Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing

Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism

Greta Gaard

Feminist Formations, Volume 23, Issue 2, Summer 2011, pp. 26-53 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/ff.2011.0017

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Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting
Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in
a Material Feminist Environmentalism
Greta Gaard

Formulated in the 1980s and gaining prominence in the early 1990s, by the end
of that decade ecofeminism was critiqued as essentialist and effectively discarded.
Fearing their scholarship would be contaminated by association with the term “eco-
feminism,” feminists working on the intersections of feminism and environmentalism
thought it better to rename their approach. Thirty years later, current developments
in allegedly new fields such as animal studies and naturalized epistemology are
“discovering” theoretical perspectives on interspecies relations and standpoint theory
that were developed by feminists and ecofeminists decades ago. What have we lost
by jettisoning these earlier feminist and ecofeminist bodies of knowledge? Are there
features of ecofeminism that can helpfully be retrieved, restoring an intellectual and
activist history, and enriching current theorizing and activisms? By examining the
historical foundations of ecofeminism from the 1980s onward, this article uncovers
the roots of the antifeminist backlash against ecofeminism in the 1990s, peeling back
the layers of feminist and environmentalist resistance to ecofeminism’s analyses of
the connections among racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, speciesism, and the
environment. Recuperating ecofeminist insights of the past thirty years provides
feminist foundations for current liberatory theories and activisms.

Keywords: animal studies / antifeminism / ecofeminism / essentialism /

material feminism

“What’s happening in ecofeminism?” a leading ecocritic asked me in July 2009,

during a seaside lunch-break at an ecocriticism conference in Taiwan. “Noth-
ing,” he asserted, answering his own question before I could interject a reply.

©2011 Feminist Formations, Vol. 23 No. 2 (Summer) pp. 26–53

 Greta Gaard · 27

And then he proceeded to tell me what was really exciting in feminism: Work
most recently produced by scholars who had previously produced ecofeminist
theory.1
What happened to ecofeminism? While various scholars outside the field
have written retrospectives on its demise (Seager 2003a) and necessary recu-
peration (Thompson 2006), few present or former ecofeminists have taken the
risk of chronicling the history of our field, its internal and external battles, and
its startlingly widespread influence on the humanities and social sciences—art,
philosophy, psychology, education, animal studies, cultural studies, postcolonial
studies, environmental studies, ecocriticism, queer theory, and feminist–gender
studies, to name a few. The fear of contamination-by-association is just too
strong. After the charges of gender essentialism—accurately leveled at cultural
feminism, a branch of thought in both feminist and ecofeminist theory—most
feminists working on the intersections of feminism and the environment
thought it better to rename their approach to distinguish it from essentialist
feminisms and thereby gain a wider audience; hence, the proliferation of terms
such as “ecological feminism” (Warren 1991, 1994), “feminist environmentalism”
(Agarwal 1992; Seager 1993), “social ecofeminism” (Heller 1999; King 1989),
“critical feminist eco-socialism” (Plumwood 2002), or simply “gender and the
environment.” Curiously, current critical developments in allegedly new fields
such as animal studies and naturalized epistemology are now “discovering”
theoretical perspectives on interspecies relations and standpoint theory that
were developed by feminists and ecofeminists decades ago, yet unlike those eco-
feminists who theorize about speciesism (a branch variously called “vegetarian
ecofeminism” or “animal ecofeminism”), few of these animal studies scholars
address interspecies or gender justice.
As a community of radical scholars and eco-justice activists, what have we
lost by jettisoning these earlier feminist and ecofeminist bodies of knowledge?
Are there features of ecofeminism that can helpfully be retrieved, restoring an
intellectual and activist history and enriching current theorizing and activisms?
By examining the historical foundations of North American ecofeminism from
the 1980s onward, this article aims at uncovering the roots of the antifeminist
backlash against ecofeminism in the 1990s, peeling back the layers of feminist
and environmentalist resistance to ecofeminism’s analyses of the connections
among racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, speciesism, and the environment.
Recuperating ecofeminist insights of the past thirty years provides feminist
foundations for current liberatory theories and activisms—indeed, I will argue,
such recuperation may be (dare I say it?) essential.

Ecofeminist Origins (the 1980s)

It is widely acknowledged that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) launched

the environmental movement that took form by Earth Day in 1970, though
28 · Feminist Formations 23.2

Carson’s applied feminism in her personal, professional, and literary life goes
almost unmentioned, overshadowed by the more visible and self-identified
feminists of the 1960s, whose activism within and across the diverse counter-
cultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s also powered the anti-war and anti-
nuclear movements. Ecofeminism emerged from the intersections of feminist
research and the various movements for social justice and environmental health,
explorations that uncovered the linked oppressions of gender, ecology, race,
species, and nation through such foundational texts as Susan Griffin’s Woman
and Nature (1978) and Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980). An
early text of radical feminism, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978), exposed the
historical and cross-cultural persecution of women as legitimized by the various
male-dominated institutions of religion, culture, and medical science (that is,
Indian suttee, Chinese footbinding, African genital mutilation, European witch-
burnings, American gynecology, Nazi medicine), linking the physical health
of women and the environment with the recuperation of a woman-centered
language and thought.
Griffin’s Woman and Nature predates today’s gender studies in its explo-
ration of the ways that the feminized status of women, animals, nature, and
feminized others (children, people of color, farmers, slaves, as well as the body
itself, emotions, and sexuality) have been conceived of as separate and inferior
in order to legitimate their subordination under an elite and often violent and
militarized male-dominant social order. Bridging socialist feminism and ecol-
ogy, Merchant’s The Death of Nature provided historical documentation for the
claim that the domination of women and of nature have shared roots in the
logic of science and capitalism, an intertwining of economics and rationalism
that Merchant traces from 1484 to 1716. Most provocative is her intersectional
linkage of racism, speciesism, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, and the mecha-
nistic model of science–nature via the historical co-occurrence of the racist
and colonialist “voyages of discovery” that resulted in appropriating indigenous
peoples, animals, and land; the three centuries of European witch-burnings
eradicating women herbalists and midwives, along with their “animal familiars”
and various gay men (“fags” used for the kindling of the witches’ burnings); along
with animal experimentation, the demise of midwifery, and the rise of Western
medical science—all functioning as illicit appropriations of self-determination,
power, and wealth from indigenous people, women, queers, animals, and nature
to elite men. Going beyond the findings of Griffin and Daly, Merchant’s docu-
mented historical research provided a materialist feminist foundation for the
activism and theorizing of ecofeminism in the 1980s and beyond. Outside of
the United States, materialist foundations were also laid down by early German
and Australian ecofeminists like Maria Mies (1986) and Ariel Salleh (1984).
Feminist activism in the 1980s offered an ecological and feminist perspec-
tive that linked militarism, corporatism, and unsustainable energy production
by joining together the antinuclear protests and the peace movement. At
 Greta Gaard · 29

