feminism – Climate Justice Now

Building Back Equal

Francesca Von Krauland COVID-19, Global Future, Uncategorized December 1, 2020December 1, 2020care work, economics, feminism, femtech, marketing, sustainability

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” So ends a Financial Times article penned by author Arundhati Roy earlier this year, when the extent of the COVID-19 situation was just beginning to become clear. Her words hold truer than ever as we near the final month of this chaotic, tragic, wake-up call of a year. Everything has changed, but have we as a society changed enough to make the most of the times to come?

In my last article, I gave a sketch of the vision of some feminist climate activists, one that involves knocking down the capitalist world order and replacing it with a collectivist and egalitarian framework. I now want to highlight some of the work already being done, within the system, to reform and rebuild the economy with both social and climate justice at the forefront.

First, some hopeful facts, as explained by Joni Seager, a feminist geographer at Bentley University. Renewables have passed non-renewables in the EU for electricity. The BP oil company says that the peak of their output has passed. The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund has said it won’t put any more funding toward fossil fuels. As a whole, in developed nations, fossil fuels are on the way out—all due the fact that rational economic behaviors would move us away from fossil fuels at this moment, more so than as a result of the compassion of the powerful and the passion of the powerless. In fact, much has been accomplished despite what Seager calls “a stubborn attachment that defies sensibility of economics” in the United States and Australia, where governments have ratcheted up commitment to fossil fuels through identity politics. From the top to bottom predominately male work force, to the fact that capital benefits accrue most to men, to the very language we use of “drill baby drill and “dominating the Permian Basin,” the fossil fuels industry is a remarkably masculinized one. Outdated for more than one reason, a society reliant on fossil fuels is also one that propagates a limiting, gendered worldview—and even those who challenge the science and economics of fossil fuels don’t always do so with equality in mind.

There’s a particular, 21st century brand of masculinity that drives environmental policy with methods that only enforce outdated social norms. The economic effects of the pandemic make the Green New Deal more urgent and relevant than ever, yet a feminist analysis of its proposed policies reveals numerous shortcomings, due in large part to the male elite perspective it relies on. A paper commissioned by two UK feminist organizations, Wen and the Women’s Budget Group, found that the Green New Deal creates tech jobs for “men in hard hats lifting solar panels,” a masculinist assumption of what the economy is for. With little acknowledgement of social difference, they emphasize that true progress lies in investing in women and POC-dominated care work, which pollutes less than construction. Care work can be paid or unpaid, and it mainly takes place in the home in the service of others, including children, aging parents, and spouses. The interconnections between the exploitation of women’s care work and the Earth need to be addressed simultaneously because all those doing the care work make survival, learning, and change possible in the face of existential threats—despite the free subsidy that care work represents to people in power. The study found that each pound invested in care produces three times as many jobs as one invested in construction, and this fact, coupled with that the vast majority of people of all genders want care work to be paid, points toward an economic solution that would also have a positive social impact. Supporters of a care-centered green movement consciously distance themselves from some of the ideas of the climate feminists of my last article. Branding themselves “eco-feminists,” supporters of a Feminist Green New Deal emphasize that their ideas are not about women being close to nature or other such caricatures, but about rational arguments for the democratization of care work.

Within the Femtech sector, which is “an all-encompassing name that defines innovations designed to support, improve and promote women’s health,” many products designed and sold for and by women are also eco-friendly. Replacing wasteful, disposable menstrual products with reusable cups, for example, is one of many ways that women are dominating the movement toward sustainable innovation and consumerism. Of course, this is problematic in another way—most available environmentally conscious products on the market, including reusable shopping bags, household cleaning products, and cosmetics, are marketed toward women, with some saying that green is the new pink in women’s marketing. While showcasing the ingenuity and motivation of the women behind some of these campaigns, such an approach alienates men, actually fueling the belief that saving the planet is women’s work, rather than something that can only be achieved through intersectional, inclusive action. But even these notions are dwindling among younger generations, which is a definite cause for hope.

There’s much to be done in the climate movement by both men and women—and deconstructing needlessly gendered economic and business policies seems like a good start. In reforming our global order to address the climate crisis, the pandemic, social injustice, and the economic crisis, solutions need not throw out the system in order to improve it. Policies that are feminist, sustainable, and economically sound would move society forward in a way that’s equal parts revolutionary and truly feasible.

Featured Image from Tee Public

Feminism and Climate Justice: Working “Collectively, Carefully, and Tenderly”

Francesca Von Krauland Global Future November 22, 2020November 24, 2020capitalism, climate justice, feminism, indigenous, intersectional

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