from NWSA Journal Volume 9, Number 3

Women, Ecology, and the Environment: An Introduction

MARLENE LONGENECKER

Ohio State University

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[T]he advocates of People's Park had asserted another version of what is probably America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land as essentially feminine-that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification--enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction.

--Annette Kolodny

The challenge to feminists, environmentalists, and environmental ethicists . . . is to overcome metaphors and models which feminize nature and naturalize women to the mutual detriment of both.

--Karen J. Warren

Feminism, at least since Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), has always been concerned with the relation of women to nature. On the whole, that relation has been seen as an oppressive one: biology is destiny; male superiority is "natural"; women's work is reproduction, not production; the womb is the site of hysteria; inferior bodily strength signifies mental incapacity; woman = "immanence," man = "transcendence": the familiar clich»s of sexism. "Nature" has for centuries been advanced as prescriptive of gender as well as descriptive of sex, and Western feminism, in all its varieties, has long been devoted to deconstructing that connection, arguing for the difference between sex and gender, extending to women the subjectivity, agency, autonomy, and claims to culture assumed "naturally" by men.

Ecofeminism, introducing the sciences and philosophies of ecology and environmentalism into feminist discourse, has complicated all that. Ecofeminism begins with the premise that in transcultural, global patriarchal practices, "women" and "nature" share a subordinate and instrumental relationship to men; both are subject to patterns, attitudes, and institutions of male domination and control; both are gendered "feminine" as one of the means of that control; but, given women's affiliation with nature, women have a unique responsibility to the health and survival of nature itself, to the care of the planet. As victims of what ecofeminist philosopher Karen Warren calls "the logic of domination" ("Power" 21), women and nature must also be allies in the struggle to resist it.

But ecofeminism is as diverse as feminism itself, and the usual feminist questions immediately arise: What, exactly, does "women" (or "woman") mean? What, after all, is "nature"? What, precisely, do we mean by "patriarchal practices"? And what, above all, is the nature of that "affiliation" and "alliance" between women and nature? What should our relationship--material, spiritual, political--to nonhuman nature be? How is it gendered and what are the consequences of that gendering for women? For nature? How do these consequences differ by race or class or nation or age or sexuality or any of the vital categories in the matrix of feminist analysis? At what point, under what conditions--if ever?--should "human" needs take priority over those of the nonhuman? Or vice versa? Who decides? What if feminists could decide?

Within ecofeminism, there are two principal positions on the vexed question of the relation between women and nature, with most people falling somewhere on a continuum between them.¹ The first, often associated with feminist spirituality and with what used to be called "cultural" feminism, has insisted on reclaiming the connection--whether spiritual or biological or social--as a source of power and celebration, a sign of women's greater sensitivity to and capacity to care for nature. For some, the fact of women's procreative capacity is itself the source of a biological tie with nature's life-giving processes; for others, the fact that women have for so long been associated with nature gives us a unique opportunity to shape the relationship for the empowerment of both; for still others, the association with nature is a more metaphorical ("Mother" Nature, "mother earth") but equally powerful source of what they see as their moral call to stewardship and protection of the environment.²

The second position finds this renewal and reclamation effort tainted with essentialism and dangerous to women and to nature, since claiming a "special" female relationship with nature can only replicate the very patriarchal prescriptions it attempts to resist. For social and political ecofeminists, the best way to "protect" nature is to deconstruct the nature-culture (and gender) dualism itself as a false dichotomy.³ As Catherine Roach argues in, "Loving Your Mother: On the Woman-Nature Relation," it is ecologically unsound to argue that women or men are "closer to" or "farther from" nature: there is nowhere else to go.

[T]he hierarchal dualism between "nature" and "culture" or between the nonhuman and the human . . . is unsound because it encourages the belief that "culture" and humanity are quite apart from "nature" and that we humans may thus use and abuse the environment at will, without ourselves suffering from the damage we inflict. (59-60)

Culture, as ecofeminists are fond of pointing out, comes from agriculture, from "cultivation" of the land--a particularly intimate (though human-constructed) relationship to nature. The notion that nature and culture are opposed has intensified with industrialization and urbanization, but the idea of "culture" as a kind of defense against "nature" is a destructive one. We need to substitute a dialectical relationship for the dualism that now pertains. For all our ecological interconnectedness with nature, it is also true, as Roach points out, that humans' toxic waste dumps, for example, do more damage than beavers' dams (61), and there are ways in which humans are not natural--are separate from and "other" to nature--and therefore have custodial duties not ethically imposed on other species. But to assume that humans can ever be wholly "other" to nature is to ignore ecological reality. Most ecofeminists would argue that the gendered nature of labor, knowledge, and social practices does give women a "closer" view of environmental problems and solutions, if not a unique "connection" to the nonhuman.

