysis of the different kinds of theoretical
moves that make up “essentialisms” of various sorts: a typology of
essentialism. Ferguson points out that the charge of “essentialism” is often
thrown about without specifying what is particularly being objected to. She
distinguishes three kinds of “essentialism.” The first she calls “essentialism
per se”: arguments attributing “women’s pyschological and social
experiences to fixed and unchanging traits resident in women’s physiology
or in some larger order of things.” 46 The second form she calls
“universalism,” which “takes the patterns visible in one’s own time and
place to be accurate for all.” The third kind she calls “the constitution of
unified categories,” which “entails any constitution of a unified set of
categories around the terms woman and man.” 47
Ferguson argues that the first kind, “essentialism per se,” while it exists in
a number of feminist theories and political positions, is rare and always
contested from within the given position that generates it. 48 “In fact,” she
writes, “[feminist theorists] have been so determined not to participate in this
[biologistic] discourse that we have difficulty talking coherently about
bodies at all.” Thus, she argues: “Within current debates in feminist theory,
accusations of this form of essentialism do battle with an argument made
largely out of straw.” 49
Ferguson finds more frequent examples of “universalism” in
contemporary feminist theories. The third kind, “the constitution of unified
categories,” she finds to be problematic as a charge. “Any analysis requires
the naming of such coherencies; it is fundamental to the use of language to
employ some set of categories about which generalizations can be made.
There are ways to assert one’s categories that contain periodic reminders of
their partiality, and ways that do not, but the need to operate with some set of
unified categories is unavoidable. Feminists who deplore this as essentialist
or universalist are over-looking their own necessary participation in this
linguistic practice.” 50
The problem that Ferguson identifies with charges of essentialism is that
they commonly confuse the three kinds of essentialism. There is a “slippage
among different meanings of essentialism”: 51 a critique of unified
categories often claims that they produce universalism, and then
universalism is characterized as essentialism per se; or, the criticism starts
with the last term and conflates it with the first. Ferguson identifies this
process as the culprit in a constant contest to identify “bad” feminist theories
versus “good” feminist theories.
Beginning with the easy target of essentialism per se, the argument slides through a criticism
of universalism into an untenable rejection of unified coherencies themselves. In the process,
a comforting but overly simple distinction emerges between virtuous theories that do not
employ unified categories of analysis and offensive theories that do. I do not mean to say that
there are no offensive theories. … My point is that important critics of universalizing weaken
their case by neglecting their own participation in the linguistic/political practices they
deplore. 52

I would add to Ferguson’s point that if unified categories are a necessary, if

sometimes unfortunate, part of an analysis, it may also be true that unified
categories, and possibly universalism, are a necessary part of mobilization
for political action and strategic positioning within hegemonic political
processes. This would explain why feminist activists are so often relegated
to the “essentialist” categories of feminist theory. And, as I have tried to
demonstrate throughout this book, such “essentialist” rhetorics, seen from
within movements rather than from an outsider’s point of view, are often
understood as a political strategy rather than a statement of “fact.” 53
Further, given Sandoval’s description of the way in which Third World
women of color are willing to strategically occupy politically useful unified
categories out of which to construct tactical subjectivities, it would also
indicate the (unconscious) logic behind placing “women of color” in these
“essentialist” categories of feminism. Thus, in examining ecofeminist
typologies, we should not be surprised to find similar patterns of exclusion
and rejection of activists, as well as patterns of making ecofeminists of color
invisible as theorists. I will turn now to such an examination of ecofeminist
typologies.
 Carolyn Merchant has used Jaggar’s typology of liberal, radical, Marxist,
and socialist feminisms, and generated out of it categories of liberal, radical,
and socialist ecofeminism. For Merchant, socialist ecofeminism is the
“winner” of the categorical contest, because radical ecofeminism, “in
emphasizing the female, body and nature components of the dualities
male/female, mind/body, and culture/nature … runs the risk of perpetuating
the very hierachies it seeks to overthrow.” 54 In contrast, a socialist
ecofeminism “views both nature and human nature as socially constructed.”
55 These quotes come from an early version of Merchant’s typology, and the

newness of ecofeminism as a position is signaled by a constant slippage

between “feminism” and “ecofeminism” in Merchant’s language. In a later
version of this typology, Merchant’s categories are liberal, cultural, social,
and socialist ecofeminism, marking both the successful instatiation of
“cultural” over “radical” for the “essentialist” version of feminism, as well
as acknowledgment of the specific ecofeminist arguments arising out of the
social ecological position, which differentiates itself from socialism. 56 In
this version, “cultural ecofeminism” is once again marred by essentialism
(and Merchant, focused here specifically on what Ferguson calls
“essentialism per se,” connects it with “spirituality”) while social
ecofeminism “distinguishes itself from spirituality-oriented cultural
ecofeminists … [by beginning with] the materialist, social feminist analysis
of early radical feminism that sought to restructure the oppressions imposed
on women by marriage, the nuclear family, romantic love, the capitalist
state, and patriarchal religion.” 57 (Note the resuscitation of the “feminists”
versus “politicos” split, here produced as “cultural ecofeminist” versus
“social ecofeminist.”) Socialist ecofeminism, on the other hand, “offers a
standpoint from which to analyze social and ecological transformations, and
to suggest social actions that will lead to the sustainability of life and a just
society.” 58
 Here socialist ecofeminism takes the role of “suggesting” political action
to others, rather than generating it from within its own location. Merchant’s
typology consistently places ecofeminist activists in either the “cultural
ecofeminist” category or as examples of action “explained” by socialist
ecofeminism. Notably, the activists in the first category are primarily white
U.S. ecofeminists or multiraced women environmental activists, while the
activists that conduct actions “suggested” by socialist feminism are from the
Third World and the Second World. This ambiguity around whether these
latter activists are socialist ecofeminists or are simply explained by socialist
ecofeminism arises from Merchant’s implicit understanding that to claim
certain women environmental activists as ecofeminists, particularly when
they are Third World women or U.S. women of color who do not identify as
ecofeminists, is a form of appropriation. After all (like Jaggar’s
understanding of socialist feminism), Merchant is aware that socialist
ecofeminism is a theoretical position located primarily in academia, which
has been to a great extent generated out of her own scholarship (work that
has made immense contributions to ecofeminism, whatever the critique I
make here of her typology). 59 As she says in 1992, “Socialist ecofeminism
is not yet a movement, but rather a feminist transformation of socialist
ecology that makes the category of reproduction, rather than production,
central to the concept of a just, sustainable world.” 60
Interestingly, Merchant characterizes ecofeminist activists in the two
arenas of “cultural ecofeminism” and “socialist ecofeminism” as having
distanced, but not equally distanced, relations to “theory.” (Even more
interesting and amazing, she lists no forms of activism under social ecology,
completely eviscerating their considerable activism from “social ecologists”
like Ynestra King, Ariel Salleh, and Chaia Heller.) Before listing protests
against nuclear radiation, pesticides, herbicides, hazardous wastes,
household chemicals, nuclear power plants, and nuclear weapons, Merchant
says: “Much populist ecological activism by women, while perhaps not
explicitly ecofeminist, implicitly draws on and is motivated by the
connection between women’s reproductive biology (nature) and male-
designed technology (culture).” 61 Discussing Native American women’s
organizing against uranium mining and resulting birth abnormalities, she
provides this implicit explanation for placing Native American feminist
environmentalists in the category “cultural feminism”: “Native American
women … recognized their responsibilities as stewards of the land and
expressed respect for ‘our Mother Earth who is a source of our physical
nourishment and our spiritual strength.’” 62 Thus, “cultural ecofeminist”
activists have either an implict, or “spiritual,” grasp of “theory.”
The Third World and Second World activists she cites as examples of
“socialist ecofeminism,” on the other hand, are characterized as conducting
actions based either on critiques of development and industrial capitalism or
on Marxist theory, respectively. Yet the quotes Merchant uses to demonstrate
these theoretical positions differ little from the position she has characterized
as “cultural ecofeminism.” Here are a few examples. She quotes Vandana
Shiva as saying: “The life-enhancing paradigm [of forestry] stems from the
forest and the feminine principle; the life-destroying one from the factory
and the market.” 63 From Isabelle Letelier: “Women give life. We have the
capacity to give life and light. We can take up our brooms and sweep the
earth.” Gizelda Castro says: “Men have separated themselves from the
ecosystem.” 64 And as for women environmentalists in the Second World,
Merchant quotes Eugenia Afanasieva as saying: “It seems to me that women
are more active in environmental programs than men. We give birth to our
children, we teach them to take their first steps. We are excited about their
future.” 65 These examples create significant confusion between positions
putatively ascribed to “cultural ecofeminism” and “socialist ecofeminism,”
making the latter position, once it attempts to indicate examples of
appropriate forms of activism, sound as “essentialist” as the first. The (anti-
essentialist and therefore “superior”) theory of socialist ecofeminism is thus
portrayed as outside the activist practice of Third and Second World women,
while the (essentialist and therefore “inferior”) theory of cultural
ecofeminism is allowed to directly motivate the efforts of almost all of the
activists she uses as examples.
What I think is going on here is that “essentialisms” of universalisms and
unified categories are embedded in activist practice and rhetoric; indeed,
these are often indicators of the theorizing going on within and through
activist practice, a notion I call “direct theory.” 66 That is, the unified
categories of “women” are constructed by environmentalist activists to
signal and analyze the complicity of masculinism with projects of
environmental destruction. Used as a tool to mobilize people on the basis of
a collective subjectivity to take action now (wherever that particular “now”
is historically located), these unified categories slide into a universalism, an
argument that the present conditions under which they struggle are
applicable over a wide range of cultural differences and historical
specificities. To separate oneself from this form of “direct theory” is to
separate oneself from the activist component of ecofeminism—or of
feminism, for that matter. This is precisely the effect of Merchant’s typology,
in which “socialist ecofeminism” gains the high ground by distancing itself,
especially in its guise as a “theory,” from ecofeminist and environmental
activism by women (a move that produces the troubling impression that
white socialist feminism is the theory, and the environmental justice
movement is the practice 67 ).
Many of the other typologies generated by ecofeminist theorists in order
to identify a nonessentialist ecofeminism make moves similar to Merchant’s,
especially in placing ecofeminist activism under the rubric of “cultural
ecofeminism.” This is especially true when they rely upon Merchant’s
typology for their own distinctions between an essentialist and a
nonessentialist ecofeminism. Roger J.H. King, for example, characterizes
“essentialist” or “radical” ecofeminism as having “a logic that can link a
womans relation to her reproductive nature to a relation to the environment
more generally. Articulating this logic, many ecofeminists have focused on
those aspects of environmental destruction that impinge directly or indirectly
on women’s reproductive nature, that is, on the consequences of the
environmental crisis for individual and local community health and the
conditions necessary for nurturing the life and growth of future generations
of human beings.” 68 Relying on Merchant’s typology, King goes on to put a
variety of ecofeminist actions within the category of “essentialist
ecofeminism.” “The link between women and biological reproduction,” he
states, “leads ecofeminists to address the consequences of nuclear radiation,
toxic wastes, household chemicals, pesticides, and herbicides for women’s
reproductive organs, for pregnant women, and for children. But, as
[Merchant] also notes, ‘A politics grounded in women’s culture, experience,
and values can be seen as reactionary.’” 69 On the other hand, in describing
“conceptualist ecofeminism” (King’s nonessentialist version of
ecofeminism), he does not refer to any activist component; instead, Karen
Warren’s work stands in for the “conceptualist” position.
Interestingly, King’s depiction of an “essentialist” logic found in
“women’s reproductive capabilities” that motivates ecofeminist actions is
usefully reformulated by Giovanna di Chiro, who describes the impetus for
the activism of women of color and working-class women in the
environmental justice movement: “Although most of the women in the
environmental justice movement will, to some degree, assert that they are
acting on behalf of the well-being of their children, their identity as simply
‘mothers’ is by no means always the central focus of their activism.” 70
Rather, she argues, women in the environmental justice movement see their
activism as a defense of community survival, not just the survival of their
own individual children, and in the course of their activism, “they break
down traditional constructions of gender, race, and class and construct new
empowered identities and political agencies.” 71 Once again, a
characterization of environmental activism by women as stemming from a
“maternalist” and therefore “essentialist” politics (in this case King’s) misses
the element of the tactical construction of collective identities and the use of
such identities to “read” configurations of power that Sandoval claims is the
provenance of the “differential consciousness” deployed especially by
women of color, such as the environmental justice activists di Chiro has
studied, who are deeply engaged in the projects of activism King lists above.
It is interesting that theories of activism stemming from collective identities
located in community and family are generated out of the environmental
justice movement, the majority of whose activists are women of color and
working-class women of all races.
Not all of the ecofeminist typologies I’ve placed in my chart above end up
placing “activists” in the essentialist category and “theorists” in the anti-
essentalist category, and not all of them make women of color invisible as
feminist theorists. Still, these typologies often create oddities of attribution
in the course of their effort to demonstrate that not all ecofeminism can be
characterized as “essentialist.”
One of the most charming and useful typological presentations of
ecofeminism, one which I cannot by its nature adequately depict here, is
Greta Gaard’s illustration of the relation of different ecofeminisms to
different feminisms in her video, Ecofeminism Now! 72 As the camera zooms
in on the words “labor, environmentalism, peace/antinuclear, animal rights,”
the narrator says: “While people have come to ecofeminism from different
paths of activism and spirituality [note that they do not come from academia,
necessarily], feminism has provided the defining contours.” The camera then
pans a range of mountains (appropriately, the Grand Tetons), while the
narrator says: “Imagine the several varieties of feminism as if they were
mapped onto the land itself.” Then we are shown a picture of a mountain
range, with each mountain labeled with a variety of feminism_ liberal,
radical, womanism, socialism, anarchism. The narration resumes: “From
these mountains of feminist thought, various streams have contributed to the
lake of ideas that is ecofeminism.” From the stream of “radical feminism,”
we get the tributaries “animal ecofeminism,” “radical ecofeminism,” and
“spiritual ecofeminism (goddess worship)”; the three areas are represented
by Josephine Donovan, Marti Kheel, and Carol Adams, all firmly located in
the area “animal ecofeminism” by their comments. We are left to wonder
about “radical ecofeminism” and “spiritual ecofeminism,” or to assume that
“animal ecofeminism” incorporates them both. From the stream “anarcha-
feminism,” we get “social ecofeminism,” eloquently articulated by Chaia
Heller. From the stream “socialist feminism,” we get “socialist
ecofeminism,” represented here by Vandana Shiva and Karen Warren.
Unlike the early academic feminist typologies, Gaard acknowledges the
special contribution of women of color to feminist theory by including the
category “womanism,” but its legacy for ecofeminism is treated in a unusual
way. From the stream “womanism,” we get two tributaries: one, unremarked
upon, leads to “socialist ecofeminism” (perhaps accounting for Shiva’s
presence there?); the other leads to a rock labeled “spirituality/politics.”
Thence ensues some comments on the unfortunate and unnecessary divide
created by the opposition of spirituality and politics (from Deane Curtin and
Karen Warren), closing with a comment from Winona LaDuke (whose
ambivalent relation to ecofeminism I have had occasion to note a number of
times previously) about the importance of spirituality to the environmental
activism of Native American peoples. Finally, from liberal feminism, a
stream flows down to a swamp located just on the margins of the lake of
ecofeminism, entitled “liberal ecofeminism.” Meanwhile the voiceover
discusses the need for short-term “stop-gap” measures against environmental
destruction, though stressing the point that liberal ecofeminism is not willing
to undertake the radical economic and social transformation that is deemed
necessary.
The next section of the video takes up varieties of ecofeminist activism.
Gaard’s typology differs from others I’ve just discussed in its willingness to
recognize the centrality of activism to ecofeminist theory (perhaps
explaining her inclusion of “womanism” and “anarchism” as categories of
feminist theory?). She is unwilling to place activism in any one category of
ecofeminism and thus reject it (except, perhaps, the “stop-gap” measures of
liberal ecofcminism, which makes our swamp more pleasant without
eliminating it—though one might speculate on the ecological necessity of
swamps to lakes!). Her listed examples include antitoxics, labor,
environmental justice, antibiotechnology, and indigenous rights activism.
The representatives of this activism are Cathleen McGuire (part of a
“guerrilla” activist group gathered around the newsletter entitled EVE:
Ecofeminist Visions Emerging), Carol Adams (representing Feminists for
Animal Rights), Judi Bari (who tells the story about women’s action in the
Northern California logging communities which I’ve recounted in chapter
1), Vandana Shiva (who comments on her work against the bioengineering
of native seeds as well as mentioning Chipko), and Erica Briemer Kniepp
(who discusses her work against breast cancer in the women’s health
movement). Finally, the camera focusses on the terms
“labor/queer/environmental justice/anti-toxics” while the narrator
emphasizes the need for coalitions with others struggling for social justice
and environmental quality. Gaard’s typology is framed by activism,
beginning and ending with it, making it central to rather than separated from
feminist theories.
 Though clearly conflicted about the place of women of color in
ecofeminism, the typologizing practice in this video (perhaps because, as a
visual mode, it generates representations unavailable to the written mode)
keeps the question about what constitutes the “best” ecofeminist theory up in
the air, and highlights the necessity for activism when and where possible,
emphasizing the urgent need for coalitions rather than generating a “correct”
approach owned by one variation of ecofeminism. This creates possibilities
in ways not found in typologies built around the goal of distinguishing
essentialist and nonessentialist forms of ecofeminism; perhaps because of its
focus on the activist imperative, Gaard’s typology cannot afford to rule out
any version for its theoretical insufficiencies.
In arguing that typologies create exclusions through their distinctions
between kinds of feminist theories, I don’t want to be seen as eliminating the
necessary and useful task of creating unified categories of feminisms in
order to make discriminations between ways of conceiving and acting
against sexism. I am arguing not against analysis, critique, or debate; nor am
I claiming that there are no useful distinctions to be made. I am arguing
against a certain pattern of exclusion, embedded in early efforts of feminist
typologizing that arose out of a particular historical moment in second-wave
feminism. This pattern, overlaid on a dynamic and changing movement, has
continued to exclude the overlapping categories of feminist activists, women
of color, and working-class women from the arena of “feminist theory,”
which has become the provenance of academic feminism. Without claiming
they are the same, I find typologies like Gaard’s and Sandoval’s to be more
useful, for their making activism and the need to continually strategize
against power central to their terms, In particular, Sandoval’s “topography,”
which sees distinct ways of understanding domination as tools—rather than
as fixed, competitive, and exclusive locations—seems a more descriptive,
hopeful, and powerful way of understanding the crucial tasks before us as
feminist theorists and activists. 73