Greenham Common in England, the longest-running women’s peace camp

(1981–2000) began with the presence of “Women for Life on Earth,” an encamp-
ment of women who pressured the Royal Air Force to cease operating and testing
nuclear cruise missiles, announcing their “fear for the future of all our children
and for the future of the living world which is the basis of all life” (Cook and
Kirk 1983). In the two volumes documenting the early visions of this movement,
Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk’s Greenham Women Everywhere (1983) chronicled
the first two years of the movement, providing photographs and interview
excerpts, while Léonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland’s anthology Reclaim the
Earth (1983) offered international feminist perspectives on the intersection of
women and ecology, linking the Women’s Pentagon Action and the women’s
peace camp with the politics of women’s health, poverty, food security, forestry,
urban ecology, indigenous people and environments, technology, the feminist
connection to animal rights, birth and female infanticide, work, play, militarism,
philosophy, and spirituality. Caldecott and Leland’s volume bridged the later
division between theory and activism, offering poetry as well as scholarship,
and work by a diversity of feminists, including Wangari Maathai (Kenya) on the
Green Belt Movement, Rosalie Bertell (Canada) on nuclear power and health,
Wilmette Brown (UK/US) on black ghetto ecology, Marta Zabaleta (Argentina)
on the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Manushi Collective (India) on female
infanticide, and Anita Anand (India) on the Chipko Andolan.
Across the Atlantic in the United States, a parallel movement critiquing
militarism, nuclear power and weapons, and the oppression of those constructed
as feminine was enacted on the East Coast through the Women’s Pentagon
Actions of 1980 and 1981 and the Conference for Women & Life on Earth.2
Key feminist activists and writers—Ynestra King, Grace Paley, Chaia Heller—
grounded in social ecology and studying directly with Murray Bookchin created
a “social ecofeminism,” articulating a materially based analysis of alienation,
hierarchy, and domination that linked the mutually reinforcing structures of
the economic, political, social, and gender hierarchies. This version of ecofemi-
nism resonated with the East Coast culture by giving primacy to economic and
political analysis and envisioning solutions that relied on radical municipalism,
small-scale communities, and direct, participatory democracy.
By the end of the 1980s, ecofeminism was articulated on the West Coast
as well, initially through a conference held at California’s Sonoma State Uni-
versity in 1981, and later, in 1987, through a conference held at the University
of Southern California (USC); feminist actions defending Clayoquot Sound
in British Columbia (Maingon 1994), as well as Judi Bari’s (1994) organizing
in the Redwoods of northern California, articulated ecofeminism’s utility in
advancing intersectional analyses of gender, class, indigeneity, and ecology. In
the volume of conference essays and presentations edited by the USC confer-
ence organizers, Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein’s Reweaving the World
(1990) articulated ecofeminism through essays addressing the intersections of
30 · Feminist Formations 23.2

race and toxic waste (Lin Nelson, Cynthia Hamilton), childbirth, midwifery,
and colonialism (Arisika Razak, Irene Diamond), the colonial and patriarchal
“development” of non-Western countries (Vandana Shiva), the role of religion
in shaping human relationships with nature (Charlene Spretnak, Riane Eisler,
Carol Christ, Starhawk), and critiques of feminist theory’s anthropocentrism
(Carolyn Merchant, Ynestra King, Lee Quinby), as well as the male-dominated
Western environmentalisms, deep ecology (Marti Kheel, Michael Zimmer-
man) and bioregionalism (Judith Plant). In Vancouver, Judith Plant’s more
community-focused and bioregional version of ecofeminism appeared in Healing
the Wounds (1989), confirming the leading voices and foci of ecofeminism in
Griffin’s (1978) analysis of Western (“split”) culture, King’s (1989) social eco-
feminism, Vandana Shiva’s (1988) critique of colonialist development in the
third world, and Marti Kheel’s (1989) critique of speciesism and Western medical
science, along with Charlene Spretnak’s (1982), Starhawk’s (1979, 1982), and
Rosemary Radford Ruether’s (1983, 1996) versions of earth-based spirituality. In
these three international anthologies written for “cross-over” (popular, as well
as scholarly) audiences—Reclaim the Earth (Caldecott and Leland 1983), Healing
the Wounds (Plant 1989), and Reweaving the World (Diamond and Orenstein
1990)—ecofeminism in the 1980s took shape.3
Both within and alongside of these anthologies, critiques of racism,
speciesism, and colonialism claimed central importance. Marjorie Spiegel’s The
Dreaded Comparison (1988) drew clear parallels between the enslavement of
nonhuman animals and African Americans in the United States, while Andreé
Collard and Joyce Contrucci’s Rape of the Wild (1989) explored the masculinized
violence directed at women, people of color, animals, and the natural world
through structures of domesticity, enslavement, hunting, militarism, science
and technology—all legitimated and normalized through religion, culture, and
language. Growing out of the Women’s Pentagon Actions and organized by
ecofeminist activist-scholars King, Starhawk, and Rachel Bagby, the Woman­
Earth Feminist Peace Institute took shape in 1985, and in its four-year course
focused on creating racial parity among ecofeminist activists while simultane-
ously addressing racism within feminist and environmental movements (Stur-
geon 1997). Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988) critiqued the reductionist and colonial
aspects of Western science and technology used to create food insufficiency and
deforestation, damming the rivers, producing monocultures, displacing women
from food production and forestry, and working against ecosystems and soils to
extract wealth for corporations and first world elites, while producing scarcity
and poverty for local communities.
At the same time in the 1980s, other forerunners of the feminist movement
for human and environmental health took action and created theory that later
influenced ecofeminist thought. Lois Gibbs’s work as a mother defending her
children and organizing her community at Love Canal in 1978 led to the cre-
ation of both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Act and
 Greta Gaard · 31

Gibbs’s own Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, formed in 1980 and
later renamed the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice (Gibbs 1995).
Activists who exposed the logic that led to building a working-class community
atop Hooker Chemical’s hazardous-waste dump initially identified themselves as
the antitoxics movement, but a decade later defined their work as a resistance
to “environmental classism”—a counterpart to the “environmental racism” that
activists in Warren County, North Carolina, resisted in 1982 by challenging the
siting of a toxic-waste dump in an impoverished African American community.
Indigenous women called attention to the colonialism and environmental
racism that legitimates hazardous waste, military bomb tests, coal mining,
nuclear storage, hydropower construction, and PCB contamination on reser-
vation lands (LaDuke 1999). Feminist actions in the breast cancer movement
linked breast cancers with environmental toxins like endocrine disruptors emit-
ted by the same chemical corporations that funded the “pink ribbon” walks for
breast cancer research (Clorfene-Casten 1996; Greene and Ratner 1994), made
connections between environmental estrogens and prostate cancers (Colborn,
Dumanoski, and Myers 1996), and thereby unmasked (once again) the linkages
between the gendered culture–nature dualism, capitalist economic structures,
and medical science and technology. Although not explicitly ecofeminist,
these activisms and theories strongly influenced the further development and
sophistication of ecofeminist theory in the 1990s.
Thus reviewed, the history of ecofeminism seems very promising. Many
believed ecofeminism would become feminism’s “third wave,” building on and
transforming the anthropocentric critiques of first- and second-wave feminisms
with an ecological perspective. But what happened was something entirely
different: Focusing on the celebration of goddess spirituality and the critique
of patriarchy advanced in cultural ecofeminism, poststructuralist and other
third-wave feminisms portrayed all ecofeminisms as an exclusively essentialist
equation of women with nature, discrediting ecofeminism’s diversity of argu-
ments and standpoints to such an extent that, by 2010, it was nearly impossible
to find a single essay, much less a section, devoted to issues of feminism and
ecology (and certainly not ecofeminism), species, or nature in most introductory
anthologies used in women’s studies, gender studies, or queer studies.4 As Charis
Thompson (2006) reflects, “poststructuralist feminisms somehow lost sight of
the structuralist insight of ecofeminism that yoked together world patterns of
environmental degradation with women’s oppression” (511).
Merchant’s (1995) materialist account of the woman–nature connection—
like those of Ynestra King (1989), Karen Warren (1991, 1994), Val Plumwood
(1991, 1993), Ariel Salleh (1984, 1997), Lori Gruen (1993), and many other
ecofeminist scholar-activists—described a socially constructed association
among women (sex), femininity (gender), and nature that was contextual and
fluid, not ahistorical and static (Thompson 2006). In the 1990s, this feminist
analysis shifted from exploring associations among the objects of oppression
32 · Feminist Formations 23.2

