Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
Like many children, at 11 years old I was horrified to learn that the food served to me by my mother was the dead bodies of other animals, and I immediately faced down my parents. They were not receptive to my trans-species empathy and I tried reasoning with my father, explaining, “I wouldn’t tear off your arm and eat it, and I won’t do that to a bird, or to our dog Pookie!”
Photo credit: Greta Gaard.
[Image description: Head shot of Greta in fron of a river with green trees
in the background. Picture taken by her daughter, Flora, during a hike on
the North Shore of Lake Superior in late summer 2018.]
Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, and activist. Her work has
been one of the first to integrate queer theory, queer ecology, veganism and
animal liberation in ecofeminist studies. She is a professor of English at
the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where she teaches human-animal
studies, environmental justice and LGBT literature.
In this interview she talks about how she got involved in ecofeminist
activism, her academic work on ecofeminism, the early backlash against the
study of ecofeminism, and why the climate crisis is also a feminist issue.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your activism journey - for example,
where you started and where you are now?
The foundation of my feminism, environmentalism, and social justice work
began in my childhood, through my sense of connection with other species.
Like many children, at 11 years old I was horrified to learn that the food
served to me by my mother was the dead bodies of other animals, and I
immediately faced down my parents. They were not receptive to my
trans-species empathy and I tried reasoning with my father, explaining, “I
wouldn’t tear off your arm and eat it, and I won’t do that to a bird, or to
our dog Pookie!” My mind included all these species in the category of
personhood, recognizing their care for their young, their exuberance and
joy, their angry battles with their peers, and their own ways of living.
At the same time, I was an ardent lover of plants and wild environments,
seeking out these as playmates preferable to some humans. I simply enjoyed
the company of trees, their steadfast energies and smells. Like any
heartfelt ethics, it took education and study to help me find the words to
articulate these values of interbeing. Along the way I encountered sexism,
and my feminism grew in graduate school. When I found Aviva Cantor’s short
article, “The Club, The Yoke, The Leash” describing the intersections of
sexism, racism, and speciesism, I was thrilled! Here was a clear and concise
articulation of what I had suspected: these oppressive structures were
conceptually linked. So I made copies for everyone in my Feminist Studies
program, using my meager graduate student salary to do so, and waiting
joyously… then with sorrow, as no one replied. Ever. That silence introduced
me to the realization that simply articulating these intersections would not
be enough: reaching the hearts and minds of others might take a lifetime of
effort.
Q: As scholar and now professor of English, how did you become interested in
and involved in the study of ecofeminism?
Given the intersections I had discovered among sexism/racism/speciesism, I
wrote a conference paper titled “Feminists, Animals, and the Environment:
Toward an Ecofeminist Approach” for the National Women’s Studies Association
1989 conference, I actually thought I had made up the term myself, as it’s
simply logical: “eco” for the animals and nature, and “feminism” to address
sexism and racism. I was placed on a panel with Marti Kheel (co-ounder of
Feminists for Animal Rights) and Ariel Salleh (a socialist ecofeminist from
Australia) and when I walked to our session the room was jammed with people
crowded in the hallways. Evidently this was a convergence moment—other women
thought they too had invented the word “ecofeminism”!
After the session, about 50 of us launched the NWSA Ecofeminist Task Force
with Noel Sturgeon as the newsletter editor. Afterward, the acquisitions
editor at Temple who had attended our session approached me and asked me to
write a book on ecofeminism, but I insisted that it would have to be an
edited volume, as this was a *movement*, not a single-author stardom. She
agreed, and I began collecting proposals and chapter drafts for what became
my first book, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Temple University Press,
1993).
Q: How would you define 'ecofeminism'?
Ecofeminism is variously seen as a branch of feminist theory, a subset of
environmental ethics, and a manifestation of environmental politics.
Ecofeminist activisms are manifested through movements linking gender,
species, and environmental justice, water and food democracy, and local
self-sufficiency. Based on a self-identity that is fundamentally
interconnected with earthothers—diverse humans, other animal species and
individuals, plants, waterbodies, earth and air, rock and fire—ecofeminists
have diverse interests and ecopolitical commitments, but share the insight
that these many paths are inextricably intertwined.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about the subjects you are currently teaching at
the University of Wisconsin-River Falls? Which are the main areas that you
focus on and what are student’s reactions and responses to integrating
literature and environmental justice?
