Discourses of domination are used to exploit the environment
Cuomo 2002 (Chris J. Cuomo is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, the Institute for African-American Studies, and the Institute for Native American Studies; “Ethics and the Environment”, p.3; http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=info:72d4AK2Z5_sJ:scholar.google.com/&output=instlink&hl=en&as_sdt=0,44&scillfp=5622333272395021783&oi=lle)
I take that phrase "power and promise," an unusually optimistic measure for anything in the contemporary discipline of philosophy, from the title of Karen Warren's widely-read and often reprinted 1991 essay, "The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism." That essay includes an argument that is basic to Warren's Ecofeminist Philosophy, and that is commonly characterized as the fundamental insight of ecofeminism. The view argued for is that a "logic of domination" that divides the world into bifurcated hierarchies is basic to all forms of oppression and domination. This logic (which Warren also calls a "conceptual framework") is a way of thinking that encourages separating from and mistreating nature and members of subordinated groups, for no good reason. In addition, the conceptual frameworks that are used to justify racism, sexism, and the mistreatment of nature (efe.), are interwoven and mutually reinforcing. Some ecofeminists find that the very aspects of identity and otherness (gender, race, class, species, efe.) are created through conceptual frameworks that encourage domination rather than connection, but Warren remains agnostic about such ontological issues. Her emphasis instead is on a more basic point - that the morally loaded concepts through which we understand ourselves and reality (and through which "we" humans have historically constructed knowledge) are at the core of the terrible ecological and social messes we currently face.