*(this article has the potential for a queer k too (anything highlighted in pink)!)*

(Greta, professor at University of Wisconsin – River Falls, teaches Literature of Environmental Justice, Green Business Writing, US Environmental Lit, Human-Animal Studies, Women’s Lit, LGBTQ Lit – BA from Pepperdine University, MA from Claremont Graduate School, PhD from University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, “Ecofeminism and climate change”, https://pdf-sciencedirectassets-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/271772/1-s2.0-S0277539515X00021/1-s2.0-S0277539515000321/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEBoaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJIMEYCIQC2eaNmtMxfQTTpwu1CUlxIC6YzgkGzytWa2GR%2BdrdP1QIhALo8deNDxUfgSOy9QJWoUSznDnoi18wRIP%2BYf6EZ0fmFKrwFCPP%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEQBRoMMDU5MDAzNTQ2ODY1Igw69Qd2JEJCok447kMqkAVC7HLGUL5J%2FooMYAiDOJPDpA5yj%2B40%2Bl1Lg38VwFIfw7Um8dvIoEXb2g5GpWlvd5Q%2BHuldOgivToLX7Nn2hvSL6RZCDfw1ZWv8th9nZI5BPl%2FPPa%2FQ%2B9nZo%2BJnl2ykt5%2BeO9V%2BLX85KBzWLkQ89h%2FQs0MJWMwx9%2FRyaUQfJAX6LWVIRwS6DWk1pWDZKoy4MyThb8aG000BpKzPTmBsa0h%2FZo2q5xk4OhyXKbhrPe6OlRxqIXN0gLtFxk12tKUKjxm7tu4raXloD5Ei4b5H2AJDW3aPvk%2FDc1SpVRmeRoo665Ij3x7Ff6q96UQesShNxJV0vOqjamogo%2BOJ8adXFWyAwxvHXO1iP7gWsdw6QNUQjIoQmEpgaCfqFwwoYGL8NrIrDLkDpMxr5OD4q%2B8Gl2iabV55oq6s2mCUtWv1XDaeL4P%2F84rY5ltkXaDzPMg2pP4Lp1R4Fczy6sxaJUG2dWuHnbnCN8yJICiNCXN%2B6rE5R91wuyNhiNIZxfNbVzyDYI9BQsKOikyrAXA9JyUfX0TvloUdSdslZO6M%2B6y43%2F8TStIpWO6k7S64wgsjoC5H9%2BBQIX%2BkP6AHU8G3aeKo5xjpIDvcP%2BR9Cu1N792xhnsIwURh4EbdubquDt%2Bd1XZ3T5uPm3QCGQYdB7IZRkKpwk%2FSIgMRwocG6oPJTn8%2FLYUBF38699fS82IDw870lt8ANyHhMxhE8mLEi5o0U8Ejf9yzuEEqCHPX8H%2ByOFRiYEShFMqEeMFch%2BXwk7nF2ssVgvdbr0RTnnaboXX79O3RhBVU%2FS%2BFlFfqFh0P56rNL8F0gofkfQvSiPVZvMJTwDoA451WVV84QScXmWWA6DHU6yb0LtmG23gzOiFc4PRSj1dlWzC245S1BjqwASUEY5qnKQCTKQ0FXxgCudOVnAC8QVU%2FwC6CMOL1zIj2YryxZLRJefyN5MLthJQv0ZYQBp2CpOgc26iOQWVrIRUL1KgtJSjTr%2FIL7HAhE4fOcq8XaYSmhxe0%2BKVghq%2FTcG0WhcWDyfnJwFD1oNRNvS%2BejIHHzfxPqh6EP4e7qtHFcF5Hw0YanQK1Bk2OTkHdqxwPVHzeHydfUdksIO58nw5DgEKGl%2Bg%2FFPFrmZUHwdNJ&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20240727T175557Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTY2AJTLG5L%2F20240727%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=3e6a5848e93a74397e85b0020cfe3587bf446a3d165634921f8cac94c6410cda&hash=8c54cc764304165084e87faa5bc7bd7d6d4d33eb886e7a4522bd9ee2c191528e&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S0277539515000321&tid=spdf-de79c86e-5d5a-49a6-8dc1-b0e9a233d81f&sid=d66ff11f9be56944ef192ba26e440079891dgxrqa&type=client&tsoh=d3d3LXNjaWVuY2VkaXJlY3QtY29tLnByb3h5LmxpYi51bWljaC5lZHU%3D&ua=131c5e0659005e51045d&rr=8a9e80d8cf60aa30&cc=us&kca=eyJrZXkiOiIzdFFnYWZZZ0haRi9TZUlZUkNUKzNwU3FlSGNWcHVDeTlZbTdUcWxNSWtYTlhlaVY5VHhCY0RaQ3dpeWN3a3lPOVowbkZ2QU03MDEyNmJ6Y3poVDFqbzExdkkxK2FieS90RGRvd2x0eThDNUlRRnUvSmt2bXBVenFtZVdJaTdlWjg2cEJhbGhCc0svV1ZhN3Y3TmpTUGxaRGJMVWQ2Q0FnNlBmVFd5MmZyRW51d2Q1TSIsIml2IjoiZDgzNmY4ZDY0NThkYzc2YzU1ZTYzMzg1ZTBhNzI0OTQifQ==_1722102962372) (sorry for the link font size, it’s super long!) //GB <3