This topic is huge, and I cannot do it justice here, but give only one
example. I have offered a Human-Animal Studies course on this Agricultural
campus for several years until the MultiDiscipinary requirement was removed
and the course eliminated.
During the years I offered the course, I used Mindfulness as a strategy to
help students recognize their own embodied empathy for other species. The
students consistently dropped empathy once we studied the issue of animals
used for food, and their responses were similar to those deflective
responses that white people use to block empathy for others across race. The
resonances were so strong that I decided to explore Mindfulness as an
Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy, and that is my research area presently.
Last fall, I was awarded a grant to host a Think Tank on this topic,
bringing together faculty across the upper Midwest, New York and California
to discuss how to use mindfulness as an anti-oppressive pedagogy. All the
information about animal suffering is available, but what will it take to
reconnect students with their own embodied experiences of empathy? This
question is the most urgent question I have considered in my teaching
career.
Q: In your essay “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and
Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism” you describe how
ecofeminism has been discredited in the past and how a wide array of
knowledge has been lost as a result. Which do you feel were the main factors
contributing to this backlash?
As I discuss in that essay, two kinds of critiques were advanced against
ecofeminism in the 1990s: one against conflating categories of sex and
gender, and homogenizing women’s experiences, and another, against the
inclusion of species and nature as analytical categories crucial for
feminist thought. Only the first critique was legitimately grounded.
Criticisms of ecofeminism came from both mainstream feminisms and
formerly-ecofeminist philosophers. Few scholars point out the feminist
resistance to acknowledging that feminists can still be oppressors of other
women (via race and class privilege) or of other female animals, which was
the uncomfortable point animal ecofeminists made: women’s socially
reproductive labor is analogous (not identical) to the female reproductive
capacities and lives that are exploited in the production of cows’ milk, and
the female egg-laying capacity that is exploited in chickens. Throughout the
1980s, 1990s, and into the new millenium, vegetarian ecofeminists
foregrounded species as they addressed the intersections of feminism,
ecology, race, class, gender, and nation, through a variety of issues:
animal experimentation and the myth of the animal’s willing sacrifice,
industrialized animal food production and its reliance on undocumented
immigrant workers (who risk deportation if they report their hazardous
workplace conditions), vegan and vegetarian diets in relation to social and
environmental justice as well as human and animal health, contextual moral
vegetarianism, hunting and the social construction of masculinity, the
sexism and racism of PETA’s “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign,
mad cow disease in terms of social/ecological/interspecies ethics, rBGH and
its effects on female humans/cows/calves as well as small farmers and the
environment, the essentialism of the gendered “Mother Earth” metaphor, and
the uses of restoring truncated narratives and contextualizing ethical
decisions in analyzing what might appear to be competing issues among
various oppressed groups (women, indigenous communities, nonhuman animals,
workers, immigrants, the environment).
In the course of developing these arguments, ecofeminism was developing in
convergence with the environmental health/justice movement. Ecofeminists
foregrounded issues such as Black ghetto ecology, colonialism and third
world development, the UFW Grape Boycott, and environmental justice theory
in ecofeminist anthologies, and some later renamed their transformed
ecofeminism as a hybrid ‘global feminist environmental justice’. But as with
postmodern feminisms, environmental justice theory did not as readily listen
to or embrace ecofeminist insights, and the focus on race, class, and
environment backgrounded issues of gender, sexuality, and species for
roughly fifteen years, from the mid-1990s through the first decade of the
new millenium. During that period, the anti-essentialist backlash succeeded
in denouncing ecofeminism, largely via arguments over speciesism.
In retrospect, it’s clear that mainstream feminism advanced critiques of
ecofeminism under the cover of “anti-essentialism,” but effectively couldn’t
handle the inclusion of speciesism as a form of oppression: instead, these
critiques insisted that consideration of nonhuman animals within feminism
was essentialist and ethnocentric.
Q: In your perception, is this ‘backlash against ecofeminism’ still ongoing?
I think ecofeminism and ecofeminist perspectives are regaining ground,
simply because the analyses they offer provide the kind of intersectional
and posthumanist analyses most relevant to addressing “wicked problems” such
as climate justice.
If you look at the updated reissue of Mies and Shiva’s Ecofeminism (1993,
2014) and Adams’ Sexual Politics of Meat (1990, 2010), along with
applications of Plumwood’s theory in Critical Ecofeminism (Gaard 2017) and
in Sherilyn MacGregor’s Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment (2017),
you’ll see ecofeminism has provided both foundation and impetus for these
new projects.
