Ecofeminism
In claiming affiliation with nature/environment, ecofeminism defines itself as a philosophical and political movement whose framework is designed by the interconnection of ecological(1) and feminist concerns, regarding both as being consequences engendered through and by the male domination in society. Analyzing the proximity of oppression shared by the collective experience of women and the exploitation of the environment, the noticed parallel forms of domination showcase themselves to be symptoms of the Eurocentric matrix of modern/colonial power(2). Through the process of alienation, women’s historical deprivation of resources in all areas of the patriarchal society that has succeeded within the matrix of colonial power, it is observed that: “women and nature were oppressed, commodified and ultimately abused by the same dualistic patriarchal system,” (Cook, 2008, p. 26). Thus, within the framework of the Eurocentric matrix of modern/colonial power, women and nature are systematically alienated from the rest of society at the same time that they are further alienated from each other(4). Ecofeminism claiming affiliation with nature/environment is not only a direct negation of the patriarchal-societal traditional norms, but it is also an active, intentional, and assertive displacement of alienation as it is a practice of mutual recognition of nature, space, and relocated(4) knowledges.
Coined by Franҫoise d’Eaubonne as a connection between ecology and women (1992, p. 4) in 1974, the emergence of ecofeminism triggered concern and, ultimately, political movements. Pepper (1984, p. 16) identifies the growing concern as having its beginnings in the early 1970s, stating that the growing concern of a deteriorating environment became incontestable as it was accompanied by sustained economic expansion. Delveaux further explains that:
Worried about ecological damages due to increased consumption, rapidly expanding populations, and the Americans using huge amounts of defoliants in the Vietnam War, a heightened awareness of environmental problems emerged, (2001, p. 3).
The heightening of ecological awareness also expanded itself through environmental ethics, the philosophical branch of theoretical knowledge that can be seen as being centered around examining the moral foundations of ecological responsibility. According to Delveaux, there are three distinct views of moral responsibility to the environment: 1) anthropocentric, 2) environmental obligation, and 3) ecocentric(5).
Ecofeminism is transcended by Alice Walker by intertwining the issues relating to race with the already rich socio-historical context that exists within the ecofeminist framework. Understanding how race is a postulated axes in which colonial power is fundamentally articulated then, ecofeminism, as a theoretical framework, is shown to be a well-rounded articulated description of all three axes of colonial power. Through this conception of ecofeminism, the exploration of environmental racism can be analyzed through multiple areas that are unable to alienate themselves from colonial violence and contemporary/modern capitalism. At the same time, the engagement with political work to dismantle the multiplicities of white supremacy is made accessible as practicality is a fundamental component of ecofeminism.
Walker’s contribution to the concept of ecofeminism demands scholars, educators, and practitioners of ecofeminism to engage with the materialization of the growing ecological crisis through a racial lens. Environmental racism, then, is also positing the need to engage with the particularities of the spaces that are being studied to further understand environmental racism and its impact on historically alienated communities. Race is a crucial component for understanding ecofeminism as a political movement that aims at disrupting white supremacy globally. As such, it’s important to note how ecofeminism expands on the concept of community empowerment. Mainly, in the ways ecofeminism showcases the numerous ways women are materially changing the spaces around them through this political framework. Ecofeminists engaging with critical race ideologies that are fundamentally demanding a disruption of white supremacy at a global scale can understand how black ecofeminists specifically understand their excluded material reality and are working towards redesigning spaces specifically curated for their liberation and, ultimately, challenging practices that aimed at disrupting global white supremacy.
Environmental Racism: A Global Disruption of Nature/Environment
Walker stated that the earth has also become a victim of systemic oppression and exploitation alongside women, people of color, and poor people. Robinson, in discussing environmental racism and the issues that have risen due to its expansion, defines environmental racism as:
“Racial discrimination in environmental policymaking and the enforcement of regulations and laws; the deliberate targeting of people of Coloured communities for toxic and hazardous waste facilities; the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities; and the history of excluding people of color from the leadership of the environmental movement,” (2001, p. 1).
Tracing the history of colonial violence allows for the understanding of the engendering of environmental racism as well as assists in pinpointing how the exploitation of people of color has taken up forms of “genocide, chattel slavery, indentured servitude, and racial discrimination— in employment and housing,” (2001. p. 1). Due to its history and connection to modern colonialism, environmental racism has connections to gentrification, displacement, colonial settlement, disposition, and more. In the United States, the historically alienated communities that are predominantly impacted by environmental racism are Non-Black Latine, Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities. For context, it is noted that:
“Three out of five African Americans live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites. Native American lands and sacred places are home to extensive mining operations and radioactive waste sites. Three of the five largest commercial hazardous waste landfills are located in predominantly African American and Latino communities,” (2001. p. 1).
