XI
Women and Environment
The convergence between the environment movement and the women’s movement goes beyond the particular issue of the effect of the Structural Adjustment Programme or seeds patent issue. It has to do with the development model – of growth under intensive capitalism and reliance on exploitation of nature and people, particularly the vulnerable, in pursuance of that growth. The devaluation of nature carries along with it a devaluation of subsistence living. This is intrinsically linked to women and their work and productivity. Similarly, one can draw a parallel between the violence against nature and violence against women. The relationship between women and environment is an ongoing area of enquiry, intervention, and debate summarised in two differing  points of view put forward by two well know women, Vandana Shiva, an eco-feminist and Bina Agarwal, a feminist-ecologist.

For Vandana Shiva the link between women and ecology, is not new. It is rooted in the ways of life and thought that see the woman-nature dyad as natural and superior to the dyad of man-culture. The new insights provided by rural women in the Third World are associated not in passivity but in creativity and in the maintenance of life, providing new categories of thought and fresh exploratory directions. The women and environment issue can be approached either from these categories of challenge or through an extension of conventional categories of patriarchy and reductionism. In the perspective of women engaged in survival struggles which are, simultaneously, struggles for the protection of nature, women and nature are intimately related, and their domination and liberation similarly linked.

The women’s and ecology movements are therefore one, and are primarily counter-trends to a patriarchal mal-development. In their right to survive its onslaught, women have begun a struggle that challenges the most fundamental categories of western patriarchy - the concepts of nature and women, and of science and development. “Their ecological struggles are aimed simultaneously at liberating nature from ceaseless exploitation and themselves from limitless marginalisation. They are creating a feminist ideology that is humanly inclusive; they are challenging patriarchy’s ideological claim to universalism not with another universalising tendency, but with diversity; and they are challenging the dominant concept of power as violence with the alternative concept of non-violence as power.” (1)

Further, for Shiva, the ecological crisis is, at root, “the death of the feminine principle.” Within this radical ideology, the material links between women and nature is their respect for, and specialist knowledge of, nature.

However this thesis on women-ecology, and the hailing of feminine values of peace, nurturing and caring against the patriarchal values of competition, domination, suppression(2)(3) – has been criticised as an essentialism and biological determinism. Bina Agarwal, for example is critical of Shiva saying that it is a very unitary view of Third World women.

For her, the predominantly Hindu conception of preserving nature as related to the feminine principle of nurturing and creativity, is alien to women of some other religions. Shiva, she feels, ignores the fact that women, like men, are socially structured and that their responses to nature is a result of their specific socialisation. Agarwal would argue for a feminist environmentalism as opposed to eco-feminism. She focuses on the material reasons for the connection between poor peasants and tribal women with nature. She feels that because women have historically been associated with the responsibility for cultivation, collecting fuel and fodder in several hill and tribal communities, they seem to have a closer link to nature.(4)(5) Thus, the privatisation of rural resources and destruction of the environment affect women differently depending on their class, caste, ethnic and economic positions.

Bina Agarwal’s view on eco-feminism takes away the suggestion that the women-nature closeness is naturally or biologically ordained or that ecological sensibility is an essentially feminine principle. The view calls for a specific choice of an environmental sensitive economics, society, and culture. It says that the fact that, women, especially poor women are more likely to accept such a view is because of their historical and social conditioning. It also suggests that one does not have to accept the essentially subjugated position that women have had to suffer in exchange for such closeness to nature.

What both Agarwal and Shiva agree on is that environmental concerns are not elitist but are central to struggles of poor peoples, especially women, for survival and for living spaces.

In resistance to the myopic policies that are being pushed there have been the visible protests like the action against Cargill, Monsanto or even the highly publicised action against the Kentucky Chicken outlets in Bangalore. Several women-led organisations like Navdanya and Green Foundation have formed seed banks and have started special programmes to save the varieties of seeds that are part of our heritage. They have formed Jaiv Panchayats, which aims at protecting the bio-diversity of each region and highlighting the fact that the collective knowledge base of these systems is being stolen, under the guise of “free enterprise”.(6) The campaign also underlines the fact that in the ultimate analysis it is not research into newer strains or the stockpiles of excess grain in the world granaries, but women,  who Feed the World!