from the ecofeminist archive
Janet Biehl has published several
critical essays on eco-feminism in recent years, now collected together and
revised as Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (1991). Her book sets out the terms of a long overdue political debate
between social ecology and a spiritually oriented culturalist feminism.(1) The guiding parameters of this exchange
for Biehl - intimate disciple of Murray Bookchin, are to be the woman-nature connection; origins
of domination; political relevance of the Goddess; reason versus unreason;
grounds for a naturalist ethic; and women's role in democratic renewal. Biehl attempts to show how an ecological feminism can be
housed in social ecology. From a feminist, or more
specifically eco-feminist point of view such as my own, a number of problems
attach to this project. Further, while Biehl declares a defence of feminist ideals, there is
little interest in women’s scholarship. In fact, the mood of writing soon nudges the reader to ask: Who
is being addressed here, and Why? My summation is that Biehl's work has a double function. One, is a celebration of Bookchin himself, as friend and philosopher; the
second, is to capture the emerging Green movement for social ecology.
But this is to run ahead. First, to historicise Biehl's social ecological critique of ‘eco-feminism’. The tension between
these two ideological tendencies became clear at the National Green Gathering
in Amherst, Massachusetts, June 1987. Bookchin, the
father of social ecology, was a key speaker at this event, and spiritual
eco-feminist Charlene Spretnak, a mother of Green
politics, was another. A sense of competing hegemonies clouded the Amherst
meeting, some describing it as a collision between New England rationalists
and California mystics. Spretnak was also
identified with deep ecology, another West Coast approach to Green thought
and total anathema to Bookchinites. The subsequent
rise of a Left Green Network and Youth Greens organised from Vermont, has been one practical outcome of the Amherst experience - a
concerted effort by social ecologists and others on the Left to ensure an
adequate social analysis informs the development of Green politics in the
USA.
I - domination: patriarchal, capitalist,
imperialist
A further agenda introduced by the East v. West Coast divide at
the first (US) National Gathering, was a tacit struggle over the body of
eco-feminism. Where should it belong? Was it to affirm the life giving
potency of 'woman and nature' through ritual celebration of the earth
Goddess? Or was eco-feminism to walk hand in hand with social ecology, as Ynestra King, in those days a teacher at Bookchin's Institute for Social Ecology, still believed.
From the perspective of women in an international eco-feminist community now
some 15 years old, this ideological schism is very much a product of social
conditions peculiar to the USA. Eco-feminists in Scandinavia or Australia,
for example, enter a political scene where socialist ideas have currency even
in establishment circles, and where the famous 'L' word so precious to
American progressives, is seen as conservative. The mainstream community
temper in the wider Western world tends to be secular humanist too, rather
than shaped by religiosity as it is in the USA. In India or Venezuela,
eco-feminism encounters different conditions again. For the point is, that the problems facing Green activists around the
world, including eco-feminist activists, vary with the unique historical
trajectory of their region.
So this brings up a serious limitation of Janet Biehl's book. The title Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics is misleading, in that it depends on a falsely universalised notion of what eco-feminism is. Her
eco-feminist textual sources are - Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature (1978), Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature (1980), Charlene Spretnak's The Politics of Women's Spirituality (1982) and The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics (1987), Riane Eisler's The Chalice
and the Blade (1987), Starhawk's Truth or
Dare (1988), Andree Collard's Rape of the Wild (1989), and essays
from anthologies like Plant's Healing the Wounds (1989) and Diamond's
and Orenstein's Reweaving the World (1990).(2) While Biehl claims to engage with a movement, her bibliography
deals only with North American material. The upshot of this inadequate
research base, is that eco-feminists in the wider
international community have their political contribution marginalised.
Yet, equally unfair, they have to wear criticism that does not necessarily
apply to their articulations of eco-feminism. Biehl comments somewhere in her book that the US education system is notably remiss
in conveying a sense of history and geographic relativity to its people.
Clearly, this serves the impoverished imperialist consciouses in many ways, but it is ironic to see this same limitation reflected in
radical American writing as well.
Of course the mis-match between the
book's rather home grown project and the global reach of its title, may have issued from publication editors with a
keen eye for commodity export. The political impact of that decision will
continue to ripple outward into the international scene, nevertheless. To
take a case in point. On the Island Continent where Green parties began, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics has been embraced by
unreformed Trotskyists who move under a Green
Alliance banner, and used as a means of invalidating the work of Green
activist women.(3) These cadres, never much troubled
by ideological consistency when scoring a political point, are too unread to
be inhibited by the message of Bookchin's ‘Listen Marxist!’. - Perhaps the time
is right for Murray to look at a revised, updated version of his earlier
essay? A number of eco-feminist activists and scholars on these fatal shores
would value his efforts. - But to return to Biehl.
It is not Janet's fault that her writing is being abused in this way,
although there is a salutory lesson in taking stock
of the political landscape on all fronts, before setting out to attack potential
allies. The other lesson in all this, is a reminder
that history is made up of internal contradictions; eco-feminism has no
prerogative on them.
Because eco-feminist politics grows out of a plurality of social
contexts, it will have many complexions. Biehl asserts
that it is marred by ‘massive
internal contradictions’. But
one cannot expect the spontaneous organic voice of a worldwide democratic
groundswell like eco-feminism, to show the same degree of philosophic
grooming as a statement like social ecology, born of the pen if a singular
charismatic figure. Despite differences among eco-feminists, there is always
a common strand to women’s experiences - things shared by dint of the patriarchal ascription of
'womanhood', and things beyond that. The knowledge of this unity is
empowering to women and a delight. Women are discovering themselves as
sisters outside the divisive legacies of patriarchal capitalism, colonialism,
and even (sometimes) Marxism and Green ideologies. In a global context,
women, 53% of the world's population, are the largest 'minority group'. It is
women who put in 65% of the world's work for 10% of the world's pay. This is
what marks 'women' out as a significant political category - not an
essentialist fabrication as antifeminists want to claim. But Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics forgets this material fact,
preoccupied as it is with the status of political ideas. In this respect, New
England rationalists display an idealism equal to
that of the spiritual feminists who bother it so.
