Raising Your Hand in the Council of all Beings: Ecofeminism and Citizenship

Ethics and the Environment, 4(2):219-233 ISSN: 1085-6633 Copyright © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Catriona Sandilands Raising Your Hand in the Council of all Beings: Ecofeminism and Citizenship PROLOGUE This paper is part of an ongoing conversation that I have had with (other) ecofeminists on the general theme of democracy and citizenship. Some of these conversations have been held in relative privacy; others have appeared in a variety of published fora. But they are—necessarily, as I suggest below—conversational utterances, designed more to open questions than to answer them, inspired more by a desire to include new voices and topics in the discussion than to establish my (tenured ) place in an academic establishment. This paper should thus be read as an argument to a community. More than anything, this means that I insist on the "I" of its composition in order to highlight my public appearance as the bearer of these ideas (if not always their creative source) and as a citizen of this political community. This conversational desire also means that I take certain tenets of our community conversation as established wisdom (if not as truth), and give them my own spin rather than rely primarily on the original desires of the authors involved (which may get me in trouble, but that's the risk of appearance). Thus, this article is not a good introduction to ecofeminism; there are plenty of these about. It is, however, an investigation designed to get us—and the broader community of environmental thinkers—to think more systematically about citizenship as a key tenet of ecological thought. As I said, this is a conversation (and one in which I owe particular thanks to Greta Gaard): from my doxa to yours, with the hope of mutual creation. Direct all correspondence to: C. Sandilands, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto , ON, Canada M3J IP3; E-mail: ESSANDI@YORKU.CA 219 220 ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT Vol. 4, No. 2,1999 I. INTRODUCTION: ECOFEMINISM, PUBLIC LIFE, AND HANNAH ARENDT In her 1958 book, The Human Condition, political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, rather controversially, that human beings reach their fullest potential in the realm of action. Distinct from labor—the reproduction of the biological life of the species—and from work—the production of nonorganic physical artifacts—action, to Arendt, comprised the world of speech and deed among people. "Action," she wrote, is "the only activity that goes on directly between [people] without the intermediary of things or matter[; it] corresponds to the human condition of plurality, the fact that men, not Man [sic], live on the earth and inhabit the world" (Arendt 1958, 7). Thinking, speaking, and acting collectively on the issues of world demarcate a realm in which people reveal their individuality; denuded of the protective covering of objects and matter, people reveal "who" they are as individuals as opposed to "what" they are in terms of their categorical attachments to roles, things, ascribed identities, and biological contingencies. Action produces our distinctiveness; we reveal our potential for uniqueness as human beings by appearing to speak and act with other human beings in the public realm of debate and common activity. Leaving aside, for the moment, her 1958 use of the terms "man" and "men," one might still ask what such a view could possibly offer to feminism, which insists on the deep meaning of gender as a category of appearance in social and political life? How can we appear as individuals in a world so gendered, racialized, sexualized—so bound by the power relations of category and experience? Even more, what of ecofeminism, which also insists that so-called biological contingencies are a crucial and undervalued marker of identity—and realm of activity—in the world? Why would we want to "forget" survival in order to act when the world demands action in order to survive? While acknowledging these important questions, and the debates that have occurred in feminist literatures about Arendt's problematic distinctions among labor, work, and action, I would like to argue that her notion of action is a rich and important terrain from which to think about ecofeminism as a...