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Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security
J. Ann Tickner
Columbia University Press, New York
1992
4. Man over Nature: Gendered Perspectives on Ecological Security
| Taking care of one planet is nothing special, nothing sacred, nothing holy. It's something like taking care of our own house. |
| Dalai Lama |
| Americans did not fight and win the wars of the 20th century to make the world safe for green vegetables. |
| Richard Darman * |
Until very recently ecological concerns have not been at the center of the agenda of international relations theory or practice. A global issue that defies national boundaries and calls for collective action, caring for the environment does not fit well with the power-seeking, instrumental behavior of states that I have described in previous chapters. Barry Commoner's definition of ecology as the "science of planetary housekeeping" 1 is not the business of Realpolitik; such metaphors evoke images of the devalued private domain of women rather than the "important" public world of diplomacy and national security. Ecological bumper stickers with such messages as "Love Your Mother" are hardly designed to appeal to those engaged in the "serious" business of state-craft and war. Therefore the inattention to environmental problems and the silencing of women in international relations may be more than coincidental.
The term ecology, which means the study of life forms "at home," is based on the Greek root for house; its modern meaning is the interrelationships between living organisms and their environment. 2 These definitions evoke images of a domestic space traditionally populated by women, children, and servants. Ecology's emphasis on holism and reproduction and metaphors such as global housekeeping connect it to women's rather than men's life experiences.
Yet ecology has also been viewed with some ambivalence by feminists. Many of them are suspicious of ecology and ecofeminism because they regard the age-old connection between women and nature, which both have espoused, as a basis of women's oppression. Socialist feminists, particularly, have criticized what they see as ecofeminists' tendency to essentialize women and naturalize their reproductive and domestic roles. This tendency perpetuates the dualistic hierarchies described in chapter 1 that most feminists believe must be eliminated if gender equality is to be achieved. 3 Yet some recent ecofeminist scholarship is rejecting this essentialist connection between women and nature, as well as making important and interesting alliances with the ecological tradition. Believing that the oppression of women and the domination of nature are both the result of patriarchy, these ecofeminists claim that the connection must be made explicit if structures of domination in both our natural and human environments are to be overcome. For this reason, these feminist ecological perspectives can offer us important new insights into the way we think about our natural environment, insights that could be useful for thinking about the achievement of global ecological security.
Since its birth in seventeenth-century Europe, the modern state system has had an uneasy relationship with its natural environment; natural resources and geographical spaces have been viewed as resources for increasing state power and wealth. Feminist writers such as Carolyn Merchant and Evelyn Fox Keller describe a fundamental change in the Western scientific community's attitude toward the natural environment that also began in seventeenth-century Europe. Before this scientific revolution, nature had been seen as a living system of which humans formed an integral part; in the seventeenth century, human beings became preeminent, and nature began to be viewed as a machine to be exploited for human benefit. This mechanistic view of nature has been highly compatible with the needs of a competitive international system, a world divided into antagonistic political units, each seeking to enhance its power by securing and increasing access to natural resources, through geographical expansion when necessary.
Since this is a worldview that has had important, although often implicit, implications for the evolution of the theory and practice of international relations, I shall begin this chapter with a feminist account of the way nature has been viewed by Western Enlightenment science. This changed perception of nature, from living organism to inert machine, was accompanied by shifting attitudes toward women whose lives were gradually being moved into domestic spaces where they were to become increasingly marginalized from the productive system. These changes can be linked to the competitive security-seeking behavior of an expansionary state system, whose colonizing activities have caused ecological changes in larger geopolitical spaces. This power-seeking behavior poses dangers for the security of the natural environment and its inhabitants, women and men alike.
Although raising environmental issues only marginally, scholars in conventional international relations approaches have assumed that natural resources are an important element of state power and thus vital for national security. Recently, however, some new thinking in international relations has begun to question these assumptions; the pressure on what is now seen as a finite resource base, as well as the inability of states to deal with environmental degradation, is threatening the security of all, whether rich or poor. These new thinkers also draw attention to international inequalities associated with environmental degradation and attempt to revisualize geopolitical spaces and boundaries from an ecological perspective.
Although much of this new thinking questions the optimistic assumptions of Enlightenment science about nature's rejuvenative ability to provide unlimited resources for human progress, it remains firmly rooted in an Enlightenment view of nature as machine. Only ecologists and ecofeminists have taken an even more radical step, one that challenges modern science's mechanistic view of nature. I shall conclude this chapter by examining the views of ecologists and ecofeminists who believe that solutions to our contemporary dilemmas demand a revolution, not only in our political thinking but also in the way we view nature-- in other words, a revolution as fundamental as the one that took place in seventeenth-century Europe.
The Modern State and Its Natural Environment
Hans Morgenthau's text Politics Among Nations, discussed in more detail in chapter 2, pays scant attention to the natural environment, an omission common to many traditional texts in international relations. Morgenthau discusses natural resources only in terms of their role as essential elements of state power. 4 He emphasizes the importance of natural resource self-sufficiency as crucial for national power, particularly in wartime. He describes dramatic historical shifts, such as the disappearance of the Near East and North Africa as centers of power, caused by a notable decline in agricultural productivity. Consistent with the Western geopolitical tradition of the early twentieth century, Morgenthau claims that the United States owes its status as a great power in part to its advantageous geographical position in the international system. As a large land mass protected by bodies of water on both sides, the United States has been in a strategically advantageous position throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly for purposes of making credible nuclear threats.
Morgenthau's treatment of natural resources and geopolitics typifies the way the natural environment has been viewed in the dominant traditions of Western international relations "theory. In a hierarchical international system, access to natural resources and a favorable geographical position have been key elements for the achievement of state power; for those with the capabilities to do so, these assets should be protected by military means and increased through overseas expansion or conquest if necessary. 5
"State-of-nature myths, used by realist theoreticians to explain and prescribe for states' behavior in the international system, have reinforced this dominating and exploitative attitude toward nature. Metaphors that depict a wild natural environment devoid of controlling political institutions, "the war of everyman against everyman," demand the erection of "strong boundaries to protect tamed domestic spaces against uncontrollable outside forces. States with the capacity to do so may move beyond these boundaries to reap the bounties of nature through projects of expansion and subjugation.
