this is our home the first people who lived here saw the land plants and animals as part of their family alive with the spirit of the Creator later other people came here to possess the land and its inhabitants and later still their descendants began to question the Traditions they had inherited some began to look for new or very old ways of living that cherished our human relationships with each other and with the land today women are looking for their own histories of environmental activism and finding it in figures like Rachel Carson whose work criticized Western culture's increasingly toxic attempts to control nature around the world women are building a movement in defense of the Earth [Music] I believe that we need to redefine what is the Environmental movement in this country and that um Grassroots communities working on not in my backyard toxics that you know the woman who at sack and fox went out and stopped her Tribal Council from approving a nuclear waste research contract Grace Thorp that you know these Indian women in Northern Saskatchewan that that stopped their Tribal Council from agreeing to a land uh deal that would have caused clear cutting are the environmental movement too I believe that a lot of Grassroots organizing is undertaken by women of course the thing that really stirred me very much into this kind of thinking the fact that when you really come to think of it who battles around the Forest who battles around the toxic dump it's very ordinary women extremely ordinary women who get tremendous extraordinary strength just from the fact that they care so deeply and that has been the backbone of the environmental movement beginning in 1980 with the women in life on Earth conference and the women's Pentagon action a number of Eco feminist conferences and organizations have taken shape in July 1994 women gathered at The Institute for social ecology to discuss the convergence of movements on behalf of women people of color and the Earth we began with an exploration of the word that had brought many of us here Eco feminism terms like Eco feminism are really useful as a kind of shorthand and as a way to to rally and to feel connected and to feel an affinity and they're not necessary um and sometimes they're off-putting to people who are doing things um very powerfully and feel like the term means you're an academic who is making this heady analysis but you're not really out there working with real people one time I was reading the newsletter from the citizens Clearing House on toxic waste and the president's letter by Lois Gib the president's column by Lois Gibb uh was very eco- feminist and so I just telephoned her out of the blue and I introduced myself and I said you know I read this column and I just wondered do you self-identify as an Eco feminist and Lois Gibbs said um oh yes absolutely but very few of the women in this national network do because uh they don't want the word feminist they would say oh those are people who hate men and they don't want the word ecologists or environmentalists because they say oh those are people who care more about bunnies and deer than people so so many of them identify as a community activist and they don't want the label but um she feels what they're doing is Eco feminist work as she understands it and I agree I I guess people would probably call themselves Eco feminists if asked but people don't really think of it in those terms I don't think I mean we're just a community that's defending the Earth and battling against this Corporation you know defending both the human and nonhuman parts of our community against the assault of this Corporation weighing our ideas and experiences women have begun to shape by hand a language and a movement the raw materials of Eco feminism are familiar to women from many walks of life a love for the earth and the animals of this Earth a deep belief in Justice and a conviction that is humans we are not separate from the rest of nature each one of us is interconnected with all life on Earth and from that felt sense of interconnection comes the desire to communicate these ideas to let these ideas take shape I have had hundreds of women come up to me since I you know in in the years since I wrote green Paradise loss and I've been lecturing about it and said to me variations of you've put into words what I felt for many years um you've written the book that I couldn't write but would have liked to after the Eco feminist conference at USC in 1987 when Miz had just a little write up about it they got all these letters saying I've never heard of this but I know this is for me eco feminism yes this is what I do in my community I'm an Eco feminist it was an amazing response but uh to my amazement at least the term had a lot of power to people who heard it because they had already thought through this connection Echo feminism resonated with memories from childhood and enabled me empowered me encouraged me to reclaim uh those things that had started in childhood uh perhaps uh never reached fruition though I came to Eco feminism first through the written word um actually was a really the in jth Plants book the poem called just simply tampons where it talked about women bleeding on the stairs of legislature and corporations I thought this is really cool and it was actually personally for me a a rock climbing experience that M that made me an eagle feminist where I realized that within a span of a few days my beliefs and values not only had changed but my behavior toward Iraq changed well I see the movement as growing both out of a Grassroots need to keep our communities clean out of a intellectual understanding of the connection between isms of domination of a a political practice understanding that the greens and the women's movement and the anti-nuke movement and the anti-racism movement had a common agenda at some level and from personal experience [Music] at the time that I wrote um feminism and the Revolt of Nature and began thinking about the relationship between these things Eco feminism was a term that I came up with um um just you know it's a sort of obvious term in a way you know that when you put these things together that's the word that makes sense or the the to to to talk about them and I you know I can't I understood later really shortly thereafter that um Francois duon in France had also used this term Eco feminism and Mary Daly came out with um Gynecology in which she used the term Eco feminism as well right around the same time I think probably Eco feminism started to develop as a theory because of the way in which animals and the environment were neglected by discussions within feminism and at the same time women's issues were neglected by um environmentalists and Eco feminism started as a way of trying to be more inclusive as an environmental Theory and as a feminist Theory many people have asked various Eco feminists how to define Eco feminism and we we seem to Define it differently depending upon our perspectives the one thing I've noticed is that we have one set of beliefs we seem to all be committed to and that's the belief that there are intimate and not just accidental connections between how you treat women and how you treat the Earth and that a failure to see those connections results in bad feminism results in bad environmentalism and it results in bad Theory I think that Eco feminism has been a way a form in which women can articulate these very logical and important understandings of how male power has gotten into the planet um it's really given a language to that radical feminism wasn't focused on that you know it's it's a question of emphasis or Focus I don't think it's necessarily one is um more evolved than the other I think that it makes a lot of sense that in the 90s when PE when ecological crises are coming to a head that we would have an Eco feminism it sort of speaks to the anxieties and the concerns of [Music] today while people come to Eco feminism from different Paths of activism and spirituality feminism has provided the defining Contours imagine the several varieties of feminism as if they were mapped onto the land itself from these mountains of feminist thought various streams have contributed to the lake of ideas that is Eco feminism one stream of Eco feminism emphasizes the importance of animals to both feminism and Eco feminism these Eco feminists work to bridge the animal Liberation feminist and environmental movements by pointing to their shared histories and their shared concerns the history of feminism uh there are a number of feminists who've been very concerned about animal issues and uh even um well concerned about nature in the broad sense is more of a 20th century phenomenon but um about but if you go back to someone like Mary wi Suncraft the considered probably the first major Western feminist theorist um she was very concerned about animal issues and um and you go on through I mean 19th century feminists were the majority of them were either concerned about um diet vegetarianism certainly the majority were concerned about Animal Welfare issues um the anti VI movement of the 19th century was largely populated by women so there is a whole history there of feminist um involvement and concern uh with animal issues and uh so it's not something new historically the animal rights movement in the environmental movement have have come from different Arenas and for me they're both movements of compassion I mean that's how I conceive them so I think of them as inherently United and I think that practically they're they are many areas where it's just so obvious that they are united and I think it's important for us to start looking at those uh those commonalities and I think certainly vegetarianism is an important way in which both movements can be United because of the tremendous ecological destruction of a meat-based diet and because of the inherent cruelty to animals vegetarianism is an act of resistance it resists killing animals first of all it resists plundering the Earth animal based agriculture is highly exploitative of the earth as well as of the workers who must kill the animals as well as of the animals [Music] themselves Anarchist feminism has critiqued all forms of hierarchy and this stream influenced by social ecology has led to social Eco feminism which looks at how relations between humans shape the way that humans relate to Nature as a social Eco feminist I see things I have an e ecological perspective that's informed by social ecology and social ecology looks at Social crises and tries to understand how an ecological perspective awakens us to the idea of our of our role and our our um participation in creating Natural History Humanity has not destroyed the planet 1% of humanity has destroyed the planet and plundered the planet I get very frustrated when I hear people saying that oh Humanity has had its way long enough and now it's time for nature to take its course or let's just let nature alone the fact is when people the only people I notice making those sorts of statements are usually very privileged white men and women mostly men are making those sorts of statements um the fact is that 99% of humanity is plundered along with nature you know in most ecological catastrophes and in most social catastrophes so the question isn't really is it going to be an ecological Society you know are we going to let nature finally have its way or is it going to be a social Society the fact is we have to liberate all of all people and we all these people now have to live in harmony with the planet so it has to be a social ecological movement it has to be a feminist anti-racist movement it has to be an anti- capitalist anti-h hierarchy movement it has