Make no mistake: women are indeed the ones most severely affected by climate change and natural disasters, but their vulnerability is not innate; rather it is a result of inequities produced through gendered social roles, discrimination, and poverty. According to CARE, an international NGO, women work 2/3 of the world's working hours, produce half the world's food, and earn 10% of the world's income; of the world's one billion poorest people, women and girls make up 70%.4 If there were an unimpeded correlation between hard work and earnings, women would be the world's highest earners. Instead, structural barriers of gender put women—and children—among the world's poorest people, situated on the front lines of climate change. Around the world, gender roles restrict women's mobility, impose tasks associated with food production and caregiving, and simultaneously obstruct women from participating in decision-making about climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and decisions about adaptation and mitigation. In developing countries, women living in poverty bear the burden of climate change consequences, as these create more work to fetch water, or to collect fuel and fodder—duties traditionally assigned to women. When households experience food shortages, which occur regularly and may become more frequent due to climate change, women are the first to go without food so that children and men may eat. As rural areas experience desertification, decreased food production, and other economic and ecological hardships, these factors prompt increased male out-migration to urban centers with the promise of economic gain and wages returned to the family; these promises are not always fulfilled. In the short-term, and possibly long-term as well, male out-migration means more women are left behind with additional agricultural and household duties, such as caregiving. These women have even fewer resources to cope with seasonal and episodic weather and natural disasters.

Gender inequalities mean that women and children are 14 times more likely to die in ecological disasters than men (Aguilar, 2007; Aguilar, Araujo, & Quesada-Aguilar, 2007). For example, in the 1991 cyclone and flood in Bangladesh, 90% of the victims were women. The causes are multiple: warning information was not sent to women, who were largely confined in their homes; women are not trained swimmers; women's caregiving responsibilities meant that women trying to escape the floods were often holding infants and towing elder family members, while husbands escaped alone; moreover, the increased risk of sexual assaults outside the home made women wait longer to leave, hoping that male relatives would return for them. Similarly in the 2004 Tsunami in Aceh, Sumatra, more than 75% of those who died were women. In May 2008, after Cyclone Nargis came ashore in the Ayeyarwady Division of Myanmar, women and girls were 61% of the 130, 000 people dead or missing in the aftermath (CARE Canada, 2010).

The deaths of so many mothers lead to increased infant mortality, early marriage of girls, increased neglect of girls' education, sexual assaults, trafficking in women and child prostitution. Even in industrialized countries, more women than men died during the 2003 European heat wave, and during Hurricane Katrina in the U.S., African–American women—the poorest population in that part of the country —faced the greatest obstacles to survival (Aguilar et al., 2007). Women who survive climate change disasters are then faced with the likelihood of sexual assault: for example, after Hurricane Katrina, rapes were “reported by dozens of survivors” and mentioned in news stories, but there was no discussion of rape support teams being included with the rescue teams, and no mention of reproductive health services that should have been made available to women who had been raped (Seager, 2006). Moreover, the likely assaults on gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered queer (GLBTQ) persons went unreported.

