Eco-Feminism: Vandana Shiva's "Development, Ecology and Wome

Vandana Shiva and Ecofeminism

"Development, Ecology and Women" from Staying Alive

"Make me more womanly" --

Gandhi's daily prayer

>Women of the Chipko movement: In the 1970s, an organized resistance to the destruction of forests in India.

"What do the forests bear? Soil, water and pure air."

>Women in agriculture; women in the Third World; agricultural extension services. Green revolution vs. the "Feminine Principle"

"Growth = Poverty"

Who is Vandana Shiva? What is ecofeminism?

"Development, Ecology and Women"

>Vandana Shiva is a physicist, environmental activist and ecofeminist. Shiva participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement during the 1970s and has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. She has contributed to the fields of intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, bioethics and genetic engineering. In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which led to the creation of Navdanya, a network of seed keepers and organic producers spread across 17 states in India.

>Ecofeminism (aka ecological feminism): a social and political

movement recognizing the connection between the

domination of women and the domination and destruction

of nature.

Chapter 1 summary from Staying Alive: Development as a new project of western patriarchy -- Maldevelopment as the death of the feminine principle -- Two kinds of growth, two kinds of productivity -- Two kinds of poverty.

>Links between ecological crises, colonialism and the oppression of women

>Development; growth; GNP (Gross National Product)

Conclusion of Staying Alive

Chapter 5 from Staying Alive

Shiva's letter on "The Connection Between Global Economic Policy and Violence Against Women"

Women in Agriculture

pg 224: "The two central shifts in thinking that are being induced by women's ecological struggles relate to economic and intellectual worth. The first relates to our understanding of what constitutes knowledge, and who the knowers and producers of intellectual value are. The second involves concepts of wealth and economic value and who the producers of wealth and economic value are. Women producing survival are showing us that nature is the very basis and matrix of economic life through its function in life-support and livelihood, and the elements of nature that the dominant view has treated as 'waste' as the basis of sustainability and the wealth of the poor and the marginal...They are showing that production of sustenance is basic to survival itself and cannot be deleted from economic calculations; if production of life cannot be reckoned with in money terms, then it is economic models, and not women's work in producing sustenance and life, that must be sacrificed...in recovering chances for the survival of all life, they are laying the foundations for the recovery of the feminine principle in nature and society, and through it the recovery of the earth as sustainer and provider."

Women in the Food Chain:

pg 97: “From seeing farming as a process of nurturing the earth to maintain her capacity to provide food, a masculinist shift takes place which sees farming as a process of generating profits. Ecological destruction is one inevitable result of this commercial outlook. Economic deprivation is the other, because production for profits instead of needs excludes larger numbers of women and peasants from food production and even larger numbers of women, children and the poor from entitlements to food. The fact that larger numbers of the poor in the Third World are victims of hunger and famine today is intimately related to a patriarchal model of progress which sees sales and profits as indicators of well-being and thus destroys the real well-being of people.”

http://www.wfo-oma.com/women-in-agriculture.html

http://www.wfo-oma.com/women-in-agriculture/case-studies.html

http://womenthrive.org/sites/default/files/images/case%20studies%20by%20sector.pdf

http://www.farmingfirst.org/women_infographic/

http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/i2050e/i2050e.pdf

http://www.navdanya.org/

"Could there be a connection between the growth of violent, undemocratically imposed, unjust and unfair economic policies and the growth of crimes against women?"

>"Growth" begins with violence against women by discounting their contribution to the economy. A model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women's work and wealth creation in the mind deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend -- their land, their forests, their water, their seeds and biodiversity."

>Two vital economies: nature's economy and sustenance economy

>"a culture of rape -- the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, the rape of women."

Discussion Questions