Nature, Women, and the State in Early Modern Europe
These views of the natural environment as spaces to be tamed, mastered, and used for profit and advantage are also reflected in the shift toward a mechanistic view of nature that appeared in seventeenth-century Europe at the time the modern state system was born. In her book The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant documents this changing attitude toward nature generated by the scientific revolution. Although humans' "dominion over nature" has been traced back to Greek and Christian roots, 6 Merchant claims that in medieval Europe nature was viewed as an organism or living system in which human beings and their natural environments were highly interdependent. Nature was generally depicted as female, the earth as a nurturing mother who provided for the needs of humankind. Nature could be dangerous, however; its wild and uncontrollable behavior could produce chaos. 7 In the seventeenth century nature was gradually conceptually transformed from a living organism into a lifeless inert machine, thereby permitting its exploitation and use for purposes of human progress. This evolving view of nature as machine was vital for the goals of the emerging new science, which sought to tame nature through the discovery of predictable regularities within a rationally determined system of laws. According to Merchant, a central concern of the scientific revolution was to use these mathematical laws in order to intervene in an increasingly secularized world. 8
Changing attitudes toward animals provide further evidence of the taming and depersonalization of nature in early modern Europe. In her book The Animal Estate, Harriet Ritvo describes the legal system of medieval England, which had implicitly invested animals with human rights and responsibilities. Animals were held accountable for their crimes: dogs, cats, and cocks were permitted, as members of households, to testify in court-- or at least their presence there was considered to strengthen the aggrieved householder's complaint. 9 By the nineteenth century, however, animals could no longer be sentenced to die for their crimes. Ritvo claims that this seemingly humanitarian policy had a reverse side; animals were no longer perceived as having any independent status. This changing relationship between animals and people ensured the appropriation of power by people as animals became objects of human manipulation. As animals' position in the human world changed so did the way in which they were studied. According to Ritvo, modern scientific methods of classification of animals and plants, which employ anthropocentric binary distinctions such as wild/tame, useful/useless, edible/inedible, also attempt to impose order on a chaotic natural environment. Just as many feminists see gender dichotomizations as instruments of domination, Ritvo views the classification of natural objects as the human attempt to gain intellectual mastery and domination of the natural world. 10
Although Ritvo's study is not specifically a feminist text, she makes reference to language employed by naturalists and animal breeders that sets both women and animals below human males in the natural hierarchy. 11 The use of sexual metaphor, which feminists believe had the effect of establishing a male-dominated hierarchy, was also employed in the language of the scientific revolution. The taming of nature was usually described in gendered terms that reflected the social order. Feminist scholars have drawn attention to the sexual metaphors employed by Francis Bacon and other Enlightenment scientists. Central to Bacon's scientific investigations was a natural world, frequently described as a woman, that required taming, shaping, and subduing by the scientific mind: "I am come in very truth leading you to nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave." 12 Social ecologist William Leiss agrees that Bacon's scientific project was centrally concerned with mastery over nature. But while Leiss notes the sexually aggressive overtones in Bacon's language, he is less concerned with the implications of Bacon's sexual metaphors than with a scientific tradition that has resulted in the domination of certain men over other human beings. This system of domination has spread outward from Europe to the rest of the world through the appropriation of nature's resources. 13
Feminist scholars such as Carolyn Merchant, Sandra Harding, and Evelyn Fox Keller, who have written about the origins of modern science, would agree with Leiss's argument that domination of nature was a central goal of modern science. Using a gendered perspective, however, they take his argument further: suggesting that the sexual imagery in seventeenth-century science was intrinsic to its discourse, they claim that the domination of certain men over other human beings, other cultures, and nature cannot be fully understood unless this gendered language is taken seriously.
In her discussion of metaphors in science, Sandra Harding asks why certain metaphors, such as the rape of nature, have been dismissed by historians and philosophers as irrelevant to the real meaning of scientific concepts while others, such as the metaphor of nature as a machine, have been regarded as fruitful components of scientific explanation. 14 Harding and Keller claim that these gendered metaphors are crucial for understanding Western science as a masculine enterprise. The separation of mind from nature and the investigator from his or her subject of investigation have been important goals for modern science's quest for objectivity. But as reason was separated from feeling and objectivity from subjectivity, science came to be defined in opposition to everything female. This kind of knowledge is consistent with a project that has involved the mastery, control, and domination of nature. 15 These feminists therefore believe that such seventeenth-century gendered metaphors were fundamental to developing attitudes toward nature and women, as well as the racist attitudes toward non-Western peoples that I described; these attitudes have been consistent with the practices of an expansive and dominating international system.
As seventeenth-century science associated nature and the body with women, so the mind, or rational thought, came to be associated with men. In the West, culture has generally been linked historically and symbolically with elite men whose writings, music, and art are enshrined as the canons of Western civilization. According to Merchant, this nature/culture dichotomy was used as a justification for devaluing women and keeping them in subordinate positions in early modern Europe. As documented by Merchant, Keller, and other feminist scholars, the Enlightenment was not a progressive time for women; as is often the case in eras that have traditionally been described as progressive, the position of women in public life suffered a setback in the seventeenth century. Women's association with a disorderly nature was personified by an increase in the persecution of witches, who were linked to the superstition and chaos that modern science was attempting to control and tame through its investigations. Both Merchant and Leiss note the legal metaphors in Bacon's language, metaphors that Merchant explicitly links to seventeenth-century witch trials. 16 Simultaneously, the needs of early industrial capitalism stimulated a growing division of labor between home and workplace that began the process of severely curtailing the economic, political, and social options available to women. 17
This transition to a capitalist market economy required a greater exploitation of natural resources than did the subsistence economy of feudal Europe. Merchant outlines changes Bin seventeenth-century English agriculture, which began to encroach on woods and fen lands in the pursuit of the higher yields required for production for the market. Seventeenth-century scientists justified their goals of "mastering" and "managing" the earth in the name of human progress and increasing material wealth. The demands of a market economy, and the increases in productivity that it generated, required the use of nonrenewable energy resources such as timber and coal. Rendering nature as a dead, inert object was essential for eliminating fears that the mining of metals and fuels crucial for the coming industrial revolution was a violation of nature's inner resources.