Climate change homophobia is evident in the media blackout of GLBTQ people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, an unprecedented storm and infrastructure collapse which occurred just days before the annual queer festival in New Orleans, “Southern Decadence,” a celebration that drew 125,000 revelers in 2003 (ecesis.factor). The religious right quickly declared Hurricane Katrina an example of God's wrath against homosexuals, waving signs with “Thank God for Katrina” and publishing detailed connections between the sin of homosexuality and the destruction of New Orleans. It is hard to imagine GLBTQ people not facing harassment, discrimination, and violence during and after the events of Katrina, given the fact that Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi lack any legal protections for GLBTQ persons and would have been unsympathetic to such report

Queer and transgendered persons already live on the margins of most societies, often denied rights of marriage and family life, denied health care coverage for partners and their children, denied fair housing and employment rights, immigration rights and more. Climate change exacerbates pressures on marginalized people first, with economic and cultural elites best able to mitigate and postpone impacts; as a global phenomenon, homophobia infiltrates climate change discourse, distorting our analysis of climate change causes and climate justice solutions, and placing a wedge between international activists. For example, at the First Worldwide Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, April 19–22, 2010, Bolivian President Evo Morales claimed that the presence of homosexual men around the world was a consequence of eating genetically-modified chicken: “The chicken that we eat is chock-full of feminine hormones. So, when men eat these chickens, they deviate from themselves as men” (ILGA, 2010). This statement exemplifies a dangerous nexus of ignorance, speciesism, and homophobia that conceals the workings of industrial agribusiness, and simultaneously vilifies gay and transgendered persons as “genetic deviants.” Yet in statements of climate justice to date, there is no mention of the integral need for queer climate justice—although all our climates are both gendered and sexualized, simultaneously material, cultural, and ecological.

Described largely from the perspective of the environmental (climate) sciences (i.e., astrophysics, atmospheric chemistry, geography, meteorology, oceanography, paleoclimatology), climate change has been most widely discussed as a scientific problem requiring technological and scientific solutions without substantially transforming ideologies and economies of domination, exploitation and colonialism: this misrepresentation of climate change root causes is one part of the problem, misdirecting those who ground climate change solutions on incomplete analyses (cf. Klein, 2014). On an international level, solutions mitigating climate change include Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+ Initiative), the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that encourages emission trading, sustainable development funding for Two-Thirds countries, genetically modified crops, renewable energy technologies, and the more recent strategy, geo-engineering (Klein, 2012). On an individual level, citizen-consumers of the North/One-Thirds world are urged toward green consumerism and carbon-footprint reduction. Certainly renewable energy is a necessary and wholly possible shift; moreover, it carries within its practice the ideological shift needed to make a wider transformation in the North/OneThirds consumers' relationship with environments and ecosystems. From a feminist perspective, however, the problem remains that at the highest levels of international discussion, “climate change is cast as a human crisis in which gender has no relevance” (MacGregor, 2010) and “man” is supposed to mean “everyone.” Such gender-blind analysis leads to excluding data and perspectives that are crucial in solving climate change problems, while the issues that women traditionally organize around—environmental health, habitats, livelihoods— are marginalized by techno-science solutions which take center stage in climate change discussions and funding. GLBTQ issues such as bullying in the schools, hate crimes legislation, equity in housing and the workplace, same-sex marriage (not to mention polyamorous marriage) don't appear in climate discussions either. Given the gender-blind techno-science perspective dominating climate change discussions, queer feminist entry to these discussions has been stalled, trapped between Scylla and Charybdis: over the past two decades, discussions have alternated between the liberal strategy of mainstreaming women into discussions of risk, vulnerability, and adaptation, as WEDO has done; or, adopting the cultural feminist strategy of calling on women's “unique” capacities of caring for family and for environment, women's “special knowledge” and agency based on their location within gender-role restricted occupations, and lauding women's grassroots leadership. In either strategy, “gender” is restricted to the study of women, and feminist analyses of structural gender inequalities that compare the status of men, women, and GLBTQ others are completely omitted.

