61
THE ECOFEMINIST DESIRE FOR NATURE
U.S.
EcoFem In isivi
Of Hie
Late 1 980s AncI BEyoNd
"While ecofeminists from the U.S. participated in international feminist forums
during the mid-1980s, an autonomous ecofeminist movement in their own
country began to wind down. The early years of U.S. ecofeminist activity were
for many the ‘high point’ of the movement’s history. Punctuated by the Women
and
life
on
Earth
Conference,
WPAs,
Seneca
Peace
Encampment,
WomanEarth, and an array of local actions in the Northeast and throughout the
country, these short years in the early 1980s were a time in which U.S.
ecofeminism was
particularly
rooted
in
an
activist
tradition
originally
constituted by the New Left.
Indeed, by the late 1980s, although many individual ecofeminists were
active in Green movements, struggles for animal rights, and forest defense
work, there was little to suggest that autonomous ecofeminist activism would
be revived. If ecofeminism did not take to the streets, it took to the many
literary and educational forums that would proliferate over the next decade.
The bursts of early ecofeminist activity had captured the imaginations of a wide
range of activists, students, and scholars interested in feminist critiques of
science, environmentalism, animal rights, feminist theology, and feminist
philosophy, both within and outside of (he academy. By the early 1990s, there
were three ecofeminist anthologies, an array of ecofeminist journals, related
books, major conferences, workshops and university curricula that helped to
further stimulate excitement about ecofeminism.
During
this time, some left-oriented feminists noticed a problematic
tendency within the movement: its vague relationship to anarchist or leftist
politics. The ecofeminism introduced by King at the ISE was linked to a vision
of a non-hierarchical, ecological society free of statist and capitalist social
relations.29 Hie Women’s Unity Statement of the WPAs reflected this sentiment
by challenging (he power of the state and capital through its defamation of the
Pentagon, the U.S. government, and multinational corporations.
From a social ecofeminist perspective,
an ecofeminist perspective
informed by social ecology and social anarchism, the writings that filled the
pages of the first two major anthologies on ecofeminism were disappointing
indeed. Of the twenty-six chapters of the anthology Healing the Wounds,
published in 1989, there were only two authors, Vandana Shiva and Ynestra
King, who mentioned the words capitalism or the state. Instead, writers
pointed to the causes of ecological destruction by appealing to terms such as
“technology”,
“patriarchal
rationality”,
“economic
motivation”
and
“industrialization.” For instance, in her introduction to the anthology, Judith
Plant describes the causes of ecological destruction to be the result of a man’s
world: