Ecofeminism
Based on Wikipedia: Ecofeminism
In 1973, in the mountainous Uttarakhand region of northern India, women began wrapping their arms around trees. They weren't performing some mystical ritual. They were preventing loggers from cutting down the forests they depended on for survival. The men had left for city jobs, and these women—who gathered firewood, collected water, and foraged for food—understood something the timber companies didn't: that the forest wasn't just an economic resource to be harvested. It was the foundation of their lives.
This movement, called Chipko (a Hindi word meaning "to cling"), became one of the most powerful examples of a phenomenon that would soon get a name. A year later, in 1974, French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne published a book with a title that doubled as a manifesto: Le Féminisme ou la Mort—Feminism or Death. In it, she coined a term for the connection those Indian women had embodied: ecofeminism.
The Core Insight
Ecofeminism begins with a pattern recognition. Look at how Western societies talk about nature: we describe the earth as something to be tamed, conquered, exploited. We call natural resources "virgin" land. We speak of "penetrating" wilderness. We refer to the planet as "Mother Earth"—nurturing, passive, there to provide.
Now look at how those same societies have historically treated women.
The parallels aren't accidental, ecofeminists argue. Both nature and women have been cast as resources—property to be owned and used. Men were positioned as the cultivators of civilization, while women were relegated to nature. And in this framework, domination became the organizing principle: men over women, humans over nature, civilization over wilderness.
This isn't just about metaphors. These patterns of thinking have real consequences. They shape who gets to make decisions about the environment, whose health matters when pollution spreads, and whose knowledge counts when we talk about how to live sustainably on this planet.
Before There Was a Word
Long before anyone called it ecofeminism, women were at the forefront of environmental protection. The connection wasn't theoretical—it was practical.
Consider Rachel Carson, a marine biologist who worked for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1962, she published Silent Spring, a book that documented how synthetic pesticides—particularly DDT—were devastating bird populations and poisoning the food chain. The title referred to a hypothetical future spring where no birds sang because they had all been killed.
The chemical industry attacked her viciously. They questioned her scientific credentials (she had a master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins). They questioned her mental stability. They questioned her femininity. One industry spokesman reportedly asked why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.
Carson died of breast cancer just two years after Silent Spring was published. But her work helped launch the modern environmental movement and led directly to the ban on DDT in the United States.
She wasn't alone. Around the same time, women philosophers and writers were developing what would become the intellectual foundation for ecofeminism. Karen Warren, who would become one of the movement's key theorists, traces her thinking back to Aldo Leopold's 1949 essay "Land Ethic." Leopold was a forester and wildlife ecologist who argued for something radical: that land—including animals, plants, soil, and water—wasn't just property to be exploited. It was a community to which humans belonged.
This idea of belonging rather than owning, of relationship rather than domination, would become central to ecofeminist thought.
Women on the Ground
While philosophers were developing theories, women around the world were engaging in direct action—often without any label for what they were doing.
In Kenya in 1977, a woman named Wangari Maathai started planting trees. It sounds simple, even quaint. But Maathai, who had a doctorate in veterinary medicine (the first woman in East Africa to earn such a degree), understood that deforestation wasn't just an environmental problem. It was destroying rural women's ability to provide for their families. Without trees, there was no firewood for cooking, no material for building, no watershed protection for clean water.
She founded the Green Belt Movement, organizing rural women to plant trees around their villages—at least a thousand per community. The program provided income for women, restored degraded land, and gave participants something else: agency in their own communities. By the time Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, the movement had planted over 30 million trees.
The connection between environmental and social justice became impossible to ignore.
In 1978, a working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, discovered that their homes sat atop a toxic waste dump. Love Canal, as the neighborhood was called, had been built over a landfill containing 21,000 tons of chemical waste. Children played in yards where strange substances bubbled up from the ground. Women experienced miscarriages at alarming rates. Birth defects became common.
A mother named Lois Gibbs began knocking on doors, gathering stories, documenting illnesses. She had no formal training in organizing or environmental science. She was, as she later described herself, "just a housewife." But she mobilized her community, confronted politicians and corporations, and eventually forced the federal government to evacuate and relocate nearly 800 families.
The Love Canal disaster led directly to the creation of the Superfund program, which forces polluters to pay for cleaning up hazardous waste sites. It also demonstrated a pattern that would repeat around the world: women, often dismissed as mere housewives or mothers, becoming the most effective environmental activists precisely because they were the ones who saw the impacts most directly.
The Pentagon and the Reservation
By the early 1980s, ecofeminism was becoming a self-conscious movement.
