THE ECOEEMINIST DESIRE FOR NATURE
and
children
woven
in
the
miles
of fencing
51
around
military
installations, wearing flowers and brilliant colors as we face into the
gray and khaki of militarism, opposing machines with hand-crafted
alternatives. 15
By reversing (yet reproducing) the domestic/public split as an analytical
framework, the WPA began to counter the values of capitalist consumerism
and state militarism by expressing a new revalorization of the everyday life of
the domestic sphere.
By
1981,
an
international
ecofeminist
network
had
emerged.
Ecofeminism, with its analysis of the interconnectedness of oppressions and its
insistence on the need for international dialogue, provided a global forum for
addressing women’s social and ecological crises.
In response to this 'missile
crisis’, a group of British peace and ecology activists, along with the recently
established group,
Women and Life on Earth’ in England, created the
Greenham Common Peace Encampment at the military base located there. At
the time, Greenham represented an ongoing international direct action, a
demonstration of women’s work of everyday survival in a patriarchal nuclear
age. Setting up camp outside the gates of the base, women lived in tents and
shelters and were re-evicted each morning by (he military police. Subsequently,
in solidarity with Greenham, women in the U.S. founded the Seneca Women’s
Peace Encampment in Seneca Falls, NY, to protest cruise missiles that were
positioned to leave Seneca for Europe.1^
Finally, in the mid-1980s, a group of ecofeminists began to specifically
address issues of race and class in relationship to the ecofeminist project.
Initiated in 1984, the WomanEarth. Feminist Peace Institute was founded by a
group of radical women of color, ecofeminists, and feminist peace activists
including Ynestra Ring, Gwyn Rirk, Barbara Smith, Rachel Bagby, Luisah Teish,
and Starhawk, who came together to create a multi-racial, multi-cultural forum
in which women could discuss issues of race, gender, class, peace, spirituality,
and ecology. Following the suggestion of Barbara Smith, WomanEarth became
the first feminist institute to be organized around the principle of racial parity,
giving equal voice, participation, and leadership to both women of color and
white women.17
While WomanEarth sought to become an educational and political
institute that could provide a base for an ecofeminist movement, internal
struggles within the organizing group regarding race and class privilege, in
addition to financial pressures, led to the eventual dissolution of the project in
1989. As Noel Sturgeon points out, however, WomanEarth still serves as an
example of a moment in ecofeminist history in which white ecofeminists
placed questions of racial privilege and power at the center of their political
agenda. The commitment that ecofeminists brought to this project was