Bearing in mind that US eco-feminism is Biehl's focus, she expresses disappointment in a literature that fails to - quote - ‘draw upon the best of
social theory and meld it with radical concepts in ecology to produce a
genuine anti-hierarchical, enlightened, and broadly oppositional movement’.(4)
She is disturbed by eco-feminists who seem to situate themselves ‘outside’ the emancipatory legacy of Western political culture. As her
book goes on, she offers Bookchin's social ecology
as the most promising model in this legacy for eco-feminists and other Greens
to espouse.(5) Now Biehl is rightly concerned, in
that there is no well developed socialist (in the broad sense) eco-feminist
account among the texts she addresses. But she is wrong to go on to conclude
that eco-feminism as such, lacks this analysis. Or more seriously, that it
lacks the intellectual resources for arriving at same. German eco-feminist
Maria Mies' study Patriarchy and Accumulation (1987) offers a coherent analysis of an internationally predatory capitalist
system, and how it uses patriarchal violence on women and nature to secure
economic ends. Mies steps outside the Western
legacy to look for an empirically grounded 'feminine voice', then brings this voice into dialogue with the basic
presuppositions of Marxism itself. Vandana Shiva's Staying
Alive (1989) is another eco-feminist statement whose postcolonial expose
of developmentalism is informed by a socialist
analysis. Other eco-feminist positions again, have developed from the
interplay of gendered living, environmental struggle, and intensive study of
dialectical philosophies. This scarcely represents a turning away from social
theory.(6)
A key theoretical dispute between social ecology and eco-feminism
concerns ‘the
origins of domination’ - this
aggravates a fundamental nerve in Bookchin's eco-anarchism. Was hierarchy introduced by invading Indo-European hordes as
Charlene Spretnak proposes? Or, was it internally
generated with the grasp of economic power by a group of men? Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics states that a gerontocracy of
this kind was the original status hierarchy among humans, though Bookchin's earlier writing is more agnostic, and even
mentions gender domination as a possibility. Biehl will
concede that ‘Perhaps
the earliest slaves were women 'weavers' and servants whom patriarchs brought
to the service of their wives and families...’, but wives not withstanding (sic), she
will not join with Ynestra King and other
eco-feminists who maintain the sexual and labour subordination of women was prototype for all forms of domination.(7) Janet
wishes to emphasise that gender stratification is
qualitatively distinct from hierarchy as such, and there seems to be nascent
within social ecology here something like the dual systems theory developed
by socialist feminists to account for the relative autonomy of capitalism and
patriarchy. But Biehl dismisses links eco-feminists
draw between the origins of family (private property) and state. The only
agreement in this area between social ecologists and eco-feminists, is that the capitalist separation of home and workplace has damaged women's
lives immeasurably.
Another of Biehl's misgivings over
what her North American sisters are doing, focuses
on their invocation of Goddess imagery to mobilise feminist consciousness. In fact, the appeal to spirituality is not only
directed at women's empowerment, but seen as antidote to the alienation of
both men and women in a barren secular age. Spretnak has argued for Green politics to root itself in a renewed sense of oneness
with the earth, and Neolithic Goddess worshiping cultures pre-dating the rise
of Western patriarchy and its modern capitalist face, are her inspiration for
a future life affirming society. Biehl's dissection
of spiritual eco-feminist texts is scathing and personal, but she does raise
some valid problems concerning social domination and its correlates. Goddess
celebration in Minoan Crete probably went along with low status for ordinary
women and a high degree of stratification and exploitation generally. Again,
where Iroquois women have been held in high esteem, and their tribe was not
hard on nature, Iroquois men are supposed to have been remarkably warlike.
There is no systematic tie between Goddess adulation, sensitivity to nature,
peacefulness, and a fair go for women as many eco-feminists argue. Advocates
for the Goddess, Riane Eisler and Spretnak may indeed have fallen into the trap
of ‘religious
determinism’,
though I did not read their conjectural histories of patriarchy this way. In any
event, Biehl's probe can only help cultural
feminists to sharpen their conceptualisation.
Eco-feminism should have no quarrel with the social ecologist's observation
that ‘there
are social reasons why early Neolithic cultures are likely to have been peaceful
and egalitarian and even matricentric’.(8) Matrilocality and an horticultural mode of production are
important determinants. Biehl will find an
eco-feminist social history of domination along these lines if she consults Mies' work.
A more worrying aspect of the West Coast Goddess revival is its
ready commodification in a late capitalist culture
where middle class freedom has dissolved into the paraphernalia of New Age
commercial iconography. Bookchin and Biehl both note this with alarm. Janet bristles as she quotes
the therapeutic slogan - ‘Allow
yourself to be a tree and let that be sufficient’.(9) In the context of
a structurally violent world market system and a society of mass manipulated
consumers whose political awareness is weakly developed, deep ecological
transports such as this should be queried. Spiritually oriented eco-feminists
do need to assess the social conjuncture critically and weigh up
unanticipated effects of their creative energies. The ‘unifying mode of
consciousness’ to
borrow Eisler's joyful phrase, can be a way of
papering over political tensions in a racist, classist, sexist and
anti-nature system. The would-be happy consciousness only seals this
destructive status quo with an illusion of ‘interconnectedness’, unless caring people
also strive to unlock their daily dependence on very brutal and destructive
economic processes.
II - politics in a ‘different’ voice
It is urgent to envision restored community and democratic life as
social ecology does, but yet another reality of our time may be that before
new Green practices are formulated, a deep felt acknowledgement of how women
have been historically oppressed needs to be granted. Moreover, a perception
of how women's voices have been historically suppressed - and how this has
deformed the Western political legacy, needs to be arrived at. Structural
change without corresponding change of cultural consciousness, runs the risk of an ‘eternal
return’. For
this reason, social ecology's optimistic assumption that structural integration
of women in democratic institutions will suffice to resolve ‘the woman question’, is too reminiscent of mainstream bourgeois reformism to be comfortable. The
present generation of feminists tried this tack in the 70s and 80s and found
it wanting. Feminist theory has moved on accordingly. However Biehl's book shows no familiarity with the direction
(dare I say, legacy) of feminist scholarship since its dalliance with
liberalism. One thinks of the vigorous debate among socialist feminists over
the relation of capitalist and patriarchal systems; discourse analysis and poststructuralism; and now eco-feminist arguments for
equality and sustainability as interlocking political goals.