to addressing the structure of oppression itself, exposing the “logic of domina-

tion” (Warren 1990) and the “master model” (Plumwood 1993) that had shaped
Western culture’s relationship with nature. While ecological feminist works
like Kate Soper’s What Is Nature? (1995), Karen Warren’s Ecofeminism (1997),
Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and Environmental
Culture (2002), Stacy Alaimo’s Undomesticated Ground (2000), and Ariel Salleh’s
Ecofeminism as Politics (1997) and anthology Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice
(2009) all use a materialist feminist approach to explore the oppression of
women and nature—thereby taking postmodern and poststructuralist thought
seriously—postmodern feminism focuses primarily on human categories, with
little concern for the environment.
It is this human-centered (anthropocentric) feminism that has come to
dominate feminist thinking in the new millennium, effectively marginalizing
feminism’s relevance. The global crises of climate justice, food security, energy
justice, vanishing wildlife, maldevelopment, habitat loss, industrial animal food
production, and more have simultaneously social and ecological dimensions that
require both ecological and feminist analyses. Ecofeminists have listened to their
feminist, social ecologist, deep ecological and environmentalist critics—but
have their critics been listening to ecofeminists?

Convergence and Backlash (the 1990s)

In fact, they have not. The charges against ecofeminists as essentialist, eth-
nocentric, anti-intellectual goddess-worshippers who mistakenly portray the
Earth as female or issue totalizing and ahistorical mandates for worldwide
veganism—these sweeping generalizations, often made without specific and
supporting documentation, have been disproven again and again in the pages
of academic and popular journals, at conferences and in conversations, yet the
contamination lingers. Ecofeminism in the 1980s was indeed a broad umbrella
for a variety of diversely inflected approaches, some of which were rooted in
essentialist (cultural) feminisms, just as others grew out of liberal, social, Marx-
ist, anarchist, and socialist feminisms (Gaard 1993b, 1998; Merchant 1995;
Sturgeon 1997), and in the 1990s, ecofeminist theories continued to refine
and ground their analyses, developing economic, material, international, and
intersectional perspectives. Misrepresenting the part for the whole is a logical
fallacy, a straw-woman argument that holds up an “outlier” position and uses it
to discredit an entire body of thought. Why would mainstream feminism resist
the findings of ecofeminism so strongly? What could be at stake?
Eighteen months after publishing Josephine Donovan’s “Animal Rights
and Feminist Theory” (1990), in June 1992, the leading journal of academic
feminism, Signs, rejected a review essay of ecofeminism its managing editors
had commissioned just a year earlier. The editors’ reasons for their decision
included the following: “ecofeminism seems to be concerned with everything
 Greta Gaard · 33

in the world . . . [as a result] feminism itself seems almost to get erased in the
process” and “when [ecofeminism] contains all peoples and all injustices, the
fine tuning and differentiation lose out.” The review essay summarized the ways
ecofeminists had noted connections among the oppressions of nature, women,
and all those constructed as “feminine” by examining global economics, third
world debt, maldevelopment, industrialized animal food production and food
scarcity, reproductive rights, militarism, and environmental racism. To these
researched and documented observations, Signs editors replied that “this is
really an opinion piece [and] the ties to women are not very clear.” Reluctant
to believe that socialist feminists would so blithely reject a feminist approach
to environmental problems, the essay’s authors attributed these reactions to a
possible personality conflict and resubmitted the article to another feminist
journal—with the same results.
By November 1992, editors at NWSA Journal had rejected the essay as well,
commenting that “it is not at all clear that there is anything new brought out
by [the] paper”—an observation that, paradoxically, based the rejection on an
acknowledgment of ecofeminism’s roots in standard feminist analysis. But the
other reasons for the essay’s rejection were more inscrutable: In response to
pages of examples citing the placement of toxic waste in communities of color
around the world, NWSAJ’s editors remarked, “[i]t is a difficult argument to
make—what does concern with ecology have to do with concern with sexism,
racism, and classism?” In the early 1990s, despite feminist leadership in the
antitoxics and antinuclear movements and women’s leadership in the burgeon-
ing environmental justice movement, feminist scholars still conceived of social
justice, interspecies ethics, and environmental concerns as separate. Recogniz-
ing that mainstream socialist feminists would continue to silence articulations
of such intersections, the essay’s authors submitted the article to Society and
Nature, a journal of social ecology, where it was soon published (Gaard and
Gruen 1993), and was later reprinted in an anthology of environmental ethics
(Light and Rolston 2003).
The editorial perspectives of Signs and NWSA Journal were reinforced by
feminist publications like Ms. and The Women’s Review of Books. From 1990
to 1994, Ms. ran a section on ecofeminism, with articles that varied widely in
content, quality, and political perspective. There, diverse articles addressed
Green politics (Petra Kelly), genetic engineering (Vandana Shiva), Redwood
Summer (Judi Bari), hunting sabotage (Hope Burwell), the chocolate industry
(Cat Cox), ecofeminist motherhood (Ynestra King), feminist bioregionalism
(Hannah Holmes), the Army Corps of Engineers (Joni Seager), environmental
racism (Valerie Taliman), and feminism and animal rights (Carol Adams)—
clearly topics appropriate for ecofeminist inquiry. Other articles on trekking
across the South Pole, cattle ranching, and rodeo-riding were also published in
the “ecofeminism” column, though their connection to ecofeminism remained
unclear (and, for the latter two, quite suspect, given their speciesism). It appeared
34 · Feminist Formations 23.2

