Climate change is an issue based in fact and science, but its effect on people calls for an ideological approach to problem solving. Many of the proposed solutions to the climate crisis draw on the same ways of thinking that created the problem in the first place. While it is possible to work within the system for green reform, some people advocate for more profound systemic change. The intersectional feminist movement has taken on the challenge of using their ideology of inclusivity and equality in the face of historical power in order to reform the capitalist and paternalistic world order at the root of climate change.
Last month, I attended a symposium called Feminist Pathways to Just and Sustainable Futures. Directed by Carol Cohn, and featuring notable professors in the field, the meeting was a discussion of the diversity and depth of the feminist movement’s approach to fixing the climate crisis. Cohn asserted that a feminist approach to solving the crisis makes sense because the problems being addressed in both the climate and feminist movement are dominant power structures and the mentality of denial surrounding the problem itself. Therefore, the solution for both problems is the same: a total overhaul of the system rather than top-down change that only benefits a select few. Of course, there is no one feminist approach to problem solving since the movement itself is multidimensional, but the underlying idea is that because feminism aims to dismantle inequality, it should address injustice in all of its manifestations. Ideas about gender create racial violence, racial violence creates colonial violence, and all of these violences are wrought upon the Earth in transnational, historical systems that result in climate change. Feminism has always been critical and visionary, and one of the most important ways of employing feminism as a lens through which we can develop the climate movement is by valuing the subordinated perspective. In her address, Cohn asserted, “In a world of a dominant class of men deciding what counts as knowledge, taking women seriously as knowers is revolutionary.” People of different genders, classes, and backgrounds have different kinds of knowledge, the value of which white men have until recently held the power to judge. A feminist approach to climate justice urges the need to take seriously the “anecdotal, heathen, superstitions, idealistic, storytelling, irrelevant” knowledge of people whose understanding of the human relationship with the Earth might just be a model upon which we can rebuild sustainably.
Power structures enforce dominant ways of thinking, and practices that are unjust come to be understood as the only way to do things. In a world in which, for example, sustainable, locally used lands are considered a waste that can be better taken advantage of by dominant institutions, it will seem reasonable that corporations engage in fracking, and destroying the Amazon, and biofuel production, and destroying local livelihoods. But if we understand the land from another perspective, that of an indigenous tribe, corporate practices seem barbaric and outdated. Professor Deborah McGregor at York University explains that climate change is a kind of modern genocide for indigenous groups whose land is often most directly affected by changes to the environment, further exacerbating existing health and housing crises. Multiple joint statements by indigenous groups, such as the Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women in 1995, the 2013 Lima Declaration, and the 2020 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, argue for the protection of the environment on the basis of their understanding of the land as a female, maternal figure in need of defending. The traditional idea of everyone being connected, with the whole of the human and non-human inhabitants existing with the Earth in one shared story fuels their beliefs. Some indigenous women link feminism and climate justice because they see women as experiencing men’s violence the same way that the Earth does. Many claim that the Earth’s agency must be acknowledged, rather than talking about the Earth as something we do something to in order to destroy or save.
Intersectional feminism also carves out space for workers, migrants, and people of color within the climate movement, emphasizing that solidarity between the marginalized is the only way to truly combat the crisis of inequality. Dismissing romanticized solidarity, feminists like Ruth Nyambura of the Coordinate Hands of Mother Earth Campaign urge that real work must be accomplished “collectively, carefully, and tenderly” in order for an imagined community across boundaries to form and reject the ideas of their and the Earth’s disposability. Agribusiness and fossil fuels rely on the gross treatment of animals and of workers, and bodies and labor and territories are all exploited by the capitalist system that puts value on shared resources and living people. For people like Nyambura, solidarity with the Earth, and with other social movements, is an expression of tenderness.
I’m a feminist and a climate advocate, but before listening to this symposium, I’d never linked the two before. I like the idea of change coming from a place of caring, and agree that profound change must occur in both business and social contexts. But I hesitate to agree with one of the most basic assumptions of this feminist climate theory—that the climate crisis can only be solved by overthrowing the capitalist system. It’s the kind of statement that alienates well-meaning people who would otherwise be enthusiastic about using their ample resources (acquired with the forces of capitalism) to reform the system from within to a path of sustainability. Rebuilding society in the wake of the pandemic must take sustainability into account, and it must work towards inclusion and fair treatment of women, indigenous people, POC, and other groups, but the idea that the system must be discarded rather than simply improved is a dangerous impediment to progress. It’s also untrue. In my next article, I examine how capitalism and the climate movement are both gendered, and how solutions should be feminist, sustainable, and profitable in order to create realistic and lasting change.
Featured Image from Coursera