Is Ecofeminism Feminist? Or Is Feminism

Ecofeminist?
Other typologies of ecofeminism concentrate on whether or not ecofeminism
is feminist. This is the move made by Seager, Agarwal, and Alaimo,
provocatively included in my chart of ecofeminist typologizers above. All
three, in different ways, support the project of connecting feminism with
environmentalism but reject a reductively portrayed ecofeminism as
“essentialist,” and hence present themselves as “outside” ecofeminism and
“inside” feminism. Both Seager and Alaimo critique forms of “essentialism
per se” or biologistic arguments, and “universalism,” or positing one
experience as universally applicable, which they find in a very selectively
depicted “ecofeminism.” Given the widespread effort by many ecofeminists
themselves to argue against “essentialism per se,” all three typologies
engage in some rather peculiar acts of naming and renaming in order to
conduct their arguments. Seager, for instance, uses Ynestra King (in my
account, the person who coined the term “ecofeminism” in the U.S. context)
to argue against “ecofeminism’s” supposed positive revaluation of the
woman/nature equation. 74
Alaimo’s article is a brilliant and lively analysis of “essentialist
ecofeminism,” but her reductive definition of ecofeminism as essentialist is
curious, especially since she relies at crucial points on critiques of such
essentialism by other ecofeminists (notably Ariel Salleh, 75 Stephanie Lahar,
and Carolyn Merchant). She also characterizes Donna Haraway’s work as an
outsider’s critique of “ecofeminism”: “The writings of Donna Haraway and
the texts of ecofeminism offer radically different approaches to negotiating a
feminist environmentalism.” 76 While Haraway has certainly been critical of
essentialism (including all three versions Ferguson identifies), her critiques
of essentialist moves have not been limited to nor applied to a reductive
characterization of “ecofeminism,” and she has at a number of points placed
herself inside “ecofeminism.” Indeed, Haraway has been explicitly interested
in expanding the purview of ecofeminism from within. Alaimo’s
characterization of one of Haraway’s arguments against “holism,
appreciation of intuitive method, presence of matriarchal myth systems and
histories of women’s cultural innovation,” as an explicit critique of
“ecofeminism” 77 is misleading, since Haraway, in the piece referenced, is
writing more broadly about a number of elements within “western
feminism” that turn toward the “organic” in order to critique western
patriarchy. Haraway’s citation for this point includes only one “ecofeminist,”
Carolyn Merchant, 78 whom Haraway does not identify as such and whom
Alaimo herself wants to exclude from “ecofeminism” because she cannot
characterize her as an essentialist. Some have taken Haraway’s last sentence
from “The Cyborg Manifesto” as a specific repudiation of ecofeminism_
“Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than
a goddess.” 79 This is only true if one believes, à la Janet Biehl, that
ecofeminism is no more than Goddess worship. As I have been
demonstrating, the diversity of ecofeminism belies this reduction. Further, I
understand Haraway’s position, in binding together the cyborg and the
goddess in the “spiral dance,” as an argument that both have their uses,
while her personal commitment is to an anti-essentialist, nonprimitivist
ecofeminism. In “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway suggests this reading of
her position—once again, significantly, in the last sentence of the article:
“Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofeminism, turn on
revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to
converse.” 80 In later work, Haraway continues to both claim the position of
ecofeminist and to considerably expand its meanings. 81
Agarwal, though in some ways less reductive than Seager and Alaimo in
her portrayal of ecofeminism, also wants to define a feminist
environmentalism outside of ecofeminism. Her analysis of ecofeminism
provides a perfect example of Ferguson’s point that critiques of
“essentialism” slide too easily between different and incommensurable
categories. Agarwal’s complaints about ecofeminism are not initially
centered on claims that it is “essentialist per se,” nor, relying on Merchant,
does she find it intrinsically “universalist.” But when Agarwal summarizes
the problems with ecofeminism, she moves from a complaint about the
construction of “unitary categories” (Ferguson’s third category of
“essentialism,” a critique of which she finds “untenable”) through a
complaint about universalism, to a complaint about essentialism per se. 82
This generates the result that ecofeminism, which up to this point Agarwal
has not characterized (through her appreciation of Merchant) as inherently
unable to overcome its universalistic tendencies, is now produced as
“essentialist,” unlike Agarwal’s version of an appropriate “ecofeminist”
theory, which she calls “feminist environmentalism.”
Much of Agarwal’s critique of ecofeminism parallels others that we have
encountered before, critiques that can be answered by pointing to the variety
of ecofeminist arguments as a demonstration that ecofeminism is not
innately incapable of addressing questions of diversity, or producing
historically specific arguments (positions which Agarwal herself allows at
different points in her article). Other points of her critique, such as “the
ecofeminist argument does not take into account women’s lived material
relationship with nature,” 83 sound hollow in the face of an ecofeminism that
frequently bases its arguments on women’s roles in agricultural production,
health care, household work, child care, and consumer activity. Even when
presented in problematically universalist terms (which I would not defend)
that obscure their origins in white, middle-class, U.S. culture, ecofeminist
accounts of women’s rock climbing, women’s relation to wilderness,
women’s gardening, and women’s experiences with animals are all attempts
to account for, describe, and theorize “women’s lived material relationship
with nature (though a very particular and unacknowledged raced and classed
relationship).” 84
Agarwals questionable contention that ecofeminist accounts do not
address the “materiality” of women’s lives is related to her stronger claim,
that ecofeminism “locates the domination of women and of nature almost
solely in ideology, neglecting the (interrelated) material sources of this
dominance (based on economic advantage and political power).” 85 The
latter point is provocative, for if, as we have seen, typologists of
ecofeminism have consistently organized out the activism of women
engaged in issues affecting their communities and the materiality of their
daily lives, what would be left would be a critique of ideology. What
Agarwal does not consider here are the many ecofeminist writings not
engaged in typologizing, that do in fact look at on the “materiality of
women’s lives.” Indeed, this focus may lead them into claims about
“women’s experience,” which Agarwal would reject for their universalism.
The remainder of Agarwal’s article demonstrates the strength of an
analysis that does pay attention to material questions and their interaction
with various relations of power, and she is right that it is a kind of analysis
that ecofeminists could engage in more frequently, an analysis that could
considerably enrich ecofeminism as a political and theoretical position. But,
shorn of her other critiques of ecofeminism, nothing in her “materialist”
analysis could not be accomplished within ecofeminism as a feminist
theoretical location.
 Indeed, the same comment could be applied to Seager and Alaimo as well
as to Agarwal. All three of these authors provide insightful, interesting, and
wide-ranging arguments for the effectiveness and importance of engaging in
both a feminist and environmentalist theoretical endeavor. Why insist on
another name for an analysis that combines and connects feminism and
environmentalism? Essentialisms of various kinds, as Ferguson has so
carefully pointed out, are not avoided by changing the names of your
theoretical positions. They are avoided by paying close attention to the
exclusionary effects generated by the (inevitable, or at least very difficult to
avoid) construction of unitary categories for the purposes of analysis. Or
does avoiding “ecofeminism” have to do with the U.S. genesis of the term
within activism, which displayed “essentialist” rhetoric in the course of
political mobilization and actions? If so, anti-essentialist feminist theory will
find itself continually cut off from activist efforts.
The effort represented here by these three articles, to portray ecofeminism
as ultimately nonfeminist, is turned on its head by Karen Warren, whose
typology’s goal is to show that a feminism without an ecofeminist analysis is
not adequately feminist. Here, Warren examines the four standard categories
of feminism found in Jaggar’s typology: liberal, Marxist, radical, and
socialist. To these she adds a fifth category, “transformative feminism,”
which, reminiscent of Sandoval’s “differential consciousness,” operates
through the other categories of feminism to
expand on the traditional conception of feminism as “the movement to end women’s
oppression” by recognizing and making explicit the interconnections between all systems of
oppression. In this regard, a transformative feminism would be informed by the conception of
feminism which has been advanced by many black feminists and women in development. …
A transformative feminism would acknowledge the social construction of knowledge and a
conception of epistemology that takes seriously the felt experiences of women as a
subordinate group—however different those experiences may be. … In this respect, it would
 reflect a commitment to what Iris Young calls “a politics of difference,” viz., one that asserts
the value and specificity of group difference in political theory and practice.” 86