The Domination of Nature Globalized
A nascent market economy and its need for an ever-expanding resource base, together with a new vision of scientific progress, were important motivating forces as the early modern state system began to expand beyond its European boundaries. Europeans started venturing overseas in search of additional wealth and natural resources. Merchant describes an ecological crisis-- caused by Europe's shipbuilding industry, an industry that was one of the most critical for subsequent commercial expansion and national supremacy-- that occurred as early as the sixteenth century. Shipbuilding, which depended on mature oaks for masts and hulls, created a severe wood shortage in many parts of Europe, forcing the turn to mining coal as an alternate source of fuel. 18 As Europeans began to sail beyond their shores, the exploitation of natural resources in the name of human progress took on wider dimensions, beginning a process that has culminated in the twentieth century's highly interdependent global resource base with its strong potential for increasing international competition and conflict over scarce resources. As ecological crises have begun to take on global dimensions, humanity's vision of conquering nature has even extended beyond the earth into space. Schemes for mining the moon and using the material to create a "Pittsburgh in space" are being envisaged. 19
In an international system consisting of autonomous sovereign political units, the notion of the world as a single resource base has led inevitably to political competition and conflict. European expansion and imperialism extended the seventeenth century's instrumental view of nature beyond the boundaries of Europe as scientific progress became in itself a justification for imperialist projects. The Enlightenment belief that the transformation of the environment was a measure of human progress was used as a justification for colonialism, because native populations were not deemed capable of effecting this transformation for themselves. 20 Thus the lower position assigned to women and nature in early modern Europe was extended to members of other cultures and races.
Harriet Ritvo argues that the growing dichotomy between domestic and wild animals in modern Europe was frequently compared to the dichotomy between civilized and savage human societies; she cites a report, to which Charles Darwin refers in his writings, of two Scottish collies who visited Siberia and "soon took the same superior standing" with regard to the native dogs "as the European claims for himself in relation to the savage." 21 The Regents Park Zoo, opened in London in 1828, was a celebration of England's imperial enterprise; wild animals from all over the world were displayed as evidence of England's ability to subdue exotic territories and convert their wild products into useful purposes. Ritvo cites a popular nineteenth-century zoology text that compares the ferocity of wild animals to the barbarity of native populations: when describing Africa, its author claims that "in all countries where men are most barbarous, the animals are most cruel and fierce." 22
Carolyn Merchant asserts that by 1700 "nature, women, blacks and wage laborers were set on a path toward a new status as 'natural' and human resources for the modern world system." 23 "Empty" or "virgin" lands became sites for European conquest and settlement; according to Vandana Shiva, wastelands, a word loaded with the biases of colonial rule, were seen as spaces to be cultivated for the generation of revenue and resources for the "mother" country. 24 In reality, these spaces were not empty at all but occupied by people with very different relationships with their natural environment. The expansion of the European state system meant that the scientific revolution and its mechanistic attitude toward nature began to take on global dimensions with far-reaching implications for non-Western ecological traditions, most of which have been lost to the cultural imperialism of the West.
Merchant's account of changing attitudes toward nature in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England provides a case study of one such ecological revolution caused by European expansion. 25 Before European colonization, Native American populations, living in subsistence communities, regarded natural resources as gifts given by nature to take care of human needs; humans and animals lived in interlacing, cyclical time and space. As European settlers moved into these spaces they saw these new lands very differently, as "wastes" or wildernesses to be tamed and "improved," projects that required the expertise of a "superior" culture. The scientist Robert Boyle, who was also the governor of the New England Company, declared his intention of ridding the "Indians" of their "ridiculous" notions about the workings of nature whom they misguidedly perceived "as a kind of goddess." 26 This taming process gradually set humans, European and native alike, apart from nature. Although Native Americans continued to be associated with animals in the minds of European settlers, and were thus placed below Europeans in the social and political hierarchy, Native Americans began to see themselves as distanced from natural resources and apart from nature. Through their involvement in the fur trade Native Americans began to objectify nature as it became associated with commercial transactions, and the killing of animals was undertaken for profit rather than survival. 27
Merchant's account of the next phase of this ecological revolution in early New England parallels her earlier work on seventeenth-century Europe. As agricultural production was transformed from subsistence to market, farming gradually changed into a manufacturing industry. As this transformation took place, production and reproduction were split into separate spheres, and women became defined by their reproductive function within the private sphere. Commercial farming, conducted mostly by men, required the management of nature as an abstract mechanical force; nature as mother retreated into the private sphere along with women, who were expected to be the upholders of moral values that had no place in a market economy. 28
Merchant's conclusion is an ironic one when framed in a global perspective. She argues that since contemporary New England depends on outside sources for most of its energy, food, and clothing some of its own environment has recovered, as evidenced by the regeneration of its natural forests. However, we should remember that today it is people in the Third World who are suffering the gravest consequences of resource depletion: with its colonial legacy as supplier of raw materials to the "civilized" world, the Third World today suffers some of the harshest effects of environmental degradation. The demands upon the world's resources by the Eurocentric state system have imposed and continue to impose heavy burdens on the natural environment and its human inhabitants worldwide.
Nature and the Reconceptualization of Geographic Space
The mechanistic attitude toward nature that began in seventeenth-century Europe and was subsequently globalized through imperialism led to a fundamental shift in the conceptualization of geographical space. Merchant notes that in the case of early America a breakdown of the Native American way of life began with the mapping of their homeland onto geometric space by European explorers and mapmakers. As space was reorganized, fixed boundaries between wild and civilized appeared, boundaries unknown to Native American cultures. The mapping of the world by European explorers led to similar processes of reconceptualizing and organizing geographical space on a global scale, a process that has lent itself to projects of management, control, and domination of the environment.
