THE ECOEEMINIST DESIRE FOR NATURE
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of polluting industries, poisons, and pollutants in communities of color in
addition to the exclusion of people of color from environmental policy making,
regulatory bodies,
mainstream
and from mainstream environmental
environmentalism
or
deep
ecology,
the
groups.
struggle
UnJike
against
environmental racism does not historically emerge from an abstract or romantic
desire for nature expressed as a yearning to ‘protect’ a pre-sodal idea of
nature, but from an historical appreciation of the inseparable conditions of
ecological and social injustice.
Unlike early ecofeminist theory that emerged out of the analytical
framework of domestic/public or nature/culture, the environmental justice
movement tended to deploy categories defined in terms of race, class, and
culture.
For activists in the environmental justice movement, environmental
problems are not seen to be the result of man’s alienation from an embodied,
domestic sphere identified with women. Instead, environmental injustice is
seen to be the consequence of a specifically Western, racist, and capitalist
society that has constructed itself at the ecological and cultural expense of poor
communities of color.
Thus, in the movement for environmental justice, we see another
expression of the desire for nature, a desire for ecological integrity that reflects
yet another set of identities and situations. Often identifying as members of
indigenous cultures or communities of color struggling for survival, rather than
as “feminists” (a term emerging out of white middle-class context), a new wave
of women leaders arose during the 1980s, changing the ecological landscape in
die U.S.
Over the past ten years, women such as Winona La Duke, Peggy
Dye, Dorceta E. Taylor, Vemice'Miller, and Cynthia Hamilton have emerged as
internationally recognized leaders in the struggle to end environmental
injustice. According to Cynthia Hamilton:
Women often play a primary part in community action because it is
about things they know best. Minority women in several urban areas
have found themselves part of a new radical core as the new wave of
environmental action, precipitated by the irrationalities of capital
intensive growth, has catapulted them forward. These individuals are
responding not to nature in the abstract but to the threat to their
homes and to the health of their children.2^
Women active in struggles against environmental racism have particularized the
ecological question with a politics grounded in an analysis of history,
capitalism, and racism. During a time when many deep ecologists and
mainstream environmentalists rarely speak of capitalism as a factor in
ecological and social devastation (referring instead to euphemisms such as
‘technology’ ‘modern society’, or ‘industrial society’), environmental justice