Additionally, like Haraway’s notion of the cyborg, Warren argues that a

“transformative feminism would involve a redi inking of what it is to be
human, especially as the conception of human nature becomes informed by a
nonpatriarchal conception of the interconnection between human and
nonhuman nature.” 87
Warren makes these claims audaciously, suggesting that a “transformative
feminism” is one that “makes an eco-feminist perspective central to feminist
theory and practice.” 88 Here is a typological move that intends to produce
“ecofeminism” as the “best” feminist theory. She bases this argument on the
claim that ecofeminism, with its “central project the unpacking of the
connections between the twin oppressions of women and nature” and “by
understanding how a patriarchal conceptual framework sanctions the
oppression of both women and nature,” is in a position to show why
‘naturism’ (i.e., the domination of nature) ought to be included among the
systems of oppression maintained by patriarchy. This opens the door for
showing how, in Sheila Collins’ words, ‘Racism, sexism, class exploitation,
and ecological destruction are four interlocking pillars upon which the
structure of patriarchy rests/” 89
This is a bold move, and, as Warren says, “the stakes are high.” 90 This is
the environmentalist intervention into feminism, the reverse of the process
that we investigated in chapter 1. Warren is arguing that environmentalism is
not just an important issue that feminists may be concerned with as it
impacts their lives, but that an environmentalist perspective is theoretically
necessary to feminism. By critiquing the culture/nature divide that upholds
the “patriarchal logic of domination” from the side of nature—that is,
accounting for “naturism” as well as other forms of interlocking oppressions
—Warren argues that ecofeminism addresses “the conceptual and structural
interconnections between all forms of domination.” 91
Though I think Warren’s argument persuasive on many points, Agarwal’s
complaint about the emphasis in ecofeminism on ideological forms of
generating oppression, rather than material means of domination, applies to
Warren’s analysis here. For instance, Warren states: “Eco-feminism,
therefore, encourages us to think ourselves out of ‘patriarchal conceptual
traps’ by reconceptualizing ourselves and our relation to the nonhuman
natural world in nonpatriarchal ways.” 92 While “freeing the mind” is an
important function for radical politics, for which category of women (or men
for that matter) is it sufficient? Warren does make further arguments for the
necessity of “making connections with ‘the revolution of insurgent people,’”
93 but this residue of a certain idealism sits uncomfortably with the radical

claims she makes here for “transformative ecofeminism.” Further, she does
not qualify a “patriarchal conceptual framework” as the particular Western,
white, capitalistic ideology which it in fact is. This critique is not meant to
vitiate Warren’s important contribution to ecofeminist theory, but rather to
point to the effects of the way her argument is framed so that it can
accomplish an environmentalist intervention into feminism.
Val Plumwood makes claims superficially similar to Warren’s as to the
explanatory and liberatory value of an ecofeminist theory dedicated to
overcoming the culture/nature dualism residing at the heart of Western
capitalist patriarchy, but she is more precise about that dualism’s cultural,
racial, and historical location. She also explicitly refuses the idea that
ecofeminism should replace or subsume feminism, or that any form of
oppression should be seen as foundational or primary. 94 Like Warren, she
also argues that ecofeminism is the “third wave” in feminist theory, because,
in its critical versions, it interrogates not only sexism, not only racism,
classism, and heterosexism, but also the Western dualism of human/nature
that constructs ideologies that justify the cross-cutting hierarchies of
male/female, white/black, civilized/savage. However, Plumwood objects to
arguments that “the alignment of women to nature [is] the entire basis and
source of women’s oppression … since women often stand in relatively
powerless positions even in cultures which have not made the connection of
women to nature or which have a different set of genderised dichotomies.”
Hence, she destabilizes the notion that the culture/nature dualism is
foundational to sexism. “Nevertheless,” she argues, “the association of
women with nature and men with culture and reason can still be seen as
providing much of the basis of the cultural elaboration of women’s
oppression in the west.” 95 One could still ask for more clarity, since the
“west” (which, with it’s “w” in lower case, seems to designate a region
rather than a dominant ideology—however, this is more likely a copyeditor’s
doing than it is Plumwood’s) contains within it many cultures and historical
residues of cultures that did and do not partake of the dualisms Plumwood
identifies and the forms of domination which she argues flows from them. 96
But certainly we would not want to argue against the notion that the contours
of the racist, classist, imperialist, sexist forms of power that generate
oppression and domination worldwide are deeply shaped by the dualistic
Western classical and Enlightenment notions Plumwood is critiquing,
especially in her examination of how the culture/nature dualism is also,
importantly, a reason/nature dualism. Plumwood is also careful to show the
ways in which the culture/nature dualism operates not primarily in terms of
hierarchical value dualisms of male/female but instead is implicated across a
range of kinds of domination: “The gulf between the rational and the non-
rational, and the inferiority of the latter, can be used to support the supposed
inferiority not just of women, but also slaves, people of other races and
cultures (‘barbarians’) and those who perform manual as opposed to
intellectual work.” 97
 Both Warren and Plumwood’s very differently inflected claims that
ecofeminism is important to feminism, as I have indicated above, do
important work in specifying the culture/nature dualism at the heart of white
Western capitalist patriarchy as well as including crucial questions of
environmental quality, sustainable economic practices, and the exploitation
of nonhuman species within a feminist purview. The environmentalist
intervention into feminism insists that essentializing nature and exploiting
nature are as problematic in our world as “naturalizing” women, people of
color, or working-class people.
But the emphasis on critiquing the culture/nature dualism can sometimes
retain a static, ironically dualistic framework for theory. This is most clearly
seen in Warren’s argument, which moves easily from the statement that
“there are important connections between the oppression of women and the
oppression of nature” 98 to the assertion that “the twin oppressions of women
and nature” 99 underlie the “patriarchal conceptual framework” that produces
all varieties of domination (she specifically includes racism, classism, and
imperialism along with sexism and naturism; she does not mention
heterosexism or speciesism). Though she sees her goal as tying “the
liberation of women to the elimination of all systems of oppression,” 100 her
analysis privileges sexism and naturism as the foundational forms of
domination, from which all the others flow. This assumption is common in
ecofeminism, focused as it is on the related concepts and practices that
produce sexism and environmental degradation. But it does not provide a
flexible enough framework for understanding the shifting and complex
connections between all forms of domination, particularly racism, classism,
and heterosexism. With a residue of the search for a “root cause,” Warren’s
“transformative” feminism, or ecofeminism, generates explanations of
domination in which racism, classism, and heterosexism are derivative of the
interaction between sexism and naturism. Rather, racism, classism or
heterosexism could be analyzed as having complicated interrelationships
with naturism on their own; or, even more in tune with the kinds of theories
of simultaneous oppressions created by feminists of color, these various
kinds of domination could be explored as having levels and layers of
interrelation with incredible variations historically, economically, and cross-
culturally. For instance, in what ways does a “patriarchal, naturist, racist,
classist, heterosexist conceptual framework” produce notions of nature that
are simultaneously raced and gendered, or in which mobile forms of capital
require the naturalization of heterosexuality? How are some people
culturally and politically situated in ways that confound the idea that
domination always functions along a dual axis, with one group “up” and the
other “down,” as Warren puts it? What about those that are “up” in some
cases at the same time that they are “down” in others? Beyond these
theoretical questions, more attention could be paid to the mechanics of
activist coalitions. At the moment, radical political theories of all kinds—
feminist, antiracist, economic, queer, environmentalist—share an (unevenly
theorized) agreement that all the forms of domination on which they reflect
are interconnected. While theoretical and scholarly work will always be
needed to articulate the nature of these interconnections, we need to put as
much emphasis on the details of forming working, activist coalitions around
them.
Both Warren and Plumwood, as well as a number of other ecofeminists,
social ecofeminists, conceptual ecofeminists, critical ecological feminists,
ecological feminists, feminist green socialists, environmental feminists,
feminist environmentalists, feminist political ecologists, etc., agree that
because the culture/nature dualism has done so much damage to humans,
animals, and the earth, radical political theories must attempt to deconstruct
this dualism. With Ynestra King, they argue the need for a “third direction,”
one that neither refuses the equation between women and nature nor
celebrates it, but rather that refuses separation both from culture and from
nature, and engages in political projects that dissolve and interrogate the
boundaries between the two. 101
These kinds of questions are also brought into view in Donna Haraway’s
work, which centrally engages the problems involved with the culture/nature
divide, but through consistent attention to the boundary-constructing
practices and transgressions, rather than through the fixed relations between
two objects, which are the ongoing task of both power and resistance to it.
Most usefully, her work persistently questions categories on both sides of
operative dualisms, nature as much as culture, and brings in a focus on the
human/machine dualism. This focus is crucially important to ecofeminism,
especially in order to provide a balance between the often counterposed
areas of wilderness and animals as against urban life and technology. This is
a perspective that is much needed in an ecofeminism which frequently
essentializes nature. For Haraway,
nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor as
essence to be saved or violated. Nature is not hidden and so does not need to be unveiled.
Nature is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine. It is not the
“other” who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature
is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man. Nature is, however, a topos, a
place, in the sense of a rhetorician’s place or topic for consideration of common themes;
nature is, strictly, a commonplace. … Nature is also a trópos, a trope. It is figure, construction,
artifact, movement, displacement. Nature cannot pre-exist its construction. This construction
is based on a particular kind of move—a trópos, or “turn.” … Nature is a topic of public
discourse upon which much turns, even the earth.” 102

Haraway thus insists on a social constructionist perspective that resolutely

interrogates the category “nature” while paying attention to nature conceived
in Elizabeth Bird’s terms as a “social actor.” 103 Thus, Haraway’s perspective
should not be mistaken for an argument that “nature” is entirely constructed
by human beings. Rather than supporting such a notion, which she claims is
a “violent and reproductive artifactualism, in the form of a hyper-
productionism actually practiced widely throughout the planet,” 104 she
argues that
The actors are not all “us.” If the world exists for us as “nature,” this designates a kind of
relationship, an achievement among many actors, not all of them human, not all of them
organic, not all of them technological. In its scientific embodiments as well as other forms,
nature is made, but not entirely by humans; it is a construction among humans and non-
humans. 105