Ecofeminist work on species justice inspired the fields of human-animal
studies, critical animal studies, and posthumanism. Australian philosopher
and critical ecofeminist, Val Plumwood’s scholarship grounds postcolonial
ecocriticism (Huggan & Tiffin 2010), and queer ecofeminisms inspired both
Queer Ecologies (2010) and the eco-erotic defense of earth-others shown in
“Goodbye Gauley Mountain” (Stephens and Sprinkle 2013). Material Feminisms
(Alaimo & Hekman 2008) also rests on groundwork laid by the feminist
environmental health movement, and ecopsychology’s insights into ecological
grief and human-place identity also rearticulate ecofeminist and
environmental justice foundations. So, ecofeminism may be a feminist theory
that has grown with the times, and continues to offer incisive critiques and
solutions for pressing eco-justice problems.
Q: In the foreword to the landmark book Ecofeminism: Women, Animals,
Nature (1993) you point out that you and other ecofeminist activists and
scholars wrote these texts as a response to a lack of work that connected
environmentalism, animal liberation and feminism. Why must ecofeminism
include the study of speciesism and the oppression of non-human animals?
Speciesist thinking lies at the root of our environmental problems, and it
doesn’t stem from traditional indigenous perspectives: it is a Eurocentric
and western view that human animals are separate from and superior to other
animal species and nature, and that humans are the best (or only) beings to
have a “mind” and agency. The human-animal dualism is simply another
reworked manifestation of the culture/nature dualism that preserves
human-centered thinking, and this thinking will never solve our climate
crises because humans do not exist apart from nature.
Reconceiving humans as animals, as one animal among many, has the potential
to introduce some humility and a more ecological perspective. More
important, however, is the simple truth that oppression is like cancer and
cannot be removed or “cured” if one takes only a part of the disease:
speciesism is integral to racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism; it is
part of western culture’s “erotophobia,” or hatred of nature and our animal
bodies, desires, and capacities. Finally, the human loneliness of species
extinction is becoming more pronounced: as one animal species among many, we
are losing our animal and ecological family via the overconsumptive and
polluting practices of industrial capitalist patriarchy. We need other
species to flourish, to be respected and cherished, and their habitats
safeguarded.
Q: A large body of your work covers women and the climate crisis. Can you
explain why climate change is a feminist issue?
Issues that women traditionally organize around—environmental health,
habitats, livelihoods—have been marginalized in debates that treat climate
change as a scientific problem requiring technological and scientific
solutions without substantially transforming ideologies and economies of
domination, exploitation and colonialism. Issues that GLBTQ people organize
around—bullying in the schools, hate crimes, marriage equality, fair housing
and health care—aren’t even noted in climate change discussions. Ecofeminist
analyses are well positioned to address these and other structural
inequalities in climate crises, and to unmask the gendered character of
first-world overconsumption. Bringing together a wealth of intersectional
perspectives, a queer feminist and posthumanist approach to climate change
analyses and solution strategies will be most inclusive and thus effective
in tackling the antifeminist threads companioning the scientific response to
climate change: the linked rhetorics of population control, erotophobia and
ecophobia, anti-immigration sentiment, and increased militarism.
Q: Speaking in less academic terms, how are gender inequalities linked to
the climate crisis? Are there any particular examples for how women are
affected more than men?
Women are indeed the ones most severely affected by climate change and
natural disasters, but their vulnerability is not innate; rather
vulnerability is a result of inequities produced through gendered social
roles, discrimination, and poverty. According to CARE, an international NGO,
women work 2/3 of the world’s working hours, produce half the world’s food,
and earn 10% of the world’s income; of the world’s one billion poorest
people, women and girls make up 70%. If there were an unimpeded correlation
between hard work and earnings, women would be the world’s highest earners.
Instead, structural barriers of gender put women—and children—among the
world’s poorest people, situated on the front lines of climate change.
Around the world, gender roles restrict women’s mobility, impose tasks
associated with food production and caregiving, and simultaneously obstruct
women from participating in decision-making about climate change, greenhouse
gas emissions, and decisions about adaptation and mitigation.