The systematically arranged consequences for these historically alienated communities are often premature death, higher infant and adult mortality, poor health, poverty, diminished economic opportunities, substandard housing, and an overall degradation of quality of life. Understanding how these isms are all interwoven with one another and working all at the same time, the collective form of colonial violence being practiced by the United States becomes undeniable.
Some examples of environmental racism in the United States are: 1) Farm workers working on crops that are treated with toxic pesticides. Being exposed to such pesticides can result in death, birth defects, cancer nerve disorders, skin diseases, and other problems. 2) Due to state environmental regulations becoming more stringent in recent years, Indigenous reservations have been targeted as being the primary spaces of waste disposal farms. 3) Mossville, a predominately Black rural community in Louisiana, has over 30 petrochemical and industrial plants within a two-mile radius. Companies occupying these spaces have admitted to contaminating water with toxins that can damage human reproduction, cancer, hormone disruption, and severe impairment of a child’s physical and cognitive development. Environmental racism does not remain enclosed in the United States. Globally, environmental racism has been expanded to part of Latin America, Africa, and other spaces; perpetuating similar acts of violence in these spaces, (Robinson, 2001, p. 3).
It’s important to understand how these forms of violence can be practiced in the United States through constitutional and judicial laws and policies. Critical race theorists’ critique of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) provides the opportunity to reform the structure of political/justice systems for various reasons and one is how society has viewed violence. Historically, the United States has functioned under the assumption that the concept of violence, as a conception, is a singular, individual act that impacts individuals in a similar, singular manner. Due to this conception (re: misconception), violence at a larger scale, in this case, environmental racism, in the United States is not a punishable offense. Legal positivism and the legal system, have conditioned society into viewing violence as a direct, private, rare act caused by only a couple of “bad apples.” An act that is irregular in a society filled with well-intended individuals. Violence, however, is a process that can take various forms and its outcome cannot be separated from the system by which it is oriented; structural violence is founded in systemic oppression, which has in its intersection race as a factor of that oppression.
Karliner, along with others, notes that “as the centers of political and economic power shift from the nation-state toward an international economic system increasingly dominated by transnational corporations, shifting also are the strategies, tactics, and targets of movements working on social and environmental justice,” (1997, p.198). Understanding that one is unable to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools then, is not just a philosophical claim/observation of the United States’ historical, social, legal, and political, positioning of its intentions and actions, but a claim that demands the practice of reimagining. For Walker, this also means that to materially implement ecofeminist ideologies is to practice the holistic concept of love. According to Walker, “Love is the key to saving the Earth,” (2001, p. 3). As such, love and mutual respect are the answers to paving the way for the prevention of future problems and the solving of current and past issues regarding the exploitation and modification of the environment as well as other issues concerning gender and race.
Salinas: An Environmental Racist Crisis
As a third-year graduate student, my research is centered around two key objectives: 1) understanding the relationship between spaces (re: communities) and the institutions (re: K-12 schools) posited in those spaces. I analyze how they interact with one another as “consciousnesses” and how their interactions shape the environment around them. This is the background (abstract/philosophical work) that enhances my ability to produce spatially relevant pedagogical practices. My second objective is to ensure that students are provided with a curriculum that not only reflects their culture, but their space and environment in the most particular way possible. I focus my resources and knowledges on the East side of Salinas, CA, the space that has nurtured me all my life. While my work does engage with theoretical concepts of culturally relevant pedagogical practices, I center my educational philosophies around “space.” When I began to substitute “culture” with “space,” I demanded of myself to understand the history, nature, construction, and importance of the geographical location where students resided. Space, I found, was a significant factor in shaping one’s understanding of their own culture. “Space” does not replace “culture.” Space does, however, describe my work more accurately.
The East side of Salinas is a predominantly Non-Black Latine geographical space that is home to a large field working community. The average household size in these family homes is 15.7 people, with 32.7% of the overall population speaking little to no English and over 50% of its population being born outside of the United States (City-Data, 2019). As of 2019, 46.8% of residents in the East side of Salinas are working in farming, fishing, and forestry occupations. Further, only 6.1% of the population is in undergraduate colleges and 0.8% is in graduate schools, (City-Data, 2019). As a population that has been impacted by immigration, displacement, gentrification, and other systematic forms of oppression due to global white supremacy, the East side of Salinas is not exempt from environmental racism. On June 22, 2017, for example, several fieldworkers reported feeling dizzy, and weak, having stomach pain, headaches, sore throats, and eye irritation (Goldberg, 2018). The pesticide exposure that caused 17 farmworkers to fall ill resulted in a consequential fine of merely $5,000 for the Salinas produce company that had employed and had their workers sickened due to the pesticide exposure.
