ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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[Tlhe world is rapidly being penetrated, consumed, and destroyed by
this man’s world—spreading across the face of the earth, teasing and
tempting the last remnants of loving peoples with its modern glass
beads—televisions and tanks; filling the ears of poor peoples with
doublespeak about security, only to establish dangerous technology
on their homelands; voraciously trying to control all that is natural,
regarding nature as a natural resource to be exploited for the gain of
a few.30
In this passage, Plant points to the effects of, and social relations within, a
market economy by discussing the exploitative “gain of the few .” Yet Plant fails
to mediate her discussion of the causes of ecological problems with categories
of race, class, or with an understanding of institutional forms of capitalist and
state power. Instead, she invokes universal notions such as this man’s world
(retained from radical feminist theory) that did not help to clarify her political
position.
During this time, some social ecofeminists, along with other ecofeminists,
also began to notice a minor, but notable, romantic tendency within several
ecofeminist writings that made the theory a target for unending, and often
unfair, criticisms of essentialism 31 The second major ecofeminist andiology,
Reweaving the World (containing essays written in the late 1980s),52 was
punctuated with several unproblematized essentialisms regarding nature and
culture. For example, in her essay ‘‘Ecofeminism: Our Roots and Flowering,”
Charlene Spretnak described “the elemental power of the female”33 appealing
to an essentialist notion of ‘gender’. In turn, while reflecting upon the day on
which she introduced her newborn daughter to the world of nature by
bringing her into the backyard of a Los Angeles hospital, Spretnak conflates
this act with that of ritual practiced by Omaha Indians:
I introduced her to the pine trees and the plants and the flowers, and
they to her, and finally to the pearly moon wrapped in a soft haze
and to the stars. I, knowing nothing then of nature-based religious
ritual or ecofeminist theory, had felt an impulse for my wondrous
little child to meet the rest of cosmic society...that experience was so
disconnected from life in a modern, technocratic society...(that) last
year when I heard about a ritual of Omaha Indians in which the
infant is presented to the cosmos, I waxed enthusiastic...but forgot
completely that /, too, had once been there, so effective is our cultural
denial of nature...34 (emphasis added)
Spretnak’s text demonstrated the problem that surfaced as some ecofeminists
asserted universal notions of ‘nature’, ritual, and cultural practice. As a
middle-class white woman of Christian heritage, Spretnak described giving