to be a movement that committed to getting rid of the toxin of domination hierarchy as well as toxins such as cfc's and and all the sorts of monstrous Frank intinan nightmarish substances that men have put on the planet socialist feminism exposes the social structures which operate to ensure that women people of color and the working classes receive the fewest resources and hold the least amount of power in Western industrialized culture this branch of feminism emphasizes the ways that social structures shape human identities and experiences associating women with nature in a way that authorizes our dual subordination when we are simultaneously ecological and feminist what we're trying to do is not look so much as what women are but how dominant power perceives them and manipulates structure to exclude violate Dominate and to see how closely the attitudes to women are related to Attitudes to Nature and how the violence against women and the ecological crisis mimic each other all the time unlike the early 60s feminism can't be seen nor could e EOP feminism in my point of view as a shared experience is movement because there may be points at which the only one in the movement is the individual me or you or her because there are experiences I have that you don't have that I think are relevant to my eco feminism and so I think Bel hooks is quite right a shared experience movement is an ethnocentric movement uh potentially racist in classes and what you need is a shared beliefs movement and men don't get let off the hook on that one they can get these beliefs and in fact I think they're morally obligated to get these beliefs and yet they can't be female feminism developed specifically by women of color sometimes called womanism contributes to both the spiritual and the political aspects of Eco feminism both radical and womanist Eco feminists have emphasized the significance of woman- centered spirituality but within Eco feminism there has been much debate over the relationship between spirituality and politics a debate which some find unnecessary there's a spiritual Dimension to my form of Eco feminism as well as a political Dimension I have to say I'm really dismayed though over the the kind of fighting we've experienced in the last few years between these two contingents of Eco feminism between the hard-headed political types and the spiritual types there's a lot of people that come more out of the uh old left Traditions that have inherited the Marxist idea that spirituality is first of all they don't distinguish between spirituality and religion and then uh say that religion is the opiate of people which is a bit of an arrogant position on religion much less spirituality I mean this the the role that religion has played in for instance the African-American movement the Native American movement uh I mean most uh disenfranchised folks of color don't have this split between spirituality and religion but I do believe that earth-based spiritual practice is how we uh renew strengthen and retain our relationship with the Earth and I believe we have a responsibility to do that each of us individually and collectively as societies and cultures both woman and man are both natural and spiritual and nature itself is imbued with spirituality in the sense that the ancients saw it we called it animism but in truth they recognized uh what scientists today call the Gaia hypothesis GA being of course one of the ancient names for the mother goddess that this is a living interconnected organic ho that we're dealing [Music] with all these emphases within ecofeminism share a common belief that social justice and environmental justice are inseparably linked to achieve these goals Eco feminists agree that a social and economic transformation is needed because liberal feminism is not focused on transforming but simply correcting the present system liberal feminism has not contributed to Eco feminism's reconstructive Vision nonetheless activists often use liberal strategies as effective short-term Solutions and numerous stop Gap reforms are are needed along the path to social transformation taken together all these varieties of Eco feminism strive to offer a panoramic view of our current situation one that is both feminist and ecological Eco feminism offers a vision for reconstructing Society in balance with nature you know I think part of what has interested a lot of people in Eco feminism during the 880s is um you know the Recon structive or Visionary or alternative possibilities um you know in in in the context where a lot of the feminist Theory that's been done is you know is deconstructive um rather than reconstructive and so you know in that sense um feminism needs and any social movement needs Vision Eco feminists have been active in fighting toxics and biotechnology building coalitions between labor activists and environment Al ists and contributing to the movements for environmental justice and Indigenous rights there's a variety of eco- feminist actions building Community fighting back against oppression and bringing an awareness of our interconnected struggles to every part of our work Eve which is Eco feminist Visions emerging got started around February of 91 when my twin sister Colleen and I realized that that we wanted more Community we were moving towards a space in feminism that we hadn't seen elsewhere and so what we decided was that if we can't find the kind of feminist community that we wanted which we had come to find out was Eco feminism then we would create it ourselves for nearly 3 years eve activists met once a month in a study group to discuss readings they had chosen to learn together these discussions were printed up in a news letter which was distributed internationally but Eve activists did several other things as well one was a gorilla graffiti group that got together once a month and