Ecofeminism Now

Ecofeminism Now Anna Saave Ecofeminism is not a solution for everything, but it is for most things. Given the contested history of ecofeminism’s reception, the proposition that ecofeminism could be a solution is provocative. Some feminist positions have long viewed ecofeminism more as a problem than anything else. Geographer Joni Seager1 comments on the eventful history of the hotly contested field of research and activism that is ecofeminism with the relieved insight that feminist environmentalism is (finally) coming of age, thereby applauding that the baggage attached to the term ecofeminism seems finally to be left behind. Ecofeminism was first coined as a term by Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book Le féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death).2 It emerged as a movement in the 1980s and seemed to be defunct already ten years later: ‘too spiritual and in principle unfeminist’ are still often voiced objections today. But what makes ecofeminism so contentious? The approaches located within the label ecofeminism differ greatly, including varying worldviews and theoretical stances, from spiritual and theological reflections,3 to the empirical treatment of women’s roles in agrarian change in the Global South,4 to a broadening of the conception of human-nature-relations via queer ecologies,5 and new materialisms.6 Within this spectrum, major controversies exist especially regarding the underlying understanding of feminism. Terms such as feminist environmentalism are posited as counter-concepts to create distance from ecofeminism while still being able to fundamentally address what concerns all of these approaches: connecting gender and nature relations and a critique of the (de)valuations and forms of oppression that are perpetuated through those relations. In what follows, I will introduce an ecofeminist political-economy perspective that can inform social-ecological transformation projects and respective societal changes of the early 21st century in the Global North. To this end, I will begin with highlighting a main controversy around ecofeminism, introduce ecofeminism’s historical insights, and then focus on 336 LEFT STRATEGIES IN THE COVID PANDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH ecofeminist political economy in particular and conclude with a remark on the expression of rage. For and against ecofeminism While all ecofeminists agree that systems of oppression have to dismantled, especially patriarchy, the way to do this is a topic of debate. One can distinguish a strand of cultural ecofeminism7 that wants to uplift women’s position in society by enhancing the status of formerly devalued feminine qualities. Part of this project of altering how society values feminine vs. masculine characteristics is to connect the feminine with nature in an affirming way. It is this connection – that is at times formulated in an essentialist way – which is so often contested. And it is exactly this debate around essentialism to which ecofeminism is often reduced. The core of the accusation from an intersectional feminist viewpoint is that the realities of women’s lives become generalised through a link to nature, which leads to the concealment of overlapping relations of domination that affect women in different, sometimes contradictory ways. Moreover, linking the theorisation of the exploitation of women and nature and the accompanying attempt to conceptually give value to these domains is thought to have a spiritual, anti-scientific underpinning. The overall result of this debate has been that ecofeminist writings have been severely marginalised in academic discussion for decades.8 To disconnect ecofeminist critique from the allegation of a potentially misled idealisation of the connection of women to nature, feminists have tried to find other concepts that still express ecofeminist critique, such as feminist environmentalism. Feminist environmentalism9 offers empirical data as well as societal analysis to show how women and nature are connected, not regarding their essence or intrinsic worth, but rather through social practice and material realities. New materialist ecofeminist thinkers on the other hand aim at reconceptualising ‘nature in such a way that it can no longer serve as the ground of essentialism, because it is no longer the repository of unchanging truths or determining substances but is itself an active, transforming, signifying, material force’.10 However, with spiritual practice and discourse gaining force,11 the place of spirituality and the degree to which one should affirm or work with feminine qualities and women’s (or people’s) inner connection to nature will possibly remain controversial. Beyond this debate, ecofeminism has, however, contributed highly relevant critical reflections. One of those ground-breaking contributions is the critical analysis of European and Western histories through which a connection between women and nature was established in the first place. ECOFEMINISM NOW 337 The Death of Nature as a starting point Carolyn Merchant, in her account of the historical changes in Western European conceptions of nature, shows that nature has been historically conceptualised as female throughout most of Western Europe.12 Until the 16th century, nature was understood as a living organism, a nourishing mother, and humans were considered