In developing countries, women living in poverty bear the burden of climate
change consequences, as these create more work to fetch water, or to collect
fuel and fodder—duties traditionally assigned to women. When households
experience food shortages, which occur regularly and may become more
frequent due to climate change, women are the first to go without food so
that children and men may eat. As rural areas experience desertification,
decreased food production, and other economic and ecological hardships,
these factors prompt increased male out-migration to urban centers with the
promise of economic gain and wages returned to the family; these promises
are not always fulfilled. In the short-term, and possibly long-term as well,
male out-migration means more women are left behind with additional
agricultural and household duties, such as caregiving. These women have even
fewer resources to cope with seasonal and episodic weather and natural
disasters.
Gender inequalities also mean that women and children are 14 times more
likely to die in ecological disasters than men. For example, in the 1991
cyclone and flood in Bangladesh, 90% of the victims were women (IUCN based
on Ikeda, 1995). The causes are multiple: warning information was not sent
to women, who were largely confined in their homes; women are not trained
swimmers; women’s caregiving responsibilities meant that women trying to
escape the floods were often holding infants and towing elder family
members, while husbands escaped alone; moreover, the increased risk of
sexual assaults outside the home made women wait longer to leave, hoping
that male relatives would return for them. Similarly in the 2004 Tsunami in
Aceh, Sumatra, more than 75% of those who died were women (Oxfam). In May
2008, after Cyclone Nargis came ashore in the Ayeyarwady Division of
Myanmar, women and girls were 61% of the 130, 000 people dead or missing in
the aftermath (Post-Nargis Joint Assessment, 2014, p.61).
The deaths of so many mothers leads to increased infant mortality, early
marriage of girls, increased neglect of girls' education, sexual assaults,
trafficking in women and child prostitution. Even in industrialized
countries, more women than men died during the 2003 European heat wave, and
during Hurricane Katrina in the US, African-American women - the poorest
population in that part of the country - faced the greatest obstacles to
survival. Women who survive climate change disasters are then faced with the
likelihood of sexual assault: for example, after Hurricane Katrina, rapes
were “reported by dozens of survivors” and mentioned in news stories, but
there was no discussion of rape support teams being included with the rescue
teams, and no mention of reproductive health services that should have been
made available to women who had been raped. Moreover, the likely assaults on
gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered queer (GLBTQ) persons went unreported.
In 2018, Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown described the 100 most substantive
solutions to global warming, but the book doesn’t present the solutions in
order of effectiveness, but rather in ways that Hawken expects his readers
will be able to be persuaded! So when you look at the back of the book for
the listing of most potent solutions, here’s what you find: out of 100
ranked solutions, a plant-rich diet is #4, educating girls is #6, and family
planning is #7. These top rankings for vegan diets that reduce animal
suffering, and for girls‘ and women’s self-determination through education
and bodily reproductive control confirm ecofeminism’s analysis: gender and
species liberation is fundamental to our planetary survival and
socioeconomic well-being.
Q: Which ecofeminist projects, activists and scholars inspire you and give
you hope for a positive change?
I’m inspired by global feminisms such as the Women’s Environment and
Development Organization (WEDO) focusing on international governance and
climate justice; the Women’s Earth Alliance protecting land rights,
seed-saving, and sustainable farms; Women’s Voices for the Earth, addressing
environmental health and justice via hair and nail salon environments,
cleaning and sanitary products, pregnancy and chemicals of concern; and the
Women’s Environmental Institute, teaching food justice and organic farming.
Certainly, indigenous women’s leadership in the Standing Rock Pipeline
resistance and water protection actions has inspired many young women’s
eco-justice actions, as has the activism of Berta Cáceres, Malala Yousafzai,
Greta Thunberg, and now the activist behind the “Green New Deal,” Rhiana
Gunn-Wright of Chicago.
I truly believe the culmination of women’s activism over the centuries is
coming to fruition, and not a moment too soon for our planet, and for the
survival and well-being of so many species and marginalized humans.I would
urge any feminist who despairs to turn to progressive media like Democracy
Now, Al Jazeera, Women’s Media Center, or London’s The Guardian. Despair is
often connection to a sense of isolation, and a belief that we are acting
alone - far from it! Feminism, ecofeminism, indigenous feminisms,
posthumanist and anti-speciesist feminisms are all taking action for life on
earth.
Finally, the intersectional ecofeminist praxis -- linking the liberation of
species, gender, class, ecology, sexuality -- articulated through the
activism and education provided by pattrice jones and the VINE Sanctuary
activists give me great inspiration too! It’s the accumulation of these
local acts and organizations of resistance and of justice that will create
the tipping point we need to bring about a more ecologically just society.
Articles and books that were referenced in this interview (sorted by author's name)
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