To date, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) “Gender and Climate Change” website addresses these problems by drawing on both reformist liberal ecofeminisms and cultural (essentialist) ecofeminisms. In its statement on women's vulnerability, inclusion, and agency, the UNFCCC website asserts: “It is increasingly evident that women are at the centre of the climate change challenge. Women are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, such as droughts, floods and other extreme weather events, but they also have a critical role in combatting climate change.” In order to perform that “critical role,” however, gender parity in climate change discussions is a minimum requirement: women need to be equal members in policy-setting and decisionmaking on climate change. And to have authentic, inclusive feminism, gender justice and sexual justice must be partnered with climate justice, for women of all genders and sexualities form the grassroots force within these three movements (cf. Olson, 2002).

How did the problem arise? Blaming overpopulation and backgrounding gender across species

Misdirecting analyses of root causes, and thus protecting the status quo, three more prominent antifeminist threads companion and vie for prominence alongside the mainstream scientific response to climate change: the linked rhetorics advocating population control, anti-immigration sentiment, and increased militarism. Ever since Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ehrlich, 1968), one thread of First World environmentalism has placed overpopulation (primarily in the Third World) at the root of environmental degradation, though some manifestations of this discourse link population with First World overconsumption, arguing for twin reductions of both. In practice, this rhetoric has implicitly targeted third world women with “family planning” packages of contraception, abortion, and sterilization, though more recent manifestations of “population science” have been influenced by feminist arguments for reproductive and sexual health/rights as evinced by discussions at United Nations conferences on population in 1974 (Rumania), 1984 (Mexico), and 1994 (Cairo). Arguing that “women and children in poverty are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, despite their disproportionately low contribution to the problem” (Engelman, 2010), the WorldWatch Institute advocates a population reduction approach to the impacts of climate change on the world's most vulnerable communities, implemented through a three-pronged strategy:

• Eliminating institutional, social, and cultural barriers to women's full legal, civic, and political equality with men;

• Improving schooling for all children and youth, and especially increasing educational attainment among girls and women; and

• Assuring that all women and their partners have access to, and full freedom to use, reproductive health and family planning services so that the highest proportion possible of birth results from parents' intentions to raise a child to adulthood (Engelman, 2010).

While these three strategies may seem globally relevant, they also seem to target populations in developing countries, as evidenced by the WorldWatch Report's cover photo of two women and three children, captioned “A family on their parched land in Niger.” The report offers no interviews with the women targeted for family planning to discover whether this strategy is one they desire or would be able to implement, showing a “Father Knows Best” approach to population and climate science.

Approximately 80% of the world's population (the global South) has generated a mere 20% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: in other words, the other 20% (the global North) is responsible for 80% of the accumulated GHG emissions in our atmosphere (Egeró, 2013; Hartmann, 2009). Despite the clarity of this logic, population reappeared in publications leading up to the 2009 UN Climate Change COP in Copenhagen, with proponents arguing for family planning among poor communities as a cost-effective method of reducing carbon emissions (Egeró, 2013). Not to be outdone, the UK Population Matters has launched a “population offset” system similar to carbon offsets purchasable by jet-setting firstworld consumers (MacGregor, 2010). On their website, the organization claims that “PopOffsets is the world's first project that offers to offset carbon dioxide emissions through the most cost-effective and environmentally beneficial means — family planning” (see http://www.popoffsets.com/). None of these strategies suggests reducing the North/First World's alarming overconsumption of the planet's resources, or seriously restricting its 80% contribution of greenhouse gases.

Reducing third world population becomes increasingly important when first-world overconsumers realize that the severe climate change outcomes already heading for the world's most marginalized communities will create a refugee crisis and urgent migrations of poor people. Since the growing populations of the Two-Thirds World will be hardest hit by climate change effects and will seek asylum in One-Thirds nations—a migration perceived as a threat to the disproportionate wealth (i.e. “security”) of the North—the specter of climate refugees has inspired arguments for increased militarization as a protection against migration (Egeró, 2013; MacGregor, 2010). Noting the ways that women are blamed for climate crises which in fact impact women the hardest, both during climate disasters and in the frequency of gender-based violence and material hardships following these disasters, Rojas-Cheatham et al. (2009) have urged “looking both ways” to recognize the intersections between climate justice and reproductive justice. For all these reasons, feminists have strongly resisted arguments for population as the root cause of environmental degradations, including climate change (Gaard, 2010; Hartmann, 1987; Silliman, Fried, Ross & Guttierez, 2004).