To reject an essential or metaphysical relationship between women and nature, then, is not to reject a political one. If poststructuralism has taught us anything, it has taught us that categories of difference are also always hierarchies of value, and, in dominant Western ideologies, women and nature are both equated and devalued (or, alternatively, exalted, which comes to the same thing) in relation to men and culture; women (along with children and people of color) do in fact bear a disproportionate amount of the health and risk factors associated with a toxic environment;⁴ women have certainly shared with nature what Susan Griffin, in Women and Nature: The Roaring inside Her, has described as a "pornographic" place in male imagination: constructed for the satisfaction of masculine desire. Women have also long been in the forefront of environmentalism and of global efforts to establish a sustainable human relationship to the biosphere.

In addition to the problematic philosophical and political question of woman's (or women's) relationship to nature, which all of the essays in this volume address from a variety of perspectives, four other themes, emerge from this collection as central to ecofeminist debates:

1. Intersubjectivity. How do our notions of ourselves and nature change if we begin to imagine nature as a subject? Since intersubjectivity is difficult (some say impossible) even between humans, is it likely between human and nonhuman nature? Is there something about women that makes them more receptive to an intersubjective relationship with nature? If nature is a subject, does nature have "rights"? If we imagine nature having consciousness or desire or even intention, are we simply anthropomorphizing once more, inventing a romantic relationship for our own pleasure? Can intersubjectivity escape romance? (See Bjornerud, Murphy, Sandilands, Henry.)

2. Diversity. Increasingly, ecofeminists are finding in biodiversity both a model and a "biological" rationale for human diversity--racial, ethnic, and cultural. What are the relations between human diversity and biodiversity? Is ecofeminism itself (which is dominated by white, middle-class academics and activists) sufficiently diverse? (See Murphy, Zweifel, Schneiderman, Filemyr.)

3. Interdisciplinarity. Ecofeminism, perhaps more than any other contemporary feminism, is a site where scientists and humanists must talk to each other. Clearly, the dichotomy between the "two cultures," like so many others, is slowly being loosened, if not dissolved, and ecofeminism may justly claim a leadership role in that intellectual process.⁵ Can feminist science and feminist humanism meet in intellectual interdependency--even, indeed, in an "ecological" relationship--in environmentalism? (See Vance, Bjornerud, Dodd, Schneiderman, Filemyr, Henry.)

4. Coalition. Ecofeminism continues and enriches feminism's long (if by no means always easy or successful) tradition of political alliances between academics and activists. Ecofeminism is itself, of course, founded on a coalition between ecology and feminism, and, especially in the environmental justice movement, ecofeminists and environmentalists are finding crucial opportunities for important political alliances with people struggling for equity and justice for poor and minority communities and for women in Third World nations. (See Sandilands, Murphy, Zweifel, Schneiderman, Filemyr.)

The Essays

The first two articles in this volume, by Catriona Sandilands and Patrick Murphy, engage the questions of ecofeminism from the perspective of critical theory and the debate between feminism and postmodernism. Though Sandilands and Murphy both imagine similar outcomes--the achievement of a nonexploitative, intersubjective relation among humans and between human and nonhuman nature (Murphy calls it "kinship" and Sandilands calls it "affinity"), they take significantly different philosophical positions regarding the potential of postmodernism and radical poststructuralism to provide us with grounds for an ecofeminist theory and politics.

Catriona Sandilands's essay, "Mother Earth, the Cyborg, and the Queer: Ecofeminism and (More) Questions of Identity," is an application of postmodern queer theory to ecofeminism. Since ecofeminism is a coalition between feminism and environmentalism, it requires what the author calls "new coalitional myths" that deconstruct not only "woman" but "nature" as well. Fixed identities, like static political positions, do not lend themselves to coalitions but in fact defeat them. The old identity politics, Sandilands argues, only return us to conventional relationships between women and nature, in which nature is used as a rationale for sexism (as the "origin" of repressive social categories like gender) or for an essentialist claim to women's special relationship with nature that Sandilands disavows. Even "strategic" essentialism--the political rather than metaphysical claim by some feminists of women's identification with nature--is, she claims, "never simply 'strategic'" (28) but always threatens to reinscribe patriarchal discourse. Instead, she maintains, postmodern identities--unstable, indeterminate, ironic--are prerequisites to an emancipatory politics for women and for nature. The "new" feminist identities modeled on the "queer" or the "cyborg," especially as articulated by Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, are, for Sandilands, the most productive grounds for merging poststructuralist feminism with ecological feminism; in their fundamentally parodic and performative relationships to patriarchal discourse, queer and cyborg identities "open up different subject positions to the possibility of influence by others" (00). This "influence," she believes, is only possible in conditions of radical contingency and requires what she calls "performative affinity"--a term that combines Butler's idea of gender as performance with Haraway's "politics of affinity" to describe a subject position that both breaks the patriarchal identification of woman with nature and maintains a postmodern, feminist connection with nature, based not on "matriarchal" reversals of patriarchal representations but in playful parody of them.