This feminist and environmentalist perspective, which refuses to reinstatiate

the culture/nature split, might be playfully named “cyborg ecofeminism.”
This variant of ecofeminism would include Haraway’s work as well as a
number of other theorists of the relation between science, sexism, racism,
and naturism. “Cyborg ecofeminism” is consciously built on Chela
Sandoval’s “cyborg feminism,” but enacts an environmentalist intervention
into her neologism that does not, I think, substantially alter its basic
characteristics. 106 This is a renaming which does not have as its project
policing the divides between essentialism and anti-essentialism, activism and
theory, and that selfconsciously does not desire to start its own school nor to
install Haraway as the pre-eminent ecofeminist theorist. Rather I take up
renaming as serious play, reversing the strategy of typologizing practices
which create a divide between antiessentialist feminist environmentalism
and essentialist ecofeminism by incorporating antiessentialist positions
within ecofeminism. “Cyborg ecofeminism” is the variant that informed the
theorizing of the affinity group “Surrogate Others,” whose story began this
book. It has as its motto: “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival!” 107 In Alaimo’s
words, it would envision “women and nature as political allies
[emphasizing] the importance of women as political activists and [stressing]
the agency of nature.” 108 By challenging the perverse denial of the use of
technologies as a masculinist mode of reproduction, cyborg ecofeminism
intends to hold the military-industrial complex responsible for their “non-
biological children,” in Zoë Sofia’s words, warning “the Pac-Men, those
radiant incorporating heads who have our futures all scoped and scooped out
for us, that if they don’t start cleaning up all that waste they’d like to pretend
they haven’t created, we Earthlings will teach them some home truths about
the role of recycling in the uroboric economy.” 109

Beyond Naming, Toward Action

“Cyborg ecofeminism,” if it were to be created as another form of
ecofeminism, would produce its own exclusions, contain its own theoretical
insuffeciencies, just as all ecofeminist variants have done. For example, a
“cyborg ecofeminism” would have to manage the problems encountered by
the figure of the cyborg, which, given its strong articulation to masculinist
uses in popular culture, science, and militarism, is a problematic feminist
metaphor. But my argument throughout the book has been that we do not
need to produce a new and more perfect ecofeminism, but rather to
recognize as necessary the dance of critique and consolidation that is part of
theorizing and political action; the dialectic of creating, deconstructing, and
reforming political identities, new alliances, complex analyses, and creative
oppositional strategies. Every theory aimed towards political change
contains historically contingent arguments; each solution to political and
theoretical problems will be historically transient. We should not cease our
search for the most effective political strategies, theories, and practices; so,
we should not cease our penchant for critique. But I think we must also
recognize the dynamism of social change, and the necessity for strategic
calculation in particular political circumstances. We must offer criticism in
the spirit of constructive debate, not with the aim of destroying or trashing
those who are our allies but keeping in sight the ways in which their
intentions are similar to ours. Our most trenchant critiques should be aimed
at concrete, material power relations, hegemonic discourses and practices,
not at damaging already fragile and internally contested modes of
opposition. This doesn’t mean that we should avoid debate or disagreement
within social movements (as if we could, as long as they are democratically
structured!). But if we wait to have the perfect theory before joining popular
oppositional movements, we shall surely fail. In my understanding, the most
vital radical political theories develop in tandem with radical movement
practice; one does not preceed the other.
So in the spirit of offering an agenda for ecofeminist theorizing in this
particular historical conjuncture, I close with a series of suggestions which I
construct explicitly as the wish list that is the real nature of the supposedly
“best” theories in various typologies: the desired political theory and practice
whose realization is always deferred toward the future because of the way in
which actual policial theory and practice is (thankfully) a messy, imperfect,
contested, and dynamic actuality. I focus on strategies, not goals, and
concentrate primarly on those issues I’ve discussed in this book. I make
suggestions for an unspecified “we,” meaning those who want to work in
alliance against sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, neo-colonialism,
transnational capitalism, ableism, naturism, and speciesism. And since it is a
“wish list” (as I am reminded by watching my seven-year-old son, Hart,
construct such lists) it does not pretend at all to completeness, but allows for
the inevitability of future desires arising in the dynamism of historical time
and from within the layers of the divisions that separate us.
We should recognize the stress on antiessentialism within feminist
scholarship as a particular strategy for scholarship, both in terms of its
production of useful feminist knowledges, but also in terms of its primary
location in universities, where publication and teaching are two kinds of
political action that may not require the production of collective identities in
the same way community organizing does, but rather precisely the kind of
deconstruction of identity politics that antiessentialist theories are good at.
We should use the insights of antiessentialist feminist theorizing to create
more inclusive political coalitions, but not to prevent us from acting
collectively as we urgently need to do in the present moment.
We should cultivate difference in our political organizations, but only or
especially multiple kinds of difference that exceed or complicate the
hegemonic binary differences created by racism, sexism, heterosexism, and
classism.
We should bring radical activists and radical scholars together more
frequently and in more places, working against the structures of academic
knowledge production that maintain barriers between activism and
scholarship (and force academic feminists to give up activism in order to get
tenure!).
We should hone our tools of critique to a fine point, but also our ability to
envision and articulate a practical, constructive radical politics.
We should use environmentalist politics as a fertile location for imagining
the deployment of a new strategic and embodied politics, since the
environment is not a political location closely tied to one embodied identity
constructed by axes of naturalized hierarchies of value, like race, gender,
class, or sexuality but it is an arena in which we can counter racism, sexism,
classism, and heterosexism.
We should make it a priority to create active, ongoing coalitions between
all kinds of ecofeminists with environmental justice movements, locally,
globally and transnationally. This would require us to deal seriously with, as
Haraway puts it, “the terrible political demands of understanding the deep
specificities of local situations, [while] understanding the global not as just
an additive collection of local points.” 110
 Finally, we should fully engage in the interweaving of humor, irony,
grace, resistance, struggle, and transformation that constitutes the best of
political action.

