A New Global Vision Called Ecofeminism : Activists Trace Separation of People, Nature to Men’s Domination of Environment, Women

Ecofeminist Perspectives (a conference flyer):

. . . what we propose is a conference that will critically examine an emerging perspective known as “ecofeminism” that links the exploitation of the Earth with the subordination of women . . .

And so they came to USC last weekend, several hundred men and women “from all seven continents,” organizers Gloria Orenstein and Irene Diamond kept saying, people intrigued or already familiar with the developing concept of ecofeminism.

Diverse Backgrounds

Different routes had brought them together under the umbrella of ecofeminism, and Charlene Spretnak, a Greens activist who spoke at the opening session, described them historically.

There were those women whose feminism had them explore the dominance theory, where men controlled women in marriage and all aspects of society. Some women were drawn first to environmentalism, and worked for those issues. Their initial connection with feminism, she said, was the liberal feminism of the “up the career ladder” variety. Others were drawn first to the goddess, to nature-based religion, “a religion that honored the female and had nature as its good book.”

A United Concern

Whatever the route, they were brought here by their concern that the radical separation between man and nature has headed the planet for disaster. They trace that separation to a male, or patriarchal, model that has at its base the domination of man over nature and over women.

“They pushed for nuclear power plants when they had no idea what to do with the waste,” Susan Griffin, author of “Women and Nature,” said at the opening session as an example of that thinking. “Why? Somebody always comes along later to clean up. Like mom.”

If the group at USC was any indicator, “mom” is on a radical and global cleanup campaign that seeks to reunify human beings with nature. Following is a look at three participants each working under the banner of ecofeminism.

Ariel Salleh, 42, of Sydney, Australia, readily identifies herself as an ecofeminist. An activist and academician, she is involved in the stirrings of the Greens movement in Australia, participates in protesting any number of issues such as uranium mining, port visits of ships bearing nuclear weapons and the building of hydroelectric dams. Since 1984, she has been teaching a master’s course in ecofeminism which she designed at the University of New South Wales.

A sociologist by training, she said she was part of the counterculture movement of the ‘60s and a single mother. She got swept along by feminism, having become increasingly disillusioned “with our boys in the movement.” At the same time, her involvement with ecological issues had led her to “deep ecology,” a discipline that concerns itself with “the radical separation between humans and nature.”

“One day the penny dropped. I realized it was the same story. The oppression and exploitation of women was the same, was based on the same attitudes, as the oppression and exploitation of nature . . . . It became a matter of exploring that further.”

She did so, and when bidden will reel off any number of books and authors--American, French, English--seminal to her thinking and the growing movement of ecofeminism. It was, she discovered, an extension of radical feminist analysis. What amazed her, and affirmed her own thinking as reasonable and not “cranky,” she said, was the overlap. Whether the entry point was the study of the goddess myth, the ecology, environmental issues, peace, it quickly connected.

“Women all over, in isolation from each other, are preparing the same analyses,” she said.

And taking action. She mentioned “the women of Love Canal” concerned about pollution in Upstate New York, the women camped at Greenham Common in England, concerned with peace and militarism, the “guerrilla grannies” in Japan camping outside of military installations.

Not all of those women would call themselves ecofeminists, she said, but there is a connection.

“We’re very much interested in sources of patriarchal power,” she said, a system that has not only dominated women but has put man against nature.

“We’re trying to mend that,” she said.

She is a shaman, a healer who regards herself as a channel for energy coming from the Great Spirit. Her father is the leading shaman of her people, the Sami, often called Lapps, a pejorative word she says, given the Sami by the Scandinavians. She had come to USC from Samiland, that part that is within Norway, to talk about “energy fields, power and forces that surround the human being.”

Until she was 7, Ellen Marit Gaup-Dunfjeld lived in a tent, and traveled the land with her parents and their reindeer herds. Then her parents settled in a village so she could attend school.

When she was 7, her parents were away and she cut her leg with an ax while trying to chop firewood. She stopped the bleeding by holding her hand on the wound.

It had not been certain that she would be the one to carry on her father’s tradition of shamanism, but that was an early sign.

“It’s a gift,” she said at USC several hours before the conference began. “All people have some of this inside. . . . The Great Spirit, some call it God, is around you, inside you, and around the world. If you can open your soul so the Great Spirit can reach you, you get very strong. That spirit is what allows you to heal. It’s a force. I call it universal force.”

No Defense Against Death

Western people, urbanized people have gotten away from that force, she said, that connection to nature and she thinks it is where indigenous people can help, if Western people want to learn.

“I think that is the way to save Mother Earth.”

Even a shaman, however, is no defense against death and dying. Now 42, married and the mother of one son, 23, she lost her another son in a car accident four years ago, and tears stream down her face as she recounts his death, and her ultimate acceptance of it.

Likewise she accepts her limitations when faced with the Chernobyl disaster. The explosion at the nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union last year has had a devastating effect on the reindeer and portends problems for the Sami.

“There’s not so many things we can do with what happened, but we have to try to teach people to think about it. They don’t have to destroy the Earth. People have gone too far,” she said, extending it to modern science and industry in general. “You can’t do nature better in a lab. It will bring a big, big ecological catastrophe in the future. If people destroy the nature, nature will protest--at last.”

Of her life in West Germany before the government tried to put a nuclear reprocessing site in her community 10 years ago, Lilo Wollny, new Greens Party member of the Bundestag, or parliament, from Lower Saxony, said:

“I was a normal housewife. I raised five kids. I cooked my meals; washed my dishes. I grew up in an anti-Hitler family, so as a kid I was an outcast. (As a result) I had no interest in politics. I was not involved. I read the newspapers and cursed what was wrong.”

The specter of having a nuclear facility in her backyard changed all that. She began thinking of joining a citizens committee, reasoning, “even if I can’t do anything about it, I have no right to be neutral.”

She got busy, learned on her feet from the women’s movement, and helped found the Citizens Action Group Against Nuclear and Fuel Plants in Gorleben. Her husband, she smiled and said fondly, started getting used to her activity, but “it was hard on him.”

She clearly sees herself as a newcomer not only to ecofeminism, but to the women’s movement. Wollny is a heavy-set woman with a stern face and tender smile, who wears her gray hair hanging to her waist in a limp ponytail, spectacles, no makeup, plain but colorful clothes and smokes cigarettes.

To this day although she supports the Greens and was their candidate, she is not officially a member of the party, a holdover, she said, from her reluctance to connect herself with a political party. She was simply an “anti-nuke” activist, but as of January, she is one of the Greens Party’s 44 members in the Bundestag out of 497.

Back in Gorleben, her committee succeeded in defeating the reprocessing plant. However, the local government announced plans to store 430 containers of nuclear waste in the ground. The committee did not defeat that move. Wollny was out of town when her husband reached her with the news.

“He called me up about it and he cried on the telephone,” Wollny said. Her head lowered, she looked over the top of her glasses, at her listeners, a living room full of women gathered under the term ecofeminists. Tears starting to flow briefly, voice breaking momentarily, she said softly, “I felt so bad about it. I was not there with him. All I could say to him was, ‘Come on boy, we’ll make it.’ ”