EcofeminismRosemary Radford Reuther
What is Ecofeminism? Ecofeminism represents the union of the radical
ecology movement, or what has been called 'deep ecology', and feminism.
The word 'ecology' emerges from the biological science of natural
environmental systems. It examines how these nat ural communities function
to sustain a healthy web of life and how they become disrupted, causing
death to the plant and animal life. Human intervention is obviously one of
the main causes of such disruption. Thus ecology emerged as a combined
socio-econo mic and biological study in the late sixties to examine how
human use of nature is causing pollution of soil, air and water, and
destruction of the natural systems of plants and animals, threatening the
base of life on which the human community itself dep ends.1 Deep ecology
takes this study of social ecology another step. It examines the symbolic,
psychological and ethical patterns of destructive relations of humans with
nature and how to replace this with a life-affirming culture.2 Feminism
also is a complex movement with many layers. It can be defined only as a
movement within the liberal democratic societies for the full inclusion of
women in political rights and economic access to employment. It can be
defined more radically in a
socialist and liberation tradition as a transformation of the patriarchal
socio-economic system, in which male domination of women is the foundation
of all socio-economic hierarchies.3 Feminism can be also studied in terms
of culture and consciousness, c harting the symbolic, psychological and
ethical connections of domination of women and male monopolization of
resources and controlling power. This third level of feminist analysis
connects closely with deep ecology. Some would say that feminism is the pr
imary expression of deep ecology.4 Yet, although many feminists may make a
verbal connection between domination of women and domination of nature,
the development of this connection in a broad historical, social, economic
and cultural analysis is only just beginning. Most studies of ecofem
inism, such as the essays in the book edited by Judith Plant, Healing the
Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism (New Society Publishers, 1989) are
brief and evocative, rather than comprehensive.5 Fuller exploration of
ecofeminism probably goes beyond the expertise of one person. It needs a
cooperation of a team that brings together historians of culture, natural
scientists, and social economists who would all share a concern for the
interconnectio n of domination of women and exploitation of nature. It
needs visionaries to imagine how to construct a new socio-economic system
and a new cultural consciousness that would support relations of
mutuality, rather than competitive power. For this one needs
poets, artists and liturgists, as well as revolutionary organizers, to
incarnate more life-giving relationships in our cultural consciousness and
social system.
A Platform for Deep Ecology Below is what I call "the platform of the
Deep Ecology movement", or rather, one formulation of such a platfrom; it
consists of eight common points to guide those who believe that ecological
problems cannot be solved only by technical 'quick-fix' solution s.
1. The flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic
value. The value of non-human life forms is independent of the usefulness
these may have for narrow human purposes. 2. Richness and diversity of
life forms are values in themselves and contribute to the flourishing of
human and non-human life on Earth. 3. Humans have no right to reduce this
richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. 4. Present human
interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is
rapidly worsening. 5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is
compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The
flourishing of non-human life requires such a decrease. 6. Significant
change of life conditions for the better requires change in policies.
These affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. 7.
The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality
(dwelling in situations of intrinsic value) rather than adhering to a high
standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference
between big and great. 8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have
an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to
implement the necessary changes. -Arne Naess
Such a range of expertise certainly goes beyond my own competence.
Although I am interested in continuing to gain working acquaintance with
the natural and social sciences, my primary work lies in the area of
history of culture. What I plan to do here is to trace some symbolic
connections of domination of women and domination of nature in
Mediterranean and Western European culture. I will then explore briefly
the alternative ethic and culture that might be envisioned if we are to
overcome these patterns o f domination and destructive violence to women
and to the natural world.
Pre-Hebraic Roots
Anthropological studies have suggested that the identification of women
with nature and males with culture is both ancient and widespread.6 This
cultural pattern itself expresses a monopolozing of the definition of
culture by males. The very word 'nature'
in this formula is part of the problem, because it defines nature as a
reality below and separated from 'man', rather than one nexus in which
humanity itself is inseparably embedded. It is, in fact, human beings who
cannot live apart from the rest of nat ure as our life-sustaining context,
while the community of plants and animal both can and, for billions of
years, did exist without humans. The concept of humans outside of nature
is a cultural reversal of natural reality. How did this reversal take
place in our cultural consciousness? One key element of this
identification of women with non-human nature lies in the early human
social patterns in which women's reproductive role as childbearer was tied
to making women the pr imary productive and maintenance workers. Women did
most of the work associated with child care, food production and
preparation, production of clothing, baskets and other artifacts of daily
life, clean-up and waste-disposal.7 Although there is considerable
variation of these patterns cross-culturally, generally males situated
themselves in work that was both more prestigeous and more occasional,
demanding bursts of energy, such as hunting larger animals, war and
clearing field s, but allowing them more space for leisure. This is the
primary social base for the male monopolization of culture, by which men
re-enforced their privileges of leisure, the superior prestige of their
activities and the inferiority of the activities asso ciated with women.