Claims about overpopulation in climate change analyses function as an elitist rhetorical distraction from the more fundamental and intersecting problems of gender, sexuality, and interspecies justice. To date, even feminist discussions about these issues have remained limited by the perspective of humanism. As feminist science studies scholars affirm, the best analysis of the problem of oppression will be the most inclusive —excluding data is not conducive to good research, good argumentation, or good feminism. On this foundation, it is imperative that feminist approaches to climate justice take a material and posthumanist approach by considering the larger environments in which these ethico-political problems of climate change are embedded: our interspecies and ecological transcorporeality, manifested in our practices of global food production and consumption.

Two branches of feminist inquiry support recuperating these “backgrounded” (in Val Plumwood's terms, an operation of the Master Model that supports domination) elements of climate change. Material feminism (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008) advances the concept of transcorporeality, the physical fact of our co-constituted embodiment with other flows of life, matter, and energy. This recent articulation of feminist theory rests on four decades of feminist science studies and ecofeminist perspectives on the human-environment connection, developing knowledge in the study of gender, race, class, age, and public health. In the 1970s, feminist health advocates began challenging dominant perspectives in science by noting the research focused on male-only samples, and then generalized the results to women and children. These feminists raised questions about women's and children's health by exploring the influence of environment on human health, and exposing environmental links to breast cancer, asthma, lead poisoning, reproductive disorders, and other types of cancers. National women's groups such as Silent Spring Institute and Breast Cancer Action have worked to bring a feminist environmental perspective to all aspects of breast cancer research and prevention, from corporate profits to environmental contaminants, pharmaceuticals, “pink”-washing,6 and individual breast cancer sufferers and survivors. Building on Carson (1962) uncovering the links between environmental chemicals and their impact on birds, other animal species, and ecosystems, feminist environmentalists exposed the links between synthetic chemicals and the endocrine systems of human and nonhuman animals. From pesticides and plastics to paint and pajamas, synthetic chemicals are linked to the feminization of male reproductive systems in frogs and other wildlife (Aviv, 2014) and associated with breast cancer in women. Lois Gibbs' work on dioxin (Gibbs, 1995), Liane Clorfene-Casten's work on breast cancer (Clorfene-Casten, 2002; 1996), Theo Colborn's exposé of synthetic chemicals (Colborn's, 1996), and Steingraber's (1997, 2001) eloquent studies of agricultural chemicals, environmental health, children's health, and human cancers are all landmark contributions to our understanding of the interconnections among environmental health, public health, and social justice. This feminist health and environmental science research has contributed to the scientific and epidemiological foundations of the environmental justice movement, and provides longstanding environmental feminist foundations for material feminist theorizing.

A second branch of feminist theory, feminist animal studies has explored the links between the production, transport, consumption and waste of animals used in industrial food systems, and that industry's many assaults on human and environmental health. Today's industrialized production of animal bodies for human consumption emerges from a constellation of oppressive practices. Building on earlier feminist research into the exploitation of female reproduction (Corea, 1985), and the development of reproductive technologies via experimentation on non-human females first, feminist animal studies scholars have emphasized how western systems of industrial animal production (“factory farming”) rely specifically on the exploitation of the female (Adams & Donovan, 1995; Donovan & Adams, 2007), harming the health of both nonhuman females and the human females who consume their bodies and their reproductive “products.” As Carol Adams (2003) points out, “to control fertility one must have absolute access to the female of the species” (147). The control of female fertility for food production and human reproduction alike uses invasive technologies to manipulate female bodies across the species (Adams, 2003; Corea, 1985; Diamond, 2004): • Battery chickens are crowded into tiny cages, de-beaked, and inoculated with numerous antibiotics to maximize control of their reproductive output, eggs (Davis, 1995). Male chicks are routinely discarded because they are of no use to the battery hen industry, while female chicks are bred to deformity with excessively large breasts and tiny feet, growing up to live a radically shortened lifetime of captivity, unable to perform any of their natural functions (i.e., dustbathing, nesting, flying). • Pregnant sows are confined to gestation crates and after they give birth they are allowed to suckle their offspring only through metal bars. • Dairy cows are forcibly inseminated, and their male calves are taken from them 24–48 h after birth and confined in crates, where they will be fed an iron-deprived diet until they are slaughtered for veal.7