One of Sandilands's most radical moves, I think, is to insist not only on "troubling" the category of "woman" but on deconstructing nature itself, unraveling the idea of nature as the "reified, victimized, epistemically transparent, and passive entity" (00) that she finds in some ecofeminist texts. Noting that postmodern science and chaos theory have "displac[ed] the idea that nature (nonhuman or human) is governed by a series of constant laws that humans can 'discover' through . . . scientific method" (00), Sandilands charts (with the help of recent work by Stacy Alaimo) a transgressive notion of nature as active subject and of humans and nature as coagents in the creation of the world. Like other authors in this volume who attempt to ascribe a kind of agency to nature (see especially Murphy, Bjornerud, and Henry), Sandilands wishes for a theory--and a reality--in which both nature and women are freed from their status as passive object.

"Calling the identity 'woman' into question," says Catriona Sandilands, "is and should be understood as a practice of everyday life" (24). Patrick Murphy would argue, I think, that such a prescription for "everyday life" could only originate in the late-capitalist metropolis and that if relevant to the privileged minority who live there, it is more problematic for most of the world's populations. From Murphy's perspective, it is difficult to see how or why women whose everyday life consists mainly in gathering food, fuel, and water could or would deconstruct identity, and that is one of Murphy's principal quarrels with postmodernism: it does not, he argues, include those who do not live in the condition of postmodernity, who exist in what he calls paramodern circumstances--rural and indigenous communities that exist "alongside and beyond" the modern and the postmodern, in the same biosphere but not in the same world. Like Sandilands, Murphy sees utopian possibilities in the alliance between feminism and environmentalism, but in his essay, "Ecofeminism, and Postmodernism: Agency, Transformation, and Future Possibilities," he is fundamentally skeptical of the idea that an antifoundationalist ideology of radical indeterminacy can provide us with a viable utopian politics.

Murphy believes that postmodernism (his examples range from postmodern theorists of development to Drucilla Cornell, bell hooks, and Linda Hutcheon) has in fact opened up a space for a radical politics of resistance and critique but that it cannot offer a genuine politics of transformation. In addition to what he regards as postmodernism's Eurocentric and ethnocentric repression of the realities of paramodern cultures, Murphy articulates three major political flaws in postmodernist theory that, from his point of view, limit its applicability to ecological feminism. First, like many critics of postmodernism, he is critical of the overly semiotic nature of poststructuralist theory: textuality replaces "reality," and postmodernism, from his perspective, is limited to the "discursive terrain," neglectful of materialist analysis, and thus never directly engaged with the "biospheric terrain" where, Murphy believes, genuine social transformation must take place (42). Second, postmodernism lacks a genuine theory of community. Unlike Sandilands, Murphy does not find in postmodernism the possibility of coalition; he sees it as "too obsessively focused on the idea of the individual and the construction of singular, even though fragmented and continuously reconstituted identity, while the struggles of the oppressed around the world are much more concerned with the idea of maintaining communities and the conservation of culturally and environmentally relational identity" (44). And finally, Murphy believes that postmodernism is far too complicit with commodity culture to be applicable to a theory of biospheric ecology. Nature itself, he argues , is commodified in postmodernism's fascination with technology, and postmodernism, Murphy writes, "seems utterly ignorant of the organic limitations to the satisfaction of culturally constructed desires" (47).

In the final sections of his essay, Murphy outlines ecofeminism's potential for a transformative politics, some of which he finds reflected in the work of contemporary women writers. Ecofeminism, unlike postmodernism, is not "locked in a negative critique of the present," (42) but meets the criteria Murphy believes are necessary for utopian social change: it is global, diverse, more oriented toward materialist analysis and praxis, committed to nonhierarchical relationships, dialogical, a form of "situated knowledge." Like Sandilands, Murphy believes especially in ecofeminism's potential to extend agency to the nonhuman, to deconstruct self-other dichotomies, and to imagine a "kinship" with nature. But the contradictions between these two essays are instructive: the authors might not recognize each other's "postmodernism," and that, in itself, says a good deal about the diversity of critical theory with which ecofeminism must engage.

