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  • Toward "Global Feminist Environmental Justice" 1
  • Michelle Garvey (bio)
Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural by Noël Sturgeon . Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009, 240 pp., $25.95 paper.
Environmental Justice in the New Millennium: Global Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Human Rights edited by Filomina Chioma Steady . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 296 pp., $95.00 hardcover.
Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology edited by Ariel Salleh . New York: Pluto Press, 2009, 336 pp., $100.00 hardcover, $34.00 paper.

This is a time of intense fossil-fuel consumption, unregulated oil mining, and catastrophic spills; a time when devastating hurricanes and tsunamis unmask centuries-long injustices; a time when corporate public relations, media, and entertainment capitalize on "green" rhetoric, further entrenching neoliberal ideals and usurping genuine, sustainable ecological responsibility. Today, environmental ills, as well as "environmentalist" responses to them, are nothing if not thoroughly globalized, multifaceted, and contradictory.

Since the advent of ecofeminism in the 1970s, feminist environmentalists have provided the theoretical apparatuses and activist insight to demystify, contest, interpret, and often re-prioritize these complexities. In so doing, they amplify concerns that mainstream, neoliberal "envirocratic" organizations, policies, and government institutions traditionally ignore. Most fundamentally, these feminists take intersectionality to its radical in/conclusion by extending the concept of mutually reinforcing oppressive systems beyond the scope of the human to concern nonhuman beings, ecological systems, and biosocial relationships as well. This means that few, if any, global inequities escape the potential for feminist environmentalist theorizing, making the field among the most inclusive and expansive to date.

Three prominent scholars—Noël Sturgeon, Filomina Chioma Steady, and Ariel Salleh—make noteworthy contributions to contemporary feminist environmentalism through their 2009 book publications. These authors gather salient insight tailored to the multilayered predicament of globalized inequity, which derives its strength and momentum from historically entrenched systems of oppression. Now more than ever, our liberatory efforts must aim to dismantle all of these interlocking systems, lest we repeat past failures of "freeing" one marginalized community at the expense of another.

Perhaps more importantly, we are better positioned today than at any other historical moment to build powerful liberatory global coalitions. Indeed, environmental issues are uniquely suited to inspire alliance-building, for they [End Page 216] can transgress national, racial, specied, and gendered boundaries. None of these observations are lost on Sturgeon, Steady, and Salleh, who are explicitly global in their reach, intersectional in their analyses, and attuned to material realities. Collectively, they inspire radical interventions into hegemonic environmental discourse, policy, and activism.

The most accessible of the three publications is Environmentalism in Popular Culture, wherein Sturgeon evaluates U.S. nature-culture tropes for their environmental implications. She finds that these tropes often perpetuate insidious forms of oppression that elude uncritical audiences. Her first chapter, "The Politics of the Natural," addresses various television and magazine advertisements that naturalize problematic norms. For example, a Hennessy Cognac ad labels an exotified Asian woman "man-eater" as she stands beside a pristine blonde woman labeled "vegetarian." The caption reads "mix accordingly," hinting at the homosexual, transracial boundary-crossings to come (38-39). Without a theoretical apparatus to deconstruct this popular artifact, racist, imperialist, hetero/sexist, and speciesist undertones may go unnoticed.

But Sturgeon moves on from this rather commonplace foray into critical media studies to digest less often critiqued sites of cultural meaning. She interrogates the American frontier myth in the next chapter, "Frontiers of Nature," by locating stereotypes of the Noble Savage and Ecological Indian as illustrative of the continuing Euro-American civilizing mission. This project can be cited in a variety of films she discusses, such as Dances with Wolves (1990), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and Hidalgo (2004). Sturgeon argues that in addition to pigeonholing diverse peoples into monolithic categories, such films exemplify white liberal guilt over conquering "original" Others and "pristine" lands, which has left a barren, contaminated modern landscape in its wake.

Sturgeon extends the frontier myth into a complex critique of militarism and space exploration in the third chapter, "Planetary Security, Militarism, and the Nature of Violence," arguing that militarized space exploration exists along a continuum of masculinist violence...

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