a part of this nature. In what followed, this organic world view was replaced by a mechanistic one. To enable this paradigm shift, justification first had to be presented for the idea that nature can be interfered with by force, for example in order to extract mineral resources. In her work The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Merchant establishes that feminine nature finally had to ‘die’ in the transition to the mechanistic world view and respectively that the conception of nature became separated from the assumption of nature as a living organism while the gendered conception prevailed. After the Renaissance, a masculine-mechanistic worldview replaced the earlier feminine-organic one. Within this transition, nature was subjugated, enabled by legitimation attempts that reinforced nature as feminine. Making nature available and exploitable thus became connected to making femininecoded things exploitable. Although mostly neglected today, this historical perspective shows that the subjugation of subjects and objects considered feminine is not simply given, but follows a logic of appropriation of nature that first had to be established through historical legitimation efforts. From Silvia Federici13 we know that the subjugation of women, reproductive practices, and the knowledge that comes with them, was also historically constitutive of capitalism in particular.14 What prevails as a legacy of this history until today is the more or less conscious presence of dualisms underlying Western societies and understandings of science, such as culture/nature, masculine/feminine, rational/emotional, etc.15 Thanks to the insights of ecofeminist works such as Merchant’s Death of Nature it is now understood that the ‘female’ and the ‘ecological’ are devalued and made invisible in similar ways. The unreflected continuation of such dualisms has manifold unsustainable and socially unjust consequences. Thus, dualistic thinking and practice need unpacking and need to be transformed. Ecofeminism offers avenues to tackle both challenges and helps to understand that embeddedness, connectedness, or dependence are not human flaws that need to be overcome to reach full subjectivity, but that they have to be recognised as essential experiences in (human) life. Ecofeminism offers to remedy dualistic abstractions and thus counters a tradition of thought that essentially abstracts from life. In the following, I will focus on the contributions of ecofeminist radical 338 LEFT STRATEGIES IN THE COVID PANDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH political economy, being one strand of ecofeminism that is, due to its close interrogation of the economy and economics, particularly well positioned to contribute to the question of a social-ecological transformation. Ecofeminist materialism uses Marxian critiques of capitalism to expose and explain the parallel devaluation of women and nature. While some ecofeminist approaches historically trace the devaluation of women as natural and the devaluation of nature as feminine, such as Merchant does, or foreground empirical analyses for these connections,16 ecofeminist materialism, by contrast, uses the functional involvement of women and nature, or femininely connoted and naturalised subjects and domains, in the accumulation of capital to explain their devalued status. As Johanna Oksala points out: ‘The systemic character of the connection between gender oppression and environmental devastation becomes discernible once we recognize the indispensable function that the naturalization of women’s reproductive labour plays in contemporary capitalism.’17 This approach has particular relevance for socioecological transformations because it analyses the ecological, gendered, and racialised material foundations and their profit-enhancing contributions to capital accumulation, which have been omitted in mainstream economics and for a long time also in Marxist theories.18 Ecofeminism as ecofeminist political economy Socio-ecological transformation is a technical term that refers to what one might sum up as humanity’s current central project: staying alive while keeping the planet safe and healthy. We are all aware of climate change as well as other critical processes, such as ocean acidification or the loss of biodiversity around the globe. These developments pose the question: How can we, as individuals, as European nation-states, and trans-European movements and institutions, organise human life on earth in a sustainable and equitable way? In answering this question, ecofeminism is insightful as it especially brings to the table perspectives involving devalued and invisiblised aspects as well as the permanent thinking in terms of power structures. Ecofeminists connect staying alive with the questions of how to live well in and with nature and fellow human beings. Theorists and activists from this sphere of ecofeminist radical political economy19 connect the cultural subordination of nature, women, and colonies to the economic devaluation of processes and activities attributed to them.20 They understand capitalism as a system encompassing both an ‘inside’ of the capitalist mode of production, in which exploitation of workers for generating profits takes place, as well as an ‘outside’, in which people’s (re) productive capacities as well as natural resources and other ecological services