In "Ecofeminism and Wilderness," Linda Vance takes up a much more specific theoretical and practical question: what should a feminist perspective on wilderness and wilderness protection be? As she points out, the increasingly global move to "protect" wild places and preserve them from human development seems to most environmentalists a noble goal and to most ecofeminists an exception to the norm of patriarchal domination of nature. But, Vance argues, an analysis of the "conceptual foundations" on which wilderness protection rests suggests quite otherwise: these conceptions, she says (her examples are largely from the United States), "support the rationalist project of controlling nature and, by extension, the project of controlling women" (61).

In the section called "The Culture of Nature," Vance raises a series of questions she thinks are central to a feminist analysis of wilderness. Wilderness, she maintains, is "the part of our environment that is idealized as 'perfect nature,'" nature in its "pure" form (62). Why, she wonders, do we believe that the "best" nature is that which is most other, most separate, most untouched by culture? If we think of wilderness as "perfect" or "pure," what aspects of nature are therefore necessarily "impure," "imperfect," inferior? Does wilderness, like the "true woman," get worshipped only so that other forms of nature (your local park, your own backyard) will, like "impure women," be scorned? If we spend our resources protecting "virgin" (the pun, of course, is telling) forests, what happens to the ones that are, as it were, damaged goods? Does wilderness in fact serve to open more space for the exploitation of nature not wild enough to be preserved? As Vance points out, it is the ecosystems closest to us that are "most in need of remedial attention" (63) but that suffer by comparison to the wild spaces in our symbolic imagination. Who is served by these conceptions of a nonhuman wildness "beyond" culture?

The mainstream idea of wilderness protection, Vance argues perpetuates the dualism between nature and culture through the fantasy of an "untouched" space of "otherness"; deep ecology, on the other hand, of which Vance is equally critical,⁶ seems to want to reduce all difference between human and nonhuman nature through its desire for a mystical connection to the inherent value of wilderness for its own sake. From an ecofeminist perspective, Vance believes, both positions are untenable. How, she asks, can we "have an ethic of respect for nature without assimilating it to self" (68)? For Vance, the idea of wilderness, at least as it is currently imagined as an almost "aesthetic" entity, prevents us from forming a more dialectical--and thus more ecologically sound and politically just--relationship to nature and each other. She offers us, in the last section of her essay, perceptive analyses of three "problems" related to wilderness--grazing, recreation, and biodiversity--as examples of how an ecofeminist analysis differs from that of both mainstream land managers and deep ecologists. In each case, she finds, ecofeminism asks the questions the others do not, complicating our human relations to natural space, politicizing both nature and human in ways that might genuinely advance the health of the biosphere. It is startling--and not a little unsettling, to me, at any rate--to think that "wilderness" may be a regressive idea; but so Vance would have us understand: "It can only serve," she says, "to distract us from what ought to be our focus: the relationships of domination that intrude on all our interactions, whether among humans or between humans and the nonhuman world" (72).

One of ecofeminism's most controversial moves in the attempt to reverse the structures of domination over women and nature that Vance and others describe has come from the "spirituality" wing of the movement: the attempt to revive or adapt ancient or indigenous forms of "goddess" worship for a late-twentieth-century woman-centered theology.⁷ Like most feminist spirituality movements, this one has received a mixed reception from feminists generally and from most ecofeminists. In discussions reminiscent of the debates in the 1970s and early 80s between radical and cultural feminisms on the one hand and Marxist, socialist, womanist, and "Third World" feminisms on the other, the attempts by some ecofeminists to create what Karen Warren calls "liberating, life-affirming, and post-patriarchal worldviews" ("Philosophies" xiv) through goddess worship and other earth-based theologies have been criticized as essentialist and apolitical. As I mentioned earlier, "mother earth" and "Mother Nature" have not seemed progressive ideas to the more political contingents of the feminist--or the ecofeminist--movement. Elizabeth Dodd's essay, "The Mamas and the Papas: Goddess Worship, the Kogi Indians, and Ecofeminism," is a significant cautionary tale in this debate.

Intrigued by Alan Ereira's BBC documentary on the Kogi, From the Heart of the World: The Older Brothers' Warning (1992), and by Ereira's written account of filming it, Dodd researched the anthropological studies available on the Kogi, that she compares with their representation (and self-representation) in the television production. The Kogi are a reclusive tribe in Colombia who agreed to a documentary to warn Westerners, whom they call "younger brothers," to stop killing the earth, which they call The Mother. The Kogi have a complex cosmology and creation mythology that might, by Western standards, seem "feminist": it imagines the Earth as mother and creator; it lacks rigid gender dualisms; and, most important from Dodd's point of view, it figures a world in which "thoughtful creativity and biological procreativity are closely connected" (79). The Mother-creator is "not merely a progenitor figure but an intellectual one" (80). It turns out, however, that the apparently egalitarian myths coexist with the rigid social, political, and spiritual exclusion and devaluation of "real" Kogi women: "[t]he spiritual life of the Kogi . . . is presented as a matrifocal cosmology administered by a present-day patriarchy" (80). The Kogi--perhaps in part because of the stresses of Spanish colonialism--are in fact misogynist goddess worshippers, suggesting to Dodd the serious limits of merely cultural female power.