The history of spatial changes is also the history of power changes. 29 The interrelation between geographical space and power politics noted by Hans Morgenthau and other contemporary international relations scholars was developed more comprehensively by the Western geopolitical tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although it fell from favor in Western international relations scholarship in the post-World War II period, owing to its association with Nazism, geopolitical thinking had considerable influence on United States containment policies of the Cold War era. 30
In his study of Western geopolitical thought, Geoffrey Parker defines geopolitics as the study of international relations from a spatial viewpoint; geopolitics views the world as an interlocking mechanism, an assumption that links it to the Enlightenment view of nature as a machine. 31 While looking at the globe as a totality, geopolitics sees a world divided into bounded political entities competing for control over their environment. Citing Friedrich Ratzel's description f the state as an organism engaged in a competitive struggle of evolution and decay, Parker notes the Darwinian influence on nineteenth-century geopolitical thinking. 32 The German school of Geopolitik, of which Ratzel was a member, was founded on environmental determinism: the power that any state could command depended on its geographical circumstances. In geopolitical terms, spaces are contested areas populated by colonists, soldiers, navies, and traders. As geopolitical thinkers along with mapmakers were effecting this transformation in our perception of the global environment, the native inhabitants of these spaces were being marginalized, just as women were increasingly being confined to the private space of the family.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the expansion of the European state system had brought the entire world into an integrated space upon which the geopolitical tradition imposed the hierarchical notion of order and power that has been fundamental to traditional international relations theory and practice. While geopolitics made explicit the domination that states have attempted to impose on their natural environment, modern science's mechanistic view of nature provided the framing assumptions basic to the Western tradition of international relations theory. Hobbes's Leviathan, his solution to the dangers inherent in this system, is a mechanistic model of society in which order can be guaranteed only by an absolute sovereign operating the machine from outside. 33 The lack of such a sovereign in the state of nature leads to disorder, which results from unbridled competition for scarce resources. As discussed in a previous chapter, this condition of "anarchy" has been used by realists as a metaphor to portray the international system; the wildness of nature beyond the boundaries of an orderly "domesticated" political space demands that states try to control and dominate this external environment through the accumulation of national power that can protect their attempts to appropriate necessary natural resources.
Hobbes's Leviathan was a model for a society developed in the seventeenth century when the perception of the universe shifted from organic to mechanistic. According to Merchant, one of the most significant achievements of mechanism as a worldview was its reordering of reality around a masculinist notion of order and power. 34 In addition to their potential for dominating nature, machines brought certainty and control. In international relations, the search for control has also led theorists and practitioners to mechanistic models such as power balancing with its seeming promise of imposing order on a disorderly international system. But power balancing and its resultant practice of self-help through military means if necessary do not offer solutions for the security of the natural environment. Paradoxically, the quest for national security, which involves the appropriation of natural resources through the domination of global space, is a historical process that has actually contributed to a decline in the security of the natural environment. Given the potential of modern weapons for mass destruction, military force, the last resort of states for security enhancement, has become the ultimate threat to the natural environment.
This paradox has stimulated some international relations scholars to begin reconceptualizing security in ecological terms and to challenge the traditional formulations of geographical space. Such thinking attempts to move beyond a worldview whose boundaries are imposed by traditional national security concerns to one that reconceptualizes geographical space in terms of the fragility of the natural environment and its human inhabitants.
From National Security to Environmental Security
From Geopolitical to Ecopolitical Space
The erection of boundaries has been an important part of the modernist goal to tame nature and impose order and control on dangerous geographical spaces. The geopolitical tradition has drawn our attention to boundaries and spaces carved out by states to enhance their security and command over natural resources. New thinking on environmental security first drew attention to environmental degradation by eliminating these boundaries altogether. Pictures of earth, sent back from the Apollo II spacecraft in 1969, were used to change our spatial perception of the globe from a world divided into hierarchical, competitive states to "spaceship earth," a fragile, interconnected whole whose inhabitants-- women, men, and nonhuman forms of life-- were equally at risk. "From space, we see a small and fragile ball dominated not by human activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils." 35 This new image underscored the uselessness of state boundaries as protection against ecological threats. As Patricia Mische reminds us, the Great Wall of China, the only human creation visible from space, was built to protect against invaders, but it has now become victim to the forces of nature, dwarfed by mountains and other natural features and offering protection against nothing. 36
Just as Merchant describes a reformulation of geopolitical space brought about by an ecological revolution in early New England, scholars concerned with environmental degradation today are challenging us to rethink once again our ideas about contemporary geopolitical space. In an era where modern ecological revolutions have had dramatic impacts on non-Western cultures and peoples worldwide, these new thinkers encourage us to look at the world not as a system of land-based states but as a global unit sharing a dependence upon one atmosphere and upon a single body of water that encompasses 70 percent of the earth's surface. Harold and Margaret Sprout visualize the world not according to familiar maps that depict national boundaries, but as an ecosystem, a global unity of natural carriers composed of the atmosphere and sea water. 37 Although they do not believe that the state is withering away, they do suggest that it is becoming unviable for the provision of personal safety and the survival of the human species. 38 While it is too early to speak of a world community in the political sense, the Sprouts see a tightening interdependence that is forging a community in an ecological sense.
This fragile ecosystem cannot be protected by boundaries, traditional instruments of national security. Problems of the ozone layer, acid rain, and river and ocean pollution are impervious to national boundaries. Just as nuclear testing in the South Pacific has posed severe dangers for local populations, no state in Western Europe was able to protect itself against radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine in 1986. The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, which is suspected of causing a rise in skin cancer in Australia, is thought to be the result of pollution emanating primarily from the Northern Hemisphere. Military power, traditionally used by states to ensure protection of their boundaries from external threats, is seen by environmentalists as not only useless but counterproductive. While modern warfare inevitably imposes enormous devastation on the natural environment, as was evident in the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, weapons testing, military maneuvers, and waste from weapons production contribute to environmental destruction even in peacetime. Military hardware is highly energy intensive. As military spending continues to increase in all parts of the world, environmentalists draw attention to the trade-offs between military and environmental spending. The Worldwatch Institute has estimated that expenditure of a cumulative sum of about $774 billion during the 1990s, a sum less than annual world military spending since the early 1980s, could turn around the adverse trends in soil erosion, deforestation, and decline in energy efficiency, as well as contribute to the development of renewable sources of energy. 39
Global insecurities, as a result of these environmental threats and resource scarcities, were further underscored by the literature on global modeling that, in the early 1970s, began to produce dire warnings of physical "Limits to Growth." Emphasizing this one-world image, forecasts from the Club of Rome predicted that an exponential growth of population and industrially caused pollution would collide with a fixed environment sometime in the next fifty to one hundred years, causing dramatic population decreases and a decline in the quality of life due to a depletion of natural resources, a rise in pollution, and a shrinking of the food supply. 40 Its highly controversial conclusions suggested that only if population increases and economic growth were halted could catastrophe be avoided.