ECOFEMINISM NOW 339 are appropriated for free, thereby enabling profits in markets.21 This implies differences between the formal economy and things that are perceived to be outside of it. Yet, both realms are connected – a fundamental relation that has to be accounted for when designing projects and policies for socioecological transformations. Feminist analyses have shown how some processes and activities are similarly devalued in and excluded from the formal economy – this applies especially to the work of social reproduction, care work, and ecological processes.22 These processes and activities, while unpaid or poorly paid, and mostly unrecognised, are not actually separate from the formal economy or from capitalism’s ‘inside’; they only appear as separate. This is the result of a theoretical neglect in the economics discipline as well as a cultural recognition bias and the absence of the practical valuation of things coded as part of an ‘outside’. Overall, this leads to a dis-embedded economy – an economy that seemingly works on its own based on commodity production and wage labour. Through the lens of ecofeminist theories of appropriation23 and externalisation24 this dis-embedding can be identified and critiqued. Appropriation One stream of ecofeminist literature converges around the term ‘appropriation’ with regard to accumulation. Within this literature, feminist sociologists Maria Mies, Claudia von Werlhof, and Veronika BennholdtThomsen contributed the ‘subsistence perspective’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Originally, the subsistence perspective was intended as a contribution to the wages-for-housework debate of the 1970s. Taking up the feminist Marxist concern for incorporating unwaged female work into an analysis of capitalism, the subsistence perspective assumed that the capitalist mode of production ‘permanently needs new wage workers who are living, healthy, strong, not hungry, washed and clean, as well as sexually satisfied, to be able to suck dry their labour power’.25 As seen from the subsistence perspective, appropriation occurs when the capitalist mode of production makes use of various resources gratis in order to generate profits. Other scholars refer to similar dynamics, as for example David Harvey, who later used the term accumulation by dispossession.26 However, the three authors offer a feminist, class- and race-conscious reading of appropriation while connecting their analysis to ecological problems, which makes their contribution stand out. Shaping a society and an economic system that is not based on the ‘exploitation of people and nature’27 motivated the subsistence approach. Its authors intervened in a discussion taking place since Karl Marx introduced his critique of political economy. Marx used the term original (sometimes 340 LEFT STRATEGIES IN THE COVID PANDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH called primitive) accumulation to describe the process of the beginning of the capitalist mode of production. For the case he studied, England in the 16th century, original accumulation meant that farmers were separated from their land and possessions. As a consequence, two classes of people within society formed: capitalists, who are defined by owning or controlling the means of production, employing workers and making profits, and wage workers, who ended up owning neither land nor the means of production and thus have to sell their labour power. This results in the antagonism between the profit seeking interests of so-called capitalists and workers. The scholars working from the subsistence perspective agree to a critique of political economy,28 but – building on the substantial contribution of Rosa Luxemburg to the understanding of accumulation with regard to non-capitalist spheres29 – they question that there are only two relevant classes. What about farmers working in subsistence agriculture in the Global South? What about housewives, or at a more general level, what about all work that is not wage labour? These subsistence producers are neither completely inside nor outside the wage relation and are thus affected by original accumulation in a specific way: their work is appropriated under capitalist conditions but not through the wage relation. The authors of the subsistence perspective furthermore transfer the concept of the colony from colonised countries and peoples to women’s work and nature. They propose to understand capitalism’s ‘outside’ as three colonies: women, the environment, and subsistence workers in the Global South are alike in their function for the accumulation of capital.30 The outcomes of housework, production in the colonies, and processes of the natural environment are made use of gratis or merely for a meagre and unsustainable compensation. However, the three colonies serve as an enabling condition for making profits. Women and nature are claimed like colonies for profit maximisation and are ‘defined into nature’.31 It is the specific logic of gaining access to their resources and/or services that makes the three colonies comparable, while appropriation – as either an incorporating or predatory process32 – is the dynamic that puts the three colonies to use for capitalist accumulation. Drawing a connection between work/resources that are invisible from the perspective of capitalist markets, but still generate profits on those