Even given the limitations of cross-cultural analysis, Dodd believes we can learn from this example to be cautious of ecofeminist spiritual desires centering on women as procreative, fertile, nurturing, and instinctively life-affirming. In addition to the fact that the social status of women may have no relation to their "mythic" status, Dodd feels the symbolic conflation of female creativity and procreativity points to a very real, material danger in overvalorizing the fertility goddess figure: it contributes ideological force to overpopulation--a problem the ancient goddess worshippers, of course, did not have to face. Dodd urges that instead of regendering our cultural myths, we find ways to transcend traditional categories of both gender and "species" and seek metaphors that "figure the ethos of the 'biotic community'" (87). Marcia Bjornerud is not quite so skeptical of the potential contributions of myth and metaphor to social transformation. Her essay, "Gaia: Gender and Scientific Representations of the Earth," is an analysis of the controversial Gaia theory and a feminist critique of mainstream, male-dominated science. Writing as a scientist herself, Bjornerud is interested in the ways in which Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment mechanistic explanations of natural law may have "limited the range of acceptable metaphors for the natural world" (89) and thereby also limited human attempts to attain a healthy, sustainable relationship to the planet. Gaia, she thinks, may provide us with an important alternative conception of earth and, interestingly, of social relations that could challenge the dominance of the machine in science and in human consciousness.

"Gaia" is the theory, named after an ancient Greek earth goddess, that the earth and all of its creatures constitute a living organism that, in a sense, "created"--and continues to manipulate--its own atmosphere to suit its needs. The earth, in this theory, is capable of maintaining the homeostasis it requires to sustain life, and the Gaia hypothesis suggests that organisms have acted collectively, if not intentionally, "to make the global environment favorable for the biosphere" (89). Though this theory has gained some respect in scientific circles, most of mainstream science regards it as full of poetry signifying nothing; Bjornerud describes both the history and development of the idea and science's hostility to it. Following Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature, Bjornerud reads the seventeenth-century ascendancy of mechanistic models for nature as having resulted in the exclusion of women from science, since women were associated with "organic" metaphors and systems--with nature itself, not with the study of it. She points out that over the past three centuries the "metaphor of the machine" has developed into a tacit, invisible, and unquestioned scientific "truth" but that it, like "Gaia," began as metaphor and is embedded in the symbolic. Recent feminist science (Bjornerud cites especially the work of Helen Longino) has begun to create new criteria for evaluating scientific theories, attempting to free science from rigid and perhaps outmoded hyperempiricist methods. "Gaia," Bjornerud maintains, meets these new criteria.

But Bjornerud is not committed to establishing Gaia as "science" so much as she is to asking "science" to recognize its own metaphorical genealogy and to exploring what science fears in its rejection of these new metaphors. And that, though she would not perhaps use these terms, is something like Freud's idea of the "uncanny": the return of the repressed--and the repressed is female.⁸ If mechanistic models exclude woman, Gaia returns her to the center of concepts of nature. And the result, from Bjornerud's point of view, yields a new scientific model that disturbs male science but that may have progressive social and cultural applications: earth is granted an active and creative role in its own evolution--almost a form of consciousness; microorganisms that "fuel" the process are given greater roles than those "higher" on the food chain, thus inverting conventional scientific hierarchies; evolution seems more related to cooperation and symbiosis than to Darwin's competitive model of natural selection; concepts such as equilibrium, homeostasis, mutuality, and feedback may become principles of a new scientific paradigm--and potentially of social relations. Indeed, Bjornerud wonders whether some of the ecodisasters we face now--especially the decline of biodiversity--might have been avoided "if the scientific community itself had been more diverse" (101).

In this final speculation, Bjornerud echoes an idea familiar in ecofeminist theory, elaborated on by Catriona Sandilands and Patrick Murphy and in the next essay by Helen Zweifel: the crucial importance of biodiversity and its promise as a model for cultural diversity. Indeed, many scientists and theorists, Zweifel among them, suggest that human cultural diversity is a form of biodiversity, an adaptation to problems of survival in particular environments; from a scientific point of view, human multiculturalism is not just politically desirable but biologically necessary to species survival.