While these universalizing images of "one world" and its fragility have served to alert people to the dangers of environmental degradation and resource constraints, they have seriously depoliticized issues that remain embedded in the historical practices of the European state system. The image of "Mother Earth" tames and domesticates our perception of a world in which this historically expansive system has been responsible for the erection of contemporary boundaries between North and South, rich and poor, and men and women. 41 These boundaries of inequality affect the way in which environmental dangers influence people's lives. While the affluent are concerned with the potential hazards of a thinning ozone layer, the poor are confronted by more immediate environmental degradation, such as contaminated water and soil erosion, which threaten their daily existence.
The cleavage between North and South became apparent at the United Nations Conference on the Environment in 1972, when representatives from states in the South criticized the North for prioritizing the issue of environmental pollution. Although the South has softened its position on this issue somewhat, it continues to resent the attention given to pollution in international forums at the expense of its preferred definition of environmental problems in terms of poverty and maldistribution of resources. The South was highly critical of the Malthusian implications of the Limits to Growth literature that seemed to preclude any chance for a better life for the world's poor. Admonitions that economic growth must be stopped in all parts of the world, when an average person in an industrial market economy uses more than eighty times as much energy as someone in sub-Saharan Africa, were deemed unacceptable. 42 The South has also resented the North's concentration on population control in a world where resource use is highly unequal. Although documents such as Our Common Future, the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, have tried to overcome the hostility engendered by the no-growth implications of the global modelers with calls for "sustainable development," a type of growth that respects environmental constraints, 43 the global effort to deal with the environment has continued to center on pollution, an issue of greater concern to states in the North.
Looking at environmental issues in terms of poverty, as the South demands, draws attention to boundaries that segregate the world's poor into areas of extreme environmental degradation and that render them immediate victims of environmental stress. In the South, disease from polluted drinking water is the single largest cause of premature death, young children being particularly at risk. The United Nations Environmental Program has estimated that 35 percent of the land surface of the earth is threatened with desertification. 44 Problems of desertification and soil erosion have caused widespread famine, particularly in the poorest countries where growing populations press upon inadequate land and fuel resources. In parts of the Sahel, refugees from environmental degradation face further hardships when they become involved in political and social problems such as tribal and ethnic disputes. These extreme problems are not limited to Africa. It has been estimated that one-sixth of the population of Haiti has left that country because of environmental degradation. Haiti suffers from some of the world's most severe soil erosion problems. 45
Environmental boundaries that segregate the poor are generally the result of social or economic inequalities. For example, in Latin America in 1975, 7 percent of landowners possessed 93 percent of the most desirable land, while 83 percent of the population lived on plots too small to support a household, most of them either in damage-prone or forested land. 46 These immediate environmental insecurities are not limited to the rural poor or to people living in the South. Poor people living in urban slum conditions, in rich and poor countries alike, are also particularly vulnerable to environmental threats. In his discussion of "Black Ecology" Nathan Hare claims that blacks in the United States are concerned with the immediate problems of survival, overcrowding, work hazards, and infant mortality, rather than clean beaches and redwood trees. 47 Just as many African Americans are ghettoized in urban slums in the United States, other marginalized peoples are subject to arbitrary boundaries that wall off areas of environmental stress. Native Americans have been placed on some of the worst rural land in the United States, just as South African blacks have been relegated to overcrowded, resource-scarce townships.
For the most part, environmentalists who have described these particular insecurities of marginalized people have failed to address the particular plight of women, who are often the worst victims of environmental degradation. Even the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, an important internationally sponsored report on the environment, does not touch on the immeasurable consequences for women of the deterioration of the environment. 48 As gatherers of firewood and water, rural women in the Third World bear a large measure of responsibility for providing clean drinking water and energy for the household. Since they are responsible for household energy needs, women bear the burden of a severe fuelwood crisis that is widespread in many rural areas of the Third World. In rural areas throughout the world, women carry loads of wood weighing up to thirty-five kilograms as much as ten kilometers from home. 49 It is rarely pointed out that wood is being depleted more rapidly than any fossil fuel; since its consumers have little political power, it is not an issue that commands much attention from those concerned with environmental security. Environmental damage has a severe impact on women's reproductive systems; besides claiming the lives of thousands of victims, the accident at a pesticides plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 had enormous repercussions for women who sought abortions for fear that the leakage of poison gas might cause birth defects. It was women who first organized the protest at Love Canal in New York State in the 1970s because of damage that began to show up in their own reproductive systems and in the bodies of their children. Mothers in toxically contaminated communities have become key environmental activists, often motivated by mothering an environmentally wounded child. 50
The State and Environmental Security
A common theme running through much of the literature on international relations and environmental security is that the contemporary state system is not adequate for the task of solving these problems. Just as this system was born at a time of scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, many contemporary environmentalists believe that another revolution, the technological revolution of the late twentieth century, is creating problems with which this system of sovereign states will be unable to cope. Describing an international relations system in transition, Dennis Pirages claims that the state-centric, exclusionist paradigm described in chapter 2 no longer serves us well in dealing with the rapid changes being brought about by new technologies and their negative consequences. 51 Resource interdependence and pollution demonstrate the permeability of traditional international boundaries and the impossibility of separating domestic and international affairs. In a highly interdependent global ecosystem, many environmentalists believe that the contemporary state is becoming anachronistic. 52
Traditional international relations theory, which describes the self-seeking, conflict-prone behavior of states and its detrimental effects on the natural environment, also offers a pessimistic view of the potential of the state as an environmental manager of the global commons. As Rousseau's metaphor of the stag hunt suggests, collective action for the common good is hard to achieve in anarchical realms with no legally sanctioned method of enforcement. When public goods such as clean air and water can be consumed by all members of the system whether or not they pay for them, states tend to act selfishly, hoping that others will bear the costs. The Sprouts claim that when national governments look to spaces outside their own territory, their concerns reflect their own national values rather than the shared values of a global community. 53 Paradoxically, the great powers, the traditional managers of the international system, pose the greatest threat to the environment by virtue of their disproportionate consumption of resources, their high level of pollution, and their possession of large numbers of environmentally threatening weapons. Given the principle of state sovereignty, internal boundaries that contribute to environmental degradation are also hard to change when it is not in the interests of national political and economic elites to do so.