In 1980 and 1981, women organized protests at the Pentagon—the headquarters of the United States military in Arlington, Virginia. They called themselves the Women's Pentagon Action, and their demands wove together what had previously been seen as separate issues: equal rights for women, an end to militarism, environmental protection, economic justice. They held hands in a massive circle around the building, draping the entrance with yarn to symbolize their interconnection.
The activist and theorist Ynestra King was one of the organizers. She articulated what many participants felt: that militarism, environmental destruction, and the domination of women were all expressions of the same underlying ideology. You couldn't fight one without fighting the others.
Meanwhile, the environmental justice movement was making visible something that mainstream environmentalism had often ignored: that pollution and environmental destruction didn't affect everyone equally. The poor and marginalized—and especially poor communities of color—bore the brunt of industrial contamination.
In 1985, Katsi Cook, a Mohawk midwife, launched the Akwesasne Mother's Milk Project. The Mohawk reservation in upstate New York sat downstream and downwind from a General Motors plant, aluminum foundries, and other industrial facilities. Cook wanted to know what this pollution was doing to her community's children.
The results were devastating. Through breast milk, Mohawk children were being exposed to twice the toxins of children living elsewhere. The contaminants included polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—industrial chemicals that accumulate in body fat and have been linked to cancer, developmental problems, and immune system damage.
Cook's work illustrated what environmental justice advocates call "environmental racism": the systematic placement of toxic facilities in or near communities of color, combined with inadequate regulatory protection for those communities. It wasn't a coincidence that the Mohawk reservation was polluted. It was a consequence of who had power and who didn't.
The Harlem Gardens
Not all ecofeminist action involved confronting corporations or governments. Some of it was quieter, rooted in creation rather than resistance.
In 1989, Bernadette Cozart looked at the vacant lots scattered through Harlem—a historically Black neighborhood in New York City—and saw possibility. Where others saw blight, she saw potential gardens. She founded the Greening of Harlem Coalition and began transforming abandoned spaces into community gardens.
The benefits went beyond aesthetics. Fresh produce in neighborhoods often called "food deserts" for their lack of grocery stores. Green space in one of the most densely built environments in America. A gathering point where neighbors could meet, work together, and build community. And something harder to quantify: a connection to the earth in a place where concrete dominated.
By 1990, observers noted that most of the people involved in Harlem's garden movement were women. The same pattern emerged in Detroit, where a group of African-American women calling themselves the Gardening Angels began transforming vacant lots in 1994. Similar movements spread globally.
These urban garden projects embodied something that ecofeminist theorists had been arguing: that caring for the earth and caring for communities weren't separate activities. They were the same thing.
The Four Horsemen
By the early 1990s, ecofeminism had developed a sophisticated theoretical framework. Scholars Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, writing in 1993, identified four historical forces that had created the current ecological crisis:
First, the rise of patriarchal religions. These traditions, Gaard and Gruen argued, established hierarchies of gender while removing divinity from the natural world. Earlier goddess-centered religions had seen the sacred as present in the earth, the animals, the cycles of nature. The new religions placed God outside and above creation, and placed men closer to that transcendent God than women.
Second, the scientific revolution. When thinkers like René Descartes and Francis Bacon developed modern science in the 17th century, they conceptualized nature as a machine to be understood and manipulated. The natural world lost its agency, its aliveness. It became inert matter, raw material for human use. Bacon famously wrote about putting nature "on the rack" to extract her secrets—using the language of torture and domination.
Third, cultural dualisms. Western thought organized itself around pairs of opposites: mind versus body, reason versus emotion, culture versus nature, male versus female. These weren't neutral distinctions. One half of each pair was valued more highly and associated with masculinity; the other was devalued and associated with femininity. The result was a conceptual framework that made domination seem natural and inevitable.
Fourth, capitalism. This economic system, ecofeminists argued, required the instrumental exploitation of animals, land, and people to create wealth. It treated everything—including women's reproductive labor and the regenerative capacity of the earth—as resources to be extracted rather than relationships to be maintained.
Together, these four forces created what ecofeminists called a "separation between nature and culture"—a conceptual split that made exploitation possible by defining certain things as outside the circle of moral concern.
Not Because They're Women
One of the most persistent misunderstandings about ecofeminism is that it claims women have some mystical, biological connection to nature. That women are inherently nurturing, closer to the earth, more ecological in their thinking.
Most ecofeminist scholars reject this view emphatically.
The connection between women and nature, they argue, isn't about biology. It's about shared experience of domination. Women are more likely to notice environmental destruction not because of feminine intuition but because they're often the ones dealing with its consequences—fetching water that's become polluted, caring for children sickened by toxins, trying to grow food on degraded land.
The Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva has written extensively about this practical connection. Women farmers in subsistence economies, she argues, have developed sophisticated ecological knowledge through daily interaction with their environment. They understand soil, water, seeds, and seasons not through abstract study but through the work of keeping their families alive.
This knowledge, Shiva argues, has been systematically devalued. Western development models dismissed it as primitive tradition rather than recognizing it as genuine expertise. The "reductionist capitalist paradigm" (her phrase) couldn't see the interconnectedness of natural systems or the value of women's work because it defined productivity purely in terms of commodity production.
Women's reproductive labor—bearing children, feeding families, maintaining households, caring for the sick and elderly—was labeled "unproductive" because it didn't produce things that could be sold. The same logic applied to nature: a forest was only valuable when cut down for timber, a river only valuable when dammed for power.
The Science Question
In their 1993 book Ecofeminism, Vandana Shiva and German sociologist Maria Mies took aim at a sacred cow: the objectivity of science.
Modern science presents itself as value-free, a neutral method for discovering truth. But Shiva and Mies argued that what counts as scientific knowledge—and who gets to produce it—has always been shaped by power. The scientific revolution didn't just develop a new way of understanding nature. It actively displaced other ways of knowing, particularly those associated with women and non-Western cultures.
Consider childbirth. For most of human history, birth was attended by midwives—women who learned their craft through apprenticeship and experience. Over the past two centuries, childbirth has become increasingly medicalized, moved into hospitals, managed by (mostly male) doctors, subjected to technological interventions. This wasn't a neutral advance; it was a transfer of authority and knowledge from one group to another.
Or consider agriculture. Industrial farming replaced traditional practices with chemical inputs and monoculture. This was presented as progress—scientific agriculture replacing superstition. But it also meant replacing seed varieties developed over generations by local farmers with patented seeds controlled by corporations. It meant replacing knowledge held by women (who traditionally saved and selected seeds) with expertise held by agronomists and agribusiness.
Shiva has been particularly vocal about this process, documenting how global development institutions have systematically devalued traditional ecological knowledge while promoting technologies that benefit multinational corporations.
Materialist Ecofeminism
While some strands of ecofeminism emphasized spirituality or cultural analysis, a group of scholars developed what they called "materialist ecofeminism." Their focus was on economic institutions: labor, property, and power.
The key insight was a distinction between production and reproduction. Capitalism values production—the creation of goods that can be sold for profit. But it depends on reproduction—the biological and social processes that maintain life and create new workers. Someone has to bear children, feed families, care for the sick, and maintain households. This work, overwhelmingly performed by women, is essential but unpaid or underpaid.
Materialist ecofeminists argued that nature occupied a similar position. Natural systems perform essential work: purifying water, regenerating soil, cycling nutrients, regulating climate. But this work is invisible in economic calculations. It only becomes visible when it's destroyed—when polluted water must be treated, when depleted soil must be fertilized, when a destabilized climate causes disasters.
This analysis connected ecofeminism to broader critiques of capitalism. The American historian Carolyn Merchant put it plainly: "Social ecofeminism advocates the liberation of women through overturning economic and social hierarchies that turn all aspects of life into a market society that today even invades the womb."
The reference to the womb wasn't metaphorical. Technologies like in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have created markets for reproductive services, extending commodity relations into the most intimate aspects of human life.
The Question of Animals
If ecofeminism examines the domination of nature, what about the domination of animals?
Some ecofeminist scholars—most notably the American writer Carol Adams—argue that any consistent ecofeminism must be vegetarian or vegan. Adams makes the case in characteristically blunt terms: "We cannot work for justice and challenge the oppression of nature without understanding that the most frequent way we interact with nature is by eating animals."
Adams traces connections between how we treat animals and how we treat women. Both are objectified—reduced to their bodies, valued for their products (eggs, milk, meat on one hand; sexual availability and reproductive capacity on the other). Both are subjected to violence that's rendered invisible or normalized.
She argues that meat-eating is tied to constructions of masculinity. "Manhood is constructed in our culture in part by access to meat-eating and control of other bodies, whether it's women or animals."
The philosopher Greta Gaard pushes this analysis further, describing meat-eating as a form of patriarchal violence. If ecofeminism is truly about ending domination, she argues, then consuming products of the industrial exploitation of animals is inconsistent with its principles.
Not all ecofeminists accept this conclusion. Some argue that subsistence hunting and traditional animal husbandry are fundamentally different from industrial factory farming. Others suggest that focusing on individual dietary choices distracts from the structural analysis that makes ecofeminism powerful.
Spiritual Currents
Running alongside the materialist and political streams of ecofeminism is a spiritual current.