While Biehl does not register it, the
eco-feminists she describes so acidly, carry a very important political
message. Whether they be spiritual activists like Spretnak and Starhawk or graduates of Marxism like Omvedt and Mies, each claims a
space for women to be heard speaking on their own terms. Biehl identifies eco-feminism as ‘outside’ the emancipatory legacy of the West, but my understanding is
rather that eco-feminist thinkers and activists confront that legacy in a
very healthy dialectical fashion. In the late 20th Century, notions of 'the
political' have been reshaped by studies in the dynamics of language,
psychoanalysis, and gender. Politics is no longer focused exclusively on the
mechanics of public order and justice, but seen to penetrate the recesses of
daily life and very fabric of the discursive medium itself. The analysis of
women's subordination by feminist theorists has given special impetus to this ‘microphysics
of power’ - to
steal from an infamous non-feminist. In addition to criticising patriarchal institutions, feminists are now taking stock of how women work
co-operatively in groups; how women approach ethical questions and how women
communicate in ways that are different to men's behaviour models. In reassessing their 'difference' from the dominant masculine ideal,
women are turning away from the early liberal feminist desire exemplified by
de Beauvoir - to be like men. Equal citizens, but on men's terms.(10) Women are reaching out to revalorise what has hitherto been despised as 'feminine'. And one should add, to reinscribe patriarchal conceptions of 'nature' along the
way. There are both secular and spiritual forms to this new political thrust
by women. Both facets break new ground in different quarters of the
patriarchal establishment.
The emancipatory legacy of ‘malestream’ thought is under
close scrutiny by women scholars. Aware that ecological crisis reframes
history, and therefore - reframes feminism too, many are now spelling out the
broader implications of their critical studies. Eco-feminist writers both
contribute to and draw on this work. There are no hard and fast boundaries in
the emerging counter culture that is women's knowledge. Some people have even characterised this development as a veritable
renaissance in Western learning. Hence, it is a shame that Biehl's book is conceived in isolation from this exciting
work. In addition to acquainting herself with the full international corpus
of eco-feminist literature, Janet might have tested her arguments about women
and politics against the substantial contribution of theorists like - Susan Moller Okin, Women in
Western Political Thought (1979), Mary O'Brien, The Politics of
Reproduction (1981), Nancy Hartsock, Money,
Sex and Power (1983), Kathy Ferguson, The Feminist Case Against
Bureaucracy (1984), Carole Pateman, The
Sexual Contract (1988), Ngaire Naffine, Law and the Sexes (1990).(11)
To follow through on just one of these. The outcome of Carole Pateman's careful reading of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and
Rawls, is that the social contract on which modern democratic theory stands,
is corrupted by an a priori but invisible sexual contract. Rather after the
manner of a slave contract, this serves simultaneously to incorporate women
into society while yet excluding them. It is a convenient patriarchal contradiction,
and it still flaws socialist and feminist derivatives of the liberal
tradition. A post patriarchal political practice must move beyond the contractarian formula - if indeed, politics will be
needed at all, once masculinism has resolved its
interior dilemmas... In the meantime however, and closely pertinent to Biehl's case, ‘To argue that patriarchy is best confronted by endeavouring to render sexual difference politically
irrelevant, is to accept the view that the civil (public) realm and the 'individual'
are uncontaminated by patriarchal subordination. Patriarchy is then seen as a
private familial problem that can be overcome if public laws and policies
treat women as if they were exactly the same as men...heterosexual relations
are not confined to private life’.(12)
Of course social ecology is not bourgeois liberalism, but given
that flawed democratic legacy, any model of renewed municipalism should make very explicit the basis on which women will enter the public
sphere as the autonomous subjects Biehl talks
about. Perhaps a Green participatory democracy will be a matter of free
association among citizens along Hegelian lines? But for Hegel just as for
the contractarians he opposed, only men retain civil
status after marriage. Husband and wife constitute a ‘little association’ - which material, or
rather ‘ethical
unity’ provides a material foundation for public life. The experience of social
relations based on trust in the private sphere, prepares the (masculine)
individual for the wider (fraternal) relations of civil society. Familial
piety is women's duty,believed to reflect the natural (sic) limit of their capacities. Men's consciousness
and identity is acquired through struggle in the public sphere. Sexual
difference is thus political difference for Hegel, since as Pateman notes: ‘Men's consciousness is not purely the consciousness of free
civil equals (the story of the social contract) - it is also the
consciousness of patriarchal masters (the story of the sexual contract).(13) An ostensible universalism pervades Western
democratic thought, but its principles of freedom and equality are premised
only on the civil status of men.
Biehl's proclivity towards liberal - as distinct
from radical feminist, socialist, or eco-feminist paradigms, has several
dimensions. Her unproblematic structural accommodation of women within
(albeit participatory) democratic institutions is one. Her synchronic
treatment of connections eco-feminists draw between women and nature, is another. The plausibility structure of
classical (patriarchal) thought is built on oppositional terms: culture v.
nature, reason v. unreason, male v. female, public v. private, where the
first of each pair is always valued. On two counts, the argument of Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics is still victim of this
static traditional context of plausibility. While Biehl will condemn women's search for sources of legitimation outside the Western legacy, she also accuses eco-feminists of accepting a
male derived ‘image
of womanhood’.
Surely, the two levels of culture, private and public, cannot be dissociated?