Consequently, many new thinkers on the environment believe that environmental management must move either up or down the organizational ladder but in any case away from the state. The Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development calls for a greater commitment on the part of international institutions and a greater willingness of states to assign management responsibilities to these global institutions. Others believe that global management will remove environmental issues from the democratic process and that care for the environment must start at the local level with the involvement of individual women and men. Many new thinkers believe that both domestic and international bureaucratic institutions, as they are presently organized around functionally specific tasks, are inadequate for solving complex problems that require an interdisciplinary understanding of whole systems.
Many of these new thinkers submit that the international system, composed of states that have sought to ensure and enhance their own security at the expense of the natural environment and its individual inhabitants, requires a fundamental restructuring if it is to overcome our environmental dilemmas. Yet few of these scholars make similar inferences about the need to restructure the relationship between humans and nature that has evolved simultaneously with the globalization of the state system. Ecologists and ecofeminists offer this more radical challenge: only by changing our relationship with nature can real security, for both our natural environment and its human inhabitants, be achieved.
From Environmental Security to Ecological Security
While environmental managers, operating under short-term constraints, try to coax recalcitrant states into a more cooperative stance vis-;aga-vis environmental crises, ecologists, committed to a more radical reformulation of the way we view our natural environment, take a longer-term perspective. Ecologists believe that only with a fundamental revolution in the way in which we understand nature can problems of such magnitude be solved. The mechanistic view of nature, bequeathed to us by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, does not bode well for an ecologically secure future. But while calling for fundamental changes in both modern science and contemporary political, social, and economic structures as great as those set in motion in the seventeenth century, few ecologists have raised the issue of gender relations. Merchant and many other feminists, however, see this issue as fundamental to those social structures as well as to the projects of modern science. For this reason, ecofeminists would claim that the science of ecology cannot live up to its claim as a holistic science without including gender in its analysis. By making explicit the inherent connection between the domination of nature and the domination of women, ecofeminists claim that both must be overcome simultaneously if true ecological security is to be achieved.
An Ecological Perspective on Security
The science of ecology is interdisciplinary and multidimensional. It assumes that all living species are part of an ecosystem in which everything is interconnected: human beings are but one of many species making demands on the earth's resources. Ecologists claim that populations and their environments are related in ways that cause each to act on the other in dialectical fashion, just as the Native Americans in New England were themselves changed by the ecological revolution caused by European settlers. Ecology studies long-term trends in humans beings' relationship to their environment over the span of geological time. As was the case in premodern Europe, nature is still regarded as a mystery whose behavior must be observed and accepted rather than tamed and controlled. 54 Ecologists claim that only by understanding the complex functioning of living systems as wholes, and their interactions with their environment, can we hope to solve our contemporary ecological crises. This demands a methodology quite different from the atomized, reductionist methods of modern science, which, because it is not holistic, fails to see the harmful side effects of its activities. Ecologists' critiques of modern science parallel those made by feminists such as Merchant, Keller, and Harding. 55
Like certain feminists, many ecologists are critical of modern society, given its dependence on an excessive appropriation of nature's resources. They suggest that the values of modern society are based on an incomplete model of humanity that emphasizes instrumental rationality, production, and consumption at the expense of humaneness, creativity, and compassion. "Economic man" is a compulsive producer and consumer, with little thought for ecological constraints. Modernization, which has legitimized these destructive behaviors, has led to a loss of control over science and technology that is causing severe environmental stress today. 56 Modernization, a product of the European Enlightenment, is now being reproduced in the Third World, where development projects often further strain limited environmental resources and reproduce inequality. Irene Dankelman and Joan Davidson claim that science's manipulations of nature, manifested in projects such as the Green Revolution, threaten the natural environment and marginalize poor people. As modern techniques are used to increase crop yields, water supplies begin to suffer from contamination from fertilizers and pesticides, making them less available for drinking. Modernization of agriculture in the Third World has encouraged monoculture and cash cropping, which makes women's tasks of feeding families more difficult. The authors point out that the ecological damage caused by modernization often falls most heavily on women in their role as family providers. 57
Ecologists are critical of environmental management in general. They claim that management techniques grow out of the reductionist methodology of modern science that cannot cope with complex issues whose interdependencies are barely understood. Such methodologies, evident in the use of computer models, perpetuate the dominating, instrumental view of nature that attempts to render it more serviceable for human needs and that leaves hierarchies-- feminists would include gender hierarchies-- intact. A mechanistic view of nature leads to the assumption that it can be tinkered with and improved for human purposes, an assumption that is increasingly being questioned as negative consequences of projects such as high-yield agriculture are becoming more evident. Ecologists believe that only when knowledge is demystified and democratized, and not regarded as solely the possession of "experts," can an ecologically sound mode of existence be implemented.
As Patricia Mische points out, we have reached a point where just as the number of international agreements on the environment is increasing, so too is the level of environmental degradation. Mische claims that this is because agreements are usually reactive rather than anticipatory, selective rather than comprehensive. 58 If environmental management is barely able to keep pace with environmental degradation, ecologists believe that only with a fundamental change in human relationships with nature can we achieve real ecological security. As an alternative to "rational man," David Orr posits "ecological man," who would be less materialistic, his behavior more finely tuned to cycles of nature and to his own biological rhythms. 59
In a similar vein, the Sprouts claim that a revolution in the way people view the world and their relation to it must take place in order to achieve environmental security. Human behavior is governed by both exploitative and mutualistic philosophies; to live in harmony with the natural environment, the Sprouts believe that it is necessary to move toward a greater reliance on mutualistic behavior, a type of behavior that they argue is more typical of family relations than public-sphere behavior. 60 Using the metaphor of the earth as an estate in trust to be prudently managed and bequeathed to posterity, the Sprouts universalize this ethic of care and responsibility associated with activities most often performed by women in the household. Although they are not explicit on this point, both Orr's construction of "ecological man" and the behavior recommended by the Sprouts are closer to most women's life experiences than to many men's.
