Feminism and Ecology (review)

Women's Words: Essay on French SingularityEcofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action by Noël Sturgeon. New York: Routledge, 1997, 260 pp., $70.00 hardcover, $18.99 paper.

Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature edited by Karen J. Warren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, 454 pp., $49.98 hardcover, $24.95 paper.

Feminism and Ecology by Mary Mellor. New York: New York University Press, 1997, 221 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $17.50 paper.

Since ecofeminism emerged in the mid-1970s, it has drawn widespread criticism for its alleged essentialism, usually interpreted as the claim that women share an inherent, biologically-based affinity with the natural world that men lack. While many academic feminists have continued to dismiss ecofeminism since this time, ecofeminist thinking has grown increasingly sophisticated over the years; most contemporary ecofeminists explicitly reject essentialism, basing their philosophy instead on the general conviction that important connections exist between the oppression of women and the destruction and misuse of nonhuman nature within male-dominated cultures. They tend to acknowledge the social construction of these connections and to understand that different women experience them in different ways.

However, teasing out and understanding the very complex nature of the relationship(s) between women and nature has been one of ecofeminist thinkers' most enduring tasks. Three recent books on ecofeminism--Noël Sturgeon's Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action, Mary Mellor's Feminism and Ecology, and noted ecofeminist philosopher Karen Warren's edited collection, Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature--continue this tradition, each providing an interesting new perspective on ecofeminism's oldest, most central question while moving the discussion far beyond the exhausted issue of whether or not ecofeminism is inherently essentialist. Each book also takes on other issues of vital importance to ecofeminism, including ecofeminism's heritage of grassroots activism, its relationship to issues of race, its connections with other radical movements, and its seeming incompatibility with poststructuralist feminist thinking. While the perspective of these books is largely what Mellor calls "Northern" (that of the developed, first world), each also addresses the ways that perspectives and concerns of women and others in the "South" may differ from those in the "North."

Sturgeon's Ecofeminist Natures makes an invaluable contribution to the academic dialogue on ecofeminism by providing an historical/political context for ecofeminist thought as it has developed internationally and in the U.S. It also conducts one of the few thorough discussions of ecofeminism's relation to issues of race--not just in theory, but as it has played out in political movements and discourse. As a cultural critic with experience as an activist in the women's peace movement, Sturgeon seems perfectly positioned to tell what she calls "an interested, contested, disrupted, and unfinished historical narrative" (19) about ecofeminism in a way that connects theory and practice while also critically examining both the problems and potential of ecofeminism as an oppositional movement.

One of Sturgeon's primary concerns is the current "political stalemate between the tropes of essentialism and anti-essentialism within feminism," (11) a stalemate which she sees working to divide ecofeminist theory from practice and ecofeminism from feminism. She not only insists--quite correctly--that ecofeminism's tendencies toward essentialism have been greatly exaggerated by its critics, but also argues that those essentialist tendencies which do exist "must be explained as well as resisted" (59). By asking where these tendencies come from and what purposes they have served, Sturgeon takes the discussion of ecofeminism and essentialism in a new and extremely productive direction. To answer her question, she delves into the historical and political context of ecofeminist activism (feminist antimilitarism for U.S. ecofeminism and "women, environment and development" for international ecofeminism), and consequently ends up confronting race and other issues that have deeply affected ecofeminism in practice and, consequently, ecofeminist theory and discourse...