that Ms. editors believed that ecofeminism was significant enough to warrant a
section in the magazine (at least in the early half of the 1990s), but not impor-
tant enough for them to research ecofeminism’s primary claims and ensure that
the articles published under that heading accurately and consistently reflected
ecofeminist theory and practice. Although Ms. magazine offered a sixteen-page
“Special Report” on “Women and the Environment” (1991) and again reported
on the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet (1992) in a section titled
“In Defense of the Earth—Global Testimony,” by 1994, the column heading of
“ecofeminism” had receded, and articles that would have well-suited an eco-
feminist heading, such as “Toxic Tampons” (1992), “The Environmental Link
to Breast Cancer” (1993), “Going Vegetarian” (1994), “A Beginner’s Guide to
Menopause” (1995), and “Whole Earth Economy” (1997), gradually migrated to
the columns on “Health.” What was initially perceived as a political feminist
theory grounded in experiential data, research, and activism became, in less
than four years, a matter of personal health, stripped of the feminist political
analysis made available through the term “ecofeminism.”
The Women’s Review of Books (WRB) fared little better. In October 1993,
in a dual review of two new collections on ecofeminism—Ecofeminism and the
Sacred (1993) and Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (1993)—reviewer
Paula DiPerna revealed the limitations of her knowledge in such statements as
“I do not believe meat-eating to be an environmental threat on par with ozone
depletion” when industrialized animal food production has been decisively
linked to global warming, and her (by now familiar) charge that “ecofeminism
has grown so holistic . . . as to render itself meaningless” (5).5 In effect, this
statement suggested that for mainstream feminism, meaning was predicated on
exclusion—and unfortunately for ecofeminists, this interpretation turned out to
be true. Uninformed, paradoxical, and openly hostile reviews of Mies and Shiva’s
Ecofeminism (Blackwell 1994) and Adams’s Neither Man nor Beast (Stange
1995) articulated the WRB editors’ position, placing ecofeminism outside the
margins of mainstream feminism via the books’ positions on animal issues. On
the one hand, Mies and Shiva were criticized for showing “little appreciation of
wilderness for its own sake and complete indifference to the rights of animals
. . . say[ing] nothing about the industrial world’s macho meat-obsession and its
relation to world hunger, environmental destruction and the rise of hideously
cruel, automated ‘factory farms’ (which inflict their worst torments on female
animals and their babies)” (Blackwell 1994, 28). On the other hand, Adams’s
“premise that species is a social construction in exactly the same way that race
and gender are” was depicted as “highly debatable” (Stange 1995, 18)—and
although Adams’s premise predated posthumanist philosophy by more than a
decade, it never enjoyed the same popularity, since her work was charged with
“gender essentialism” (ibid.). For Adams’s reviewer, the WRB editors chose Mary
Zeiss Stange, a professor of religion and women’s studies at Skidmore College
who had written for Fur Age Weekly, Petersen’s Hunting, and American Hunter
 Greta Gaard · 35

and was currently at work on her manuscript Woman the Hunter, which was
published in 1997 and celebrated as “a different view of ecofeminism” in The
Chronicle of Higher Education (Gose 1997).
At the same time that mainstream feminism was rejecting animal ecofemi-
nism, critiques of ecofeminism were being developed by feminist environmen-
talists and ecofeminists alike. Bina Agarwal’s (1992, 2001) critiques offered a
well-grounded corrective to the essentialism of the unitary category “woman.”
As Agarwal (1992) explained: “the processes of environmental degradation and
appropriation of natural resources by a few have specific class-gender as well
as locational implications. . . . ‘Women’ therefore cannot be posited . . . as a
unitary category, even within a country, let alone across the Third World or
globally” (150). Instead of locating the domination of women and of nature in
ideology alone, Agarwal pointed to the “material sources of dominance (based
on economic advantage and political power)” and the importance of “women’s
lived material relationship with nature” (151). Like Christine Cuomo (1998)
and Victoria Davion (1994), Agarwal (2001) was concerned that the celebration
of women’s defense of nature not be translated “into schemes which increase
women’s work burden, without any assurance of their share in resources, or
of men sharing women’s workloads” (12). To foreground these distinctions,
Agarwal defined her approach as “feminist environmentalism,” as opposed to
“ecofeminism” (ibid.).
Clearly, Agarwal’s distinctions remain critical for an effective ecofeminism
and feminist environmentalism alike, and her term was largely adopted by
feminist geographers and economists. Other branches of activist and scholarly
ecofeminism were already committed to addressing issues of class, culture, and
ethnicity, and most academic ecofeminists responded positively to Agarwal’s
argument, incorporating its key features into their own work though without
renaming their approach.6 By the 1990s, the term “ecofeminism” had already
developed a following, with the terms “ecological feminism” and “feminist
environmentalism” seeming more like intra-disciplinary distinctions, rather
than entirely different approaches. The resistance of mainstream feminism to
ecofeminism seemed to come from sources other than Agarwal’s well-reasoned
claims.
Adopting the academic posture of exposing essentialism, two kinds of cri-
tiques were advanced: One against conflating the categories of sex and gender
and homogenizing women’s experiences, and the other against the inclusion of
species and nature as analytical categories crucial for feminist thought. Only
the first critique was legitimately grounded.
In the 1990s, ecofeminists themselves explored the manifestations of gender
essentialism within ecofeminism, thereby seeking to strengthen and augment
the theory. Davion’s “Is Ecofeminism Feminist?” (1994) distinguished between
the gender essentialism of the “ecofeminine” and the critique of gender roles that
was necessary to ecofeminism: “there may be no unified experience of femininity
36 · Feminist Formations 23.2

(or womanhood),” Davion explained, and, in fact, some elite women may be
oppressors of other women and the natural world alike (19–20). Celebrations of
“the feminine role,” the “feminine principle,” or the “feminine values” of god-
dess spirituality homogenize and essentialize women, equating sex and gender
while erasing critical differences like race and class. Such critical distinctions,
and the emphasis on gender as a social construction, were already articulated
within ecofeminism by King (1989) and Plumwood (1991), and taxonomies of
the diverse ecofeminisms were soon developed (Gaard 1998; Merchant 1995;
Sturgeon 1997). Moreover, the highly effective uses of a “strategic essentialism”
in direct activisms have long been noted by ecofeminists (Bari 1994; Godfrey
2005; Sturgeon 1997) and provide the foundation for later developments of
“material feminisms” (Alaimo and Heckman 2007), as well as Salleh’s feminist
“embodied materialism” (Canavan, Klarr, and Vu 2010).
But in the 1990s, with the increasing visibility of the branch of “animal”
ecofeminism (which had been present from the beginning) through such
publications as Collard and Contrucci’s Rape of the Wild (1989), Adams’s The
Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), three essays (by Adams, Curtin, Slicer) developing
an ecofeminist critique of speciesism in Hypatia’s special issue on “Ecological
Feminism” (Warren 1991), and the first anthology to place species at the center
of ecofeminism, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Gaard 1993b), charges
of essentialism soon dominated the critiques and became the leading edge of
the anti-ecofeminism backlash.
Criticisms of ecofeminism came from both mainstream feminisms and
formerly ecofeminist philosophers. In her retrospective essay on “feminist envi-
ronmentalism” (published by Signs a decade after the earlier ecofeminist review
essay was rejected), Joni Seager (2003a) identifies the criticisms against ecofemi-
nism as the essentialism of the woman–nature connection, and the bifurcations
between spirituality–politics and theory–activism (946). Thompson (2006) like-
wise identifies the criticisms as charges of both essentialism and ethnocentrism.
Few scholars point out the feminist resistance to acknowledging that feminists
can still be oppressors of other women (via race and class privilege) and of other
female animals, which was the uncomfortable point that animal ecofeminists
made: That women’s socially reproductive labor is analogous (though not iden-
tical) to the female reproductive capacities and lives that are exploited in the
production of cows’ milk and the female egg-laying capacity that is exploited
in chickens (Adams 1990; Gruen 1993, 2009). Throughout the 1980s, 1990s,
and into the new millennium, vegetarian ecofeminists foregrounded species as
they addressed the intersections of feminism, ecology, race, class, gender, and
nation through a variety of issues: Animal experimentation and the myth of
the animal’s willing sacrifice; industrialized animal food production and its
reliance on undocumented immigrant workers (who risk deportation if they
report their hazardous workplace conditions); vegan and vegetarian diets in
relation to social and environmental justice, as well as to human and animal
 Greta Gaard · 37