Notes
1. At a meeting of prominent ecofeminists attending the “Eìcofeminist
Perspectives” conference in Dayton in March 1995, one topic of
discussion was the “feminist backlash against ecofeminism,” as well as
the creation of an ecofeminist journal, fostering ecofeminist activism,
and connecting ecofeminism more concretely to the environmental
justice movement.
2. Greta Gaard, “Misunderstanding Ecofeminism,” Z Magazine 3(1)
(1994): 22.
3. I thank Virginia Scharff for pushing me to clarify this point,
4. Indeed, the uncertainty built into this dynamic process has historically
made many leftists uncomfortable.
5. Katie King, Theory iti Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S.
Women’s Movements (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1994), p. 69.
To grasp the complexity of King’s argument on this point, see
especially her chapter, “Writing Conversations in Feminist Theory:
Investments in Producing Identities and Struggling With Time,” pp. 55–
91.
6. For an excellent discussion of the difficulty of separating the terms
“theory” and “practice” within feminism and ecofeminism, see
Christine Cuomo, “Toward Thoughtful Ecofeminist Action,” in Karen
J. Warren, ed., Ecological Feminist Philosophies (Bloomington:
Indiana University, 1996), pp. 42–51. Also see Stephanie Lahar,
 “Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroots Politics,” in Warren, Ecological
Feminist Philosophies, pp. 1–18.
7. The texts that I will be referring to in this section, which generate
various typologies, are Barbara Deckard, The Women’s Movement, 3d
ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1983); and Alison Jaggar,
Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman
& Allanheld, 1983); Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory:
The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism (New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1985); Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess,
Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement (Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1985); Alison M. Jaggar and Paula S. Rothenberg,
Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the
Relations Between Women and Men (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978,
1984, 1993).
8. As its usefulness to the argument in this chapter demonstrates, Katie
King’s book, Theory in Its Feminist Travels, provides a great deal of the
kind of history of feminism and feminist theory which I call for here.
9. Jo Freeman, “The Women’s Liberation Movement: Its Origins,
Organizations, Activities, and Ideas,” in Women: A Feminist
Perspective (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1979), p. 568.
10. Ferree and Hess, in Controversy and Coalition, add “career feminism”
(a basically conservative, individualistic feminist position) to the
categories liberal, radical, and socialist.
11. Donovan, Feminist Theory, p. 31.
12. Alice Echols, “The New Feminism of Yin and Yang,” in Christine
Stansell, Ann Snitow, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire:
The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp.
439–59.
13. Ellen Willis, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,” in Sohnya
Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson,
eds., The Sixties Without Apology (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1984), pp. 91–118, p. 107.
14. The story of the construction and various uses of the term “cultural
feminism” is complex, and I cannot tell it fully here. In important ways,
Willis’s and Echols’s use of the term are stimulated by the way in which
“radical feminism” had been tagged earlier with the essentialist label,
complete with accusations of racism and classism, thus engaging them
in an effort to distinguish a nonessentialist variant of early feminism,
which they called “radical feminism,” as well as an essentialist variant
of early feminism, which they called “cultural feminism.” Though
Echols’s book received significant attention, it has not changed the
conflation between the two early kinds of feminism she wanted to
distinguish, as much as it has resulted in the substitution “cultural
feminism” for “radical feminism.”
15. For instance, in Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist
Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), and Sandra Harding, The
Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1986).
16. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), p. 6.
17. And of course the irony here is that Willis, who objected so strongly to
the reductive characterization of “radical feminism” as essentialist, and
who was one of the main supporters of Echols’s book project, was also
one of the most vociferous proponents of the idea that ecofeminism was
“cultural feminism” and therefore “essentialist.” Echols echoes this
judgment; see Daring to Be Bad, p. 288.
18. For examples of feminist theorizing by women of color in the early
period of the second wave, see Cellestine Ware, Woman Power: The
Movement for Women’s Liberation (New York: Tower, 1970); Pauli
Murray, “The Liberation of Black Women,” in Mary Lou Thompson,
ed., Voices of the New Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 87–
102; Maryanne Weathers, “An Argument for Black Women’s
Liberation as a Revolutionary Force,” pp 161–64, and Patricia M.
Robinson, “A Historical and Critical Essay for Black Women,” pp.
274–83, both in Sookie Stambler, ed., Women’s Liberation: A Blueprint
for the Future (New York: Ace, 1970); Frances M. Beale, “’Double
Jeopardy,’ To Be Black and Female,” pp. 340–52, Eleanor Homes
Norton, “For Sadie and Maude,” pp. 352–59, Black Women’s
Liberation Group, “Statement on Birth Control,” pp. 360–61, Elizabeth
Sutherland, “Introduction (to Colonized Women: The Chicana), pp.
376–78, and Enriqueta Longauex y Vasquez, “The Mexican-American
Woman,” pp. 379–84, all in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful
(New York: Vintage, 1970); Michele Wallace, “Black Macho and the
Myth of the Superwoman,” Ms. (January 1979); conditions five: the
black women’s issue (1979); Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will
Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (Watertown, MA:
Persephone Press, 1981), pp. 98–101; Combahee River Collective, “A
Black Feminist Statement,” in Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Smith, and
Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Were Brave: Black Women’s
Studies (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), pp. 13–22; Angela Davis,
Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism
(Freedom Organizing Series #5), (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, 1985).
19. Katie King has accomplished an incisive analysis of Feminist
Frameworks, to which I owe a great deal. She does not discuss the later
 editions. See King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels, pp. 67–70.
20. King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels, p. 84.
21. Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism_ The Theory and
Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,”
Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 1–24, p. 9.
22. Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism,” p. 11.
23. Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism,” pp. 12–13.
24. Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism,” p. 14.
25. Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism,” p. 14.
26. “Interesting to certain third world scholars is the coalescing relationship
between these theories of postmodernism (especially between those
which celebrate the fragmentations of consciousness postmodernism
demands) and the form of differential oppositional consciousness I am
outlining here. The juncture I am analyzing in this essay is that which
connects the disoriented first world subject, who longs for the
postmodern cultural aesthetic as a key to a new sense of identity and
redemption, and the form of differential oppositional consciousness
developed by subordinated and marginalized Western or colonized
subjects, who have been forced to experience the aesthetics of a
‘postmodernism’ as a requisite for survival. It is this constituency who
are most familiar with what citizenship in this realm requires and makes
possible.” Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism,” pp. 21–22, n. 50.
27. Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism,” p. 15.
28. I am roughly following Jaggar’s assignation of various “politics” to
different categories, but the point applies to all of the typologies I’ve
cited above.
29. Jaggar, Feminist Politics, p. 123.
30. Ferree and Hess, Controversy and Coalition, pp. 154–159.
31. Ferree and Hess, Controversy and Coalition, p. 89.
32. Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, p. 174.
33. Though she does not focus on the practice of typologizing as I do here,
Elizabeth Carlassare has produced an excellent analysis of the
essentialism/constructionist debate’s effect on conceptualizing
ecofeminism. See Carlassare, “Essentialism in Ecofeminist Discourse,”
in Carolyn Merchant, ed., Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), pp. 220–34.
34. Janet Biehl, “What is Social Ecofeminism?” Green Perspectives 11
(October 1988): 1–8.
35. Carolyn Merchant, “Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory,” in Irene
Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The
Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: New Society Publishers,
1990), pp. 100–105; Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” in Radical Ecology:
The Search fora Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 183–
210; and “Gaia: Ecofeminism and the Earth” in Earthcare: Women and
the Environment (New York: Routledge, 1996).
36. Karen Warren, “Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections,”
Environmental Ethics 9(1) (Spring 1987): 3–20.
37. See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1994), especially “Feminism and Ecofeminism,” pp. 119–
40.
38. Roger J.H. King, “Caring About Nature: Feminist Ethics and the
Environment,” in Karen J. Warren, ed., Ecological Feminist
Philosophies (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1996), pp. 82–96.
39. Victoria Davion, “Is Ecofeminism Feminist?” in Karen J. Warren, ed.,
Ecological Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 8–28.
40. Catherine Roach, “Loving Your Mother: On the Woman-Nature
Relation,” in Warren, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, pp. 52–65.
41. Chaia Heller, The Revolution That Dances: From a Politics of Desire
Toward a Desirable Politics (Littleton, CO: Aigis Press, forthcoming).
42. Mary Mellors, Breaking the Boundaries: Toward a Feminist Green
Socialism (London: Virago Press, 1992).
43. Bina Agarwal, “The Gender and Environmental Debate: Lessons From
India,” Feminist Studies 18(1) (Spring 1992): 119–58; and Joni Seager,
Earth Folllies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global
Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially pp. 9–
12, and 236–52.
44. Stacy Alaimo, “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for
an Environmental Feminism,” Feminist Studies 20(1) (Spring 1994):
133–52.
45. Diane Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari, eds.,
Feminist Political Ecologies: Global Issues and Local Experiences
(New York: Routledge, 1996). This book was brought to my attention
by Chaia Heller just as Ecofeminist Natures was going to press. Thus, I
was unfortunately unable to obtain it in time to consider it in light of the
arguments I make here and in chapter 5.
46. Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist
Theory (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), p. 81.
47. Ferguson, The Man Question, p. 82.
48. This is true even for “cosmic feminism,” which is the category of
feminist theory in which Ferguson places most ecofeminists. She notes
that “essentialism per se is sometimes detected in the writings of
cosmic feminism, although it is also contested there; at any rate, the
cosmic side of feminism carries so little academic legitimacy that it is
accorded scant attention within feminist theory.” I’ll return to
Ferguson’s method of typologizing later in this chapter. Ferguson, The
Man Question, p. 81.
49. Ferguson, The Man Question, p. 81.
50. Ferguson, The Man Question, pp. 82–83.
51. Ferguson, The Man Question, p. 83.
52. Ferguson, The Man Question, p. 87.
53. Hopefully, the examples I have provided throughout this book will be
evidence enough for this point. T.V. Reed has made a similar argument:
“The deployment, for example, of a collective identity (woman, gay,
African-American, native) is most likely to be recognized as strategic
from inside that collective where intimate knowledge of internal
differences is greatest; it is on the outside that such gestures are most
likely to be mistaken as essentialist.” And he continues: “Seemingly
essentialist gestures are a necessary, recurring epistemological moment
in organizing, one that is never wholly superseded by the equally
necessary moments when internal diversity is stressed.” Reed, Fifteen
jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of Social
Movements (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), p. 149.
54. Merchant, “Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory,” in Diamond and
Orenstein, Reweaving the World, p. 102.
55. Merchant, “Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory,” p. 103.
56. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” in Radical Ecology, pp. 183–210.
57. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” p. 194.
58. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” p. 195.
59. There is a location called “socialist ecofeminism” that could have been
characterized in this book as a feminist intervention into the
environmentalist category “socialist ecology,” represented by James
O’Connor’s work and the journal Capitalism, Nature, and Society,
edited by O’Connor. This is a very small grouping, and ecofeminists
who have identified themselves as socialist feminists besides Merchant
have been few. Mary Mellors uses the label “feminist green socialism.”
 Maria Mies and Val Plumwood both call themselves socialist
ecofeminist. As we shall see in a minute, Creta Gaard locates Vandana
Shiva as a socialist ecofeminist, as well. See Maria Mies, Patriarchy
and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed Books, 1986); Maria
Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993);
Mary Mellors, Breaking the Boundaries; and Gaard, Ecofeminism Now!
(Medusa Productions, 1996), VHS, 37 minutes, available for $15 plus
shipping from Dr. Greta Gaard, Department of English, 420 Humanities
Building, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN 55812.
60. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” p. 195.
61. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” p. 192.
62. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” p. 193.
63. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” p. 201.
64. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” p. 205.
65. Merchant, “Ecofeminism,” p. 208.
66. See Noël Sturgeon, “Theorizing Movements: Direct Action and Direct
Theory,” in Marcy Darnovsky, Barbara Epstein, and Richard Flacks,
eds., Cultural Politics and Social Movements(Philadelphia: Temple
University, 1995), pp. 35–51; and “Direct Theory and Political Action:
The U.S. Nonviolent Direct Action Movement,” Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of California, Santa Cruz, March 1991.
67. ’This phrase was suggested to me by Ednie Garrison.
68. King, “Caring About Nature,” p. 88.
69. King, “Caring About Nature,” p. 89.
70. Giovanna di Chiro, “Defining Environmental Justice: Women’s Voices
and Grassroots Politics,” Socialist Review 22(4) (October-December
1992): 93–130, p. 115. For similar arguments depicting women’s
activism arising out of “community,” see Joni Seager, “Hysterical
Housewives, Treehuggers, and Other Mad Women,” in Earth Follies,
 pp. 253–79; Celene Kraus, “Blue-Collar Women and Toxic-Waste
Protests: The Process of Politicization,” pp. 107–17), and Vernice D.
Miller, “Building on Our Past, Planning for Our Future: Communities
of Color and the Quest for Environmental Justice,” pp. 128–37), both in
Richard Hofrichter, ed., Toxic Struggles (Philadelphia: New Society
Publishers, 1993); and Maria Cuevas, “Community Work as Family
Work: Chicana Community Empowerment Strategies in Los Angeles,”
paper presented at American Movement Cultures: Boundaries, Borders,
Bodies conference at Washington State University, June 1996.
71. Di Chiro, “Defining Environmental Justice,” p. 118.
72. Greta Gaard, Ecofeminism Now!
73. Sandoval’s schema of reformulating liberal, Marxist, radical/cultural,
and socialist feminisms is especially useful for understanding the
process of consciousness-raising that is part of teaching Women’s
Studies in a university context. In my experience, my primarily white
and middle class students come into my Introduction to Women Studies
course with the (liberal) assumption that “women are the same as men.”
In the course of exposure to the analysis of the social construction of
gender and the various forms of sexism, they go (rapidly and unevenly)
through the stages “women are different from men” and “women are
superior to men” (the stages that create the most consternation among
conservative and feminist critics of Women Studies alike). My task is to
get them to the “women are a racially divided class” moment before
they leave the Intro course. In that mode, they come into the upper-level
“theory” classes, which, oriented as those classes are around the
material and skills appropriate for preparation into professional
academic careers, concentrate on the critical, textually based practice
known as “poststructuralist feminism” (which Sandoval does not add to
her reformulation but which might be recast as “women and men are
 not unified categories”). This curriculum-based “stage” metaphor
(common in conversations around ways of formulating a Women’s
Studies program) recapitulates the idea that a move from (essentialist)
cultural feminisms to (anti-essentialist) poststructural feminisms is a
matter of “development,” in which the last stage is the best. I have
always been uncomfortable with how this process of professionalization
is obscured for what it is and how it reappears as the “maturity” phase
for a young feminist (an obfuscation, by the way, that many students in
“theory” classes furiously resist). This is particularly troublesome, as
the “earlier” stages of “women are different than men,” “women are
superior to men,” and “women are a racially divided class” are
moments in which the feminist solidarity is created that pushes young
feminists to understand the interconnections between racism, classism,
sexism, and heterosexism. Furthermore, that solidarity provides the
material basis for feminist activism. Am I saying that poststructuralist
feminism can’t be used for generating feminist activism? Not unless we
discount academic political practice as activism, which I (personally!)
would not want to do. But we must also not privilege this as the “best”
kind of feminist activism. Ongoing studies of third-wave feminism will
be the place to look for some of the answers to these questions; see, for
instance, Ednie Garrison, “The Third Wave and Postmodern Cultural
Conditions: Feminist Consciousness in the 1990s,” Kerri Dyan Gentine,
“liarth Mothers and Riot Grrrls: Why My Mother May Never Be My
Sister,” and Crystal Kile, “Hello Kitty Explains Kinderwhore to You:
Third Wave Feminism and Riot Grrrl Style,” all papers presented at the
Feminist Generations conference, Bowling Green University, February
1996. I am especially indebted to Ednie Garrison for her helpful
comments on this chapter.
74. Joni Seager, Earth Follies, p. 12.
75. The use of Salleh as a critic of essentialism is especially peculiar since
we have seen, in chapter 1, that one of Salleh’s early articles made a
quite explicitly biologistic argument for “ecofeminism,” though her
later work rejected “essentialism per se” strongly. Perhaps Alaimo only
read this later work. See Ariel Kay Salleh, “Deeper Than Deep
Ecology: The Eco-Feminist Connection,” Environmental Ethics 6
(Winter 1984): 340–45; “The Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate: A
Reply to Patriarchal Reason,” Environmental Ethics 14 (Fall 1992):
195–216; and “Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the
Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate,” Environmental Ethics IS (Fall
1993): 225–44.
76. Alaimo, “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions,” p. 133.
77. Alaimo introduces these quotes from Haraway by saying: “Haraway
critiques the ecofeminist positions on nature and science by analyzing
them in a non-Western context.” Alaimo, “Cyborg and Ecofeminist
Interventions,” p. 135. All of the material from Haraway that I cite in
what follows was available to Alaimo at the time of her writing.
78. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the
World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 412, n.30.
79. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
(New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81, p. 181.
80. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 183–201, p. 201.
81. See especially her interview with Marcy Darnovsky entitled,
“Overhauling the Meaning Machines,” in Socialist Review 21(2)
(1991): 65–84, especially p. 69–70, 78.
82. The relevant section is as follows: “At the same time [as ecofeminism
makes useful connections between feminism and environmentalism] the
ecofeminist argument fails on several counts. First, it posits ‘woman’ as
a unitary category and fails to differentiate among women by class,
race, ethnicity’, and so on. It thus ignores forms of domination other
than gender which also impinge critically on women’s position. Second,
it locates the domination of women and of nature almost solely in
ideology, neglecting the (interrelated) material sources of this
dominance (based on economic advantage and political power). Third,
even in the realm of ideological constructs, it says little (with the
exception of Merchant’s analysis) about the social, economic, and
political structures within which these constructs are produced and
transformed. Nor does it address the central issue of the means by
which certain dominant groups (predicated on gender, class, etc.) are
able to bring about ideological shifts in their own favor and how such
shifts get entrenched. Fourth, the ecofeminist argument does not take
into account women’s lived material relationship with nature, as
opposed to what others or they themselves might conceive that
relationship to be. Fifth, those strands of ecofeminism that trace the
connection between women and nature to biology may be seen as
adhering to a form of essentialism (some notion of a female ‘essence’
which is unchangeable and irreducible). Such a formulation flies in the
face of wide-ranging evidence that concepts of nature, culture, gender,
and so on, are historically and socially constructed and vary across and
within cultures and time periods.” For her example of the “biologistic”
ecofeminist argument, Agarwal uses Ortner’s famous essay, “Is Male to
Female as Nature is to Culture?” which, as I have noted before, is not
explicitly ecofeminist and indeed predates U.S. ecofeminism. Agarwal,
“The Gender and Environment Debate,” pp. 122–23.
83. Agarwal, “The Gender and Environment Debate,” p. 123.
84. Agarwal would not count these explorations as “materialist” because
she is working with a Marxist definition of “materialist,” which retains
an implicit reliance on the economic, dualistic, hierarchical
“base/superstructure” model of orthodox Marxism in which “nature” is
primarily a resource for production. Also, I want to be clear I am not
saying that all accounts of the “nature-engaging” activities I list above
necessarily have to be in terms of universalizing white, U.S., or middle-
class experience uncritically, nor that these experiences are always only
undertaken by white, middle-class, U.S. women. See, for an account of
women’s “lived material relationship” with gardening and animals,
which is quite sensitive to historical, class, and race questions, Vera
Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
See, for an account of African American women’s relation to gardening
and to animals, Alice Walker, “In My Mother’s Garden,” In Search of
Our Mother’s Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1983),
and “Am I Blue?” in Living By The Word (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 3–8. See, for a complex account of women of
color’s relationship with “nature” figured in various ways, Gloria
Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt
Lute, 1987). Elly Haney suggests that, given her own raced, classed,
gendered, and historicized subject location, “nature was a sphere of
activity free from the various constraints of being female. It was
freedom, not nurturance and fertility/creativity, that shaped my
relationship with the out-of-doors.” Haney, “Towards a White Feminist
Ecological Ethic,” journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9(1–2)
(Spring/Fall 1993): 75–93, p. 91. A complex, breath-takingly
materialist race- and class-specific narrative of encountering nature can
 be found in Val Plumwood’s “Human Vulnerability and the Experience
of Being Prey,” Quadrant (March 1995): 2, 30–33.
85. Agarwal, “The Gender and Environment Debate,” p. 122.
86. Karen Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” pp. 18–19.
87. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 19.
88. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 5.
89. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 7.
90. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 8.
91. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 17; my emphasis.
92. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 7.
93. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 19.
94. Plumwood, “Ecosocial Feminism as a General Theory of Oppression,”
in Carolyn Merchant, ed., Ecology, pp. 207–19.
95. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, p. 11.
96. I thank Julie Graham for this point.
97. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, p. 47.
98. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 4, and repeated on p. 7.
99. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 6.
100. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” p. 7.
101. Ynestra King, “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of
Ecology,” in Judith Plant, ed., Healing the Wounds: The Promise of
Ecofeminism (Philadephia: New Society, 1989), pp. 18–28, p. 23.
102. Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Gary Nelson, and
Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1991),
pp. 295–337, p. 296.
103. See Elizabeth Bird, “Nature As A Social Actor: Conversations in
Biotechnology,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa
Cruz, March 1993.
104. Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” in Grossberg, et al., Cultural
Studies, p. 297.
105. Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” in Grossberg, et al., Cultural
Studies, p. 297.
106. Chela Sandoval, “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the
Methodology of the Oppressed,” in Chris Hables Gray with Heidi J.
Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor, eds., The Cyborg Handbook
(New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 407–22.
107. Imperative exclamation point intended and necessary. Coined by
Elizabeth Bird during the Mothers and Others Day Action at the
Nevada Test Site, May 1987.
108. Stacy Alaimo, “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions,” p. 150.
109. Zoë Sofia, “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the
Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism,” Diacritics 14 (Summer 1984):
47–59, p. 58.
110. Haraway, interviewed by Marcy Darnovsky, in “Overhauling the
Meaning Machines,”
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Index
Abbey, Edward 50, 54
Abzug, Bella 150–52, 157, 158–61, 163, 226n.46
Academic feminism 167–68, 174
Activism 182–84
Activist coalitions 192
Activist politics 198n.18
Adair, Margo 108, 213n.4
Adams, Carol 130, 185, 208n.80, 223n.65
Adler, Margot 36, 131
Adorno, Theodor 34
Afanasieva, Eugenia 182
Affinity groups 1, 33, 51, 61, 71–72, 99, 211n.12
Agarwal, Bina 127, 128, 136–37, 139, 145, 178–79, 186–89, 19084,
221n.44, 233nn.82
Agenda 21, 157–58, 164. see also “Women’s Action Agenda”21,
227n.61
A. J. Muste Memorial Institute 83
Alaimo, Stacy 178–79, 186–89, 194, 233n.77
Albion Uprising 56
Alcoff, Linda 17
Alexander, Jacqui 215n.18
Alexie, Sherman 223n.67
Alinsky, Saul 85
Allen, Paula Gunn 215n.18, 218n.11
Amini, Uzuri 215n.18
Anarcha-feminism 184, 185
Animal ecofeminism 184–85
Animal liberation 31, 58, 208n.80, 210n.130
Anticommunism 148, 149
Anti-essentialism 8–16, 195–96
Antimilitarism 27, 36–37, 92, 151
feminist 1–3, 7, 70–71, 73–74, 78, 95–97, 98, 109, 110, 150,
203n.18, 210n.4
Antimilitarist direct action see direct action movements
Antimilitarist ecofeminism 59–60, 73–74
Antioch West 83, 93, 94
Antipornography movement 11
Antrobus, Peggy 152
Arendt, Hannah 200n.53
Arias, Margarita 227n.65
Arnold, Mary 99
Asian Indian women 124–28
Asian women 117

