Ecofeminism

One of the components of ecofeminism that I find both relevant and insightful is the “logic of domination” (DJ 247). When I really think about how the world is organized, these “value hierarchies” do seem to be underlying the relationships many humans have with their environments. Once again, like in social ecology, the position of this hierarchy determines how one relates to the natural world and in the ecofeminism approach the umbrella dualism might be the preference for reason over emotion. In the United States, policy decisions seem to be under the influence of this binary, as the cost benefit analysis fits perfectly under the “reason” column. Following the implications of that preference, because this trait is often associated with men, nature becomes dominated according to resource allotment. I’m not sure I follow the radical feminists argument that women have an inherent “ethics of care,” but I certainly can envision how the woman’s association with the passive and the emotional and the male with the aggressive and the reasonable dramatically shapes how we interact with the natural world.

Also, I think that these dualisms control the language we use to talk about the land, that is, the “reason” approach denotes value according to specific measures like money while the “emotional” attempts to measure something intangible and most likely subjective. Maybe the rejection of the ecofeminism approach stems from the difficulty in properly measuring that subjective or aesthetic component against human needs (of course, what is necessary for living is also debatable, which complicates even the “reason” approach). But I think that attempting to understand why humans have historically “dominated” nature is at the core of ecofeminism and perhaps, to some extent, to Timothy Treadwell’s reasons for living with the bears. Both seem focused on developing ways to escape the social dualisms that lead to the environment’s steady degradation. Both seem to step back from the social arrangement to make sense of why things happen they what that they have, which creates a foundation for injecting change into the very system. I think that these two approaches expose the human obsession with control and how this obsession cements those dualisms. With control associated with the aggressive/reasonable half of the dualism, emotion and nature are often uncontrollable, which I think makes them unsettling to the group or ideology trying to assert its superiority.