health; contextual moral vegetarianism; hunting and the social construction

of masculinity; the sexism and racism of PETA’s “I’d Rather Go Naked Than
Wear Fur” campaign; mad cow disease in terms of social–ecological–interspecies
ethics; rBGH and its effects on female humans, cows, and calves, as well as on
small farmers and the environment; the essentialism of the gendered “Mother
Earth” metaphor; and the uses of restoring truncated narratives and contextual-
izing ethical decisions in analyzing what might appear to be competing issues
among various oppressed groups (women, indigenous communities, nonhuman
animals, workers, immigrants, the environment).
In the course of developing these arguments, ecofeminism was developing
in convergence with the environmental health and justice movements. Ecofemi-
nists foregrounded issues like black ghetto ecology (Brown 1983), colonialism
and third world development (Shiva 1990), the United Farm Workers grape
boycott (O’Loughlin 1993), and environmental justice theory (Taylor 1997) in
ecofeminist anthologies, and some later renamed their transformed ecofeminism
as a hybrid “global feminist environmental justice” (Sturgeon 2009). But as with
postmodern feminisms, environmental justice theory did not as readily listen to
or embrace ecofeminist insights, and the focus on race, class, and environment
backgrounded issues of gender, sexuality, and species for roughly fifteen years,
from the mid-1990s through the first decade of the new millennium. During that
period, the anti-essentialist backlash succeeded in denouncing ecofeminism,
largely via arguments over speciesism.
From mainstream feminism, three arguments against the inclusion of
species as an analytical feminist framework were advanced under the cover of
anti-essentialist critique. Kathryn George’s “Should Feminists Be Vegetarians?”
(1994), Beth Dixon’s “The Feminist Connection between Women and Animals”
(1996), and Mary Stange’s Woman the Hunter (1997) all insisted that consider-
ation of nonhuman animals within feminism was essentialist and ethnocentric.
Four vegan ecofeminists responded to George’s critique, and this time, Signs
permitted their responses to be published (1995) in a “Comments and Reply”
section at the back of the journal. There, Adams (1995) documented ongoing
refutations of George’s flawed nutritional data, which George had curiously
omitted from her article; Donovan noted the omission of studies on traditional
vegetarian populations that were carefully contextualized in terms of race, class,
and nationality; and Gaard and Gruen noted George’s failure to use feminist
methodology in her uncritical embrace of overconsumption, along with a per-
sistent slippage from logic to insinuation and faulty inference. George’s reply
(1995) was organized in a way that appears to address these criticisms, but in
effect merely elaborated on her initial claims.
Gaard (1996) and Gruen (1996) also responded to Dixon’s straw-woman
charge that ecofeminists claim that “if animals are like women, then feminists
must defend them” by pointing to the intersectional analysis of oppression
available through Plumwood’s (1993) development of the master model, Iris
38 · Feminist Formations 23.2

Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression” (1990), and Marilyn Frye’s (1983) birdcage
analogy of the intertwining wires as different structures of oppression. Like
George and Dixon, Stange’s work also overlooked feminist and ecofeminist
theory, advancing a liberal feminist argument that women should join men in
hunting both for its “transformation of consciousness” and its alleged empower-
ment, but failing to consider “the fundamental insight of animal ecofeminism:
The importance of speciesism as a form of oppression that is interconnected
with and reinforcing of other oppressive structures” (Gaard 2000, 206). After
rejecting cultural ecofeminism’s celebration of goddess spirituality, Stange then
celebrated Artemis the Hunter as a model of women’s empowerment—a visible
contradiction that did not deter mainstream feminists from using Stange’s work
to discredit ecofeminsm.
Among ecofeminist philosophers, vegan ecofeminists already had advanced
a carefully nuanced approach to consumption that eschewed universalizing,
ahistorical claims in Curtin’s “Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care” (1991).
Curtin’s theory of a contextual moral vegetarianism explains that “the reasons
for moral vegetarianism may differ by locale, by gender, as well as by class,”
and while there does not exist “an absolute moral rule that prohibits meat
eating under all circumstances” (69), it is clear that “moral vegetarianism is
completely compelling as an expression of an ecological ethic of care . . . for
economically well-off persons in technologically advanced countries” (70). Yet,
the most prominent ecofeminist philosophers began distancing themselves
from ecofeminism’s animal ethics, first with Warren’s use of the term (and title)
“ecological feminism” (1994), and her later disassociation from the interspe-
cies ethics of Gaard’s Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (1993b) with her
play on the title in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (1997). And while
Plumwood’s life-altering experience as prey for a crocodile (1995) informed
her philosophy, it took five years for her to make a public statement about her
own ethical vegetarianism, wherein she distanced herself from other animal
ecofeminists by naming her approach as “critical feminist eco-socialist analysis”
(2000, 2002). By the turn of the millennium, other prominent ecofeminist or
feminist environmentalists (Seager 2003b; Warren 2000) finally announced
their vegetarianism as well.
In conjunction with the charges of essentialism were the criticisms of
ecofeminism’s allegedly essentialist spirituality that both gendered the earth
as female and led to elite, apolitical retreat and individual salvation rather
than inspiring engaged struggles for local, community-wide, and global eco-
justice. Yet, ecofeminist theory, spirituality, and practice have consistently been
rooted in activism that challenges any notions of essentialism. Both Catriona
Mortimer-Sandilands (2008) and Chaone Mallory (2010) have explored the
forest defense movement in the Pacific Northwest, with the former author
exploring the contested role of ecofeminism in the 1993 Clayoquot Sound peace
camp, and Mallory uncovering the role that gender, sexuality, and earth-based
 Greta Gaard · 39