Bagby, Rachel 79–108, passim, 213n.4, 215nn.14 20, 216n.42, 217n.51

Bahuguna, Sunderlal 144
Banderage, Asoka 215n.18
Bari, Judi 49, 52–57, 185
Benavides, Marta 8416, 18, 215nn.13
Bernard, Desiree 152
Bhatt, Rhada 125
Bhopal 124
Biehl, Janet 37–41, 129, 179, 187, 205n.53, 206n.56, 218n.4
Bioregionalism 68
Bird, Elizabeth 2, 3, 133, 234n.107
Boeing Corporation 70
Bohemian Grove direct action 68
Bomberry, Victoria 102, 103
Bookchin, Murray 32–41, 49, 206n.56
Boserup, Ester 142
Braidotti, Rosi 17
Breast Cancer Project 227n.55
Brown, Joan Martin 151
Brown, Wendy 2
Brundtland Commission 144, 151
Buege, Douglas 38
Butler, Judith 17, 198n.23
Buttel, Frederick 146–48

Caldecott, Leonie 26
California Rendezvous 53, 209n.116
Callicott, J. Baird 44
Campbell, Linda Wallace 161
Canadian Council for International Cooperation 225n.25
Capitalism 73–74, 126–27, 137, 145, 148–49
Capitalism, Nature, and Society 231n.59
“Capitalization of nature” 137
“Career feminism” 228n.10
Carlassare, Elizabeth 218n.13, 230n.33
Carlotti, Catherine 203n.13
Carson, Rachel 24, 200n.4
Castro, Gizelda 182
Cheney, Jim 38, 45–46, 48
Cherney, Darryl 50, 55
Chipko 124–27, 144, 185, 221n.35
Chodorkoff, Dan 32
Circle One (WomanEarth) 79–107, passim 213n.4, 215nn.18–20,
216n.42, 217n.51
Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW) 26, 203n.12
Clamshell Alliance 26, 33
Class differentiation 117, 120, 128, 215n.19
Coalition politics 133–34, 186, 192, 196
Cold War 146, 148–50, 171
Collins, Sheila 190
Combahee River Collective 12, 215n.20
Conceptual ecofeminism 183, 193
CONFENIAE 164
Consciousness-raising 17–18
feminist 64, 70, 199n.49, 232n.73
Consensus process 92–93
Constructionism 178–79, 230n.33
Corral, Thais 152, 227n.60
Cosmic feminism 198n.18, 231n.48
Crosby, Christina 15
Critical ecological feminism 193
Cultural ecofeminism 167, 181, 182, 183
Cultural feminism 11, 68, 167, 169–7317, 198n.18, 200n.1, 229nn.14
Cultural imperialism 219nn.21, 22
Culture-nature dualism 65–67, 114, 122, 123, 130–31, 132, 190, 191–
94, 204n.29, 221n.48
Curtin, Deane 185
Cyborg ecofeminism 194–95
Cyborg feminism 194
Cyborg natures 132
Cyborgs 187, 190, 194–95, 223n.72

Daly, Mary 24, 65, 200n.4

Daney, Camille 82–94, passim, 214n.8, 225n.24, 227n.55
Davidoff, Linda 49
Davion, Victoria 179
Davis, Angela 12, 26
Davis, Deeanne 102
d’Eaubonne, Françoise 202n.8
Decade for Women 143
“A Declaration of Interdependence,” 155–57, fig. 2 156
de Cotter, Maria Eugenia 152
Deep ecology: definition of 42
ecofeminist critique of 40–50, 129, 132, 147, 207n.64
feminist critique of 68
relationship to Earth First! 41, 49
relationship to eastern religions 42, 43
roots of 42
and social ecology 41
de Lauretis, Teresa 10, 16
Deming, Barbara 82, 213n.3
de Oliveira, Rosiska Darcy 227n.60
Devall, Bill 41, 42, 54
Development discourse 135–66
Development with Women for a New Era (DAWN) 143, 152
Diablo nuclear power plant 75
Diamond, Irene 27, 102, 116, 125
Di Chiro, Giovanna 183–84
Differential consciousness 175–76, 184, 189
di Leonardo, Michaela 69–70
Direct action movements 50, 52–56, 60–61, 67–69, 70, 73–74, 200n.52,
210n.4
antiracism in 210n.4
antimilitarist 200n.52, 211n.12, 23–25, 32–33, 37, 52, 61, 67–69,
71–74
feminist 11–12, 61, 69–72, 115, 177
Direct theory 183, 200n.52
Diversity: defined as international 136, 150, 153–55
differing definitions of 118
solidarity in 218n.7
Dominations 190–93
Donovan, Josephine 171, 172, 184
“Double jeopardy” 213n.2
Drengson, Alan 42
D’Souza, Corrine Kumar 25, 227n.60

