Notes on Cuomo

Ethics and the Environment, 4(1):57-61 © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. ISSN: 1085-6633 All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. SYMPOSIUM: FEMINISM AND ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES Naomi Zack Notes on Cuomo I found Chris Cuomo's (1998) work interesting and informative . The scholarship is comprehensive and the theory building is sound and suggestive . I am particularly interested in the architectonic, or shape of the ideas, implied in Cuomo's project, in her suggestions for ecological feminist ethics and in several conceptual problems that I believe require further consideration. I have therefore divided my notes on Cuomo's books into those three topics. The Architectonic Implications Chris Cuomo draws important distinctions between ecofeminism and ecological feminism, on the one hand, and on the other, between ecofeminism and nonfeminist deep ecology and environmental ethics. Ecofeminism is object-attentive and conceptually vulnerable to essentializing. The objects of ecofeminism , women and nature, are often analogized, valorized, and reified in ways that neglect both patterns of oppression in systems that oppress varied beings and differences between and within women and nature. However, Cuomo is in sympathy with the broad ecofeminist program of supporting the interests of women and nonhuman life and she considers ecological feminism to be a subcategory of ecofeminism. Ecological feminism focuses on the patterns of oppression, domination, and exploitation that have women and natural beings as their objects. For Cuomo, ecofeminism is the locus of an ethics of flourishing that combines concerns about social justice with the objectattentive focus of ecofeminists, on a (modified) Aristotelian model of virtue. Ecofeminism is prone to essentializing through assumptions that there are such monolithic things as women and nature, apart from their existent diversity and their Direct all correspondence to: Naomi Zack, Department of Philosophy, SUNY at Albany, Albany, NY 12222-0001; E-mail: nzack@cnsunix.albany.edu 57 58 ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT Vol. 4, No. 1,1999 membership in social categories that have been constructed by their oppressors. Nonetheless, ecofeminism can generate a deconstructive focus on the social contexts in which women and natural beings have been constructed in devalued ways by those who wield power over them. Such a focus would continually create opportunities for analysis and change through understanding of the ways in which capitalism, technology , racism, and global patterns of artificialization have resulted in harm to natural environments, women, and nonhuman living things. The resulting positive revaluation of women and natural beings generated by ecofeminism intersects with the traditional environmentalist distinction between instrumental and noninstrumental value. Throughout Western European environmental conservation, moves to preserve natural environments have largely been motivated by their instrumental value or use to appropriative and fabricating human agents. Ecofeminism is particularly sensitive to the noninstrumental or intrinsic value of natural beings. The same can be said about deep ecology but deep ecologists often locate intrinsic value in natural beings and ecosystems without paying attention to the unjust social and economic structures that thrive on their exploitation. Thus, deep ecology, like ecofeminism in its most essentializing moments, is object-attentive in ways that neglect the social causes of environmental depredation. Ecological Feminist Ethics Cuomo offers suggestions for an ecological feminist ethics. Ethical objects (subjects) are broadly defined as beings that can be wronged, that have moral value and interests of their own—beings that can and ought to flourish. Flourishing takes place in complex ways that do not admit of Aristotelian teleology—there is a strong theme of indeterminacy, creativity, and autonomous unruliness in Cuomo's design of flourishing. Indeed, one of the most engaging concepts of the book is her term "dynamic charm." (71-3) Living beings have dynamic charm, which both sustains them and makes it possible for other living things to value them on an intuitive level. The dynamic charm of nonhuman living beings is what alerts us to their moral status. Human beings are central to an ecological feminist ethics but their flourishing requires the presence of nonhuman living beings in a social and natural community that is capable of supporting the flourishing of all its members. ". . . An ethical view can consider human interests to be centrally valuable and find 'the center' of our moral lives to be also populated by non...