Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
feminist issues because they are fundamentally to do with relations of oppression
and as such are pertinent to the experience of women in the developing and developed
worlds, where they often seem to bear the brunt of social and ecological hardships.
For Warren, any conceptual framework that articulates a hierarchy of values,
constructs dualisms rather than complementarities or logically leads to the justification
of domination, are in themselves oppressive. She identifies eight major boundary
conditions for a feminist ethic that has profound implications for understanding and
engagement with nature and the environment. These conditions include:
•
No 'ism' that promotes social domination is acceptable (for example classism,
racism or sexism).
•
Ethical discourse and practice must be
contextual
, in other words must emerge
from the voices of people sited in different historical circumstances.
•
A feminist ethic must incorporate a range of women's voices from different
cultures and traditions, in other words be
pluralistic
.
•
Ethics are always
in process
, changing over time.
•
Inclusiveness is a guiding evaluative principle of a feminist ethics.
•
Feminist ethics are not value neutral but offer inclusivity, a 'better bias'.
•
A feminist ethics offers a central place for values that have been conventionally
downplayed or misrepresented (for example, care, love, trust and friendship).
•
A feminist ethic reconceptualizes what it is to be human - there can be no such
thing as a gender-free or gender-neutral 'mankind', no abstract individualism.
Eco-feminism therefore should be anti-naturist, refusing to perceive non-human
nature in a hierarchical or superordinate manner, with its contextual ethics based
not on rights and principles but on relationships that actually define who we are.
In this way, eco-feminism should deny the nature-culture divide but retain the capacity
to recognize difference between peoples, and between humans and the non-human
world, while maintaining a respectful attitude to both. It should refocus environmental
ethics by clarifying what nature could morally mean
for
human beings.
Although there are many areas of agreement within eco-feminism, there is also
considerable unease. The linguistic and philosophical feminization of nature, such
as the 'Mother Earth' metaphor, culturally seems to reproduce and legitimize a range
of exploitative relationships when women perform the roles of carer, life-giver,
nurturer, and so on. Empirically, there is considerable evidence showing vast socio-
economic inequalities and iniquities stemming from this ideological position and
the way society and the economy are organized (K. Warren, 1996, 2004). It should
also be remembered, as Cuomo (1992) recognizes, that women, particularly in
the industrialized and developed nations, have contributed to the exploitation of the
non-human world. This means that with eco-feminism there seems to be little support
for a biological essentialism that goes beyond offering a feminist standpoint based
on a shared understanding of cultural oppression. For Cuomo, it is not possible to
talk about caring abstractly. There has to be an object for this care and a context
in which it takes place. If care and caring is situation dependent, rather than a matter
of principle, then what will decide the issue, what will effect equitable and sustainable
change, is acute political analysis and intelligent political action.