Zweifel's essay, "The Gendered Nature of Biodiversity Conservation," describes the role of women in developing nations in the sustainable use of natural resources. Globally, biodiversity is women's work, and Zweifel feels it is especially important to the reversal of environmental degradation to make visible the indigenous knowledge those women possess. Zweifel's article concentrates on women not as participating in any uniquely female "harmony" with nature but as occupying a particular material relationship to nature resulting from the sexual division of labor. While this relationship varies some by age, class, ethnicity, religion, and nation, there are "features common to all women" (110) in developing nations that are important to ecofeminist thinking. Women produce 50 percent of the food worldwide, but because, like so much of "women's work," much of the labor is unpaid, it is unrepresented in the United Nations' and other calculations of global GNP and may therefore easily be overlooked. This oversight, according to Zweifel, will have serious--even fatal--consequences in the science of survival. The knowledge required to recognize and sustain biodiversity worldwide is highly gendered, and its very existence is threatened by sexist "development" programs (which even now tend to assume social patterns in which men are in control of resources and to pay little attention to rural women, who do most of the farming) and by modernization itself: the market economy, which values high production yields over sustainability; the "green" revolution in agricultural methods, which favors monocultural farming; formal schooling, which does not honor traditional "local knowledge systems"; the migration of men to cities to find paid work, which increases the value of women's knowledge but also isolates women and burdens them with more responsibility for the food supply.

In the section of her essay called "Intellectual Property Rights," Zweifel is particularly critical of "Northern" biotechnology, which has transformed what used to be "free" knowledge into the raw materials for industrial, agricultural, or pharmaceutical development: "The commodification of biodiversity has caused a shift in the ownership of genetic resources from communal to private. Biodiversity knowledge and resources are alienated from the original custodians and donors and become the monopoly of private industry" (117). Though the laws are changing, multinational corporations have not been required to respect women's ecological expertise, which they do not recognize as "scientific," and which is therefore not protected by global intellectual property rights. Big business can "patent" plants, marginalizing women, appropriating their knowledge, and undermining their cultural status. However, since rural women's work, in most developing nations, is ecological maintenance, the feminist efforts recommended by Zweifel at the end of her essay to establish global recognition and protection of women's special roles in these gendered knowledge systems will also work to conserve the foundation of the planetary food chain--life, as we know it. This essay shows perhaps more clearly than any in this volume how women's empowerment, ecological conservation, and environmental protection are, literally, the same thing.

Jill Schneiderman, in "The Common Interests of Earth Science, Feminism, and Environmental Justice," adds an important perspective to this volume from the environmental justice movement. Ecofeminism, though it has always articulated an antiracist politics, has, like most environmental movements in the United States, been largely a white and middle-class movement. As Schneiderman points out, environmentalism began as a late-nineteenth-century desire for a haven from the effects of industrialization, and even now it is often seen as focused primarily on the "wilderness" idea that Linda Vance critiques--wild spaces--or even just National Parks--designed in part as sanctuaries not only for "nature" but for the recreation of the privileged classes. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), detailing the effects of pesticides in agriculture and often cited as the beginning of the "modern" environmental movement, began to change that elitist focus, but, Schneiderman points out, it is only recently that activists have recognized the inner cities and rural poor communities as primary victims of environmental degradation. Most women and men of color concerned with environmental issues have created grassroots alliances in response to the fact that toxic waste sites, smog and water pollution, hazardous jobs, and carcinogenic materials disproportionately affect minority communities throughout the country.⁹ Schneiderman, working as a geologist, describes in her essay an academic alliance with a Citizen's Response Group in Fort Valley, Georgia, attempting to coordinate community response to the Canadyne-Georgia chemical plant Superfund site responsible for herbicide, pesticide, and lead contamination of the surrounding soil and water and several nearby residences. The site is bounded on two sides by African American communities, and Schneiderman, working with the Citizen's Response Group, was able to generate Geographic Information Systems maps, which she describes in her paper, that "allow us to glimpse the vulnerability of nature of the Fort Valley community" (132) and the disproportionate risk they suffer from this contaminated site.

Jill Schneiderman is one of the few authors in this issue who does not describe her work as "ecofeminist" but calls it, rather, feminist. I think that may be a comment, perhaps unintended, on the perceived political limitations of the term "ecofeminism," which, despite its many internal contradictions, seems to retain a quasi-theological ring to it for many activist feminists. Schneiderman, for example, argues that the earth does not need our "protection": at 4.5 billion years old, it has been through a good deal more than we can inflict upon it and will outlive us all (125). Unlike deep ecologists and many ecofeminists, who would disagree with that statement and would in any case hesitate to give human needs a higher priority than those of other species or than the health of the planet itself, Schneiderman focuses specifically on the critical need for a safe, clean, healthy environment for the poor women and children--in our own communities and throughout the world--who are most severely affected by the decline in environmental quality. Though humans are "insignificant in the geological scheme of things" (125), the geologist's response is to insist that the "geological microsecond" of human existence need not thrive on racism and sexism. "Communities of color," she says, "are oversaturated with environmental risk" (126), and, like Helen Zweifel (though neither of them uses the term), Schneiderman endorses a kind of environmental standpoint theory that assumes those most at risk are also those first to encounter and thus most likely to know the dire effects of such risk.¹⁰ But if environmental knowledge is gendered, it is also defined by race and by class, and for Schneiderman, working at the intersection of race, class, gender, and geology is the definition of a feminist science.