Eco-feminists understand this, but because they are working for change, they
bring the two levels into dialectical play. Eco-feminists celebrate 'woman' -
just as they celebrate 'nature'. But they challenge the political terms of reference
in which such notions are embedded. While Janet comprehends that: ‘One of the great
projects of human thought has been the attempt to transcend the dualities
that exist in objective reality’, she does not perceive how eco-feminism does just this.(14) The
woman-nature connection is a patriarchal construction, but it is not only
that. There are other historical potentials to explore in it. Inspite of her best philosophic self, Biehl again forgets the important role of contradiction in history: ‘...transitions, in
turn, arise from a process of contradiction between a thing as it is, on the
one hand, and a thing as it potentially should become, on the other.(15) Her
objection that eco-feminism is ‘mired in simplistic metaphoric, and naive, one to one
correspondences between nonhuman nature and human society...’ misrepresents this
deconstructive cultural process altogether.(16)
Not surprisingly, Biehl adopts the
classical distinction between private and public spheres as a political
given; hence, her dismissal of an autonomous feminine voice echoes Hegel's
and Rousseau's terror of women's subversive potential. Viz feminine piety versus public law represents ‘the supreme opposition in ethics’. That opposition is
played out today in debates over the adequacy of 'caring' as a feminist
ethical principle. Citing Plant, Hamilton, Keller, Diamond and Orenstein, Biehl writes that eco-feminists ‘seek to extend the
very concept of 'women's sphere' as home to embrace and absorb the community
as a whole.’(17)
While she observes that eco-feminism here coincides with the communitarian
emphasis of social ecology, and with the ecological struggle of rural women
in the Two Thirds World, the querulous tenor of the text indicates that she
is not happy to affirm this convergence in Green thought. Rather, she remarks
that ‘...decentralised community, seen abstractly without due
regard to democracy and confederalism, has the
potential to become regressive...Homophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism as
well as sexism, may be part of a parochial 'communitarian ethos'‘.(18)
Bypassing the work of women political theorists, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics comes down inappropriately on Ynestra King's reservations about ‘a political legacy
that is founded on repudiation of the organic, the female, the tribal, and particular ties between people’. Biehl calls this ‘convoluted
thinking and atavism with a vengeance, especially if one considers that the
Western democratic tradition produced a consciousness of universal freedom that
ultimately opened the public sphere to women...’(19) Feminists do not deny their
ideological roots in Western universalism, so-called, though Third World
sisters may have another take on this. The real issue is for us is rather:
why has the democratic tradition so consistently failed to deliver? Twenty
years after the Second Wave of feminism began, the
leading nation of the 'free world' still has not accorded women legal
possession of their own bodies. Hence the work of O'Brien, Pietila, Shiva, and others to diagnose the source of this
fraternal incapacity. It is not eco-feminists, but the Western legacy itself,
which continues to put women ‘outside’. - The ethnocentrism
of its universalising imperative opens up a related
set of questions. Based on this legacy are the tools of social ecology
meaningful to non-Western advocates of social change? How are ‘other’ indigenous
competences realised by its political formula?
Continuing in the vein of a patriarchal tradition that artfully marginalises feminine piety, Biehl notes that ‘What
many eco-feminists claim is an interest of particular concern to women is in
fact a general interest’.(20) This is simple projection. It has been liberal feminism
which focused on 'women's issues' per se. Eco-feminism, like its precursors
in radical and socialist feminism, has continued to broaden out the political
stakes. Biehl herself endorses the ‘appeal’ of eco-feminism
across racial and cultural lines, though her export oriented language is a
bit off, given the transcultural origin of this
politics. The enthusiasm of Green thinking men at workshops on gender and politics, is a further indication of eco-feminism’s thoroughly general scope. Eco-feminists are just as keen to undo the
deforming hold of masculinist culture on men as
they are to liberate women and nature. The first task is tied to the latter.
Interestingly, Marxists from the Left, and deep ecologists from the Right,
have also charged eco-feminism with self interest. What is behind this
unwitting unity of strangers?
The social ecological criticism of 'caring' occurs again when Biehl reminds us: ‘In any democratic polity worth of the name, one is accountable
to one's fellow (sic) citizens, not only to one's friends and lovers’.(21) She worries
about loss of political objectivity in eco-feminist communal dealings based
on the feminine principle. However, it is apparent from women's ecological
actions across the globe - the three hundred year old tradition of Chipko tree huggers in India; the peasant mothers of Seveso, Italy; Koori women anti-base activists in
Australia; that it is caring rather than any sophisticated social theory
which guides these very sound and quite universalised political stands. Women in general, and
eco-feminists in particular, do not have great difficulty applying care to
strangers and others outside their immediate kin community. Caring as an
ethical basis is no more fragile than the ‘objective’ basis of democratic rights legitimated by the polity of men. Moreover, as
eco-feminist animal liberation worker Marti Kheel has sagely commented in an environmental ethics context: the emotional
substrate of caring is prerequisite for a rights based ethic to function at
all.(22) Again, we note an invisible 'feminine'
underbelly, whose work makes possible the public world of fraternal
relations.
‘Social
ecology distinguishes between statecraft, as a system of dealing with the
public realm by means of professionalised administrators and their legal monopoly on violence, on the one hand, and politics,
as the management of the community on a grass roots democratic and
face-to-face level by citizen bodies...’(23)
But what else is implicated by social ecology's revival of the classic
Athenian model? The problem is that form (or reform) cannot be considered
without content. And on this score, the politics of the polis is compromised
by several destructive cultural binarisms. Polis
was and is, premised on a separation of humanity from nature and as such, is
ill equipped to steer an ecological future. The divide between polis and oikos was also a gendered and ethnic stratification, as
women and slaves were excluded from citizenship. The gender stratification in
turn, reinforced the separation of humanity and nature by compounding men
with culture and women with nature. With the advent of the market, polis
effectively split oikos into economy versus
ecology. And so oikos as economics, was detached from its grounding in daily needs, breaking the rational tie
between household and sustainability. Further, polis implies severance of its
own ethical universalist orientation from oikos,
supposedly limited to particularistic ends. However, feminism now teaches us
that political and personal ends are intrinsically tied; while environmental
crisis teaches that we split economy from ecology at our peril. Eco-feminists
and Greens should take due thought before walking back into this
ideologically predatory grid.
III - the regressive culture/nature
split
Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics states
that: ‘the
essence of democracy is precisely its latent capacity to cut across
particular ethnic, gender and other cultural lines’.(24) Not only is
democracy still latent, but the line that Janet does not mention here is that
which cuts humanity off from the rest of nature. As we move towards a Green
understanding, it is essential to address the entire gamut of Western
domination.(25) Eco-feminism, like deep ecology, is
concerned about the oppression of all life forms. Unlike deep ecology (to
date), and apparently unlike social ecology, eco-feminists also posit that
the same patriarchal attitudes which degrade nature, are responsible for the
exploitation and abuse of women. Against the dreary, alienating, exploitative
society of multi-national capital, Bookchin's neighbourhood assemblies and confederation of city states
offers an attractive alternative. But as deep ecological Greens and most
eco-feminists believe, a real political shift means letting go of the culture
versus nature polarity. A domain assumption of the Western political legacy
and of modern instrumentalism, this regressive split also preserves the
artificial separation of masculine and feminine genders.
Historical change involves a dialectical movement between
discourse and social structure. US cultural eco-feminism in its attempt to
discover a feminine political voice has focused primarily on the first moment
in this process; social ecology on the second, institutional moment. However,
unaware of the deconstructive cultural politics at work in much eco-feminist
writing, Biehl labels linkages between women and
nature ‘biologistic’ and regressive. Now there are occasional women who, in making
their way towards a feminist understanding will argue in a naively
patriarchal way that women are superior to men because of innate qualities.