spirituality played in the “Straw Devil” women’s- and trans-only campaign of

2003, empowering forest activists to stand in defense of economic justice and
environmental sustainability. “Clayoquot was not only a contest over nature,”
writes Mortimer-Sandilands (2008), “but also a contest over gender,” as ecofemi-
nist principles were invoked to negotiate and disrupt dominant understand-
ings of the relations between women and nature; metaphors of maternalism
and forest defense were hotly debated among peace camp activists and later
appropriated by the timber company, MacMillan Bloedel, through its images
of pro-forestry representative Linda Coady in late-pregnancy, allegedly defend-
ing the maternal and pro-nature values of the logging industry (307, 309–10).
Through these and other examples, Mortimer-Sandilands argues that “the use of
essentialism as a dismissive label tout court is a form of disavowal through which
some current strands of so-called third-wave feminism can forget the complex
gender histories through which they themselves have been constituted—as if
feminist politics can, somehow, demonstrate its own progress by showing what
it has (obviously) left behind” (306).
In the other essay on forest activism, Mallory draws on Elizabeth Carl-
assare’s (1993) work identifying the “policing” of ecofeminism via charges of
essentialism, and on Bonnie Mann’s (2006) research demonstrating that “the
charge of essentialism has long functioned to silence certain feminisms—
especially feminisms that assert that gender and environmental oppressions
must be examined together” (Mallory 2010, 62). She concludes that the fear
of spirituality is at the root of academic feminism’s resistance to ecofeminism,
since spirituality is seen as both apolitical (or regressively so) and essentialist.
Yet, many spiritual feminists are activists as well: Adams’s Ecofeminism and the
Sacred (1993) anthologizes a diversity of ecological and spiritual feminist activist-
writers; both Spretnak (1982) and Starhawk (1999) perceive their spirituality as
empowering their activisms; and Starhawk has persistently engaged with issues
of globalization and economic and ecological justice, from the 1980s antinuclear
protests through the antiglobalization movements of the 1990s and beyond. For
a decade, ecofeminists like Patrick Murphy (1988), Yaakov Jerome Garb (1990),
Catherine Roach (1991), Gaard (1993a), and Sandilands (1997) had advanced
critiques of the Mother Earth metaphor (popular among hunters and deep ecolo-
gists, as well as advocates of goddess spirituality and cultural ecofeminism) for
its gender essentialism and homogenization of ecological, cultural, and species
differences. In sum, the feminist critique of ecofeminism as inseparable from
an essentialist spirituality rested on shaky evidence.
Of course, feminists were not the only group to provide a cool reception to
ecofeminist ideas: Deep ecologists, social ecologists, Greens, animal liberation-
ists, and other environmentalists also responded to ecofeminism with skepti-
cism.7 Throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, debates between ecofeminists and
deep ecologists took place within the pages of The Trumpeter and Environmental
Ethics, with ecofeminists charging that deep ecology’s description of the root
40 · Feminist Formations 23.2

cause of Western culture’s destruction of the natural world—anthropocen-

trism—should more properly be termed “androcentrism,” since the majority of
women and people of color were only marginally included in the elite, white
male domination of nature. Ecofeminists also rejected the gender-oblivious
“deep ecological self” developed by deep ecologists to articulate their experi-
ences of oneness with nature as fundamentally narcissistic, androcentric, and
colonizing. Finally, ecofeminists criticized deep ecologists for romanticizing
their connection with wild nature through the violence of hunting (Kheel 1990,
1995, 1996, 2008; Luke 1997, 1998), for omitting the analyses of feminists from
the construction of their theories (Salleh 1997), and for constructing a theory
that functioned merely as the unfolding of white middle-class environmental-
ism in its regard for wilderness, but its utter disinterest in social justice and
the functioning of capitalism both in the United States and internationally
(Plumwood 1991, 1993). In turn, deep ecologists tended to regard ecofeminism
as a subset of deep ecology on these two philosophies’ points of convergence,
and to regard ecofeminism as simply wrong when their viewpoints diverged.
The debate finally ended (without resolution) in 1995, with Deborah Slicer’s
perceptive essay “Is There an Ecofeminism–Deep Ecology ‘Debate’?” wherein
she argued that although essays on the differences between the two perspec-
tives continued to be published, deep ecologists did not seem to be listening to
ecofeminists, reading ecofeminist scholarship, or accurately representing and
responding to ecofeminist standpoints.
From social ecologists, the first open challenge to ecofeminism appeared
with the publication of Janet Biehl’s Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (1991). Like
other feminists, Biehl charged ecofeminism with essentialism, again overlooking
the branch of social ecofeminism developed by King and Heller, feminists within
Biehl’s own community of social ecologists. Roundly refuted by ecofeminist
activists and philosophers alike (Buege 1994; Gaard 1992; Gruen 1992; Plum-
wood 1992), Biehl’s advocacy of social ecology and its celebration of libertarian
municipalism remained “caught in the old credo of a single ground of hierarchy
and a single solution to domination, a reduction which is fundamentally miscon-
ceived, insensitive to difference, and blind to exclusion” (Plumwood 1992, 36).
Yet, it was used to open a firestorm of feminist backlash against ecofeminism.
By the latter half of the 1990s and beyond, ecofeminism was diversifying
its analysis: Intersections of ecofeminism and queer theory (Gaard 1997; San-
dilands 1994, 1997, 1999, 2001a, 2001b) and a materialist base for ecofeminist
analyses of human–human, human–animal, and human–nature oppressions
(Noske 1997) were developed, along with ecofeminist perspectives on eco-social
movements (Gaard 1998; Mellor 1997; Salleh 1997), theories of democracy
and identity (Plumwood 2002; Sandilands 1999), and the intersections of eco-
feminism and environmental justice (Sturgeon 1997; Warren 1998). Animal
ecofeminists developed a culturally specific, contextualized approach to address
the competing claims of indigenous communities, animal rights activists, and
 Greta Gaard · 41

environmentalists in the widely contested Makah whale hunt of 1999 (Gaard

2001; Gruen 2001; Hawkins 2001). But the anti-essentialist backlash against
ecofeminism had already taken its toll: Feminist graduate students were being
advised against undertaking ecofeminist approaches in their dissertations, and
scholars were advised against publishing works with the word “ecofeminism”
in their titles or keywords. At a time when ecofeminists were at the forefront of
bringing animal, feminist, and environmental justice perspectives to feminist
theory, environmental studies, and ecocriticism alike, ecofeminism itself had
already become discredited.
Despite their differences, ecofeminists still maintain a footing in envi-
ronmental and ecocritical contexts, yet ecofeminism is openly spurned in
mainstream feminism. While the National Women’s Studies Association’s
annual conference theme in 1995 addressed “Women and the Environment:
Globalizing and Mobilizing” with keynote speakers Vandana Shiva and Winona
LaDuke, five years later, that conference theme still had not influenced the
human-centered focus of women’s studies, gender studies, or queer studies.8
Interest in human bodies was seen as suitably political—interest in animal
bodies and nature was not.