Writers like Starhawk (a practicing witch and activist whose given name is Miriam Simos), Carol Christ (a scholar of feminist theology), and Riane Eisler (best known for her book The Chalice and the Blade) have developed earth-based spiritualities that they see as compatible with—even necessary for—ecological politics.
The core idea is that environmentalism requires more than policy changes or economic reforms. It requires a fundamental shift in how we relate to the earth. Rather than seeing nature as a resource or a backdrop for human activity, we need to experience it as alive, as sacred, as a community to which we belong.
Starhawk calls for a spirituality that "recognizes that the Earth is alive, and that we are all interconnected." This isn't necessarily about joining a particular religion. It's about values: caring, compassion, non-violence, reverence for life.
Critics, including some ecofeminists, worry that this spiritual emphasis can become an escape from politics. It's easier to celebrate nature in a ritual than to organize against a polluting corporation. And the association of women with nurturing earth-goddesses can reinforce the very stereotypes that ecofeminism is supposed to challenge.
Defenders respond that social change is impossible without cultural change, and cultural change is impossible without transformation at the level of values and beliefs. You can't build an ecological society if people continue to believe that nature is merely a collection of resources.
The Opposite of Domination
So what would an ecofeminist world look like?
Ecofeminist thinkers have generally been clearer about what they oppose than what they propose. They oppose hierarchies of domination—humans over nature, men over women, white over non-white, able-bodied over disabled. They oppose economic systems that treat people and nature as resources to be exploited. They oppose ways of knowing that claim objectivity while systematically excluding women's experience and knowledge.
What they propose is variously described as partnership, mutuality, relationship, or care. The Australian sociologist Ariel Salleh writes about "an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group." The aim is not to replace one hierarchy with another—women over men, nature over culture—but to move beyond domination as an organizing principle.
In practical terms, this might mean: economic systems that value reproductive and caring work; agriculture that works with natural systems rather than against them; decision-making that includes those most affected by decisions; technologies designed for sustainability rather than maximum extraction; communities organized around mutual aid rather than competition.
It's ambitious to the point of seeming utopian. But ecofeminists argue that the alternative—continuing on our current path—is dystopian. The climate crisis, the mass extinction of species, the pollution of air and water, the deepening inequalities within and between nations: these aren't separate problems requiring separate solutions. They're symptoms of the same underlying pathology.
Criticisms and Complications
Ecofeminism has faced criticism from multiple directions.
Some feminists argue that it risks reinforcing the very associations it claims to critique. By emphasizing women's connection to nature, even if that connection is explained in terms of shared oppression rather than biology, ecofeminism might perpetuate stereotypes of women as nurturing, emotional, and closer to the body—stereotypes that have historically justified excluding women from public life and intellectual pursuits.
Some environmentalists worry that adding gender analysis makes already-difficult environmental politics even more complicated. Why introduce feminism when the immediate challenge is reducing carbon emissions or protecting endangered species?
Ecofeminists from the Global South have criticized the dominance of North American voices in academic ecofeminism. The theoretical frameworks developed in American universities don't always map onto the realities faced by women in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. And there's a risk that Western ecofeminists will speak for women elsewhere rather than listening to their analyses and priorities.
Within ecofeminism itself, there are deep debates. Materialist ecofeminists criticize spiritual ecofeminists for abandoning political analysis. Spiritual ecofeminists argue that materialists are missing the deeper cultural transformation that's needed. Vegetarian ecofeminists accuse non-vegetarian ecofeminists of inconsistency. Some scholars question whether "ecofeminism" is even a coherent category or whether it's a loose collection of disparate analyses held together mainly by a catchy name.
Why It Matters Now
Ecofeminism emerged in the 1970s. Some of its specific concerns—the threat of nuclear war, the optimism about the potential of green politics—belong to that era. But its core insight seems more relevant than ever.
The climate crisis is not equally distributed. Those who have contributed least to the problem—predominantly poor people, predominantly in the Global South, predominantly women—will suffer the most severe consequences. Climate change will intensify water scarcity, decrease agricultural productivity, increase extreme weather events, and force mass migrations. All of these hit women and marginalized communities hardest.
Meanwhile, the people making decisions about climate policy remain overwhelmingly male and predominantly from wealthy nations. The economic systems driving carbon emissions continue to value production over reproduction, extraction over care, growth over sustainability.
In this context, ecofeminism offers something that purely technical approaches to environmental problems cannot: an analysis of why we got here and what would need to change for things to be different. The problem isn't just that we're burning too many fossil fuels. The problem is a whole way of relating to the world—and to each other—that treats everything as a resource to be exploited.
The women wrapping their arms around trees in Uttarakhand understood this fifty years ago. They weren't just protecting forests. They were insisting on a different way of being in the world. That insistence, ecofeminists would say, is what we need now more than ever.