markets, and showing how these relations are structured and devalued along gendered and racialised lines is the landmark contribution of the subsistence perspective. By pointing to processes of appropriation which do not follow the capitalist-wageworker axis, an ecofeminist perspective contributes to a decentring of the exploitation of wage work and to a more encompassing ECOFEMINISM NOW 341 perspective. It is continually necessary to take into account all things appropriated from capitalism’s ‘outside’ as if they were a colony; otherwise the project of re-embedding economies today cannot succeed. Externalisation A complementary ecofeminist perspective is centred around the concept of externalisation. The term externalisation is often used in the context of microeconomics, where it refers to externalities as unintended consequences of economic actions. In the mainstream view, externalities can exist between two economic actors, for example two businesses,33 of which at least one produces uncompensated external effects on the other during the production process. The ecofeminist reading goes beyond this narrow interpretation of the concept. From a feminist perspective, it is especially the unwaged work (re)producing workers who become the focus of critiques of externalisation, which already goes beyond the framework of formal ‘economic actors’ producing unintended externalities. To remain within the terminology of mainstream economics, one could say that workers, people who are willing and able to work, are produced and maintained within households, families, and communities. Workers are often paid a wage that secures their lives, but whatever the level of the wage is, it is a compensation for the present and doesn’t cover the ‘costs’, the time or even the work and skill needed to ‘produce’ and ‘maintain’ those workers, as feminists have long pointed out.34 This means that social reproduction and care work can be interpreted as positive externalities,35 since businesses, and employers more generally, can actually find people to employ. The ‘positive externalities’ originating from reproductive work have been a point of intervention for feminist analyses, since this work is not only the basis of our societies, but also enables people to be workers. Yet the bulk of this work does not take place within markets, but is externalised from the formal economy. From a feminist perspective, therefore, the positive ‘externalities’ of reproductive and care work are not to be misunderstood as events of ‘accidental’ market failure, but as a structural constellation of capitalism as a system that makes use of a capitalist ‘inside’ and of its ‘outside’ in various but complementary ways.36 Biesecker and von Winterfeld make another, specific point about externalisation.37 Externalisation is more than the structural occurrence of external effects and the cost shifting to capitalism’s outside. It also takes place through a constant separating of the market economy from traditionally female work, subsistence work, and processes of the natural environment. This separation is visible in economic valuation – some activities and things carry a monetary value while others do not. Biesecker and von Winterfeld 342 LEFT STRATEGIES IN THE COVID PANDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH emphasise that externalisation as a continued separation is a basic principle of capitalist economies supporting capitalist accumulation because it excludes some activities or things from economic valuation. Externalisation requires categorisations about what is ‘truly’ economic – this usually only includes trade on markets, waged labour and commodity production.38 Through this facet of externalisation, which is essentially a separation of aspects/subjects/ things included or excluded in the formal market economy, power relations, too, are made permanent, because dualisms like production vs. reproduction are reproduced.39 What is considered reproductive is further externalised, leading to externalised aspects being perceived as outside of the economic realm and as having no value. Externalisation as a separation principle goes hand in hand with non- or de-valuation that makes externalised parts cheap and cheap to use. Reproductive processes and activities are, however, a condition of possibility for economic activity, argue Biesecker and von Winterfeld and fellow ecofeminists, and their value is thus immense and far from nil. Compared to the externalities framework in mainstream economics, externalisation as seen from an ecofeminist standpoint, does not describe ‘single phenomena’ of market failure but occurs continuously and structurally. Therefore, the problem of a dis-embedded economy must also be looked at from an externalisation perspective in order to be able to reverse effects caused by it. The ecofeminist thinker Ariel Salleh interprets externalisation as debt.40 She points out that in the context of re-embedding market economies people usually do not think about debt, precisely because ecological processes and the unpaid human activities of social reproduction and care work are perceived as external to or as separated from the formal market economy. If we combine these perspectives, externalisation as an economic principle has three functions: First, it serves to save costs through making use of the positive externalities stemming from