Keep the Focus, Lose the Name: Ecofeminists in the New Millennium

On my way from the parking lot into the gym, I caught up to a senior feminist
scholar whose primary interests were in antiracist feminism and coalition-build-
ing, and who had provided the only Euro-American Jewish lesbian perspective
on my dissertation committee long ago. She told me about her current research
projects, and then I described the article I was writing about the antifeminist
backlash against ecofeminism.
“Where are the women of color?” she asked pointedly.
“Everywhere,” I replied, listing the issues of food security, environmental
toxins, reproductive justice, forestry, urban and rural housing, hydropower dams,
and more. But my colleague’s question articulated the persistent mainstream
feminist assumption that ecofeminism was ethnocentric, elitist, and essential-
ist—just a “white women’s thing” and an irrelevant distraction from feminism’s
more critical work addressing social injustices.9
It is no wonder that feminist scholars and activists eager to receive the
acceptance and respect accorded to rigorous scholarship and committed to
sparking consciousness-change that results in real actions have taken the
anarchist strategy of abandoning institutions and terms that no longer func-
tion as conduits for critical ideas, and have continued their work under dif-
ferent labels. What terminology should be used? What language has the most
communicative force? In 1997, Noël Sturgeon advocated retaining the word
“ ‘ecofeminism’ as a term [that] indicates a double political intervention, of
environmentalism into feminism and feminism into environmentalism” (169),
42 · Feminist Formations 23.2

but a decade later, Sturgeon (2009) had also renamed her approach as “global
feminist environmental justice.” Working as an ecofeminist theorist throughout
the 1990s, Mortimer-Sandilands’s most recent work advances her earlier work
on ecofeminism, democracy, and sexuality in her co-edited volume, through
the term Queer Ecologies (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010).
Similarly, the ecofeminist corrective distinction between essentialism and
an acknowledgment of embodied, material connections with the environment,
first articulated in Slicer’s “Toward an Ecofeminist Standpoint Theory” (1998)
and also visible in both breast cancer and environmental justice activisms alike,
is carried forward in Alaimo and Heckman’s Material Feminisms (2007). There,
the editors note that
predominant feminist theories, from Simone de Beauvoir to Gayle Rubin and
Monique Wittig, have pursued a “flight from nature,” relentlessly disentangling
“woman” from the supposed ground of essentialism, reductionism, and stasis.
The problem with this approach, however, is that the more feminist theories
distance themselves from “nature,” the more that very nature is implicitly or
explicitly reconfirmed as the treacherous quicksand of misogyny. (4)

Rather than perpetuate the gendered and essentialist culture–nature dualism,

Alaimo and Heckman argue for the agency of nature and for a material feminism
that reconceptualizes nature in ways that account for “ ‘intra-actions’ (in Karen
Barad’s terms) between phenomena that are material, discursive, human, more-
than-human, corporeal, and technological” (5). In contrast, Mallory (2009) has
defended both the critical force of the term “ecofeminism,” rather than the more
neutral “gender and the environment” (because men, women, and transgendered
persons are not situated equally in terms of environmental oppression), and the
political force of the ecofeminism for its insistence on a more inclusive feminism,
one that exposes the anthropocentrism of other feminisms.
At the same time that feminists wrestle with finding language that will
communicate the focus and implications of their work, scholars in fields outside
of feminism—such as posthumanism (Wolfe 2003), postcolonial ecocriticism
(Huggan and Tiffin 2010), and animal studies (Kalof and Fitzgerald 2007; Sha-
piro and DeMello 2010)—are moving forward with ideas initially developed in
feminist and ecofeminist contexts, often without acknowledging those contexts
as foundations for their work. Is this silence a form of antifeminism, a feat of
prestidigitation that simultaneously appropriates and erases feminist scholarship?
Is it intellectual dishonesty? Is it simple ignorance of the work that has been
done? Or is it, as an eco-anarchist might argue, a clear example of diffusion in
the ways that liberatory ideas travel, gain acceptance, and take root, like wild
dandelions?
While the critical tensions in this series of questions deserve to be
addressed, for the moment a few certainties are clear. The history of ecofeminism
merits recuperation, both for the intellectual lineage it provides and for the
 Greta Gaard · 43

feminist force it gives to contemporary theory. Pragmatically, readers search-

ing for linkages among ideas are better served by a consistency in keywords;
social-change activists are more able to recognize the radically democratic
chain of equivalencies across liberatory movements when participants identify
themselves as acting from a specific constituency or analytical framework. Such
efforts at making connections visible are most effective when they are multidi-
rectional, coming from standpoints that are marginalized as well as those that
are privileged. Breeze Harper’s anthology Sistah Vegan (2010) offers just such an
example of intersectional analysis, responding to vegan ecofeminist arguments
from two decades earlier, but from a base of eco-womanism (Phillips 2006, 2010),
distinct from mainstream feminism.
The erasure of ecofeminism from feminism and other critical theories
exposes the anti-feminist uses of the backlash, as Mortimer-Sandilands (2009)
explains:
More recent rejections of ecofeminism—e.g., by privileged straight white men
in ecocritical and ecophilosophical texts that summarize ecofeminism in a
couple of paragraphs and then dismiss it as hopelessly outmoded and essen-
tialist—actually seem to play on the dissent that occurs within ecofeminism.
Not surprisingly, rather than take up the important questions that critics
raise about gender and sexuality in ecofeminism, they use anti-essentialist
rhetoric to dismiss the significance of gender and sexuality to environmental
thought and politics altogether, as if any and all ecofeminist questions are
moot because not all of us agree on what the “right” feminist perspective is.

Another feminist scholar, Simon Estok (2009), who has made a point
of exploring the intersections between ecofeminism and ecocriticism in his
own work (2001), explains his silence about using the term “ecofeminism” in
this way:
I want to be very clear about my position: For me, it is not ecocriticism if it
is not also demonstrably committed to feminism. . . . [so] my use of the term
“ecocriticism” is, in some sense, strategic. I think that mainstream ecocritics
(many of the men and certainly some of the women) react strongly against
ecofeminism simply because it is done mainly by women. . . . most men see
ecofeminism as at best peripheral and at worst as a threat (which really means
most men see women as peripheral or as a threat). Perhaps I’m wrong, but
raw sexism in its most basic form, if you ask me, is the first thing behind the
backlash. (emphasis in original)

As the slogan goes, “I’ll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy”—and when

sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, classism, racism, speciesism, ableism, ageism,
and the global inequalities produced and exacerbated by industrial capitalism
and the legacies of colonialism cease to be a problem, then feminism will have
accomplished its goals and outlived its usefulness.
44 · Feminist Formations 23.2

In the year 2011 (and beyond, I suspect), there is no lack of eco-justice

issues to interrogate, theorize, organize around, and transform using the analyses
of an ecological feminism: Global gender justice; climate justice; sustainable
agriculture; healthy and affordable housing; universal and reliable health care,
particularly maternal and infant health care; safe, reliable, and free or low-cost
reproductive technologies; food security; sexual self-determination; energy jus-
tice; interspecies justice; ecological, diverse, and inclusive educational curricula;
religious freedom from fundamentalisms; indigenous rights; the production and
disposal of hazardous wastes; and more. An intersectional ecological-feminist
approach frames these issues in such a way that people can recognize common
cause across the boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, species, age, ability,
nation—and affords a basis for engaged theory, education, and activism. What
shall we name this approach, so that future generations of feminists can find
its history, its conceptual tools and activist strategies, its critique of economic
imperialism, cultural and ecological colonialism, gender and species oppression?
If there is to be a future for “New Eco-feminism,”10 it will need to be more
cognizant of its rich and prescient history.