An Ecofeminist Perspective on Security
Social ecologists such as William Leiss explicitly link man's domination of nature with certain men's domination over other human beings. Defending the original goals of the scientific revolution as an attempt to liberate human beings from the constraints of their natural environment and increase their material well-being, Leiss claims that the rationalism of modern science became caught in a web of social contradictions. The instruments through which human beings have transformed the resources of nature into means for the satisfaction of material desires have increasingly come to be regarded as objects of political conflict both domestically and internationally. 61 According to Leiss's class analysis, the real object of domination has not been nature but human beings: through enhanced technological capabilities certain people have appropriated nature's resources and thereby dominated others. A more rational science would understand the world in a way that would produce harmony with the environment. But this can be realized only when the struggle for domination ends, along with disparities in power among groups and nations. 62
Social ecologist Murray Bookchin, one of the few ecologists who raises the issue of gender relations, also points to the hierarchical structuring of the contemporary world embodied in man's domination over man, woman, and nature. Bookchin believes that these modes of domination are historically constructed and can therefore be transcended. He stresses the emancipatory potential of ecology, a science that recognizes no hierarchy and is therefore in a position to combat domination at all levels. 63
Bookchin claims that this Western hierarchical thinking, which valorizes male power, devalues women by associating them with its devalued image of nature. It is this essentialist connection between women and nature, made both by some ecologists and certain feminists, that contributes to many other feminists' reluctance to espouse an ecological perspective. 64 The immanent connection between women and nature, linked to women's biological functions, has been criticized by many feminists as demeaning, deterministically excluding women from the male domain of culture and transcendence. Yet recent work in feminist cultural anthropology disputes claims that this connection is innate and suggests instead that it is historically contingent: rooted in Western cultural traditions, it has been imposed on other cultures as part of the Western project of domination. 65
If, as these anthropologists and social constructionist ecofeminists believe, Western civilization has reinforced the subjugation of women through its assertion that they are closer to nature than men, then the nature/culture dualism must be challenged rather than ignored. If, as these authors claim, the woman/nature connection is historically contingent, then there are possibilities for transcending this hierarchical dualism in ways that offer the promise of liberation for both women and nature. Since the liberation of nature is also the goal of ecology, ecofeminist Ynestra King suggests that feminism and ecology can usefully form an alliance. According to King, ecology is not necessarily feminist, but its beliefs are quite compatible with those of these social constructionist ecofeminists since both make their chief goal the radical undermining of hierarchical dualisms. King argues that, since ecofeminists believe that misogyny is at the root of the dualism between nature and culture that ecologists deplore, ecology is incomplete without feminism. 66
While ecologists such as Leiss have connected the exploitation of nature to class domination, social constructionist ecofeminists make more explicit an interlocking pattern of dominance relationships that include sexism and racism as well as classism and that, they claim, are historically tied to the domination of nature. Joan Griscom believes that only when conceptual connections between all these forms of repressions are made can the emancipatory potential of ecology be fully realized. 67 According to ecofeminist Ynestra King, feminism challenges the male-based values of our culture: when coupled with an ecological perspective, it insists that all human beings, both women and men, remember and accept their origins in nature. King claims that ecofeminism is in a position to heal the splits in a world divided against itself and built on a fundamental lie: the defining of culture in opposition to nature. Only by seeking to overcome such hierarchical dualisms can we move toward a more harmonious relationship with our natural environment. 68
Since women have been associated with a devalued nature through these hierarchical dualisms, women have a particular are often the worst victims of environmental degradation. But just as I have argued against perceiving women as victims in the protector/protected discourse of national security, so women must not be seen solely as victims of environmental degradation but also as agents who must participate equally in the solution of these problems. Since women have not been well represented in national and international institutions dealing with the environment, their contribution to working for ecological security has been largely at the grassroots level. For example, the Chipko movement, which began with women hugging trees as a protest against cutting them down in the Chamoli district of Uttar Pradesh in 1973, met with some success when Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi issued a fifteen-year ban on the commercial felling of the forests of Uttar Pradesh. Women are also taking part in projects of reforestation; Kenya's Green Belt Movement, started in 1977 by the National Council of Women, involves women in the establishment of "Green Belt communities" and small tree nurseries. 69
The kind of knowledge that women bring to these various environmental movements is gained from experience as producers and providers for daily household needs. However, the belief that this type of knowledge cannot be "scientific" has kept it from being recognized by development and environmental "experts" as well as foreign policymakers. As long as metaphors such as "global housekeeping" associate ecological security with the devalued realm of women, it will not become an issue of priority on the foreign policy agendas of states or in the mainstream discipline of international relations.
While it has paid little direct attention to environmental issues, the conventional discipline of international relations has relied to a great extent on modernity's mechanistic view of nature in framing its assumptions about the behavior of states in the international system. Feminist perspectives on ecology reveal not only the hierarchical relationship between humans and nature that has grown out of this worldview but also the extent to which this unequal relationship interacts with other forms of domination and subordination, including gender relations. The hierarchical dualisms discussed in this chapter, such as culture/nature, civilized/wild, North/South, rich/poor, public/private, and international/local, have been characteristic of the way in which we describe world politics and the interaction of states with their natural environment. A feminist perspective would argue that not until the boundaries of inequality and domination these dualisms represent are transcended can true ecological security be achieved. Only through the emergence of a system of values that simultaneously respects nature, women, and adversity of cultures-- norms that have been missing from the historical practices of international statecraft-- can models that promise an ecologically secure future be devised.
Endnotes
*: Dalai Lama epigraph quoted in the Boston Globe, September 17, 1990, p. 27; Richard Darman, director of Office of Management and Budget, epigraph quoted in the New York Times, May 14, 1990, p. A16. Back.
Note 1: Quoted in Sprout and Sprout, The Context of Environmental Politics,p. 58. Back.
