What is ecofeminism?

Though the feminist movement is not often seen as having environmental sustainability as its top priority, there has been significant overlap between feminist activism and environmental activism. In their campaigns for gender equity, peace, and women’s health and safety, feminists have undertaken environmental justice issues. In the 1970s, feminists developed a movement that combined the struggles against gendered oppression and environmental destruction: ecofeminism.

Ecofeminism, however, did not escape critique within feminist circles. The issue also includes an article by Susan Prentice, “Taking Sides: What’s Wrong with Eco-Feminism?” which offers a critique of ecofeminism.

Concern for environmental sustainability is also salient in feminist cultural production. Feminists artists used their creative means to provoke reflection and spark discussion on the relationships between humans and nature. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada and directed by Terre Nash, the 1991 short film, Mother Earth, offers vivid representations of the interconnections between humans and the natural world, and a critique of the ways that humans are destroying the Earth.

“The peace movement, nuclear disarmament, wildlife preservation, the use of toxic chemicals and their disposal and workplace safety have all been the focus of women’s energies in their efforts to change the status quo.”

HERizons, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1984)

Feminism and the Anti-Nuclear Movement

Anti-nuclear activism is an important thread of 1980s ecofeminism. Ecofeminists placed themselves at the forefront of struggles for peace and nuclear disarmament. In 1982, the Manitoba-based HERizons newspaper published a special issue on eco-feminism (Vol. 2, No. 5), which focuses on the intersections of feminist activism and organizing against nuclear war. The issue includes an article titled, “Forces of eco-feminism,” by Marnie Pastuck on the diverse group of women spearheading the anti-nuclear movement. Other articles in this issue warn against the adverse health effects of radiation and the dangers of nuclear war.

“Sizzle City,” advertised on the poster featured here, was a series of four sketches by a feminist anti-nuclear guerilla theatre group that satirized the government’s lack of concern for the dangers of nuclear technology. “Sizzle City” was performed at the International Women’s Day celebrations in Toronto.

The anti-nuclear movement was closely tied to the peace movement, and feminists often organized in both areas. In the 1980’s, Oscar-winning filmmaker, Terre Nash, directed two short films – both produced by the National Film Board of Canada – on two feminist activists working at the intersection of the anti-nuclear and peace movements: Dr. Helen Caldicott and Margaret Laurence.

In If You Love This Planet (1982), Dr. Helen Caldicott delivers an informative and compelling lecture on the need for immediate disarmament. (Trigger warning: images of survivors of nuclear bombings, descriptions of injuries from nuclear bombings)

In A Writer in the Nuclear Age: A Conversation with Margaret Laurence (1985), Margaret Laurence, a celebrated author from Manitoba, discusses peace, the nuclear threat, language and communication, and writers’ social responsibilities. Laurence became heavily involved in activism related to peace, social justice, women’s equality, and environmental protection in the last decade of her life.

Indigenous Feminist Activism and Environmental Justice

“Energy is a feminist issue. Women have been caretakers and nurturers for centuries. Thus we know the crucial link between survival and the regenerative, nurturing use of all our resources. We also know that the exploitation and domination of Mother Earth reflects and perpetuates the violent exploitation to which women ourselves are subjected.”

Northern Woman Journal, Vol. 5, No. 4 (August/September 1979)

Anti-nuclear activism

Indigenous lands have been made the dumping sites for nuclear waste at the expense of the health of Indigenous peoples and the flora and fauna on which they depend. For decades, Indigenous women have played an important role in collecting and disseminating information on the dangers of nuclear pollution in their communities, as well as in organizing for environmental justice. Northern Woman Journal published a number of articles by Indigenous women on the dangers of nuclear technologies.

Indigenous dispossession and worldviews on land

Indigenous women activists have shed light on the disproportionate burden of environmental destruction that Indigenous peoples face. They have shown how the commodification and exploitation of the Earth’s resources has been coupled with Indigenous dispossession and genocide.

In a speech delivered at the Women Uniting for Change Conference and reproduced in Northern Woman Journal (Vol. 14, No. 1 (March 1992)), Lorraine Sinclair identifies several differences between peoples’ relationship to land in settler colonial cultures and in Indigenous cultures.