Acknowledgments

This historical survey focuses on North American ecofeminism, which has

been developed and influenced by ecofeminists in Canada, the United States,
India, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe. National contexts surely
influence theory, and given the length and depth of my analysis, I have had
to limit its scope in order to ensure its reliability. I am grateful to Lori Gruen,
Marti Kheel, pattrice jones, and the three anonymous reviewers whose feedback
all helped to strengthen the arguments here.

Greta Gaard currently serves on the Executive Council of the Association for the
Study of Literature and the Environment. Her research and activism address the local
and global intersections of gender, race, sexuality, species, and ecology. Her essays
have appeared in Alternatives, The Ecologist, Women & Environments, ISLE:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Hypatia, Ethics
& the Environment, Environmental Ethics, Signs, and other journals, bringing
a feminist perspective to explore intersections of social, species, and environmental
justice. Her book publications include Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature
(Temple University Press, 1993); Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (University of
Illinois Press, 1998); Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens (Temple
University Press, 1998); and a book of creative nonfiction, The Nature of Home
(University of Arizona Press, 2007). She can be reached at greta.gaard@uwrf.edu.
 Greta Gaard · 45

Notes

1. For a discussion of feminism and ecocriticism, see “New Directions for

Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism” (Gaard 2010).
2. The Unity Statement of the Women’s Pentagon Action on the Peacework Web
site offers an ecological and feminist analysis of domination that—with its stated desire
for “good food, useful work, decent housing, communities with clean air and water, good
care for our children while we work . . . health care which respects and understands our
bodies, freedom from violence, reproductive and sexual freedom, renewable energy, an
end to racism”—is as timely in 2010 as it was in 1980. Accessed 22 July 2010. <www.
peaceworkmagazine.org/womens-pentagon-action-unity-statement-0>.
3. For manifestations of ecofeminism in non-Western cultures like Kenya, Chiapas,
India, Taiwan, Chile, Brazil, and Japan, see Heather Eaton and Lois Ann Lorentzen’s
excellent Ecofeminism & Globalization (2003).
4. When I presented a version of this article at the National Women’s Studies
Association (NWSA) 2010 conference, I was corrected by a member of the audience:
Gwyn Kirk let me know that her anthology Women’s Lives (2009), edited with Margo
Okazawa-Rey, offers a full section on ecofeminism and an ecological approach overall.
5. Such statements confirm the prescience of ecofeminist analyses of animal
oppression that are now more widely confirmed through studies like the United Nations,
Food and Agricultural Organization’s 2006 report Livestock’s Long Shadow and David
Cassuto’s report “The CAFO Hothouse” (2010).
6. “I have identified myself as an ecofeminist consistently since I first read the term,”
Cate Mortimer-Sandilands (2009) has explained. “I have never liked the subdivision of
the term into social-, cultural-, anarcha-, etc. for several reasons. First, it always reminds
me of the ‘Monty Python: Life of Brian’ scene in which Eric Idle insists that he’s a
member of the People’s Liberation Front of Judea, not the Judean People’s Liberation
Front (or is it the opposite?). I know that’s a dig specifically at Marxism, but it’s a good
one: Freud called it ‘the fetishization of small differences,’ and I think we all have more
in common than the hyphenations suggest. Second and relatedly, I think it’s far more
important, intellectually and politically, for ecofeminists to include than to specialize.
That doesn’t mean I’m not willing to debate” (personal communication).
7. Carol Adams has described the struggles over feminism in the animal rights
movement (see a recent interview at www.caroljadams.com/interviews6.html). Marti
Kheel (2010) also describes the Feminists for Animal Rights (FAR) battles with PETA
over the “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign in 1995, battles that have
persisted in various forms to the present: “Over the years, FAR has received numerous
letters complaining about PETA’s tactics and our response was along the lines of ‘Femi-
nists for Animal Rights has received countless letters like yours over the years and we
have conveyed these concerns to PETA numerous times, all to no avail. Since some of
their work is very good it is difficult to get people to realize that the sexist tactics that
they use do a disservice not only to women but to the larger cause of animal liberation.
We encourage you to express your criticisms directly to PETA.’ A couple of years ago I
met an activist who told me that when she called Ingrid [Newkirk, head of PETA] to
complain about their sexist tactics she was told that the only women who complain
about their tactics are the ones who don’t look good naked! (yes, this from a woman
who calls herself a feminist!).”
46 · Feminist Formations 23.2

8. One anonymous reviewer here expressed confusion about whether women

“come first” or “the ‘eco’ comes first” in ecofeminism, and the answer is that both are
linked. Numerous foundational articles in ecofeminism throughout the 1980s repeat
the ecofeminist perspective that social injustices and environmental injustices are
linked and are therefore most productively examined together. We do not exist apart
from our environments. As a movement to end all forms of domination, ecofeminism
is a logical development of feminism, linking “naturism” to the various forms of human
domination (see Warren 1987, 1990).
9. An eco-anarcha-feminist and founder of the Eastern Shore Sanctuary, pattrice
jones, comments that “the charge of being ‘a white thing’ is leveled against animal
rights (and, I suspect, ecofeminism) largely by whites who use race as an excuse not to
explore that aspect of their privilege” (2010d). jones’s work on inter-species psychology
(2010a, 2010b) and eco-justice activism (2007) affirms antiracist ecofeminist praxis; see
her “Afterword: Liberation as Connection and the Decolonization of Desire” (2010c)
in Sistah Vegan.
10. At Duke University, a new generation of feminists is revisiting what they call
the “New Eco-feminism” project, yet their invited speakers for the first year’s seminar
included only one feminist (Donna Haraway) and two other women (Temple Gran-
din and Irene Pepperberg), all of whom perpetuate species hierarchy in their “animal
studies.” The full text of “Women’s Studies Examines the New Eco-Feminism” reads
as follows: “As many may know, a discourse emerged in the mid-1970’s that aimed to
investigate the connection between feminism and earth and animals. These women
called themselves Eco-Feminists and generated many ideas about the nature of women,
the plight of animals, and the need for conservation. Due to a whole host of theoretical
and practical conflicts, this project was never seriously embraced by academic feminists.
Duke Women’s Studies New Eco-feminism project hopes to revisit these questions, and
develop theories and methodologies that will resonate within academic feminism today.
We learned from E2T that there is a great need for further study of conservation, land
use, and animal advocacy, not just from the perspective of science but from the humani-
ties and interpretive sciences as well. We believe that contemporary feminist theory has
much to offer such an engagement. Despite the fact that our eco-feminist foremothers
may have been entrenched in essentialist ideology in their formulations, we believe
their questions were the right ones. What can feminist thinking offer in response to the
many global crises we face today including massive development, deforestation, animal
torture, extinction, habitat loss, pollution, and global warming?” Accessed 22 July 2010.

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