activities of social reproduction, care work, and natural processes. Second, through the principle of externalisation being visible through selective economic valuation and requiring categorisations of having/producing value vs. being valueless we get the perpetuation of societal power relations and dualisms such as the dualism of productive vs. reproductive. And, third, externalisation serves as a practical means to cover up debt – to conceal the fact that the formal market economy is actually indebted to ‘women and the environment’ and relies on the appropriation of their contributions. ECOFEMINISM NOW 343 The challenge of speaking up/being heard The ecofeminist disentanglement of both appropriation and externalisation dynamics in the context of capitalist utilisation has been available for many decades now, but it has still hardly trickled down into realpolitik. While this is true for many left-oriented forms of societal critique due to the hegemony of (neo)liberal thought, I want to highlight specific challenges for ecofeminist critiques to be voiced and heard. Environmental problems are an expression of a crisis of society-naturerelations.41 From the point of view of social-ecological research, it does not make sense to consider social and environmental problems as independent of each other. Since the 1970s, ecofeminists have emphasised this by critically describing relations between the individual, society, and nature, showing that gendered and racialised society-nature-relations underlie the sustainability problems we experience today.42 However, adding the layer of gender and race to society-nature-relations seems to be a step that is too provocative, or even too complex for Western societies, and so this has not reached a larger audience. Revealing gendered patterns of socio-environmental problems was never an easy thing to do, as the story of Rachel Carson exemplifies. In her book Silent Spring,43 Carson pointed early on to the connection of the ways in which both nature and women have been neglected and devalued in economics, politics, and science.44 As she showed in her seminal work and also through the tragedies that affected her own biography, societies tend to look away from the socio-ecological disasters they cause. Carson highlighted the dangers of toxic rain caused by industrial emissions that would harm bird life and forests, possibly in a way that forests would become silent, with no more birdsong to be heard. The toxic substances in the rain were also likely to affect humans similarly and in subtle ways. During her lifetime, Carson, who was a well acclaimed ecologist, kept her own illness secret – she suffered from breast cancer. Carson remained silent about her illness because she did not want others to doubt her professional judgement on the matter of the ecological crisis and the dangers to bird life by appearing to be personally affected by the toxic outcomes of the industrial production that she criticised. Carson chose to be silent to be able to communicate the message of the danger of a silent spring to the public. Today, more than five decades later, we know that toxic substances carried in rain not only affect sensible bird species but can also cause cancer.45 Carson’s story exemplifies that speaking up from the position of someone who is experiencing a socioecological disaster that calls for ecofeminist critique is harder than criticising symptoms separately. Combined with the open misogyny at her time, she had to conceal that she was affected as a woman to be listened to as a scientist. 344 LEFT STRATEGIES IN THE COVID PANDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH Up to the present day, it has remained a challenge to speak up from the experience of a woman – not only since, up to the present, speaking as a woman does not equal speaking as a human being but also since the notion of the unity of all women has become contested (for good reasons!). These challenges remain exacerbated for women of colour and indigenous women, who face prejudice in multiple ways and thus often have to work even harder to be heard. The difficulty of being heard might explain to some extent why the voicing of ecofeminist critique is sometimes delivered as if it were an academic performance rather than a societal critique that is also informed by personal experience. Yet some branches of ecofeminism challenge the male-mode of academic critique, for example when Donna Haraway46 advocates for a ‘storytelling for earthly survival’, or when Susan Griffin47 communicates through an affect-centred and poetic mode of critique in her book Women and Nature. The Roaring Inside Her the insidious ways in which patriarchy exerts violence and covers up that violence, thereby sparking a roaring, almost tangible rage within the reader. The place and power of rage As a final step, let me point out the importance of rage in bringing ecofeminism to the table. Like many other feminisms, ecofeminism has been a field in which people, women like Susan Griffin, felt it necessary to express rage. This aspect might seem like a leap of scale – from socio-economic structures to the realm of personal expression and psychology – but it is actually essential. Rage is an emotion that is often misunderstood as purely negative. However, feeling rage shows the individual when a boundary is crossed. For those in society who are usually