Ann Filemyr seeks a similar coalition between the academy and the community, which, she believes, can result from a scholarly and pedagogical alliance between women's studies and environmental studies. Filemyr's essay asks us to add "ecology" to the matrix of gender-race-class-sexuality that forms the core of feminist theory and of women's studies curricula. In "Unmasking the Population Bomber: Analyzing Domination at the Intersection of Gender, Race, Class, and Ecology," Filemyr imagines an academic agenda in women's studies and environmental studies focusing on the deconstruction of patterns of dominance and oppression as they relate to a gendered ecological analysis. The analysis of patterns of dominance and oppression, she claims, should be "a core unit of knowledge . . . for all members of our society" (139), and Filemyr believes that foregrounding the ways the rhetoric of domination masks social inequities is an important part of linking feminist and environmentalist analysis. Herself a member of an interdisciplinary unit at Antioch College that includes African/African American studies, peace studies, eommunications, and environmental studies as well as women's studies, Filemyr calls for an intensified interdisciplinarity that does not just "add on" ecology and the environment to the progressive pedagogical agenda of these programs but takes the integrity and interconnectedness of ecology itself as the model for intellectual inquiry.

Her primary example is the study of the "population bomb," an image, she says, that conjures up "pregnant dark-skinned women surrounded by their hungry hordes of devouring children" (143). Filemyr argues the importance of unmasking not only the racism and sexism of the image but the ways it deflects us from serious ecological crises, some of them falsely blamed on women's uncontrolled reproduction. In a discussion of Brazil, for example, she points out that despite widespread forced sterilization by a government determined to stabilize the population and an actual decline of the population growth rate in recent years, "the rate of ecological destruction, particularly of the Amazon region, escalated during this same period" (144). It is not women having babies who are primarily responsible for the environmental degradation of Brazil (and, because of the critical function of the Amazon rain forest in the planetary ecosystem, the degradation of the entire world) but corporate developers exploiting the resources of the country. Filemyr includes in her essay a suggestive list of eight issues she believes could usefully be examined in both environmental studies and women's studies that would encourage students to link the two and thus gain an "ecological" feminist education.

Finally, Elizabeth Henry's brief essay, "Toward a Feeling for the Organism," published in the "Observations" section, is a meditation on and lucid explication of the author's own experience of reading Evelyn Fox Keller's work on Barbara McClintock, which shows Henry encountering feminist science from the perspective of a writer and literary critic. Echoing many of the themes of Marcia Bjornerud's essay on "Gaia," itself reminiscent of the "feeling for the organism" on which McClintock depended in her scientific investigations, Henry imagines in her essay a way McClintock's descriptions of a nearly mystical and apparently "unscientific" intimacy with the objects of her study can "translate" to work in the humanities, to theories of writing. "How would such a method, rooted in intimacy with the natural environment, affect our perceptions of language, reality, the relationships between mind and nature?" (159). For Henry, the work of a Nobel Prize-winning woman scientist may provide an intersubjective model of knowing that can help us write and teach others to write. Her essay ends with the description of an epiphanic moment in a graduate seminar that speaks for itself as an illustration of the possibilities she imagines.

In a sophomore survey class on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature last spring, surprised by my students' irritation with "all this nature stuff" in Romantic poetry, I asked them to try to describe the interactions they had had with nature that day. There was a long silence, and at last one of the students talked about having released a bird that had gotten caught in his air conditioning unit. Then someone mentioned a walk through the park on the way to school, and someone else a trip she had taken last summer to the Rockies. "No, today," I said. Remarkably, no one could think of anything more. Perhaps they felt they had to produce something for me as grand as Shelley's "Mt. Blanc" (the poem that most annoyed them). But this little (unscientific) experiment suggests that Linda Vance, in her essay in this volume, is right: "nature" has become something foreign, other, elsewhere, exotic; only wilderness "counts." Not one of them seemed to imagine even their own bodies as "natural," to say nothing of the various possibilities of what was, in fact, a stunning early spring day. It's not just the Wordsworthian sublime (about which feminism and ecocriticism are justly ambivalent) from which my students are estranged but the idea of nature itself, its very presence in everyday urban reality. If Patrick Murphy is also right, that one of our compelling tasks as feminists is "the rejection of alienation as a permanent condition of being human" (52), I'd say we have plenty of work to do.