Earth Day (1990) 209n.106

Earth First! 51, 207n.69, 208n.103, 209n.112
deep ecology, relation to 41, 49
direct action strategies of 50, 52
ecofeminism, relation to 49–57
internal debate within 53–57
masculinist nature of 50–52, 53, 55
The Earth First! Journal 51, 53–55, 57
Earth Night Action 209n.106
Eastern religions 42, 43
Echols, Alice 172–73, 17817, 229nn.14
Eco-Femina 152
Ecofeminism_ in the academy 25, 27, 167–68
activism, relation to 7, 25, 62, 67–69, 115, 182–84, 185–86, 189
and animal liberation 31, 204n.30
antimilitarism, relation to 1–3, 7, 23–24, 25, 27, 67–68, 109
antiracism and 30, 77–111, 133
backlash against 167–68, 228n.1
beginnings and development of 23–24, 25–28, 50, 57, 63, 125, 178,
202n.8
coalitions in 133–34, 186
as countercultural movement 158–61
class, lack of attention to 120, 128
and deep ecology 40–50, 129, 132, 147, 207n.64
definition of 23, 67
development discourse and 135–66
difference, attention to 65, 67–68, 74, 78, 85
diversity of positions within 28–29, 45–49, 57–58, 138–39, 182, 188
and Earth First! 49–57
environmental justice, relation to 133, 196
and environmentalism 31–32, 139, 218n.10
and essentialism 43, 129, 136–39, 169, 178–89, 212n.21
feminism, relation to 30, 57, 74, 146, 168–69, 186–94
feminist spirituality, relation to 29, 36–40, 114, 129–34, 187,
206n.58, 221n.48
gender essentialism in 115, 120
globalization of 27–28
 indigenous women, idealization of 113–15, 126–28, 132, 134, 136–
39
materialist analysis of 188–89, 19084, 233nn.82
maternalism, relation to 183–84
men’s involvement in 68
Native American women and 118–21, 218n.12, 219nn.21, 22
as oppositional consciousness 72–75
as a political position 18–19, 27–28, 68–69, 116, 136–66
and race 30, 77–111, 113, 115, 117, 127, 132, 133, 181, 223n.78
racial essentialism in 116–18, 127, 132
and social ecology 33–41
and social movements 3–5, 200n.2
texts of 25, 102, 20In.7
as third wave feminism 23, 24, 191, 200n.1
as straw-woman 137–39, 169, 178, 179
typologies of 178–95, 201n.5
U.S. Greens and 31, 33
Western dualisms, critique of 47, 114, 191
as a white movement 115, 118, 210n.4, 217n.51
whole earth image, critique of 227n.66
WomanEarth and 79, 110, 214n.11
on women-nature association 28–32, 65–67, 114, 115, 138, 158–60,
221n.48
Ecofeminism Now! 56, 184–86, 210n.127, 227n.54
Ecofeminist Caucus 204n.30
Ecofeminist Colloquium (Institute for Social Ecology, 1994) 220n.29
Ecofeminist natures 5, 133, 169
The Ecofeminist Newsletter 201n.5, 203n.9, 226n.53
Ecofeminist Perspectives Conference (Dayton, 1995) 228n.1
Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature, Theory Conference (USC,
1987) 27, 40, 44, 62, 101, 110, 116
Ecological feminism 193
Eisler, Riane 205n.53
Encounter of Indigenous Women of Americas 164, 165
Enge, Elin 152
Engstrom, Eleanor 2
Environmental Ethics 41
Environmental ethics 45–49
Environmental feminism 193
Environmentalism 31–32, 68, 146, 149–50, 15135, 225nn.30, 226n.41
see also globalizing environmentalisms
Environmental justice movement 118, 133, 183, 184, 196, 203n.12,
223n.81
Environmental racism 154
Epstein, Barbara 2, 36, 198n.23, 200n.52
Espinosa, María Fernanda 164–65
Essentialisms: categories of 187–89, 231n.48
constructionist, opposed to 178–79, 230n.33
destabilization of 165, 169, 200n.52
difference, obscuring of 59
ecofeminism and 178–86
feminist critiques of 12–16
social movement, relation to 6–8
strategic use of 10–11, 16–19, 66, 135, 169, 180, 231n.53
women of color and 180see also gender essentialism
see also racial essentialism
Essentialist constructs 5
Essentialist ecofeminism 183
European pagan womens tradition 113, 117, 128–29, 31. see also
feminist spirituality
Evatt, Elizabeth 152
E.V.E.: Ecofeminist Visions Emerging 185, 203n.9

Featherstone, Elena 215n.18

Feinman, Ilene 218n.12
“Feminine principle” 126
Feminism_ backlash against 219n.18
critique of Western humanism 8–9
relation to ecofeminism 168–69, 178, 186–94
New Left, relation to 170
second wave 12, 16, 32, 70, 78, 170, 171, 174, 186
third wave 191, 200n.1, 232n.73
topography of 175
typologies of 167–78, 198n.18
Feminist activism_ and community 232n.70
essentialism and 16–19, 180
feminist theory and 7–8, 16, 169–73, 177–78, 221n.48
maternalism and 210n.3
Feminist Cluster 75
Feminist direct actions see direct action movements
Feminist environmentalism 188, 193 218n.10
Feminist Generations conference (Bowling Green, 1996) 232n.73
Feminist green socialism 193, 231n.59
Feminist Peace Institute 82–84, 86, 89, 93, 95150. see also
WomanEarth
Feminist political ecology 193
Feminists for Animal Rights 185
Feminists of color 170, 171, 173–77, 178, 192, 203n.18
Feminist spirituality: antimilitarist movement and 36–37, 73–74
critiques of 37–40, 130–3168, 218n.4, 223nn.67
ecofeminism, relation to 36–40, 73–74, 114, 129–34, 181, 206n.58,
221n.48
as eros 205n.49
“indigeneity,” valorization of by 126, 155
Native Americans and 120–21, 130–31, 223nn.67, 68
race and 109, 130–31, 222n.61
politics and 185
popularity of 221n.48
scholarship on 221n.48
as a strategic position 129–30, 132
WomanEarth and 81, 84–85, 86, 91–92, 216n.28
Feminists versus politicos 170–71, 173, 181
Feminist theory: feminist activism and 7–8, 16, 169–73, 177–78,
221n.48
women of color and 185, 229n.18
Ferguson, Kathy 179–80, 181, 187, 188, 231n.48
Ferree, Myra Marx 177
Firestone, Shulamith 171
Foreman, Dave 49, 50, 54
Forward Looking Strategies 140
Forum of African Voluntary Development Organizations 152
Fourth World Women’s Conference see UN
Fox, Warwick 41, 42, 46, 48, 206n.61
Frantz, Marge 2
Freeman, Jo 171, 172–73
Fuss, Diana 14–15, 16

Gaard, Greta 56, 122, 159, 167–68, 184–8630130, 204nn.25, 205n.53,

210nn.127, 219n.21, 220n.29, 226n.53, 227n.54, 231n.59
Galland, China 26
Gender and development (GAD) 140, 143, 145, 225n.25
Gender, environment, and development (GED) 140, 145
Gender equity 142, 157
Gender essentialism 115, 119, 120, 219n.18
Gender, Science, and Development Program (Toronto) 152
Gibbs, Lois 26
Gibson, Janet 161
Global Assembly of Women and Environment 151
Global democracy 148–49
Global environmentalisms 147
Global feminism 174
Global Forum (Rio, 1992) 158
Globalizing environmentalism 135, 139, 146–50
Goddess worship 206n.58, 218n.4 see also feminist spirituality
Gomes, Teresa Santa Clara 227n.60
Green Belt Movement (Kenya) 125, 152, 161
Greenham Common 26, 68, 70, 83, 213n.4
Greenpeace 125
Green Revolution 126
Griffin, Susan 27, 65, 102, 103, 126
Guha, Ramachandra 146, 220n.24
Gyorgy, Anna 26
Habitat Summit (Istanbul) 163
Hampshire College Conference (1986): activities of 98–100
affinity groups in 99
conflicts in 83, 100, 108, 109
lesbian caucus at 99, 108, 109
organization of 79, 86, 91
participants in 92, 95–97, 98, 216nn.34–36
as a peer experience 86, 99
racial parity in 86, 94–95, 98, 99–100
themes of 85, 93, 94, 98–100see also WomanEarth
Haney, Elly 132, 233n.84
Haraway, Donna 2, 24, 73, 114, 129, 133, 187–88, 190, 193–94, 19678,
200n.4, 223nn.72, 233n.77
Hassan, Farkhonda 152
Haughton, Jim 49
Häusler, Sabine 142–44
Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism (1989) 116–34
Hegemonic feminism 174–75
Heller, Chaia 37, 39, 40, 179, 182, 185, 205n.49, 206n.56, 230n.45
Helsel, Sharon 2, 212n.26
Heresies 65
Hess, Beth B 177
Heterosexism 28, 47, 61, 86, 105, 109, 191, 192, 195, 196
Homophobia 65, 86, 100
hooks, bell 13, 16, 17
Horkheimer, Max 34
Howell, Sharon (Shea) 102
Hynes, Patricia 26
Humanism see Western humanism
Human/machine dualism 193–94
Hurwitz, Deena 2

Identity politics 5, 13–14, 17–18, 105–9

India 124–28
“Indigenous” discourse 113, 114, 115, 154–55, 218n.1
Indigenous Organization of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE)
164
“Indigenous” women: alliances within 164–65
ecofeminist idealization of 113–15, 126–28, 132, 134, 136–39
incorporation into global agendas 165–66
feminist spirituality, relation to 128–29, 155
ecofeminism, as representatives of 113–15
Native Americans, represented as 117
as victims 224n.1137
Industrial Workers of the World 209n.124
Inoue, Yuichi 42
Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) 26, 32, 33, 39, 62, 81, 220n.29
International feminist movement 142–46
International Indigenous Women’s Caucus (WEDO) 154–55
Internationalism as diversity 136, 150, 153–55
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 147
International Policy Action Committee (IPAC) 151–52
It’s Tiime to Mother Earth, fig. 3 161, 162

Jackson, Cecile 3, 127–28, 132–33, 136–39, 145

Jacob, Jane 165–66
Jaggar, Alison 171, 172, 174, 177, 180, 181, 189, 230n.28
Javors, Irene 222n.61
Jeffers, Robinson 42
Judeo-Christianity 129–30

Kaplan, Fred 149

Kaplan, Robert D. 226n.40
Kelber, Mim 150–51, 154, 158–60, 226n.46
Keller, Catherine 130
Kelly, Petra 125
Kezar, Ron 50
Kheel, Marti 44–45, 102, 103, 185, 208n.80
King, Katie 169, 174, 199n.39, 228n.8, 229n.19
King, Roger J. H. 179, 183–84
King, Ynestra 138, 155, 182, 187, 19326, 212nn.21, 222n.63, 225n.24
Janet Biehl, portrayal by 38
and Murray Bookchin 38
on Chipko 125–26
deep ecology, critique of by 45
on cultural imperialism 220n.22
and development of ecofeminism 23, 27, 60, 61–63, 65–69, 202n.8
Ecofeminist Perspectives conference, participation in 101
on essentialism 62
and feminist spirituality 37
on racial difference 87
on social construction of women-nature 137
and social ecology 22, 32, 38
and WomanEarth 79–109, passim, 213n.4, 214n.11, 215n.18,
217n.51
and Women and Life on Earth conference 26, 203n.13
Kirk, Gwyn 79–107, passim, 213n.4, 214n.5, 215n.18, 216n.42,
217n.51
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press 84
Klein, Hilary 204n.29
Kniepp, Erica Briemer 185
Koehler, Burt 50

LaChapelle, Doris 53, 122

LaDuke, Winona 153–54, 185
Lahar, Stephanie 187
Leach, Melissa 138–39, 145–46, 224n.8
Learning Alliance 49
Left Green Network 33
Leland, Stephanie 26
Leopold, Aldo 42, 44
Lesbian feminists 11, 86, 99, 100, 198n.18
Letelier, Isabelle 182
Li, Huey-li 114
Liberal ecofeminism 180–81, 185
Liberal feminism 167, 170, 174–76, 178, 180, 184, 185, 189, 232n.73
“Limits to Growth” report 143–44
Livermore Laboratories 75
Lorde, Audre 12
Lugones, Maria 176

Maathai, Wangari 125, 152, 161

Maburg, Sandra 26
McGregor, Gaile 148, 225n.35
McGuire, Cathleen 185
McIsaac, Paul 49
Macy, Joanna 125
“Maldevelopment” 126
Manahar, Sujata V. 152
Martin, Calvin 121
Martin, Jane Roland 15–16
Marxism 233n.84
Marxist feminism 171, 174–76, 180, 189, 232n.73
Maternalism 183–84, 210n.3
Mayman, Margie 79–107, passim, 213n.4, 214n.8, 215n.19, 217n.51
Maxxam 52
Mellors, Mary 179, 231n.59
Merchant, Carolyn 36, 125, 126, 137, 179, 180–83, 187, 188, 227n.60,
231n.59, 233n.82
Mies, Maria 227n.60, 231n.59
Militarism 145, 149–50
Minh-ha, Trinh T. 8–9
Mink, Patsy 226n.46
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 12, 14, 82, 84, 124, 214n.12
Molina, Papusa 79–108, passim, 213n.4, 215n.14, 216n.39, 217n.51
“Moral Mother” 69–72, 73–74
Morton, Nancy 54
Mothers and Others Day Action (Nevada, 1987) 1–3, 72
Mother’s Day Actions (1987, 1988) 61, 71–72, 75
Mother’s Day Coalition for Disarmament March (Washington, D.C.,
1981) 27
Movement organizations 79–80, 200n.52
Muir, John 42
Multicultural feminism 174

Naess, Arne 41–42

Nairobi Peace Tent 82, 88, 89
National Women Studies Association 216n.39
Native Americans: critique of feminist spirituality 120–21, 130–3168,
223nn.67
critique of white feminism 120
environmental activism of 118, 185
gender relations within 219n.14
idealized 113
potential conflict with environmentalists 123, 220n.29
relationship to ecofeminism 118–24, 218n.12, 219n.21, 22
seen as “indigenous” 117
and woman-nature connection 119
Nature: essentialist view of 132–33
social construction of 193–94
vs. “natural” 122
Naturism 190, 192
Neocolonialism 136, 143, 145, 226n.41
Neo-conservatism 147
Neo-paganism 36
Nevada Test Site 1–2, 61, 211n.4
New Left 170
New social movement theory 4, 197n.7
Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Forum (at UNCED, Rio, 1992)
143, 228n.76
Northern California Earth First! 53
Norwegian Forum for Environment and Development 152
Norwood, Vera 131
Nuclear technologies 62–63, 211n.7
NWSA Journal 168