expected to absorb tension, mediate difficult emotions and serve as a scapegoat, this means especially for women, people of colour, and other subjects socially positioned as inferior, that rage is an emotion that serves to create distance to oppressive dynamics. Sensing and expressing rage can be used as an emancipatory tool that first creates space within the individual and then in groups and societies as a whole – space needed to critically examine and take action against the current mode of production and consumption. Rage can be pacified, mostly through shame. And shaming the expression of female rage still functions as the main vehicle for keeping patriarchy in place.48 Therefore, ecofeminists of all genders should lead with rage – a rage that supersedes buying into the logic of externalisation-appropriation, a rage that is a signifier showing that the re-centring of life-creating work and processes is necessary. I am talking about a rage that is directed against economic and societal structures, not against individuals. Rage helps to feel and to embody the truth that we all ECOFEMINISM NOW 345 need to be more free of racist, heterosexist patriarchy and of the belief that humans are a more important species. This inner motivator is a force that can carry the project of crafting an ‘ecofeminism as politics’49 for the 21st century. Yet, too often the open and enraged confrontation of patriarchy is perceived as so odd that women are likely to refuse supporting the one speaking up and are quick to distance themselves from the scene of conflict in order not to have to deal with their own patriarchal wounds and possible complicity. It is time for all of us to confront patriarchy jointly and to work towards social movements that go beyond single issues.50 One way of doing this is to support ecofeminist whistle-blowers such as Rachel Carson. Conclusion: What to keep in mind for Europe’s transformation challenges If one combines the two perspectives mentioned earlier – externalisation and appropriation – in their ecofeminist reading, one thing becomes clear: The externalisation of costs combined with the drawing of a boundary between productive and reproductive realms, and the capitalist appropriation of those aspects of life that have been defined as reproductive, are two sides of the same coin. Appropriation and externalisation are functionally intertwined, and ecofeminism is uniquely positioned to grasp this relation, as its main project is to make visible the oppression of women, nature, and racialised people – all of them being the object of capitalist appropriation and efforts at externalisation. The dynamics of appropriation and externalisation both function as means to keep costs low, first by externalising some parts and then by appropriating them at next to zero cost. This double mechanism serves as a condition of possibility for the goal of realising profits in markets under capitalist circumstances. And it serves to preserve power relations that continue accumulation on the basis of externalisation and appropriation into the future. The question remains of how this knowledge can be used to re-embed the economy and work towards socio-ecological transformations. I already mentioned Salleh’s interpretation of the appropriation of contributions from externalised parts of society as debt. The capitalist global economy works because at some points debt is created and never paid back. Salleh’s interpretation raises the question whether the whole debt needs to be repaid. Would it be possible and helpful to repay this debt? In my opinion, this is not what one should aim for and it is not even possible. It is not possible to repay the debt created because making profits is only possible precisely because there is this debt. We can never redistribute all the profits created by the few to make up for the debt experienced in many quarters and environments 346 LEFT STRATEGIES IN THE COVID PANDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH because those profits are a fiction. Profits in the market economy only appear as profits if one chooses to eliminate ecological processes, social reproduction, and care work as well as production in the colonies completely from the picture – to externalize them. At the same time, profits in the formal economy are very real and allow a small segment of the global population to use up large parts of nature at the expense of many others. The important note here is to not fall into the ‘trap of capitalist valuation’.51 Instead, the (eco)feminist idea would be not to value reproductive work for the ability to produce profit or its contribution to the production of workers, but rather to enhance the capacities for producing and reproducing life and also to abolish arrangements that continually produce and rely on the production of negative externalities affecting the (re)production of life. Being aware of the partly fictitious character of profits, what follows from this feminist perspective if we still want to socio-ecologically transform the economy? First and foremost, the illusion has to be revealed, that profits originate from market economies alone. Pretending that the capitalist mode of production and therefore most enterprises and national economies are not indebted to nature and social reproduction has to stop right now. This disillusion is the necessary first step for an ecofeminist