I would like to thank all of the NWSA Journal's anonymous reviewers whose assistance in the selection process for this issue was invaluable and to acknowledge, as well, the support from James Phelan, Chair of the Department of English at Ohio State, who liberally subsidized more postage and xeroxing than he ever intended to. Special thanks to my colleague, H. Lewis Ulman, who was generous with advice and helped circulate the Call for Papers. Especially in the final stages, Patsy Schweickart has been virtually a coeditor, one whose expertise, judgment, and wisdom have been essential. Correspondence should be sent to Marlene Longenecker, Department of English, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210.

Notes

1. For excellent overviews of the various philosophical and political positions on the "woman-nature" relationship, see Griffin, "Ecofeminism"; Merchant, Earthcare; Roach; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari; Sturgeon; Warren, "Power."

2. See especially Adams; Allen; Daly; Reuther; Starhawk.

3. See especially Biehl; King; Merchant, Earthcare; Plumwood; Roach; Sturgeon.

4. See the various essays in Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari; Sturgeon; and Taylor. Taylor's bibliography is a rich source of information on environmental racism.

5. Though I received more submissions from humanists than from either social or natural scientists (reflecting, I think, the readership of this journal and perhaps the membership of NWSA), and though I write as a professor of English literature myself, I find in these essays (and in most anthologies devoted to ecofeminism) a level of interdisciplinarity rare even in feminist scholarship. It is, however, important to acknowledge what is underrepresented in this volume: perspectives from people of color; work by social scientists; literary ecocriticism; essays on animal rights. And I would have liked more about women in developing nations. This call for papers, at any rate, generated a majority of submissions from the academic areas of critical and social theory, natural sciences, and philosophy.

6. For recent perspectives on the long-standing debates between deep ecology and ecofeminism, see Sessions and Plumwood, "Nature."

7. See especially Reuther, Spretnak, and Starhawk.

8. In his classic essay "The Uncanny" (1919), Freud identifies the eponymous phenomenon as the return of the repressed, the reappearance of "something long known to us, once very familiar" (123-24): "everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light" (130). Feminists have long noted that virtually all of the examples of the repressed in Freud's essay are of women or "the feminine." See Todd.

9 For analyses of the relations between ecofeminism and the environmental justice movement, see Sturgeon and Taylor.

10. For a useful introduction to feminist standpoint theory, see Hartsock.

Works Cited

Adams, Carol, ed. Ecofeminism and the Sacred. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Biehl, Janet. Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Boston: South End, 1991.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology. Boston: Beacon, 1978.

Griffin, Susan. "Ecofeminism and Meaning." Warren, Ecofeminism 213-26.

---. Women and Nature: The Roaring inside Her. New York: Harper, 1978.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." On Creativity and the Unconscious. New York: Harper, 1958. 122-61.

Hartsock, Nancy. "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism." Feminism and Methodology. Ed. Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 157-80.

King, Ynestra. "The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology." Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Ed. Judith Plant. Santa Cruz: New Society, 1989. 18-28.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper, 1983.

---. Earthcare: Women and the Environment. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.

---. "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism." Warren, Philosophies 155-80.

Reuther, Rosemary Radford. New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. New York: Seabury, 1975.

Roach, Catherine. "Loving Your Mother: On the Woman-Nature Relation." Warren, Philosophies 52-65.

Rocheleau, Dianne, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari. "Gender and Environment: A Feminist Political Ecology Perspective." Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences. Ed. Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari. New York: Routledge, 1996. 3-23.

Sessions, Robert. "Deep Ecology versus Ecofeminism: Healthy Differences or Incompatible Philosophies?" Warren, Philosophies 137-54.

Spretnak, Charlene. Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Mythology. Ann Arbor: Moon, 1978.

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper, 1979.

Sturgeon, No‘l. "The Nature of Race: Discourses of Racial Difference in Ecofeminism." Warren, Ecofeminism 260-78.

Taylor, Dorceta E. "Women of Color, Environmental Justice, and Ecofeminism." Warren, Ecofeminism 38-81.

Todd, Janet Marie. "The Veiled Woman in Freud's 'Das Unheimliche.'" Signs 11.3 (Spring 1986): 519-28.

Warren, Karen J., ed. Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.

---, ed. Ecological Feminist Philosophies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.

---. "Ecological Feminist Philosophies: An Overview of the Issues." Warren, Philosophies ix-xxvi.

---. "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism." Warren, Philosophies 19-41.