Surely, we all heard our grandmothers say as much. The public at large also,
very probably, assumes that this is what feminism is about. Even some
educated people, deep ecologists and socialists may attribute this kind of
literalism to feminist thought. Hopefully, a glance at Alison Jaggar's classic Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983) will set these wayward intellects straight.(26)
For the majority of feminists, be they liberal, radical, socialist or
eco-feminist, the social construction of gendered identity is as foundational
a premise as ownership of the means of production was to Marx. - Just imagine
telling a Marxist that her theory is reactionary because it sets up one class
of excellent achieving human beings over and above another. Yet this is the
sort of logic by which opponents of eco-feminism have tried to undermine it.
Reading eco-feminism through a conventional patriarchal 'either nature or
nurture' dichotomy, Janet wants to suggest that its arguments are incoherent;
self contradictory because some women emphasise innate forces and others talk like social constructionists. Moreover, King,
who gives credence to both 'levels' of efficacy, is assumed to be
contradicting herself. These days, nearly all
feminist men and women concur that our social identities are produced by the
interaction of both ideological and material (including biological) forces,
so the attempt to write eco-feminism off as biologism does little to enhance the standing of social ecology.
The intolerance of linkages between women and nature, stems from
a binarist tradition that social ecology (and most
Marxism) has not distanced itself from with due care. Biehl takes her cue from the immanent critique that liberal feminists served up to
the master discourse during the 70s. This rejected the patriarchal ascription
of women as factually 'closer to nature', while it clung to the pejorative
value judgement implied.(27) Given that this brand
of feminist politics is the most visible approach in the USA today, Biehl receives raison as a majority position. Majorities
are not always right though, as Bookchin, ever
champion of dissent, reminds us. For many majorities, their time has simply
come and gone. Understandably, one of the first liberal feminist goals was to
overturn the way in which men have been keeping women subject as 'natural
bearers and rearers of children'. Early in the
Second Wave, it became a priority for most thinking women to be able to live
out their lives as freely as men did. We sought to distinguish ourselves in
academic fields; we sought economic parity alongside men in the workforce;
and equal time on Party platforms. To this end - we put down the wilderness
of our bodies with infallible man-made technologies like the pill and copper
7. For liberal feminists and many socialist sisters, this equal opportunity
track is still a political end in itself. Others among us, soon began to see that the world of men was not what it was cracked up to be.
It was certainly not compatible with any notion of global equity and
ecological sustainability.
The terms of feminist politics needed to be deepened and
broadened, and this was the point at which eco-feminism arrived, at least in
the West. Other women, housewives, grandmothers, peasant farmers in Asia and
Africa embroiled in struggle for environment or peace, stumbled across
similar insights to those of us 'in the movement'. The way women were
resourced and often abused - at home, at work, and in political organisations - parallelled men's exploitation of nature. As this Third Wave in feminism got off the
ground, ancient cultural metaphors, redolent in Western literature and in the
mythologies of many peoples, took on a new political relevance and potency
for women. But the patriarchal image of 'mother-nature' conveyed less an
absolute truth about ourselves, than it revealed an underlying compulsion
within men to dissociate themselves from women and from nature, placing
themselves over and above both by ideological devices - the polis, among
others.
To pursue the woman-nature connection a little further. Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics sympathetically confirms that ‘It is true, as
eco-feminists argue, that women's reproductive biology itself is not the
source of women's oppression, but rather the hierarchies that many men have
built on them’.(28) In the face of dialectical reason however, Biehl is not prepared to admit of any reciprocal
interaction between a woman's biological functioning and her personal
attributes. Yet we all know that metabolic rates, hormonal levels, and
similar material factors condition behaviour.
Relentlessly, she condemns Andree Collard's rhetorical line - ‘woman's reproductive
biology is the well spring of her strength’ as nothing but psychobiological reductionism, echoing ‘male stereotypes’ of womanhood.
Actually, the monocausal reduction is injected with Biehl's reading of Collard. What is more, she omits
to mention that patriarchal stereotyping functions in the opposite direction,
by naming women's biology as disabling and disqualifying.
Janet's writing in this area is very confused. She agrees with
eco-feminism that men and women are not ‘ontological opposites’ but rather ‘differentiations’ in human potential.
But her antagonism to social constructionists means that she cannot concede
this potential as discursively mediated. In other words, she is forced back
into the very reductionism that she would like to fault eco-feminism with.
Again, she is anxious about the effects of acknowledging biological (and
gender) difference, but elsewhere, insists that one can admit of variations
between human beings (size, race, age), without thereby attaching
differential political rights and statuses. Next she asserts that if
otherness is put forward as basis of a positive political identity, then eco-feminists ‘root
themselves outside of Western culture altogether’.(29)
Yet how else is the patriarchal tendency to essentialise masculinity as 'humanity' going to be negated without such antithesis?
Perhaps Kathy Ferguson's observation is helpful here: ‘...women's experience
is institutionally and linguistically structured in a way that is different
from that of men. But women are [also] different from other marginal groups
such as the mentally disturbed or the very poor in that, while they have been
victims, they have also been more than that; they have been actors, creators,
builders of objects and relations...’(30) Biehl’s worst exclusionary fears would only be realised if
men managed to silence women once and for all. But at this time in history,
the opposite potential exists. Women are demanding to be heard. They are
asking: Who owns the means of enunciation anyway? They are stretching and
reshaping the dominant Western legacy according to their own sense of things.
Perhaps the most revolutionary and sophisticated exponent of this is France’s Luce Irigaray; but many women have begun to
reassess their daily rounds, and many educated women are re-writing their diciplines. Biehl’s critique
of eco-feminism fails to recognise boldness in the
reclamation of nature. Yet, social ecology’s attempt
to demonstrate that the eco-feminist reinscription of the humanity-nature link is backward looking, is product of a failure to
think processually about feminist politics. The judgement that King, Collard, Plant and others, are incoherent,
results from taking theory away from practice: ‘identities are both created by the
dominant discourse of power and knowledge, and simultaneously create
themselves in opposition to that discourse...’(31) Feminism must be understood as the
history of feminism. Moreover, as Bookchin himself
likes to say: it is the nature of becoming to appear paradoxical.
Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics would have women place themselves along with men over and above ‘nature’. Conversely,
eco-feminist politics enlists men to join women in reaffirming their place as
part of nature and in formulating new social institutions in line with that
perception. Too much distracted by metaphor and myth in cultural and
spiritual eco-feminism, Biehl loses sight of this
profoundly democratic project. She has even dubbed eco-feminism a movement ‘based on metaphors’. She overlooks the
groundswell among women in the Two Thirds world and their Western sisters,
practical people, skilled in provisioning for other’s needs.
Such eco-feminists are conscious of the ecological value of what they have
learned in their lowly (ascribed) labours: domestic
and rural workers both, mediators of nature for children and men.
Statistically and qualitatively, women are the real proletariat. Possibly
because Biehl lives in an advanced technological
society, marked by a sharp divide between those who do thinking work and
those who labour with their hands, she does not
readily arrive at this perception of women’s productive function. The same blind spot is a problem for many people in the
USA, and this includes some of the eco-feminist writers she chastises for too
much emphasis on mythological themes. The lack of a strong grass roots
socialist consciousness in America has constrained its vernacular radicalism.
However, it follows, that by down playing the materiality of feminine
exploitation, Biehl misses out on the way in which
nature, and women’s bodies ‘as
nature’, are
resourced. Consider scientific research on in vitro fertilisation and surrogacy, for example. Like her local eco-feminist sisters, Biehl concentrates on ‘right consciousness’. That means shifting from ‘power over’ to a
society where ‘power
with’ is
the norm. For Biehl, this vision translates into a
political praxis centered on self management and town meetings. Cultural
eco-feminists have in mind nothing less than the dissolution of ‘politics’ as such, altogether.
IV - science, spirituality and ethics
Squarely within the liberal framework, eco-anarchist Biehl characterises the
eco-feminist argument that women and men are in and of nature,
anti-Enlightenment and regressive. Somewhat out of historical context but
with dramatic effect, the spectre of the German
Volk is called up to support her claim. Now eco-feminists are like deep
ecologists in endorsing a continuum between human and natural spheres, but
they are even more like those social ecologists, who argue dialectically that
human and nonhuman nature is simultaneously continuum and disjunction. Bookchin and Biehl both, trace
the gradual evolutionary emergence of human intentionality out of various echelons
of inorganic, then organic matter; and Janet goes on to say ‘natural history
clearly reveals ever greater differentiation of life forms, increasing
subjectivity and flexibility, and finally the emergence of intellectuality,
intentionality, and a high order of choice, which forms a precondition of
freedom’.(32)
Where eco-feminists strive for an intrinsic equality between all beings and a
cyclic pattern of integration, social ecology posits a graded hierarchy with
humans at its apex. From an eco-feminist view point, say Rosemary Ruether or Liz Dodson Gray, Bookchin's schema echoes the Great Chain of Being ontology that runs through patriarchal
religious thought and dodges about quietly behind the social contract basis
of modern democratic politics.(33) The evolutionism
of social ecology also tallies with the Western commitment to linear
development, mastery and progress, although social ecology does place some
limits on technological expansion.
Janet describes Bookchin's ethical
system of dialectical naturalism as organised around
three ‘orders’ or levels. First
nature, corresponds to all that is usually objectified as nature; second nature,
pertains to the appearance of humanity; and a third, ‘free nature’ expresses the emanicipated consciousness. Somewhat puzzling and
apparently inconsistent in social ecology, is the denial of any fixed telos in the unfolding of nature to ‘full maturity’.(34) In contrast to
Hegel's final closure of Absolute Spirit or Engels' materialist dialectic,
dialectical naturalism is characterised as an open
ended, self formative process, shaped by ecological principles. The question
is: - Who draws out the principles? The subject thinker of social ecology
never makes himself known. Hostile to any form of social constructionism, Biehl is adamant that an ecological ethic must be ‘ontologically’ grounded. It cannot
rest on ‘the
vagaries of social constructions, public opinion, or tradition’ as she thinks
eco-feminism does.(35) But she leaves herself
somewhat exposed as a naive realist in all this, only to contradict the
stance later, by talking about how ‘human beings create institutions’. Is this a lack of experience in
thinking about ways of knowing? Or simply the old double-standard - viz social ecology has direct access to ontological
principles, but eco-feminism is socially contaminated?
For Biehl, eco-feminism operates with ‘a mystified conception
of nature’.
Yet, classical and modern patriarchalism both
mystify nature (and women) to appropriative ends, and that includes Western
scientific reason. It is epistemologically unsound for her to say simply that ‘natural
history reveals...’ While an experience of nature like planting or
giving birth may be direct, our thought about that experience is always
culturally mediated. Thus, while social ecology's synthesis of the material
constitution of our world through geology, biology and beyond, provides indispensable foundation for a Green philosophy, the argument put
forward in Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics conveys a rather reified notion of science. True, Biehl writes that ‘science
must be understood as the history of science’, but she also leaves behind statements
like ‘the
truth is that many parts of nature do in fact function mechanically’ or ‘physical science is
quite simply true’.(36) Her dismissal of eco-feminism as mere social constructionism or worse ‘a movement based on metaphors’ is pertinent in this
context. It misconstrues the extent to which metaphor operates in the
constitution of all knowledge. Western science, for example, passed (or
staggered) from ‘organism’ as guiding perceptual
metaphor to ‘mechanism’. The latter is still
paradigm dominant in the lower reaches of scientific activity, though an
imagery of ‘chaos’ now insinuates itself
along the professional margins. The writing of Murray Bookchin is also replete with metaphor - making him one of the most perceptive and
persuasive writers alive today. Without metaphor, the beautiful symbiosis of
life forms portrayed in social ecology would surely not have been conceived.
There is always an hermeneutic moment in science, be
it physics, or indeed, the feminist sociology of knowledge. Could it be that
this soft hermeneutic underbelly to epistemology, parallels the existence of that invisible feminine substrate of 'caring'
which lurks behind patriarchal ethics?
Does Biehl really believe in
scientific objectivity sui generis? It is now quite plain that men’s intellectual culture has been permeated, if not inspired, by sexual metaphor.
