ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
36
to both social and ecological privileges; they see only the image of ‘mother
earth’ as a nurturing victim in need of their protection and control.
The practice of authentically ‘knowing’ nature is one of politicized critical
self-consciousness. As social creatures, we look at the world through social
eyes. In order to see nature, we must be increasingly conscious of how our
understandings of ‘nature’ are shaped by historical institutions such as
Christianity, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy which give rise to contradictory
yet persistent notions of nature as pure, greedy, competitive, dark, passive, and
nurturing. For instance, if we are not conscious of the social-religious causes of
our own social guilt and self-hatred, we will romanticize nature as a pure and
superior being before which we feel puny, humbled, and wretched. In the
same way, if we do not transcend “internalized capitalism,” a hegemonic
acceptance of capitalism as normative, inevitable, and progressive, we will
continue to portray nature as a social Darwinian nightmare: a romantic drama
in which only the strongest knights, or those best able to make a buck, can
survive. In this shameful narrative, the privileged turn their backs on the ‘poor
majority5 who carry both the brunt of and the blame for ecological injustices. In
contrast, a radical love of nature entails that we become aware of the history of
ideas of nature in addition to politically resisting social hierarchies that nurture
distorted understandings and practices of nature as well.
In particular, we must extend this critical self-consciousness to our poetic
and visual expressions of our desire for nature. We must be critical of our use
of metaphors and images of natural processes, making sure that they do not
reproduce racist or sexist cultural stereotypes. While there are indigenous
cultures that appeal to non-sexist female images of nature, when members of
non-indigenous
cultures
attempt
to
deploy
‘mother-earth’
metaphors,
something vital is lost in the translation. Indeed, a metaphor which emerges
within the language of an indigenous people cannot always be translated into
the language of a culture that emerged in an era of modern and postmodern
capitalism.
Audre Lorde points to a similar linguistic difficulty when discussing the
slave who uses the “master’s tools” to dismantle the master’s house.29 This has
been an ongoing struggle especially for ecofeminists relying upon patriarchal
language and philosophical constructs to critique and reconstruct patriarchal
discourses that relate to ecology. Often, the origin of words and their historical
relationship to oppressive ideologies actually contradicts the very spirit of
liberation that ecofeminists attempt to convey. Within the current society,
female metaphors of nature cannot be abstracted from Western patriarchal
values, desires, and definitions of women that saturate media, religion, and
educational forums. The metaphor of ‘mother-nature’ is culturally loaded with
masculinist ideologies
that
‘justify’
women’s
compulsory heterosexuality,