Feminism in the Climate Crisis
by Cheryl Lyon
A Swedish high school girl in pigtails, eyes burning with determination, captured the world’s attention with her “Strike for the Climate.” Greta Thunberg still makes headlines calling us to account for what we are doing to our planet and to future generations. She is viscerally aware of the terrible possibility unfolding before her and coming generations: human disappearance from Earth by our own doing.
Feminism, deeply informed and aligned with Indigenous knowledge, offers the values and the stance so vital now in the global climate crisis: right relationship, caring, balance and justice; and understanding humans as one part of the whole web of life, not as the apex of creation.
We humans are not exempt from Nature’s laws. In Earth’s long history, some living beings (think dinosaurs) became extinct because of their inability to adapt to or co-evolve with their environment. Exploitation rather than co-existence, extraction without replenishment now characterize the “dinosaur” capitalist economy that abuses Creation’s nourishing of life itself, even making human extinction thinkable.
Like the bodies of women, the body of Earth has become a site of economic patriarchy’s death-dealing drive for profit and control. Women and children are affected most severely from the resulting social injustices of violence, exclusion and poverty. Women’s knowledge and experience is lost, their labour denigrated and undermined. As Indian scholar and activist Vandana Shiva says, “worldwide destruction of the feminine knowledge of agriculture has gone hand in hand with the destruction of nature’s processes and the economic destruction of poor people in rural areas.”
The human-caused climate crisis could leave our children with food and water that no longer nourish and too often kill slowly, and social environments as polluted as plastic-filled oceans.
The children are calling us – as women, mothers, sisters, human beings – to act for their future. All must equitably benefit as we go through a new kind of conversion, the “great turning” (as Joanne Macy has called it) into kinship and solidarity with soil, air, water and all Earth’s creatures, restoring right relationship with Nature.
Women worldwide are restoring and exemplifying right relationship with Nature. From small plot women farmers to organizations like WECAN (Women’s Earth & Climate Action Network), they bring right relationship into climate action in the home, schools, economics, agriculture, courts and politics.
There will be suffering in transforming the despoiled Garden into a liveable one again. Challenging entrenched thinking, resisting corporate pushback, and re-orienting countries’ whole economies away from rapacious extraction and wealth accumulation is risky. It will have casualties that will need feminism’s compassion and solidarity with victims.
The work can begin simply in that plot of Eden that is our local community. There, we can hold the sacred conversations about the future, bring our voices into local government’s climate change plans. We can start or participate in community gardens, run for local Councils, gather neighbours together informally to “talk community.” Elders can speak up for coming generations to ensure that Nature and children’s future factor into every decision, public and private.
Two questions may help guide any climate action: does it forgo political and economic thinking that desacralize and subjugate the natural world? And how will it secure the future of the children who are inheriting the planet we are making?
We call men to be with us in the work because the crisis is most certainly theirs too. All must equitably benefit as we go through a new kind of conversion, the “great turning” into kinship and solidarity with soil, air, water and all Earth’s creatures, restoring right relationship with Nature.
Creation is our home. Perhaps a simple, homely summing up of our care for Earth and one another in this existential crisis could be: take only our share, clean up after ourselves and keep the place in good repair. And keep the kids in mind.
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1. Vandana Shiva. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books, 1989.