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#3700 -
Friday, October 30, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Excerpt from the article featured in this issue:
"The overall intention of ecofeminism is to restore, mend, and empower the hidden, censored and crushed voices of women and the voices of the distressed and imperiled earth. Two influential ecofeminists who share similar wishes for a dual liberation although offering differing analyses are Ynestra King and Starhawk.
In 1983 King outlined a number of tenets of ecofeminism. First, she notes that the building of Eurocentric culture largely in opposition to nature also promotes the subjugation of women since women are often constructed as being closer to nature. She writes that “nature hating and woman hating are particularly related and are mutually reinforcing.”
Second, she sees all life on earth as an interconnected web and not a hierarchy.
There is a socially created hierarchy that is then projected on to nature and consequently used to legitimize domination.
Third, a healthy ecosystem containing human and non human dimensions needs to be built on and to maintain diversity.
Fourth, our very survival calls out compellingly for a new or renewed understanding of our relationship to nature. Nothing short of a radical restructuring of human society based on feminist and ecological principles will suffice."
Ecofeminism: our last great hope?
By Allan Irving
http://communications.uwo.ca/com/western_news/stories/__ecofeminism:_our_last_great_hope?____20091029445093/
Thursday, October 29, 2009
“When the planet is ruined, the
continent forlorn in water and smoke,” writes Canadian poet
Dionne Brand, in her long, unflinching elegy, Inventory (2006),
in which she tallies up the disaster that is the present.
There is a chilling sense of foreboding. There is the sense as
well that the sand is fast running out on our time to act; it may
already be too late.
However, with the most crucial meeting on climate change in the
history of the planet taking place over 14 days in Copenhagen in
early December involving, it is estimated, 15,000
participants, representing about 200 countries there is a flicker
of hope, even perhaps optimism for the future.
Nevertheless it may very well be that our most likely chance for
planetary survival lies in what has come to be known as
ecofeminism.
The contemporary environmental movement and ecofeminism can be
historically located in 1962 when the marine biologist Rachel
Carson (1907-1964) published her pathbreaking study Silent
Spring. The books opening sentence contained its own
implied lament: “there was once a town in the heart of
America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its
surroundings.” The book reflected Carson’s long
standing concern that the reckless use of synthetic chemical
pesticides after World War II was not only detrimental to the
environment but to human beings themselves as a part of the
natural world.
Another formative figure in the intellectual development of
ecofeminism is the French feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne
(1920-2005) who actually came up with the word ecofeminisme; in
1974 she published Le Feminisme ou la mourt which strongly linked
the devaluation of both women and the earth. Her book provided
solid historical arguments that many women in the past used sound
ecological methods that almost always were disrupted by
male-dominated interests. The book was also a call to action:
women needed to take steps immediately to save themselves and the
earth simultaneously. If we listened to, and followed the counsel
of ecofeminists, d’Eaubonne maintained, “our planet,
close to women, would become verdant again for everyone.”
Nothing less than the extinction of people and the planet is at
stake, she insisted, and a complete revolution in thought and
action is required.
Ecofeminism is the bringing together of environmentalism and
feminism; it’s the view that there are significant
connections between the domination of women, androcentrism, and
the domination of nature, anthropocentrism. These two
dominations are inextricably linked in philosophical discourses,
the scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment. There is a long standing discourse that has
created a fundamental dichotomy between subject and object. The
objectification of nature in the thought of Aristotle occurs by
locating reality in the objects of the natural world. With Rene
Descartes’s 17th century discourse on the separation of mind
from the body or matter – thinking subject from external
object - the justification for domination was solidified. This
dualism between an active subject and passive object suggests
literally man who receives, interprets, and organizes the sense
data of a passive objective nature.
Since women were often associated and even conflated with
earth/nature it was a simple logical step to both see women as
objects and as passive, with men retaining a higher position in
the symbolic order as active subjects. Aristotle did not mince
words on this issue. He writes in De Generatione Animalium “the
female, as female, is passive and the male, as male, is active,
and the principle of movement comes from him.”
The ‘father of modern science’ Francis Bacon
(1561-1626) urged his new “man of science” to force
from nature the secrets she conceals in her womb, to unearth
“the truth that lies hid in deep mines and caves” and
“to shape her on the anvil.” Nature, as far as Bacon is
concerned, must be “bound into service” turned into a
“slave” put “in constraint” and “molded”
to serve man’s (not woman’s) ends. Both nature and
women were nothing more than objects to be undressed and
exploited. Two 19th century art works are informative here.
A sculpture located in the entry to the School of Medicine in
Paris is entitled, Nature revealing herself to science, reflected
the prevailing view that nature was only too eager to cast off
her veil and expose her secrets. In Edouard Manet’s
painting, Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, a naked women picnics on
the grass with two fully clothed men.
The overall intention of ecofeminism is to restore, mend, and
empower the hidden, censored and crushed voices of women and the
voices of the distressed and imperiled earth. Two influential
ecofeminists who share similar wishes for a dual liberation
although offering differing analyses are Ynestra King and
Starhawk. In 1983 King outlined a number of tenets of
ecofeminism. First, she notes that the building of
Eurocentric culture largely in opposition to nature also promotes
the subjugation of women since women are often constructed as
being closer to nature. She writes that “nature hating and
woman hating are particularly related and are mutually
reinforcing.” Second, she sees all life on earth as an
interconnected web and not a hierarchy. There is a socially
created hierarchy that is then projected on to nature and
consequently used to legitimize domination. Third, a healthy
ecosystem containing human and non human dimensions needs to be
built on and to maintain diversity. Fourth, our very survival
calls out compellingly for a new or renewed understanding of our
relationship to nature. Nothing short of a radical restructuring
of human society based on feminist and ecological principles will
suffice.
Starhawk is a highly respected voice in contemporary earth-based
spirituality. She is a wiccan and has written extensively
on paganism, and defines the spiritual wing of ecofeminism as
based on goddess traditions, indigenous spirituality, and
immanence rather than transcendence. What is necessary, she
affirms, is a full understanding and acknowledgement that the
earth is alive and will talk to us, call out to us “to act
to preserve her life.” For Starhawk “ecofeminism
challenges all relations of domination. Its goal is not just to
change who wields power, but to transform the structure of power
itself.”
It would seem appropriate to conclude with some lines from
another ecofeminist Canadian poet, Di Brandt. In her 2003
collection, Now You Care, she writes: ....all our night flying
has made us bold, here we come riding quantumly through your
armoured glass windows on our multicoloured cyborged wings, still
bats, witches, goddesses, still unruly mistresses of our, your,
the world’s pulsing heart.
The writer is a professor at King’s University College and a
regular contributor to Western News on environmental issues.