Perhaps, for much of human history, women ignored or discounted these male
claims to superiority, being entirely too busy with the tasks of daily
life, and expressing among themselves their assumptions about the obvious
importance of their own work as the
primary producers and reproducers.8 But, by stages, this female
consciousness and culture was sunk underneath the growing male power to
define the culture for the whole society, socializing both males and
females into this male-defined point of view. It is from the perspective
of this male monopoly of culture that the work of women in maintaining the
material basis of daily life is defined as an inferior realm. The material
world itself is then seen as something sep-arated from males and
symbolically linked with women. The earth, as the place from which plant
and animal life arises, becomes linked with the bodies of women from which
babies emerge. The development of plow agriculture and human slavery very
likely took this connection of woman and nature another step. Both are
seen as a realm, not on which men depend, but which men dominate and rule
over with coercive power. Wild animals which are hu nted retain their
autonomy and freedom. Domesticated animals become an extension of the
human family. But animals yoked and put to the plow, driven under the
whip, are now in the new relation to humans. They are enslaved and coerced
for their labor. Plow agriculture generally involves a gender shift in
agricultural production. While women monopolized food gathering and
gardening, men monopolize food production done with plow animals. With
this shift to men as agriculturalists comes a new sense of lan d as owned
by the male family head, passed down through a male line of descent,
rather than communal land-holding and matrilineal descent that is often
found in hunting-gathering and gardening societies.9 The conquest and
enslavement of other tribal groups created another category of humans,
beneath the familiar community, owned by it, whose labor is coerced.
Enslavement of other people through military conquest typically took the
form of killing the males
and enslaving the women and their children for labor and sexual service.
Women's work becomes identified with slave work.l0 The women of the family
are defined as a higher type slave over a lower category of slaves drawn
from conquered people. In patriar chal law, possession of women, slaves,
animals and land all are symbolically and socially linked together. All
are species of property and instruments of labor, owned and controlled by
male heads of family as a ruling class.ll Looking at the mythologies of
the Ancient Near Eastern, Hebrew, Greek and early Christian cultures, one
can see a shifting symbolization of women and nature as spheres to be
conquered, ruled over and, finally, repudiated altogether. In the
Babylon-ian Creation story, which goes back to the third millenium B.C.,
Marduk, the warrior champion of the gods of the city states, is seen as
creating the cosmos by conquering the Mother Goddess Tiamat, pictured as a
monstrous female animal. Mar duk kills her, treads her body under-foot and
then splits it in half, using one half to fashion the starry firmament of
the skies, and the other half the earth below.12 The elemental mother is
literally turned into the matter out of which the cosmos is fa shioned
(not accidently, the words 'mother' and matter have the same etymological
root). She can be used as matter only by being killed; that is, by
destroying her as 'wild', autonomous life, making her life-giving body
into 'stuff' possessed and controll ed by the architect of a male-defined
cosmos.
The Reformation and the Scientific Revolution
The Calvinist Reformation and the Scientific Revolution in England in
the late 16th and 17th Centuries represent key turning points in the
Western concept of nature. In these two movements the Medieval struggle
between the sacramental and the demonic vi ews of nature was recast.
Calvinism dismembered the Medieval sacramental sense of nature. For
Calvinism nature was totally depraved. There was no residue of divine
presence in it that could sustain a natural knowledge or relation to God.
Saving knowledge of God descends from on high, beyond nature, in the
revealed Word available only in Scripture, as preached by the Reformers.
Populist Calvinism was notable for its iconoclastic hostility toward
visual art. Stained glass, statues and carvings were smashed, and the
churches stripped of all visible imagery. Only the disembodied word,
descending from the preacher to the ear of the listener, together with
music, could be bearers of divine presence. Nothing one could see, touch,
taste or smell was trustworthy as bearer of the divine. Even the bread and
wine was no longer the physical embodiment of Christ, but intellectual
reminders o f the message about Christ's salvific act enacted in the past.
