Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 16:21:31 -0700
From: Lisa Rogers <eqwq.lrogers-AT-state.ut.us>
Subject:  Jackson 1995, on Environmental Myths, part 1


Part 1
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Summary by Lisa Rogers

Jackson, C. 1995 "Radical Environmental Myths: A Gender Perspective"
New Left Review 210:124-140  

Jackson addresses the "tide of ecocentric radical environmentalism"
influencing Green politics, as well as ecofeminism; "this article
considers what ecocentrism and ecofeminism share."

"Some major themes in ecocentric and ecofeminist discourses are the
rejection of self-determination, scientism and instrumentalism; the
promotion of sexual essentialism; myth making and the prescription of
subsistence utopias - I look now at their implications for women."

__Self-Determination and Freedom Myths__

"Ecocentrists and ecofeminists call for a new way of understanding
freedom and self-determination.  Key ecofeminists Maria Mies and
Vandana Shiva say that ecofeminists 'identify freedom with their
loving interaction with Mother Earth.'  Female foeticide and
infanticide in south Asia, gender wage differentials, domestic
violence and human rights are feminist concerns which find no
reflection in such definitions of freedom."

Mies claims that 'autonomy of the subject is based on heteronomy
(being determined by others) of some Other (nature, other human
beings, 'lower' parts of the self)', and that this is not good for
women or the environment.  Mies emphasizes 'embeddedness' and
'symbiosis', and rejects the atomism and isolation allegedly required
by 'self-determination'.

Jackson disagrees, saying that self-det. does not have to mean that
at all, it can mean a change in the economic/ subsistence dependence
of women upon men. 

J. Dreze (1990) is quoted to support Jackson's point that the 'net of
relations' and traditional culture are no guarantee of the well-being
of imaginary 'Third World women', as another example of how some
rad/green/fem arguments are both inaccurate and harmful to the real
interests of women/people.  "The complex of social relations in
family, village and community is the locus of gender struggles rather
than a 'safety net'..."

"Third world women's views are generalized by Mies and Shiva and
taken at face value with no attempt to deconstruct their content and
provenance or understand 'patriarchal bargains'... Social analysis is
suspended when women's voices are represented, implicit truth claims
are made and no space between women's perceptions and actually
existing reality is admitted.  The absence of critical perspectives
here is central to the myth-making discussed below." 

__Localism, Populism, and Subsistence Myths__

Ecocentrics are anti-global because they identify global as global
domination by multinationals and superpowers and their assistants. 
"Both ecocentrism and ecofeminism share an ideal of 'community' as
localized, small-scale, self-sufficient, spatially committed and
defined groups with intimate and specific knowledges of concrete
environments.  Like the broader tradition of populism they offer
little analysis of conflicting interests and inequality within the
community...  Like bioregionalism, ecofeminists such as Judith Plant
stress 'learning to become native to place' and say that 'the
bioregional view values home above all else', claiming that this is
also where women's power is based."

"This innocent view of the family and home is barely believable.  The
family has a central role in ecocentric prescriptions, with its
internal social relations left entirely unexamined."  It completely
ignores "a range of profoundly negative behavior towards women
precisely within the family; growing female foeticide and
infanticide, strengthening son preference in food and health care
allocation between children, the spread of dowry to new social
groups."  There are "no grounds for believing the family to be a
benign social institution for women."

"The sociological critique of concepts such as community and
tradition finds no reflection here, nor is there any awareness of the
gender dimensions of insider/outsider status where patrilocal
marriage frequently renders women (and other immigrants) outsiders,
with conditional property rights, and (some) men insiders."  

Ecocentrics also deplore migration and "criticize the 'modern
elevation of mobility to the highest value' and see this as a
consequence of individualism and instrumental attitudes to nature... 
Migrations however take place in a social, economic and political
context, frequently characterized by poverty and conflict, in which
mobility is a survival strategy.  Mobility in the form of rural-urban
migration has been a means, for rural women in particular, of
escaping and resisting inequality."

Another part of the eco/centric/fem prescription for development is
the rejection of wage/factory work.  This is a part of Mies' critique
of 'freedom', 'equality' and 'self-determination', that they are all
determined by how much money one has within a capitalist economy. 
But "Self-sufficient rural livelihoods exhibit high levels of unpaid
women's work, the 'moral economy' does not guarantee survival for all
equally (women in such societies frequently suffer worse access to
food and health care than men), and development from below assumes,
entirely unrealistically, gender-neutral village-level institutions. 
But non-monetized subsistence relations can be deeply
exploitative..."

"The important critique of women's employment in developing countries
exposes a gendered form of exploitation, but this cannot be read as
suggesting that engagement with labour markets is always antagonistic
to women's interests or that a retreat to subsistence production is,
a priori, any less exploitative."
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end of part 1