Sinclair also touches on the discrimination and difficulties that Indigenous women face in white environmental activist circles. For Sinclair, caring and “speaking out for Mother Earth” necessarily involves speaking out for Indigenous peoples – it involves advocating for their needs for empowerment and self-government.

That environmental destruction entails Indigenous dispossession and precarity is highlighted in celebrated filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s 1977 film, Amisk. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, this film documents the 1977 James Bay Festival, where First Nations, Inuit, and Métis performers gathered in a show of solidarity with the James Bay Cree and Inuit. The James Bay Project threatened to dispossess the James Bay Cree and Inuit from their lands to build hydroelectric power stations. Not only did this project violate Indigenous sovereignty, but it also engendered massive environmental destruction: forests were incinerated and flooded, leading to mercury contamination in fish and the deaths of thousands of caribou.

Similar to the James Bay Project, Reed Paper Ltd. generated profit by destroying ecosystems and endangering the Indigenous communities that rely on them. With support from Ontario’s Conservative government, Reed ignored land treaty rights, occupying land for their multi-million dollar mill and logging operation.

An article in a 1977 issue of The Other Woman (Vol. 5, No. 1) reports that between 1962 and 1975, Reed released over 20,000 pounds of mercury waste into the English-Wabigoon River system that runs through Northwestern Ontario, poisoning the fish that are a staple in the diet of many local Indigenous people. Moreover, Reed engaged in clear-cutting logging practices that caused irreparable environmental damage and threatened Indigenous hunting and trapping.

Key to the fight against Reed – and countless other oppressive projects – was solidarity among Indigenous peoples. This article exemplifies how Indigenous women forged these networks of activism and solidarity to contest Reed’s plans to cut down tens of thousands of square miles of boreal forest.

Women’s Health and the Environment

Feminist activists produced extensive research and advocacy materials on the ways that new chemicals that became widely used in agriculture, manufacturing, and household cleaning posed a threat to women’s health as well as the health of local ecosystems. In 1962, researcher and conservationist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the first book to link the use of environmental toxins, such as DDT, with the increasing incidence of cancer and other health problems. 

While Silent Spring laid the groundwork for analyzing environmental destruction alongside women’s health, later research highlighted the uneven distribution of environmental burden among women. In 1995, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) reviewed the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Their review was guided by the principle of environmental justice and was attuned to the workings of environmental racism. The review describes how women, Indigenous people, and people of colour have been excluded from environmental decision making and suffer disproportionately from environmental degradation and the widespread use of toxic chemicals.

According to the NAC, sewage, waste, pollution, and emissions on Indigenous lands are often not adequately treated. This leads to environmental degradation that negatively impacts Indigenous people’s health and livelihoods. For instance, the failure to regulate the amount of mercury released by hydroelectric plants in Northern Quebec led to the decline of the wildlife on which the Cree of this area depend.

Pollution and Indigenous Women’s Health

A main topic of concern among Indigenous women activists was the contamination of Indigenous mothers’ breast milk with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

“Recent research claims that mother’s milk has a level of PCBs 20 times that of cow’s milk, that an infant nursed a full year will already have ingested the maximum level of PCBs now considered to be “acceptable”, for its lifetime.”

Tapestry – Okanagan and Shuswap Women’s Quarterly (Winter 1987)

In a speech titled, “Violence in the Culture,” and published in Tapestry – Okanagan and Shuswap Women’s Quarterly (Winter 1987), Kathleen Shannon describes the “intolerable labyrinth of violence” that Indigenous women experience. One such form of violence is environmental destruction, which threatens Indigenous womens’ health.

Goddess Spirituality

Goddess spirituality figured prominently in ecofeminist activism from the 1970s to the 1990s. Donna Read’s 1989 film, Goddess Remembered, takes a deep dive into goddess spirituality, featuring many goddess-worshippers who connect the decline of goddess-centric societies with contemporary environmental degradation.

In her essay in Tiger Lily Journal‘s special issue on Women and Spirituality (Issue 17/18 (1993)), Johanna Stuckey describes goddess spirituality and analyzes its connections to the ecology and peace movements.

“The return of goddesses when ecological disaster constitutes a planet-wide threat surely can be no accident. Goddess worshippers in North America today are, many of them, deeply involved in both the ecology and the peace movements.”

— Johanna Stuckey