Cows separated from their calves bellow and appear to grieve for days afterwards, sometimes ramming themselves against their stalls in an attempt to reunite with their calves. News articles report the “amazing” feats of cows returning across miles of countryside in order to nurse calves from whom they were forcibly separated. We understand the frenzy of a human mother separated from her new infant, yet our understanding and empathy seems to halt at the species boundary, since this involuntary weaning and the attendant suffering for cow and calf continues to be the norm for dairy production: the milk that would have fed the cows' offspring is taken for human consumption, and manipulated into overproduction through the use of growth hormones.8 Bridging affect theory and feminist animal studies, Lori Gruen (2012) proposes the concept of “entangled empathy” as a strategy for reminding humans of our intra-actions across species and food production systems. Entangled empathy is an affect co-arising with our recognition of the affective states of other beings; its energetic and embodied awareness motivates action to eliminate suffering.

Describing animals used in these industrial food systems as “workers” (Haraway, 2003) is reprehensible for the ways that it obscures the institutionalized oppression of reproductive labor and human responsibility, as Weisberg (2009) explains, for who would choose a “job” requiring a lifetime of imprisonment, separation from one's family, the murder of one's offspring, along with crowding, biological manipulation to the point of crippling, all culminating in execution? In her work “bringing together environmental, climate and reproductive justice,” DiChiro (2009) defines reproductive justice as involving not just “bodily self-determination and the right to safe contraception” but also “the right to have children and to be able to raise them in nurturing, healthy, and safe environments” that requires an availability of “good jobs and economic security, freedom from domestic violence and forced sterilization, affordable healthcare, educational opportunities, decent housing, and access to clean and healthy neighborhoods” (2). Linking the exploitation of sexuality and reproduction across species as a feature of the colonialist and techno-science worldview, feminist animal studies scholars have described industrial animal food production as a failure of reproductive and environmental justice.

It's also a matter of climate justice, as the UN Food and Agricultural Organization Report “Livestock's Long Shadow” (2006) confirms. The report defines “livestock” as all animal foods, including cattle, buffalo, small ruminants, camels, horses, pigs, and poultry; livestock products include meats, eggs, milk and dairy. The “factory farming” first introduced in the U.S. has been exported globally, to the detriment of the planet. Increasing areas of cropland are being used to feed cattle and other food animals; forests are being replaced with rangeland; vast quantities of water are used to irrigate crops for food animals and given to food animals for drinking. The wastes of industrial animal food production—which include pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, hormones and antibiotics, manure, and the wastes from slaughterhouses—contaminate wetlands and wildlands, and have produced the hypoxic (“dead zone”) area at the Mississippi River's outflow in the Gulf of Mexico. Methane produced by flatulence, carbon dioxide produced through respiration and transport, nitrous oxide and ammonia are all greenhouse gases multiplied through industrial animal agriculture. Livestock production not only exponentially increases our planet's greenhouse gas emissions, it also reduces the greenhouse gas-absorbing areas of forests, the “carbon sinks” whereby the planet might restore a balance.

Human health is also variously affected. Meat production is associated with prosperity, good health, social status, and the affluent lifestyle of the western industrialized countries. As more and more nations seek to emulate the meat consumption levels of the industrialized world, their rates of cancer, heart disease, obesity, and other animal food-related illnesses increase (Campbell & Campbell, 2006). Statistics comparing the growing obesity of first world overconsumers and two-thirds world persons suffering from hunger and malnourishment can be correlated with the rates of animal food consumption, and with the gendered character of hunger. In developing countries, women account for 43% of the agricultural labor force, although their yields are 20–30% lower than men's because women are barred from farming the best soils, and denied access to seeds, fertilizers, and equipment (WFP, 2013). Around the world, it is women who are responsible for cooking and serving food, and it is men who eat the first and most nutritious foods, leaving children to eat afterwards, and women to eat last. When there is insufficient food, women deny themselves food so that children can eat: while an estimated 146 million children in developing countries are underweight due to acute or chronic malnutrition, 60% of the world's hungriest are women (WFP, 2013). According to the World Food Program, if women farmers had the same access to resources as the men do, the number of hungry people in the world could be reduced by up to 150 million (WFP, 2013).