Calvinism dismantled the sacramental world of Medieval Christianity, but
it maintained and reenforced its demonic universe. The fallen world,
especially physical nature and other human groups outside of the control
of the Calvinist church, lay in the grip
of the Devil. All that was labeled pagan, whether Catholics or Indians
and Africans, were the playground of demonic powers. But, even within the
Calvinist church, women were the gateway of devil. If women were
completely obedient to their fathers, husban ds, ministers and
magistrates, they might be redeemed as goodwives. But in any independence
of women lurked heresy and witchcraft. Among Protestants, Calvinists were
the primary witchhunters.24 The Scientific Revolution at first moved in a
different direction, exorcising the demonic powers from nature in order to
reclaim it as an icon of divine reason manifest in natural law.25 But, in
the 17th and 18th centuries, the more animist natural scienc e that
unified material and spiritual lost out to a strict dualism of
transcendent intellect and dead matter. Nature was secularized. It was no
longer the scene of a struggle between Christ and the Devil. Both divine
and demonic spirits were driven out of
it. In Cartesian dualism and Newtonian physics it becomes matter in
motion, dead stuff moving obediently according to mathematical laws
knowable to a new male elite of scientists. With no life or soul of its
own, nature could be safely expropriated by th is male elite and
infinitely reconstructed to augment their wealth and power. In Western
society the application of science to technological control over nature
marched side by side with colonialism. From the 16th to the 20th
centuries, Western Europeans would appropriate the lands of the Americas,
Asia and Africa, and reduce its h uman populations to servitude. The
wealth accrued by this vast expropriation of land and labor would fuel new
levels of technological revolution, transforming material resources into
new forms of energy and mechanical work, control of disease, increasing
speed of communication and travel. Western elites grew increasingly
optimistic, imagining that this technological way of life would gradually
conquer all problems of material scarcity and even push back the limits of
human mortality. The Christian dream o f immortal blessedness, freed from
finite limits, was translated into scientific technological terms.26
Ecological Crisis
However, in a short three-quarters of a century this dream of infinite
progress has been turned into a nightmare. The medical conquest of
disease, lessening infant mortality and doubling the lifespan of the
affluent, insufficiently matched by birth limita tion, especially among
the poor, has created a population explosion that is rapidly outrunning
the food supply. Every year ten million children die of malnutrition.27
The gap between rich and poor, between the wealthy elites of the
industrialized sector a nd the impoverished masses, especially in the
colonized continents of Latin America, Asia and Africa 28, grows ever
wider. This Western scientific, industrial revolution has been built on
injustice. It has been based on the takeover of the land, its
agricultural, metallic and mineral wealth, appropriated through the
exploitation of the labor of the indigenous people. This wea lth has
flowed back to enrich the West, with some for local elites, while the
laboring people of these lands grew poorer. This system of global
affluence, based on exploitation of the land and labor of the many for the
benefit of the few, with its high consumption of energy and waste, cannot
be expanded to include the poor without destroying the basis of life of
the planet i tself. We are literally destroying the air, water and soil
upon which human life and planetary life depends. In order to preserve the
unjust monopoly on material resources from the growing protests of the
poor, the world became more and more militarized. Most nations have been
using the lion's share of their state budgets for weapons, both to guard
against each other and to control their own poor. Weapons also become one
of the major exports of wealthy nations to poor nations. Poor nations grow
increas-ingly indebted to wealthy nations while buying weapons to repress
their own impoverished masses. In spite of mu ch toted arms reduction
treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union, what is happening
is more of a unipolar consolidation of military hegemony on the side of
the United States, and not a real commitment to demilitarization.
Population explosion, exhaustion of natural resources, pollution and state
violence are the four horsemen of the new global apocalypse. The critical
question of both justice and survival is how to pull back from this
disasterous course and remake our rela tions with each other and with the
earth.
Toward an Ecofeminist Ethic and Culture
There are many elements that need to go into an eco-feminist ethic and
culture for a just and sustainable planet. One element is to reshape our
dualistic concept of reality as split between soulless matter and
transcendent male consciousness. We need to d iscover our actual reality
as latecomers to the planet. The world of nature, plants and animals
existed billions of years before we came on the scene. Nature does not
need us to rule over it, but runs itself very well and better without
humans. We are the
parasites on the food chain of life, consuming more and more, and putting
too little back to restore and maintain the life system that supports us.