Salinas as an agricultural space is home to many of the families to emigrated to the United States from places in Latin America, predominantly Mexico. These populations, who have historically been alienated and exploited, are constantly exposed to pesticides known to cause harm. The lack of care surrounding this form of exposure is a modern manifestation of colonial violence and is an example of all axes in which colonial power is fundamentally articulated. Again, under the law, this form of violence included but was not limited to the inability to provide transportation for medical access and the failure to provide a safe work environment. Such form of violence was only punishable by law in the form of a $5,000 fine, which, if divided by the workers that were exposed, is about $294.11~ per person affected by the exposure. From previous research, it can be understood that such exposure can have long-term permanent effects. Nine pesticides were sprayed into the fields which resulted in workers falling ill (Goldberg, 2018).
At first glance, this incident does not seem to offer a connection to the global impacts of environmental racism. However, if the linear postulated module of consequences is traced out, the connection is not hard to miss, but the question of “which ones come first?” presents itself to be a difficult one to answer. It almost presents itself like a cycle: workers immigrate to the United States from Mexico to have funds for the families that they are financially supporting back home, due to exposure they can become victims of death, birth defects, cancer nerve disorders, skin diseases, and other problems, due to their inability to work they are no longer able to financially provide and so at the same time that companies are hiring new fieldworkers, the families of those fieldworkers also emigrate to the United States to work to make ends meet. The process is almost able to present itself as a circle, almost. Unfortunately, people who die do not circle their way back into the material world. Bodies able to be exploited are not in abundance. Understanding that white supremacist ideologies and violences necessitate consumption to expand is understanding how genocide adapts itself to the modern/colonial world to continue the linear process of killing people, communities, and environments.
Conclusion: Questions
Walker asserts that love is the key to saving the Earth, and has within her approach the conception that mutual recognition seems to begin with oneself and will translate to the other. She writes, “Don’t ever mess over nobody [...] and nobody will ever mess over you” (1989 p. 288). It is undeniable that love certainly plays an important role, as does nurturing, care, and mutual recognition. However, there also seems to be a deep element of dismissal that is profoundly rooted in the concept of positing the responsibility of teaching onto the oppressed; forcing the reopening of wounds that have not yet healed by demanding the colonized subject that they provide the tools for their freedom to the oppressor. It does not seem to be a contradiction that while one cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, love alone will not be able to completely disrupt the exponential increase of the globalization of white supremacy. Particularly due to its necessity to consume.
Walker states that “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (1984, p. 12), in this, she is assessing that feminism is a component underneath the much larger ideological umbrella of womanism. If womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender as Walker claims, then the practice of a demystification form of violence is to liberation as environmental racism is to genocide. Positing a Fanonion-coded question then: is a de-mystifying form of violence not one of the only successful ways to disrupt such colonial violence? Are love and violence both necessary and able to produce a solution to combat these issues at the same rate that these issues are continuing their expansion? Is there a way that such a disruption can have within itself characteristics of both love and violence? Is violence towards one’s oppressor able to be understood as an act of self-love and love for others? Love towards one community, love towards the earth, love towards nature/environment, women, and communities who have been irreversibly impacted by colonial violence?
Key Terms: Environmental sustainability, environmental protection, environmental preservation
(1) Ecocentricism: positing the environment at the center
(2) There are multiple axes in which colonial power is fundamentally articulated: race, capitalist exploitation of labor, and Eurocentric rationale. The second and third axes will be explored in this essay, particularly because of how capitalist exploitation of labor commodifies and necessitates the exploitation of both women and the environment to expand itself into a colonial power. The last of the three (as its coloniality of power), can be seen as centering itself around the Eurocentric rationality that posits the notion of a linear evolution that begins in the primitive (non-western/European) and leads by the necessity of the modern (European).
(3) European rationality has in its foundation a dependency on its perception created by colonial conditions of what the “other” (non-European) represents for them. The ”other,” due to being a necessary idea also requires their colonial condition to be a necessity by the colonial power. The irrational logic of the West, then, is a necessary idea; it cannot function without the oppression of the “other,” nor is it able to understand itself without the presence of the “other.”
(4) Relocated (re: reimagined) knowledges are, in this text, established as the forms of knowledges that are only accessible to those who participate in an active, intentional, and assertive connection with the earth (nature/environment). Relocated knowledges, due to their particularity, can only be found in practice. That is, one must be with and alongside nature/environment to be able to capture what the space (nature/environment) is willing to provide in the forms of knowledges. Lastly, relocated knowledges are interconnected with the practice of mutual recognition; one cannot formally and materially exist without the other.
(5) Anthropocentrism claims that “as human beings are (allegedly) the only morally significant persons with capacity for reason, ecological responsibility is derived from human interests alone,” (2001, p. 9). Environmental obligations concede that “some animals have the status of morally significant living creatures and, thus, claim that our responsibility toward the environment also hinges on the interests of these animals,” (2001, p. 9). Finally, Ecocentricism posits the notion that the “environment deserves direct moral consideration, has an intrinsic value, and qualifies for moral selfhood. Ecocentrism emphasizes that the environment has direct rights and, most importantly, is on the same moral level as human beings,” (2001, p. 9).