“Objects of knowledge” 169

O’Connor, James 231n.59
Ogounleye, Chief Bisi 152
“Oil crisis” (1970s) 143
Oppositional consciousness 9, 72–75, 175–76, 198n.15, 219n.15,
230n.26
Orenstein, Gloria 27, 116, 125
Ortner, Sherry 138, 204n.29, 233n.82
“Our Common Future” 144, 151
“Outsider within” 6, 198n.10
Owuor, Effie 152

Page, Margaret 177

Palco 52
Paley, Grace 26, 64, 83, 215n.14
Parity 83, 86–89. see also racial parity
Philipose, Pamela 124
Pianeta Fêmea (Women’s Tent, Rio, 1992) 157–58, 227n.60
Plant, Judith 101, 117, 121, 122, 126, 131, 219n.22
Plumwood, Val 18, 38, 40, 47–48, 155, 179, 191–93, 200n.1, 207n.63,
231n.59
Politicos 170–71, 173, 177, 181, 230n.28
Population growth 143
Pornography 70–71
Postmodernism 176, 198n.23, 230n.26
Poststructuralism 13–16, 176, 198n.23
Poststructuralist feminism 74, 172, 177–78, 232n.73
“Public happiness” 19, 200n.53
Puget Sound Women’s Peace Camp (1983–84) 61, 64, 70–71

Queer ecofeminism 204n.25

Race: constructed as binary 78, 104–9, 110, 115, 117–18

in identity politics 105–9
invisibility of in second wave feminism 78
treatment of in feminist antimilitarism 78, 210n.4
Racial difference 113, 115, 117
Racial essentialism 115, 116–18, 119, 127, 13218, 219nn.15
Racial parity 78–79, 82, 83–84, 86, 88–89, 94–95, 98, 99–100, 102–11,
215n.19
Racism 85, 106, 128, 136, 143, 154, 174
Radical activism 195, 196, 198n.23
Radical ecofeminism 180–81, 184–85
Radical feminism 11, 170–78, 184, 18917, 198n.18, 200n.1, 229nn.14,
232n.73
Radical theory 195, 196, 198n.23
Rao, Brinda 127, 132, 136–39, 145, 223n.73, 224n.1
Reagon, Bernice Johnson 104
Reaganism 63, 64, 73–74, 81
Reconstituting Feminist Peace Politics Conference see Hampshire
College Conference
Redneck Women’s Caucus 53
Redwood Summer 52–56, 209n.124, 210n.126
Reed, T. V. 211n.10, 212n.15, 231n.53
Regional Workshop of Indigenous Women 164–65
Reproduction, biological 183
Resource Center for Nonviolence 2
Resource mobilization 4
Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (1990), 116–34,
219n.22
Rich, Adrienne 12
Roach, Catherine 179
Rocheleau, Diane, et al. 178–79
Roselle, Mike 50
Rothenberg, Paula 174
Round River Rendezvous 53
Russo, Ann 214n.12

Sale, Kirkpatrick 68
Salleh, Ariel 42–44, 182, 187, 202n.8, 232n.75
Sandoval, Chela 105, 106, 174–77, 178, 180, 184, 186, 189, 194,
199n.49, 232n.73
Scarce, Rik 51, 52
Scharff, Virginia 8
Schroeder, Richard 225n.19
Scott, Joan 13, 15
Seabrook actions 211n.12
Seager, Joni 51, 149, 178–79, 186–89, 206n.60, 223n.81
Second UN Conference on Women.See UN
Second wave feminism 209n.124 feminism Seeds of Peace
Seneca Falls Women’s Peace Encampment (1983) 61, 64, 70, 210n.3
Sessions, George 40, 41, 42, 207n.66
Sexual orientation 107
Shiva, Vandana 24, 124, 126–27, 138–39, 144, 145, 152, 182, 185,
200n.4, 223n.73, 227n.60, 231n.59
Sierra, Rachel 79–108, passim, 213n.4, 217n.51
SIGNS 167–68
Sisterhood is Global Institute 152
Slicer, Deborah 48–49, 208n.80
Smith, Andy 120–21
Smith, Barbara 79, 82, 83, 8420, 215nn.14
Smith, Michael Peter 165
Snitow, Ann 83
Snyder, Gary 42
Social ecofeminism 37, 39, 181, 185, 193
Social ecology 32–41, 182
Socialist ecofeminism 180–83, 185, 231n.59
Socialist ecology 231n.59
Socialist feminism 67, 68, 125, 167, 171, 172, 174–77, 180, 184, 189,
200n.1, 232n.73
Social movement practice 4–5, 6–12
Social theory 165
Sofia, Zoë 194
Spiritual ecofeminism 184
Spirituality 29, 215n.19 see also feminist spirituality
Spretnak, Charlene 205n.53, 206n.54
27, 37, 38, 102, 103
Starhawk 24, 27, 37, 38, 79–109, passim, 131, 13311, 200n.4, 213n.4,
214nn.5, 215n.14, 217n.51, 223n.78, 225n.24
Steinem, Gloria 226n.46
Stone, Merlin 215n.18
Sturgeon-Reed, Hart 195
Subsistence agriculture 114
Surrogate Others 1–3, 194, 212n.26
Sustainable development 140, 144
Sverdrup, Amber 226n.53
SWAGSD (Senior Women’s Advisory Group on Sustainable
Development) 140
Swerdlow, Amy 26

Taylor, Peggy 26
Taylor, Peter 146–48
Teish, Luisah 79–108 passim, 213n.4, 215n.18, 219n.22
Thinking Green: Ecofeminists and the Greens 210n.130
Third wave feminism see feminism
Third World: activism, as inspiration for ecofeminism 125
difference 124
as essentialist category 127–28
failure of Green Revolution in 126
people, represented as environmental threat 144, 149
woman-nature connection in 127, 128, 221n.44
women 113, 124–28, 142–46, 181, 221n.35
This Bridge Called My Back 12
Thoreau, Henry David 42
Three Mile Island 62, 63, 211n.7
Thropy, Miss Ann 54
Tidings (Women and Life on Earth newsletter) 26, 27
Torres, Lourdes 214–15n.12
Transformative feminism 189–90, 192
Transitions, Environments, Translations: The Meanings of Feminism in
Contemporary Politics Conference (Rutgers, 1995) 228n.76
Tsing, Anna 148–50, 225n.29, 226n.41

UnderCurrents 204n.25
UNIFEM 152, 157
United Nations (UN): Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED, Rio, 1992) 27–28, 140, 151, 157
Conference on population (Cairo, 1993) 162
Conference on Social Development (Copenhagen, 1994) 162
Conference on Women (Nairobi, 1985) 82
Fourth World Women’s Conference (Beijing, 1995) 162, 163, 164,
165
gender equity, lack of in 157
Linkage Caucus in 162–63
Second UN Conference on Women (Nairobi, 1985) 143
Summit on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993) 165
UNEP (UN Environmental Program) 140, 151, 152, 154, 157
WEDO, main focus of 150, 163
Women and Development Conference (Mexico City, 1975) 142–43
Women’s Caucuses in 161–63see also WEDO
U.S. Greens 31, 32–33, 37, 58, 204n.30, 206n.54, 210n.130
Green Gathering of (Eugene, 1989) 204n.30
U.S. Third World feminism 175, 176

Vance, Carol 12
Vandenberg Air Force Base 210n.4
van den Hombergh, Heleen, fig. 1 140, 141144
Van Gelder, Lindsy 101
“victimization” paradigm 224n.1
Villafane-Sisolak, Rosa Maria 2

Wadstein, Margareta 152

Wagner, Tia 102
Walker, Alice 24, 200n.4
Wandering Star affinity group 211n.12
Waring, Marilyn 152
Warnock, Donna 64
Warren, Karen J. 38, 46–47, 137, 155, 179, 185, 189–93, 202n.8,
206n.58, 218n.7
War Resisters League 83
Waters, Maxine 226n.46
Watson, Lisa 26
Wattleton, Faye 153
Watts, Alan 42
We Are Ordinary Women 70
W.E.B.: Wimmin of the Earth Bonding 26
WEDO (Women’s Environmental and Development Organization) 21,
27, 135, 140, 150–6656, 220n.31, 224n.8, 227nn.55
ecofeminism, rejection of label by 150, 158–61
Linkage Caucus of 162–63
publications of 155–59
Women’s Caucuses of 161–63see also UN
Weedon, Chris 177–78
Western humanism 8–9, 47, 114, 191
Willis, Ellen 63–64, 65, 172–73, 229n.14, 229n.17
Wilson, Marie 131, 219n.22
Witches 73–74, 131. see also feminist spirituality
Wolke, Howie 50, 53, 54
WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute 73–11120, 214n.5, 215n.19
and antimilitarism 95–97
Antioch West, connection to 83, 93, 94
conflicts within 83, 84, 86–89, 91–94
decision making in 103
discontinuation of 103, 104
ecofeminism, relation to 79, 110, 214n.11
Ecofeminist Perspectives (USC), participation in 101, 110
Feminist Peace Institute, connection to 150
feminist spirituality, relation to 81, 84–85, 86, 91–92, 216n.28
founding of 62
founding aims of 80–82, 84, 86, 109–110
funding of 82–83, 87–89, 94–95, 100, 102, 103104, 109, 214n.8
lesbian involvement in 86, 99, 100
name, origin of 85
New York office of 83, 90–91, 97, 101, 107
public interest in 101
racial difference defined in 86–89, 104–5, 106–9, 117–18
racial parity in 20, 78–79, 82, 83–84, 86, 89, 94–95, 98, 99–100,
102–9, 110
as radical education institution 78, 93–94
three-year plan for 103see also Hampshire College Conference
WomanEarth I 83–101
WomanEarth II 101–4
WomanEarth Peace Institute 20, 62, 78–79, 82
WomanEarth Review 102
Womanism 184, 185
Woman-nature association 119, 122, 137–39, 191
ecofeminist positions on 28–32, 115, 158–60
essentialist notions of,, 205n.53 142
in the Third World,, 221n.44 127, 128
Women Against Racism Committee 99, 213n.4
Women and Development Conference see UN
Women and Life on Earth: Ecofeminism Conference (Amherst, 1980)
26, 62, 81
Women and Life on Earth (WLOE, Northampton) 26
Women and the Environment Conference (Berkeley, 1980) 26
Women, environment, and development (WED) 137, 140, 145, 150,
204n.26
“Women for a Healthy Planet Community Report Card” 163
Women for a Non-Nuclear Future 210n.3
Women for Life on Earth (London) 26
Women in development (WID) 140–43, 145, 151, 225n.19, 225n.25
Women in Solar Energy (WISE) 26
Women of color 87, 88–89, 105–9, 154, 174, 180, 18418, 219nn.16,
233n.84
ecofeminism, rejection of label by 109, 181
and feminist theory 185, 229n.18
Women of Color of North America 154
Women of the South 154
“Women’s Action Agenda 21,”. See also Agenda 157–58, 160–6121
Women’s Environmental and Development Organization.See WEDO
Women’s Foreign Policy Council 150–51
Women’s liberation movement 170
Women’s Peace Tent (Nairobi, 1985) 225n.24
Women’s Pentagon Actions (1980–81) 25, 26–27, 33, 36, 64, 160
critiques of 81, 203n.18
as direct actions 61, 68
goals of 63
Unity Statement of 27, 64–65, 67
Women’s Studies curricula 232n.73
Women Strike for Peace 150
Women’s USA Fund, Inc. 150, 226n.46
World Bank 137, 147
World debt crisis (1980s) 143, 147
“world travelling” 176
WorldWIDE 151
World Women’s Conference for a Healthy Planet (Miami, 1991) 27,
151–61, 163, 220n.31, 224n.8, 227n.56. see also WEDO

Yarning 56
Young, Iris Marion 189–90
Young, Shelagh 206n.56

Zapotes, Simon 57
Zimmerman, Michael 46, 48
Zirenberg, Nancy 51