We need to recognize our utter dependence on the great life-producing
matrix of the planet in order to learn to reintegrate our human systems of
production, consumption and waste into the ecological patterns by which
nature sustains life. This might begin
by revisualizing the relation of mind or human intelligence to nature.
Mind or consciousness is not something that originates in some
transcendent world outside of nature, but is the place where nature itself
becomes conscious. We need to think of human consciousness, not as
separating us as a higher species from the rest of nature, but rather as a
gift to enable us to learn how to harmonize our needs with the natural
system around us, of which we are a dependent part. Such a reintegration
of human consciousness and nature must reshape the concept of God. Instead
of modeling God after alienated male consciousness, outside of and ruling
over nature, God in ecofeminist spirituality is the immanent source of
life that sust ains the whole planetary community. God is neither male nor
anthropomorphic. God is the font, from which the variety of plants and
animals well up in each new generation, the matrix that sustains their
life-giving interdependency with each other.29 In ecofeminist culture and
ethic mutual inter-dependency replaces the hierarchies of domination as
the model of relationship between men and women, between human groups and
between humans and other beings. All racist, sexist, classist and
anthropocentric assumptions of the superiority of whites over blacks,
males over females, managers over workers, humans over animals and plants
must be culturally discarded. In a real sense the so-called superior pole
in each relation is actually the more dependent side of the relationship.
But it is not enough simply to humbly acknowledge dependency. The pattern
of male-female, racial and class inter-dependency itself has to be
reconstructed socially, creating more equitable sharing in the work and
the fruits of work, rather than making one
side of the relation the subjugated and impoverished base for the power
and wealth of the other. In terms of male-female relations this means, not
simply allowing women more access to public culture, but converting males
to an equal share in the tasks of child-nurture and household maintenance.
A revolution in female roles into the male work world, w ithout a
corresponding revolution in male roles, leaves the basic pattern of
patriarchal exploitation of women untouched. Women are simply overworked
in a new way, expected to do both a male work day, at low pay, and also
the unpaid work of women that sus tains family life. There must be a
conversion of men to the work of women, along with the conversion of male
consciousness to the earth. Such conversions will reshape the symbolic
vision of salvation. Instead of salvation sought either in the disembodied
soul or the immorta lized body, in a flight to heaven or to the end of
history, salvation should be seen as continual conversion to the center,
to the concrete basis by which we sustain our relation to nature, and to
one another. In every day and every new generation we need
to remake our relation with each other, finding anew the true nexus of
relationality that sustains, rather than exploits and destroys, life.30
Finally ecofeminist culture must reshape our basic sense of self in
relation to the life cycle. The sustaining of an organic community of
plant and animal life is a continual cycle of growth and disintegration.
The western flight from mortality is a fligh t from the disintegration
side of the life cycle, from accepting ourselves as part of that process.
By pretending that we can immortalize ourselves, souls and bodies, we are
immortalizing our garbage and polluting the earth. In order to learn to
recycle o ur garbage as fertilizer for new life, as matter for new
artifacts, we need to accept our selfhood as participating in the same
process. Humans also are finite organisms, centers of experience in a life
cycle that must disintegrate back into the nexus of life and arise again
in new forms. These conversions from alienated, hierarchical dualism to
life-sustaining mutuality will radically change the patterns of
patriarchal culture. Basic concepts, such as God, soul/body and salvation,
will be reconceived in ways that may bring us much closer to the ethical
values of love, justice and care for the earth. These values have been
proclaimed by patriarchal religion, yet contradicted by patriarchal
symbolic and social patterns of relationship. But these tentative
explorations of symbolic changes must be matched by a new social practice
which can incarnate these conversions in new social and technological ways
of organizing human life in relation to one other and to nature. This will
require a n ew sense of urgency about the untenability of present patterns
of life and compassionate solidarity with those who are its victims.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is a writer and active campaigner for women's
spirituality. She authored the first ecofeminist book, New Woman/ New
Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation in 1975. Her most recent
book is Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theolo gy of Earth Healing. (Send
stamped S.A.E. if you would like notes and excised mid-section.) The
Women's Environmental Network runs a number of green campaigns and also
organises occasional talks by prominent ecofeminists: WEN, Aberdeen
Studios, 22 Highbury Grove, London, N5 2EA (Tel. 071 354 8823).