Industrial animal food production has been described as “a protein factory in reverse” (Robbins, 1987), largely because eating high on the food chain requires more “inputs” of grain, water, and grazing land. The ecological and human toll of industrialized animal agriculture is no longer debated, for the facts are well known: • It takes 13 lb of grain and 2400 gal of water to produce one pound of meat, and eleven times as many fossil fuels to produce one calorie of animal protein vs. plant protein. • Raising animals for food requires 30% of the earth's surface. • There is currently enough food in the world to feed approximately 12 billion people, yet over 900 million are hungry (UNFAO, 2006; WFP, 2013). As food and development scholars have argued for decades, hunger is not a problem of overpopulation but rather one of distribution, and elite control of the world's food supply (George, 1976, 1984; Hartmann & Boyce, 1979; Lappé & Collins, 1998). Moreover, debt repayment programs (called “structural adjustment”) require developing countries to produce cash crops for export rather than food crops for subsistence as a way to pay off debt; biotechnology corporations promote high-yield seeds which require expensive inputs of fertilizer and monocropping techniques that displace subsistence foods, destroy biodiversity, and lower water quality, producing both debt and hunger. These facts notwithstanding, the worldwide production of meat and dairy is projected to more than double by 2050 (UNFAO, 2006). Industrialized animal food production is simultaneously a problem of species justice, environmental justice, reproductive justice and food justice. For too long, “food justice” has been defined solely in terms of justice across human diversities, but authentic food justice cannot be practiced while simultaneously excluding those who count as “food.” Food justice requires interspecies justice, which intersects with reproductive justice and queer justice alike.

Queer food justice grows out of today's budding eco-queer movement, which Sbicca (2012) defines as a “loose-knit, often decentralized set of political and social activists” who challenge the dominant discourses of sexuality, gender, and nature as a means for deconstructing hegemonic knowledge systems (33– 34). Reviewing the herstory of queer eco-activism in building lesbian eco-communities and music festivals, and in challenging the heteronormativity of urban parks through gay cruising and public sex (Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010), Sbicca focuses particularly on the queer food justice movement being shaped by queer farmers and gardeners who may not feel comfortable in the alternative food movement, whose most visible U.S. representatives—Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Joel Salatin, Barbara Kingsolver—are largely white, heteromale, and middle class. The grassroots food justice movement is far from this stereotype, and reaches back to European women's gardens of the eighteenth century (Norwood, 1993), Black women rural gardeners in the postReconstruction South (Walker, 1983), and women rooftop gardeners in Harlem. Formed in 2007, San Francisco's Queer Food For Love (QFFL) seems like a queer update of Food Not Bombs with their desire to provide food, community, and a safe space against prejudice. Similarly, San Francisco's Rainbow Chard Alliance, formed in 2008, bridges the organic farming movement and the queer movement, creating community for like-minded “eco-homos” in the Bay Area and California (Sbicca, 2012). Not confined to California, the queer food justice movement is articulated through groups ranging from Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut to Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, and Washington. Concerned about the intersections between environment, sexuality, and gender, these queer groups use food to build community, fight oppression, and take care of planetary and human bodies, though it's not clear whether these groups make connections between sexuality and species oppressions, and thus enact vegan food justice as well.

With these facts of world hunger, food production, gender, sexuality and species restored to an analysis of climate change, charging human overpopulation as a root cause of climate change seems misguided at best: instead, climate change may be described as white industrial-capitalist heteromale supremacy on steroids, boosted by widespread injustices of gender and race, sexuality and species. Eating high on the food chain must be seen as tilting the planet's plate of food into the mouths of the world's most affluent, at a cost of between 870 million people—almost half of them children under the age of five— who suffer from chronic undernourishment (FAO, 2013). Population control and industrialized animal food production are no substitute for reproductive justice, interspecies justice, gender justice and climate justice.