Greta Gaard Speaks About the Interconnected Message of Ecofeminism

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It’s an honor to be here this evening. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the ideas gathered under the umbrella “ecofeminism” coalesced in Minnesota about the same time as the Women’s Press. Both are movements that spotlight women’s experiences and perspectives on the ecosystems that we inhabit — ecological, social, political, familial and spiritual.

Ecofeminism is a perspective and movement that sees strong connections between the treatment and position of women and the treatment and position of all those seen as closer to nature, environments or ecology.

I came to ecofeminism in the summer of 1988 while searching for a way to articulate my ideas. I attended a poetry reading by Margaret Randall, Beth Brant and Meridel Le Sueur at the University of Minnesota’s Coffman Union, before it was renovated — no air conditioning. I remember the humidity in that small, main floor auditorium and the way the fans positioned around the doorways were blowing hot, humid air around us.

All three speakers voiced elements of ecofeminism. Margaret Randall shared writing about her years in Cuba — writing that has been described as too much feminism for the socialists and too much socialism for the feminists. In fact, socialist feminisms have been foundational forces in ecofeminism.

Beth Brant, who edited the first collection of Native American women’s writing, A Gathering of Spirit,  published in 1988, read from her work. Indigenous women’s perspectives have stood in solidarity with environmental justice activists, notably most recently at Standing Rock, where indigenous women showed their support. Ecofeminists have stood in solidarity with indigenous communities over water and oil. Meridel Le Sueur read from her chapbook “Word Is Movement,” about her bus trips from California to Atlanta to Tulsa to Wounded Knee.

Meridel Le Sueur’s passionate connection with the earth — her sense of humility and awe, her tenderness and fierce solidarity with all of life, her presence in the truckers strike in downtown Minneapolis — all of this articulates a sense of inter-being rooted in relationships of solidarity with indigenous and working people, women, animals, and the land.

After the reading, I went up to Meridel to thank her for her powerful words — words I had been searching to find, words that bridged feminism, ecology, and social justice. Meridel smiled and nodded, and then she kissed me right on the mouth, and she said, “They’re your words. Now use the words.”

In the 1990s, ecofeminists worked to unpack the roots alliances and multifaceted potentials of women’s concerns. Feminists for animal rights built coalitions between domestic violence shelters and animal shelters because there was a time when battered women would not leave abusive relationships because they knew they couldn’t take their animals to the women’s shelter. If they left the animal there, the animal would be nailed to the door, tortured in ways I’m not going to give us all nightmares about, so they wouldn’t leave. Feminists for animal rights worked to build conversations to host for the woman until she and her children could come to safety.

As Mollie mentioned, we ecofeminists poured a lot of energy into the green movement and green politics. In my view, it came to a culmination with the Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke presidential campaign.

Queer ecologies initially theorized and soon enacted, through personal performance art, spectacles of Mother Earth as drag queen. Amazing, powerful, witty connections between women and ecology.

In each of these channels, activists brought ecofeminist perspectives to the task of problem-solving this tangle of injustice that links social, economic, racial, gendered, sexual and multi-species inequalities globally.

Ecofeminists have been articulated through Wangari Maathai’s work in Kenya, who was not a tree hugger in the sense that that it’s been said as a put down. Neither were the women in India, the Chipko women. This is about survival. It’s about economics. It’s about interdependence.

When Wangari Maathai helped women subsistence farmers in managing their farms. Planting trees would stabilize the soil. It returned wildlife, birds and small mammals to the land, and it provided fuel, clean air and shade. So this emphasizes our mutual and interdependent survival.

Vandana Shiva in India, well known for her work challenging multinational corporations patenting indigenous seeds and biotechnologies that siphon wisdom and wealth from India’s subsistence farmers to enrich seed corporations in the first world.

Petra Kelly, a founding member of the German Green Party, received a Right Livelihood Award for her work uniting ecological wisdom, nonviolence, social justice and grassroots democracy — the four pillars of the green movement.

In the U.S., I point to the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, founded in Miami, Florida. Ecofeminists came from everywhere, mostly led by Bella Abzug and Mim Kelber, and continues today.

So, ecofeminists look to many traditions to affirm this shared wisdom of ecological inter-being — a continuity of breath among our own exhalations and the inhalations of trees, the flow of water that links all bodies in an ecosystem. The sudden recognition we feel when we recognize an ecological other — a bird, a squirrel, a tree — somehow looking at us, meeting our gaze, and communicating through the air or water or soil.

If we let it guide us, this interconnected self-identity is what will bring us together. It has the ability to save our communities. A relational ecological selfhood is not limited to a single gender, species, age, sexuality, or race. It is rooted in our interbeing. This is ecofeminism.

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