it was one of the funnest things that I've ever done in my whole life um women would come together and uh armed with our magic markers and we would just walk around the city and in New York there's plenty of billboards and we would correct misogynist advertising and on the spot we would look at we would see a billboard and we'd sort of deconstruct it what's going on here and then we'd put on our advertising copy hat and we would change it in 1982 Marty Keel along with a few other women founded feminists for animal rights a group which now has eight Regional centers across the us one of their recent projects is a foster care program for the companion animals of women who are the victims of domestic violence my history as a feminist has been in working in the battered women's movement and ever since I began that work I have always kept track of incidences I heard in which animals were injured as well as women and in fact it's it psych it's it's given the category put under the category of psychological battering the injury of say this couch or an animal sitting on the couch that those were both ways of a Bader to try to reach and get control over a battered woman I think feminist frano rights is an excellent example of one kind of echo feminist activism bringing together an analysis about women and animals and then doing something about it saying we can stop eating them we can stop experimenting on them we can stop wearing them and we can care about battered women we can care about women in in the slaughterhouse business it it brings it together and it acts on it in the US Canada India and across the globe Eco feminists have fought against massive logging and clear cutting in Northern California Judy Barry has worked as an Earth First activist to save the old growth redwoods and to raise awareness about the position of Women Within the environmental movement the most um representative sustained group of actions was called the albian uprising or I guess is called because we're going to be out there again this year um and the albian uprising occurred in 1992 when Louisiana Pacific tried to cut one of the last remaining relatively intact Weds in our area we actually developed in particular one women's tactic there that was explicitly developed as a women's tactic we had a solstice women's Gathering and we talked about why are there not more women in these demonstrations compared even though there there were a lot of women but not compared to the population and we discussed the fact that well women can't just show up they have to get child care and you know can't risk arrest because they have to be work the next day to take care of their kids so we talked about it and um uh we came up with just specifically answering those needs this tactic that was called yarning and what we do is we take yarn and we go out at night so you can get child care and you can you know everything range are very low Orr rest risk and we weave it in and out and in and out and in and out of the trees and it it may not sound like much but it turned out to be a really slow them down and all these tactics only slow them down they don't stop them and uh what because when they come in and try to cut it with their Chainsaw the yarn wraps around the chainsaw and stalls the chainsaw out and if they try to whack it with their logger a which is always their next thing the logger ax bounces off and the actually the most efficient and aggressively non- Macho way to get rid of a web is to cut it with a scissors but they won't do that they use their knives instead which takes longer um but so webbing yarning just became our simple every we yarn everything I mean everything you could think of even if we block a truck in the middle of the road we yarn the truck so um it it totally became the symbol of the albian uprising and along with it developed a mythology we said we we said to the loggers when they were getting ready to cut it we said um that when the this is the web of life and when the web is cut the spell is cast and uh so you know just little things like that to freak them [Music] out recognizing the life-giving importance of diversity in both human cultures and ecosystems alike e feminists have opposed the use of biotechnology and genetically engineered foods and been active in the movement for sustainable agriculture in in my own region the garwal area of the Himalaya um where the chipco movement this movement which stopped logging uh took place I started working about 3 4 years ago on uh conserving native seed and at that point I really thought that it was just the conservation aspects if I could achieve that that would be wonderful um I think the in about three valleys that I had looked at there were two varieties of local seeds left healthy ecosystems are needed to sustain human health as Eco feminists working in the antitoxic movement have found many kinds of cancers can now be directly traced to Modern production processes processes which have detrimental effects on human and animal reproductive systems alike the women's environmental health movement which I'd say I'm a part of is is part of the Eco feminist movement and that if you're going to talk about every every aspect of society that's um causing the demise of the earth and and everything else you have to also talk about health because healthy societies is in essence what we're all trying to achieve society and ecosystems breast cancer is an ecof femin issue and um I'm a young woman like I said last night I'm 26 many people tell me this isn't my issue it is my issue because one in nine one and eight of my sisters are going to die of it by the year 2000 over 1 million women will die of cancer breast cancer every year worldwide and I want to talk about breast cancer um as a gdal and ecosal epidemic and crisis that a lot what nestra said about you know genetics is focusing