The misogynist Platonic dualism of mind against body, subject against object,
through Descartes to contemporary analytic positivism, is the linch pin of 'scientific truth'. Consider Bacon's vision
of this endeavour: ‘It is Nature herself who is to be the
bride, who requires taming, shaping, and subduing by the scientific mind’.(37)
Further, the intensely personal flavour of this
'pursuit' for men, the taste of knowledge as ‘mastery', is just as apparent in the
speeches of Nobel Prize winners as it was in the imagination of science's
17th Century founding fathers. Men of the Western legacy such as Bacon have
enthusiastically purveyed the woman-nature image, just as it has fallen to
eco-feminists to enthusiastically deconstruct the many sided political
potentials of this metaphor. A subtle exercise this,
given the ever present tendency of discursive structures to reclaim their
own. Even so, the work is a necessary part of our feminist emancipatory project in a time of ecological crisis.
Remembering always, that whatever intellectuals may make of this metaphor, it
nevertheless filters the lived daily reality of most men and women.
Perhaps Biehl does not realise it, but the device of pushing women's knowledge
and culture to the margins of reason is an established patriarchal procedure.
For example, Shiva points out how women's centuries old agricultural
expertise is being displaced in India by the import of so-called
'development': the advanced dust-bowl-technologies perfected by Western
scientific men. Merchant has demonstrated how the rise of the European
scientific hegemony went hand in hand with a systematic elimination of
knowledgeable women as witches. There is a complex of historical linkages
here. Mies, in turn documents how the property of
witches appropriated by their executioners, found its way into the
bureaucratic coffers of what has grown to be the nation state. Considerable
booty was to be had from the elimination of some 12 million women tortured to
death. Before long, the trajectories of state and science became interwoven
with capital. Today, we witness successful capture of the 'knowledge
industry' (academia) by corporate interests - masculinist enterprise in yet another guise. Biehl disregards
the extent to which contemporary patriarchal institutions like science,
perpetuate and even extend our social problems - classism, racism, sexism.
Structural affirmative action programs pioneered by the early women in
science have had negligible demographic impact. It is no accident that 20 years
after the start of feminism's second wave, only 4% of physicists and
engineers are women. But then again, to interpret this more positively:
perhaps women have had little motivation to tame, subdue, reduce or eliminate
the world around them?
Among social constructionist evaluations of scientific practice
women's critiques of science have moved ahead very quickly. To name some
North American studies which should be accessible: Evelyn Fox Keller's Reflections
on Gender and Science (1985), Sandra Harding's The Science Question in
Feminism (1986), Donna Haraway's Primate
Visions (1988).(38) To quote Harding: ‘It is within moral and political discourses that we should
expect to find paradigms of rational discourse, not in scientific discourses
claiming to have disavowed morals and politics’.(39) Strictly speaking, it is science
which must now be charged with irrationalism. - Bypassing current feminist
scholarship that draws variously on Marxist, hermeneutic, psychoanalytic, and
semiotic techniques, Biehl simply assumes
eco-feminists display (womanly) irrationalism by 'rejecting science'. The
claim of course, is a logical extension of her parochial view of eco-feminism
as governed by Goddess worship. A closer reading of eco-feminist literature
reveals it unfolding in dialogue with this critical literature, often
co-terminus with it. Several eco-feminists for instance, have published
analyses of science in academic forums. And if patriarchal credentialling is the name of the game, Merchant is also
a member of the American Academy of Science. Boston eco-feminist Pat Hynes is
a qualified civil engineer. I was a foundation member of both the Women in
Science Enquiry Network in Sydney, and active with the Society for Social
Responsibility in Engineering for several years. Kenya eco-feminist Wangari Maathai is a Professor
of Agricultural Science, and India's Vandana Shiva,
a trained physicist turned policy analyst. Tasmanian eco-feminist activist
Janis Birkeland is a former attorney and urban
planner.(40)
As an old eco-feminist adage has it: ‘Women can move
mountains. But they don't.’ Already the few women to enter science have begun to change both questions
asked and methods used. - Observe, in detailed, respectfully empathic study.
Nurture, what is given. - Now there is some
continuity between women's approaches to science and to eco-feminist
spirituality. Biehl mentions Starhawk's principle of hylozoism, Merchant's interest in vitalism,
and Carol Christ's emphasis on immanence. Eco-feminist spiritual practices
play up the grounded material quality of the sacred. And this is not
unrelated to the way many women feel in awe of a nature that speaks through
their bodies - a life-giving force, beyond freedom. Women's attitudes to both
scientific and to spiritual practice are committed to being present,
embodied, integral, whole. Conversely, the Western
patriarchal legacy in religion and science, exorcises 'the body' as contamination. The mind/body split, of course, is
replicated in the rationalist dichotomy between culture and nature. For many
eco-feminists, this representation is symptomatic of the masculine struggle
for independence from the originary body of the
mother. Later, the bodies of lovers and wives, can
bring back a man’s sense of need and dependency, the terror of reabsorption.
Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau is telling in this respect: If women were not
restrained by modesty ‘the
result would soon be the ruin of both [sexes], and mankind would perish by
the means established for preserving it... Men would finally be [women's] victims...All
people perish from the disorder of women’.(41)
Women's passion is 'nature' which must be controlled, and note, transcended,
if social order is to be maintained.
Theorist Pateman surmises that our political
institutions originate in sublimation of men's fear of women's otherness. ‘Men have denied
significance to women's unique bodily capacity, have appropriated it, and
transmuted it into masculine political genesis’.(42)
At any rate, it is no surprise to find masculinist thinkers railing against immanence, or more recently against eco-feminists
who are said to ‘collapse
mind into body’.
What eco-feminists are on about is restoring the organic flow between body
and mind, the link that patriarchal culture has so compulsively checked. By
reading eco-feminism literally back into the body, Biehl takes sides with a misogynist culture that since Aristotle if not before, has
treated women to debasement by association with nature. But we are no longer
living in such unreasoned times. Eco-feminist arguments address a postmodern
conjuncture, where marginal voices have new currency. By looking at the
relation of men and women to the natural body (and its metaphors),
eco-feminism is paving the way for an ecological ethic based on a profound re-thinking
of ‘the
human condition’.
Given that we only ever approximate an understanding of ourselves through
socially given, always historical categories, few eco-feminists would be so
arrogant as to claim ontological standing for this ethic. Susan Griffin puts
it aptly: ‘We
know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from
our bodies...For we see ourselves and we are nature. We are nature seeing
nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature
speaking of nature to nature’.(43) There is little about this statement that social ecology
should have difficulty with. Unless, it is the speaker’s gender...