Note 2: Orr and Soroos, eds., The Global Predicament, p. 4. Back.
Note 3: For an overview of how various approaches to feminist theory deal with the natural environment see Carolyn Merchant, "Ecofeminism and Feminist History," in Diamond and Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World, pp. 100-105. Back.
Note 4: Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations. Originally published in 1948, well before the environment was on the international agenda, Politics Among Nations has gone through six editions, all of which have adopted essentially the same attitude toward the natural environment. Back.
Note 5: For an ecological analysis of international conflict and war, an unusual perspective in international relations theory, see Choucri and North, Nations in Conflict. Back.
Note 6: White, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." Back.
Note 7: Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 2. Back.
Note 9: Ritvo, The Animal Estate, p. 1. Back.
Note 10: Ibid., p. 11-13. Back.
Note 11: See for example, ibid., p. 3, where Ritvo discusses dog breeders' assumptions about the sexual behavior of dogs, which are loaded with assumptions about human females. Back.
Note 12: Francis Bacon, "The Masculine Birth of Time," quoted in Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, p. 36. Back.
Note 13: Leiss, The Domination of Nature, ch. 1. Back.
Note 14: Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, p. 113. Back.
Note 15: Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, pp. 63-64. Back.
Note 16: Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 168. Back.
Note 17: Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, p. 61. Back.
Note 18: Merchant, The Death of Nature, pp. 65-66. Back.
Note 19: Jack D. Salmon, "Resupplying Spaceship Earth: Prospects for Space Industrialization," ch. 11 in Orr and Soroos, eds., The Global Predicament. Back.
Note 20: Leiss, The Domination of Nature, ch. 4. Back.
Note 21: Charles Darwin quoted in Ritvo, The Animal Estate, p. 16. Back.
Note 22: Ibid., p. 25. African killer bees are a contemporary version of this argument. Back.
Note 23: Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 288. Back.
Note 24: Shiva, Staying Alive, p. 85. Back.
Note 25: Merchant, Ecological Revolutions. Back.
Note 26: Shiva, Staying Alive, p. 19. Back.
Note 27: Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, ch. 2. Back.
Note 30: Dalby, "American Security Discourse," p. 172. Back.
Note 31: Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century, p. 2. Back.
Note 33: Merchant, The Death of Nature, pp. 209-215. Back.
Note 34: Ibid., chs. 8 and 9. Back.
Note 35: The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, p. 1. Back.
Note 36: Mische, "Ecological Security and the Need to Reconceptualize Sovereignty," p. 389. Back.
Note 37: Sprout and Sprout, Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth, ch. 11. Back.
Note 39: Renner, "National Security," p. 37. Back.
Note 40: Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth. Back.
Note 41: For a feminist critique of this single-earth image, see Yaakov Jerome Garb, "Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings on Contemporary Earth Imagery," in Diamond and Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World, pp. 264-278. Garb claims that this extraterrestrial view of the world, since it relies exclusively on visual imagery that distances subject from object, is a patriarchal form of knowledge that objectifies the earth in the same way that women have been objectified. Back.
Note 42: For an extended critique from this perspective see Hayward R. Alker, Jr., and Ann Tickner, "Some Issues Raised by Previous Models," ch. 4 in Deutsch et al., Problems of World Modeling. Back.
Note 43: The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, ch. 2. Back.
Note 44: Renner, "National Security," p. 30. Back.
Note 45: The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, p. 292. Back.
Note 46: Mathews, "Redefining Security," p. 166. Back.
Note 47: Hare, "Black Ecology," ch. 12 in Pursell, ed., From Conservation to Ecology. Back.
Note 48: Pietil;aua and Vickers, Making Women Matter, p. 129. Back.
Note 49: Dankelman and Davidson, Women and the Environment in the Third World, p. 69. Back.
Note 50: Lin Nelson, "The Place of Women in Polluted Places," in Diamond and Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World, p. 180. Back.
Note 51: Pirages, Global Technopolitics, ch. 1. Back.
Note 52: Sprout and Sprout, Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth, ch. 1. Back.
Note 54: Botkin, Discordant Harmonies. Back.
Note 55: Botkin's description of the science of ecology parallels Evelyn Fox Keller's description of the scientific methodology of biologist Barbara McClintock, which, Keller claims, is different from the methodology of much of modern science. See Keller, A Feeling for the Organism. Back.
Note 56: David W. Orr, "Modernization and the Ecological Perspective," ch. 4 in Orr and Soroos, eds., The Global Predicament. Back.
Note 57: Dankelman and Davidson, Women and Environment in the Third World, ch. 2. See also Shiva, Staying Alive, ch. 5. Back.
Note 58: Mische, "Ecological Security and the Need to Reconceptualize Sovereignty," p. 404. Back.
Note 59: Orr, "Modernization and the Ecological Perspective," ch. 4 in Orr and Soroos, eds., The Global Predicament, p. 85. Back.
Note 60: Sprout and Sprout, The Context of Environmental Politics, ch. 3. Back.
Note 61: Leiss, The Domination of Nature, p. 22. Back.
Note 62: Ibid., pp. 120-122. Back.
Note 63: Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society. See also Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom. Back.
Note 64: Socialist feminists, particularly, have criticized what they see as an idealist, antirationalist connection between women and nature. As an example of one such text, see Griffin, Woman and Nature. Back.
Note 65: Carol P. MacCormack, "Nature, Culture, and Gender: A Critique," ch. 1 in MacCormack and Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture, and Gender. In arguing for a social constructionist position, these authors are critiquing an important piece by Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?," in Rosaldo and Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture, and Society, pp. 67-87. Ortner acknowledges the influence of de Beauvoir on her work. However, to be fair to de Beauvoir, her famous statement that one is not born a woman but becomes one, confirms her belief in the social construction of gender. See de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 301. Back.
Note 66: King, "The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology," ch. 2 in Plant, ed., Healing the Wounds. Back.
Note 67: Griscom, "On Healing the Nature/History Split in Feminist Thought," p. 5. Back.
Note 68: King, "Feminism and the Revolt of Nature," p. 14. Back.
Note 69: For other examples see Dankelman and Davidson, Women and Environment in the Third World and Shiva, Staying Alive. Back.
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