re-structuring of European societies. Politicians, economists, and civil society have to begin to ask the question: How can we create another economy that doesn’t need to rely on the fiction of profits and the cover-up of debts? How can we provide for the needs of individuals and societies without relying on the uncompensated appropriation and cost-saving externalisation of work, both across global value chains and (especially via the appropriation of reproductive work) also amidst European societies? Only if all take part in the project of creating an emancipatory socioecological transformation that is aware of the debt-relationships around the capitalist mode of production and the double mechanisms of externalisationappropriation, can we provide space for real alternatives to come to life. Only when we are aware of those relations can we support and empower the people who live in the complex niches striving for change which are neither inside nor outside the capitalist mode of production. Only if we free economic thinking from the fiction of profits being generated on markets alone can a social-ecological transformation take place, which does not block what so many individuals and movements are already struggling to create. To say it in the words of Rachel Carson: Ours is ‘an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged’.52 Ecofeminist insights call for the challenging of this right and thus critically inform the societal project of a socio-ecological transformation. ECOFEMINISM NOW 347 As Fraser points out, we cannot be satisfied anymore with ‘single-issue’ social movements.53 Although ecofeminism, by the components in its name – ‘eco’ and ‘feminism’ –, only includes two themes, it actually encompasses manifold struggles in its tradition of thought and social movement practice. Ecofeminism also includes an expanded view of labour. Possibly the future will see labour movements of earthcare54 – one of many inspirations which arose from ecofeminism. Ecofeminism realised that reproductive labour holds a certain potentiality,55 which resists capitalist industrial modernity and the ‘master model’ of humanity.56 The political outcome of recentring around this potentiality is not predetermined, but has to be crafted step by step by social and political movements from the left, including ecofeminism. It is a false story backed by a specific social organisation of work that leads one to believe that only the productive forces create wealth and are able to feed people and enable a modern society even though they free-ride on reproductive forces. Ecofeminism helps – because it helps us adopt a worldview that is not based on externalisation, on the conscious/unconscious not-knowing of the basis of creating life. It thus helps not to ruin the planet and in this process to struggle for equal relationships and transnational solidarity. Donna Haraway once said that all movements and eras need a good slogan, which is a bit peculiar for a scientist, as producing slogans is often understood as the opposite of pure and neat academic analyses. Taking up this pragmatic-provocative approach, ecofeminists call the radical left to re-examine their practice through ecofeminist eyes and in so doing join our enraged and engaged movement: ‘Ecofeminism is not a solution for everything, but it is for most things.’ NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 Joni Seager, ‘Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming of Age of Feminist Environmentalism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28,3 (2003): 945– 972. Francoise D’Eaubonne, Le Féminisme Ou La Mort, Paris: Payot, 1974. Winona LaDuke, ‘The Indigenous Women’s Network: Our Future, Our Responsibility’, Estelle B. Freedman (ed.), The Essential Feminist Reader, New York: Random House, 2007, pp. 405–408; Rosemary Ruether, ‘Religious Ecofeminism: Healing the Ecological Crisis’, Roger S. Gottlieb (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bina Agarwal, ‘The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India’, Feminist Studies 18,1 (1992): 119-158. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, ‘Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology’, Invisible Culture 9,9 (2005): 1–22. 348 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 LEFT STRATEGIES IN THE COVID PANDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York: Routledge, 1989; Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2016; Stacy Alaimo, ‘Ecofeminism without Nature?’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 10,3 (2008): 299–304. Kathryn Miles, ‘Ecofeminism’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018. Seager, ‘Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer’; Greta Gaard, ‘Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism’, Feminist Formations 23,2 (2011): 26–53; Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, London: Zed Books, 1997. Seager, ‘Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer’. Alaimo, ‘Ecofeminism without Nature?’, 302. J. Santamaría-Dávila et al., ‘Women’s Ecofeminist Spirituality: Origins and Applications to Psychotherapy’, Explore (NY) 15,1 (2019): 55–60. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientfic Revolution, London: Wildwood House, 1982. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004; Silvia Federici, Aufstand aus der Küche. Reproduktionsarbeit im globalen Kapitalismus und die unvollendete feministische Revolution, Münster: edition assemblage, 2012. See Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books, 1986; Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics. SeeVal Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Seager, ‘Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer’; Agarwal, ‘The Gender and Environment Debate’. Johanna Oksala, ‘Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology’, Hypatia 33, no. 2 (2018), p. 220. Nancy Fraser, ‘Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode’, New Left Review 86 (2014), 55–72. Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale; Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics; Anna Saave, Einverleiben und Externalisieren. Zur Innen-Außen-Beziehung der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise, Bielefeld: transcript, 2021. Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Maria Mies, and Claudia von Werlhof, Frauen, Die Letzte Kolonie. Zur Hausfrauisierung Der Arbeit, Reinbek bei Hamburg: RowohltTaschenbuch-Verlag, 1988. Saave, Einverleiben und Externalisieren. Adelheid Biesecker and Uta von Winterfeld, ‘Extern? Weshalb und inwiefern moderne Gesellschaften Externalisierung brauchen und erzeugen’, Working Paper Der DFG-KollegforscherInnengruppe Postwachstumsgesellschaften, no. 2 (2014), pp. 1–16. Claudia von Werlhof, Was haben die Hühner mit dem Dollar zu tun?, München: Verlag Frauenoffensive, 1991; Maria Mies, ‘Hausfrauisierung, Globalisierung, Subsistenzperspektive’, in Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (eds.), Über Marx Hinaus, Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2009, pp. 255–290; Saave, Einverleiben und Externalisieren. Biesecker and von Winterfeld, ‘Extern?’; Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics; Anna SaaveHarnack, ‘Die Care-Abgabe. Ein Instrument Vorsorgenden Wirtschaftens?’, in David Johannes Petersen et al. (eds), Perspektiven einer Pluralen Ökonomik, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019, pp. 367–393. ECOFEMINISM NOW 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 349 Mies, ‘Hausfrauisierung, Globalisierung, Subsistenzperspektive’, p. 263. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Mies, and von Werlhof, Frauen, Die Letzte Kolonie, p. III. Mies, ‘Hausfrauisierung, Globalisierung, Subsistenzperspektive’; von Werlhof, Was haben die Hühner mit dem Dollar zu tun? Rosa Luxemburg, Die Akkumulation Des Kapitals. Ein Beitrag Zur Ökonomischen Erklärung Des Imperialismus, Gesammelte Werke Band 5. Ökonomische Schriften, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1990, pp. 5–411. Oksala, ‘Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology’, p. 223. Maria Mies, Patriarchat und Kapital, München: bge-verlag, 2015, p. 130. Saave, Einverleiben und Externalisieren. Or a company and its customers, for example by reducing the staff of a call centre, which increases the wait time to be connected. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, Die Macht der Frauen und der Umsturz der Gesellschaft, Berlin: Merve, 1973. Saave-Harnack, ‘Die Care-Abgabe’. Fraser, ‘Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode’; Saave, Einverleiben und Externalisieren. Biesecker and von Winterfeld, ‘Extern?’. Adelheid Biesecker and Uta von Winterfeld, ‘Wertlos? Zur Ausgrenzung Natürlicher Produktivität und Weiblicher Arbeit bei John Locke und Adam Smith’, Bremer Diskussionspapiere zur institutionellen Ökonomie und Sozial-Ökonomie, no. 58 (2004), p. 29. Biesecker and von Winterfeld, ‘Extern?’; Adelheid Biesecker and Sabine Hofmeister, Die Neuerfindung des Ökonomischen: Ein (re)produktionstheoretischer Beitrag zur sozialökologischen Forschung, München: oekom Verlag, 2006. Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics. Egon Becker and Thomas Jahn, Soziale Ökologie: Grundzüge einer Wissenschaft von den gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnissen, Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2006. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ökofeminismus. Beiträge zur Praxis und Theorie, Zürich: Rotpunkt-Verlag, 1995. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Boston: Mifflin, 1962). Seager, ‘Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer’. Song Wu et al., ‘Substantial Contribution of Extrinsic Risk Factors to Cancer Development’, Nature 529,7584 (2016): 43–47. For example, Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Bethany Webster, Discovering the Inner Mother. A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power, New York: Harper Collins, 2021. Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics. Nancy Fraser, ‘Climates of Capital. For a Trans-Environmental Eco-Socialism’, New Left Review 127 (2021): 94–127. Stefania Barca, Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Carson, Silent Spring, p. 13. Fraser, ‘Climates of Capital’. 350 54 55 56 LEFT STRATEGIES IN THE COVID PANDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH See Barca, Forces of Reproduction. See Ariel Salleh, ‘The Meta-Industrial Class and Why We Need It’, Democracy & Nature 6,1 (2000): 27–36. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature; see also Christel Neusüß, Die Kopfgeburten der Arbeiterbewegung oder die Genossin Luxemburg bringt alles durcheinander, Hamburg: Rasch und Röhring Verlag, 1985.