History has shown us how, in contrast to the contented immanence
of the feminine condition, the defensive egoism of men engorges itself with
transcendent projects such as monotheism, global empire, scientific mastery
and the cult of Reason. Biehl, like her mentor de
Beauvoir, takes the transcendent attitude at face value as emancipatory. Unlike de Beauvoir though, she does not
identify the urge to transcendence as part of the common condition of
patriarchal men, rather she sees it as (ethnically) rooted in the Judaic
tradition. By separating divine from immanent nature, this unique culture
freed its people of any assumption that their social order was sacred. - A
difficult thesis to substantiate against the career of Israeli Zionism,
perhaps. - However, Janet continues, it is only when ‘the divine came to be
seen as outside nature - that is, transcendental, that the social order could
be regarded as malleable’.(44) This is followed by a proviso to the effect that while the
Hebrew tradition has remained essentially conservative, it gave birth (sic)
to the modern utopian sensibility of which social ecology is a part.
Biehl's primary misgiving over eco-feminist ‘immanence’ is that its ontology
(her word) is cyclic rather than progressive. She feels this mitigates against a liberatory politics, in contrast to the linear ontology of social ecology, for example.
Yet surely, looking at Green priorities, a trajectory of pure choice is
rationalist illusion: 'an embourgoisement of
freedom' to borrow Bookchin's insightful phrase.
The freedom of some is always enjoyed at the expense of others. Hence, the
social ecological grounding of ‘subjectivity’ in
the cradle of immanence also begs gendered examination. Freedom was an
important piece of ideology at a time when the classical liberal notion of
human agency was coming into Western consciousness. But democratic
citizenship, really fraternal emancipation, was only ever gained at cost to
women tacitly absorbed into social provisioning through a hidden sexual
contract. On a global scale, the freedom that men and (some) women in a
postmodern commodity culture believe they enjoy, rests on the labours of a mostly off-shore underclass, of women food
growers and silicon slaves. Commoner told it ages ago: there's no such thing
as a free lunch. Yet many Western adults are slow to grasp this Piagetian principle. We live in a material world and
freedom has material parameters. After women's embodied labours,
stands the resource substrate of nature, next in line of appropriation. In
order to arrive at a Green society, where gender equity is global and a
sustainable exchange is established with nature, we may have to rethink the
unbridled Western fetish for the transcendent state. True freedom involves
limits: an acceptance of our embodied condition. Without awareness of this,
the most enlightened citizenry is as free as infant children are.
Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics is
not a generous contribution, and not really a feminist one, as Biehl imagines it to be. While she breathes new life into
the ideas of social ecology, the verbal dismemberment which titillates in Bookchin's style is also revived. In general, social
ecology celebrates the more wholesome views of the fraternity who carved out
our ideals of freedom and equality, but the Western political legacy implodes
with unexamined patriarchalisms, and these continue
to spoil socialist, ecological, and (some) feminist programs. The material
dimension of women's oppression; the ‘difference’ in
perception that it creates; the relevance of this different voice to a new
ethic of nature - all are deflected by Biehl's tendency
to essentialise 'humanity', and to a lesser extent,
her preoccupation with archaeological hypotheticals.
With feminism, she correctly dismisses any notion that sexual difference
should carry a difference in status. But we need to be very clear on how the ‘world historic’ manipulation of women
is to be done away with in a future eco-anarchist utopia. Janet would do a
great service to Green thought, if she made use of contemporary feminist
scholarship to open up dialogue within social ecology.
Perhaps the model of dialectical naturalism might be used to
explain the logic of eco-feminism itself? For instance, if Biehl would correlate liberal feminism with our fallen ‘second nature’, she might see how
the eco-feminist search for harmony with ‘first nature’,
results in an emergent synthesis corresponding to Bookchin's ideal of emancipated ‘free
nature’. The
tension between these existential sites can indeed be identified as
contradictory. But in rejecting it as such, Biehl unwittingly collapses women's ‘free nature’ back
into ‘first
nature’, so
ignoring the process of becoming at work in eco-feminism. What may appear
contradictory in eco-feminism is none other than what social ecology has
already identified as the human condition of living in continuity and in
disjunction with nature. For historical reasons, eco-feminist women have been
quick to understand this materiality and to explore its cultural
implications. As a Green activist, Biehl would help
build dialogic commensurability in our movement by ‘re-thinking
eco-feminist politics’ with
this kind of social ecological frame, rather than the liberal feminist one
chosen as basis for her critique.
Even so, while eco-feminism can endorse much that is useful in
social ecology, the time has come for women to discover and articulate what
is ethically meaningful for themselves. To this
point in history, men have not had to listen to women's ideas; many are still
trying not to. Others with a properly democratic conscience realise they now have an exacting political role to play
in learning how to hear. There is no symmetry in the emancipation of men and
women, as Biehl supposes there should be.
Hopefully, there will be complementarity. Meantime,
to give Ferguson the last word: ‘A specifically feminist discourse can suggest a reformulation of
some of the most central terms of political life: reason, community, freedom...[but] the specific organisation of an alternative social order and the means for achieving it, are never
really answered on paper or all at once; they emerge over time as people
begin to think and live differently’.(45) Biehl's essays stand as a
reminder to the urgency of that personal/political practice.
Notes
*Ariel Salleh is an Australian eco-feminist writer and activist
and an editorial adviser to CNS.
1. Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
2. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature (New York: Harper,
1978); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco: Harper,
1980); Charlene Spretnak, The Politics of Women's
Spirituality (New York: Anchor, 1982) and The Spiritual Dimension of
Green Politics (Santa Fe: Bear and Co, 1987); Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San
Francisco: Harper, 1987); Starhawk, Truth or
Dare (San Francisco; Harper, 1988); Andree Collard, Rape of the Wild (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989); Judith Plant (ed), Healing
the Wounds (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989); Irene Diamond
and Gloria Orenstein (ed), Reweaving the World (San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1990).
3. The world's first Green Party is now recognised as the United Tasmania Group formed in Australia, March 1972. The New Zealand
Values Party appeared one month later.
4. Biehl, p.1.
5. Murray Bookchin, Towards an
Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose, 1981); The Ecology of
Freedom (Palo Alto: Chesire, 1982); The
Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black Rose, 1990).
6. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and
Accumulation (London: Zed, 1987); Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive (London: Zed, 1989); Ariel Salleh, ‘Epistemology and the
Metaphors of Production, Studies in the Humanities, Vol. 15, (1988).
7. Biehl, p.145.
8. Ibid., p.33.
9. Ibid., p.86.
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