the focus on genetics is distracting away from the reality that the human body is part and parcel and interconnected with the Earth body there's a variety of actions Eco feminists are taking to raise awareness build networks and make changes but individual changes in our personal lives are only one step toward the real solution of social cultural and economic transformation I think one of the dangerous things that comes out of environmentalism more generally is this individualistic kind of perspective that somehow if you tell your child to turn off the lights you're saving the world well in fact militarism um multinational corporations capitalism those forces are operating to destroy women to destroy animals and to destroy the environment so obviously these are the F the forces that need to be challenged even if the individual civilian consumer um stopped driving now for instance it would not make a significant dent in global warming that the military-industrial complex which is very much um welded to the corporate structure is responsible for creating the majority of say cfc's in the in the um atmosphere um that the majority of toxins that are produced are not by Joe Josephine consumer citizen it's produced by this monolithic huge structure called military-industrial complex and corporations and that the problem is that if we think for a second that we as individuals created this or that we as individuals can solve this the game is over because they have won because what what they want want what the power structures want is for us to think that it's our fault and that we as this big guilty complex or this big guilty conscience Focus all of our energy on ourselves rather than pointing our fingers and saying hey you know the military hey capitalism hate corporations you know what kind of economic system is creating this mess and what kind of um economic system do we have to recreate to get rid of this mess one of the great Promises of Eco feminism is that it does allow us to see the Matrix of forms of Oppression that come about as a result of race gender species so on I found that e feminism was really speaking more of the whole the totality of the picture it understood racism classism sexism speciesism and yet it also understood spirituality and an understanding of who we are as a species um prior to the arrival of patriarchy Eco feminists have crafted a multi-layered analysis of the problems we face as a culture along with a reconstructive vision and a variety of action strategies for achieving that Vision yet often it seems the changes come too slowly so often we think of of transformation as is something that's um just this dramatic act that comes out of nowhere and I think that really social change comes about very slowly and peac meal over a period of time there's a a whole period of time where you're laying the groundwork for for social change we have this mentality of thinking that real uh the real change is going to be in the headlines and it's going to be you know it's not these quiet changes and I think a lot of quiet changes are in fact happening all over the place to keep going forward this gradual process of social transformation requires a diversity of perspectives at every step of the way coalitions between women of all colors and sexualities must be built and maintained both within Eco feminism and across the various movements for social change only if we can remember and respect our differences will we achieve our shared goals of Social and eological Justice one thing that's one thing that that I learned I think out of the experience of the the woman Earth Institute um which was that um it's really crucial that you know for a movement which is in some way trying to be about um a conversation you know among and between women in particular with respect to a whole range of issues that there be a diversity of women present you know so I mean I I both I think you know see the necessity of that and also the difficulty of it and the level of commitment that it that really is required we need to begin to develop very concrete coalitions and and they cannot be coalitions uh just developed at the level of onot conferences so that one goes to Beijing and comes back and reports it has to be coalitions built on action uh coalitions built over years uh Coalition built on face-to-face encounters between peoples uh throughout the world I also see the combination of feminism and ecology as as a solidarity between two of the most important movements of our time [Music] it in the paper today we sacrifice the birds for someone's job and P [Music] when will we understand no one will have a job if we destroy this [Music] [Music] thing someone's playing C deciding what you feel Al and what you not someone plays with fire but you know we're only building our own f [Music] how can we sit here intellectualizing when we know what's happening is wrong causing mass extinction while doctors use machines on human lives to grow along someone's playing gu deciding who should be alive and who should not if someone plays with fire but you know he's only building his own a few [Music] roope in my mind I cannot see the sense of global suicide for the few who live been luck luxury perhaps it's up to you and I to save this world we'll have to put up one hair of good fight good fight and we have a voice the bodies that as strong as the mountain yes we have a choice part of the destruction or do something to defend the Earth defend the Earth do what you can do what you must but just do something to defend the Earth defend the Earth do what you can do what you must but just do something to defend the Earth defend the Earth do what you can do what you must but just do something to defend the Earth defend the Earth do what you can do what you must but just do something to defend the Earth defend the Earth [Music]