Western environmental science is built on inherent biases and the“transpersonal self” to erase the work of others – a shift to ecological feminism is key solve aff

Today, we misperceive environmental studies as largely based in the physical sciences, with Ethnic Studies or Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies as largely based in the social sciences. Feminist research and activism in a variety of fields corrects these misperceptions. In the field of feminist science studies, for example, scholars such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Lynda Birke, and Ruth Hubbard have challenged the androcentric construction of knowledge, the separation between researcher and subject, and the invisibly racialized qualities of scientific research. Their scholarship has provided theoretical groundwork for the women’s health movement, and the related movements for public health and environmental justice. Feminist environmental scholar-activists have generated a wealth of knowledge across the curriculum, contributing to and transforming the fields of philosophy, geography, political science, economics, literary studies, as well as in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. Beyond the academy, feminist environmentalists are active internationally, through the climate justice movement, the anti-corporateglobalization movement, and movements to promote fair trade, food security, water sovereignty, gender justice and environmental health.

Some feminist environmentalists identify themselves as ecofeminists, others see themselves as environmental justice activists, and still others self-identify as simply environmentalists or labor activists. Not surprisingly, given the persistence of sexism, racism, and other forms of hierarchical thought and institutionalized power, the intersectional work of feminist environmentalists has faced resistance across the disciplines, in their home communities and in the larger political arena as well. It’s well known that prior to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Kenya’s Green Belt Movement founder Wangari Maathai was persecuted and even beaten for her work, whipped about the head, and jailed, all for speaking out for democracy, organizing women and planting trees: the assaults came from men who felt Maathai was acting out of line from women’s assigned role. Anti-nuclear activists still remember Karen Silkwood, who spoke out against unsafe workplace conditions at Kerr- McGee’s plutonium processing plant in Oklahoma and was harshly punished for her whistleblowing: Silkwood was mysteriously contaminated with high levels of radioactivity found in her lungs and in her home; on her way to a meeting with an Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers’ union official and a New York Times reporter, where Silkwood planned to deliver a stack of documentation for her claims, she allegedly fell asleep at the wheel and drove off the road to her death—her car showing signs of being rammed from behind, and the highway behind her car marked with tire skids.

Despite persistent threats of retribution, women activists for gender and environmental justice have refused to keep silent. Their experiences and standpoints provide vital data on critical issues such as climate change, food production, and the

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fundamental connections between environmental sustainability and social justice. In short, our knowledge of science, social science, humanities and environmental studies has been transformed and enriched by the critical contributions of women.

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE, AND THE NATURE/NURTURE DEBATE

A significant contribution of feminist environmentalisms has been the revaluing of women’s bodies, experiences, and standpoints as locations of knowledge (Slicer 1998). Traditionally, scientific studies equated biology (sex) with gender, associated women with caregiving, nurturing, spirituality and nature, and then used this association to justify restrictive and conventional gender roles; this approach inspired the feminist rebuttal that “biology is not destiny.” But if feminists were to succeed in challenging gender roles and freeing women from lives of compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory motherhood, compulsory housework and the low- waged “pink-collar ghetto,” the essentialist perspective on women’s “nature” had to be uprooted; the associations and disjuncts between women/nature and men/ culture had to be investigated; the alleged “objectivity” of western science had to be unmasked; and the presumed goal of science as providing mastery and dominion over nature had to be challenged.

As more women entered the fields of scientific research, the inherent biases of conventional science became more evident. The standpoint of these new women scientists helped raise questions about scientific methods and objects of study. They discovered not only sexism, but also the more egregious examples of scientific racism that were once considered “good science”: consider Samuel Morton’s craniometry studies that compared measurements of African and European skulls to justify white intellectual superiority, or the U.S. Public Health Service study of untreated syphilis in black men—the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment that ran uninterrupted from 1932 to 1972, and provided no treatment to its participants, but sought only to compile data (Harding, 1993). Witty feminist explorations of gender attributions in “bias- free” biological science revealed discourses of egg and sperm as mere projections of cultural stereotypes: while the egg “drifts” or “is swept” along the fallopian tube, the sperm have “velocity”, “energy”, and “fuel” permitting them to “assault” and then “activate the developmental program of the egg” (Martin, 1991). Feminists realized that conventional scientists studied white male subjects and then made generalizations about all humans, unwittingly projecting cultural stereotypes about race, gender, and sexuality onto the cells beneath their microscopes. Omissions and distortions of data such as these led feminists to propose a strategy for acknowledging standpoint in the construction of knowledge.

In feminist epistemology, the standpoints of those most marginalized are taken as ideal starting points for investigating scientific problems. “Strong objectivity” is knowledge produced through community dialogue, and knowledge that is the most inclusive of diverse standpoints (Harding, 1991). Moreover, motives matter: scientific research should be undertaken not to achieve dominion over nature or to

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GREENING FEMINISM

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G. GAARD

produce knowledge for the sake of knowledge, status, or economic profit, but rather knowledge in the service of social justice; the participants in any scientific study should not only be capable of giving consent for their participation, but they should also be the first to benefit from the research findings (Harding, 1991, 1993; Keller, 1985; Keller and Longino, 1996). In short, feminist epistemology calls into question the science-as-usual practice of animal experimentation, which is at the foundation of modern scientific research (Birke & Hubbard 1995).

From a feminist perspective, knowledge is produced not through greater and greater separation, but through acknowledgement of connection (Keller 1985). Moreover, knowledge is located not solely in the mind but in the body, not solely in the isolated and artificially controlled laboratories of conventional science but in the dynamic living world, encountered as an active entity. Reconceiving research “objects” as subjects, feminist epistemology provides a theory capable of explaining how Barbara McClintock could “listen” to corn, and how primates can reason, empathize, and show willful aggression (Keller, 1983; Haraway, 1989). By reconceiving the relations between nature/culture, male/female, and human/animal as continuities rather than opposed categories, feminist environmentalism redefines what it means to be human.

This relational epistemology is both an experientially-based and socially constructed component of women’s psychology and self-identity as well as that of many non-dominant, Indigenous cultures. It forms the basis of later ecofeminist theorizing about the “ecofeminist ecological self” (Gaard, 1997b), the “mutual self” (Plumwood, 1993), the “political animal” self-identity of ecological democracy that is articulated through both political and ecological participation (Sandilands 1999), or the sense of ecological “inter-identity” and “interbeing” (Murphy 1995) expressed by ecological feminisms. This self identity stands in stark contrast to the autonomous individualism of dominant western psychology, liberalism, and their dangerous development in deep ecology’s “transpersonal self” that incorporates, absorbs, or erases the other (Plumwood, 1993).