Beyond Mothering Earth

BEYOND MOTHERING EARTH BEYOND MOTHERING EARTH Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care SHERILYN MACGREGOR © UBC Press 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca. 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Canada on ancient-forest-free paper (100 percent post-consumer recycled) that is processed chlorine- and acid-free, with vegetable-based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication MacGregor, Sherilyn, 1969- Beyond mothering earth : ecological citizenship and the politics of care / Sherilyn MacGregor. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7748-1201-6 ISBN-10: 0-7748-1201-X 1. Ecofeminism. 2. Caring. 3. Women – Social conditions. I. Title. HQ1194.M32 2006 305.42082 C2006-902217-8 UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens Set in Arrus and News Gothic by Artegraphica Design Co. Ltd. Copy editor: Joanne Richardson Proofreader: Stephanie VanderMeulen Indexer: Christine Jacobs UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083 www.ubcpress.ca To my parents, Nancy and George MacGregor, for everything Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction: Earthcare or Feminist Ecological Citizenship? 3 PART ONE: THEORETICAL INTERROGATIONS 2 The Roots and Rhetoric of Ecomaternalism 19 3 “Down among the Women”: Ecofeminism and Identity Politics at the Grassroots 33 4 From Care to Citizenship: Calling Ecofeminism Back to Politics 57 5 The Problems and Possibilities of Ecological Citizenship 81 PART TWO: CONVERSATIONS 6 Conversations with Activist Women: Towards a Counter-Narrative 123 7 The Private, the Public, and the Planet: Juggling Care and Activism in Daily Life 145 8 Activist Women Theorize the Green Political 180 9 No Motherhood Issue: The Project of Feminist Ecological Citizenship 217 Appendix: Research Process and Methods 238 Notes 249 References 265 Index 281 Acknowledgments My research and this book would not have been possible without the coopera- tion of the thirty women who took time out of their busy lives (from the autumn of 1999 to the summer of 2000) to tell me about their activist and caring work. I first want to express my thanks and appreciation to them. I owe thanks to many other people for their support and assistance at different stages of the research and writing process. I am most indebted to Catriona Sandilands whose mentorship, incisive and rigorous criticism, and commit- ment to conversation over the past nearly ten years are the reasons I was able to see this project through to fruition. Her book The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999) was an inspiration for my research and continues to inform my thinking in important ways. Ilan Kapoor, Lorraine Code, and Margrit Eichler each helped guide me through the research and writing process and gave excellent advice on how to work through and present my various conflicting arguments. Lorraine Code deserves special thanks for her careful reading and editing of my early drafts. I also appreciate Lee Quinby’s critical feedback and encouragement. I am grateful for the support and friendship of many of my colleagues in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, especially the members of the Democracy Reading Group (namely, Nick Garside, Navin Nayak, Cheryl Lousley, Kim Fry, and Pablo Bose) who helped me think and talk through what ecological citizenship might and might not mean. Ellie Perkins, Gerda Wekerle, Deborah Barndt, Barbara Rahder, Roger Keil, and Engin Isin contributed in different, yet equally valuable, ways to the different stages of the process. Students in my Environmental Politics and Advocacy course provided inspiration, though they probably didn’t know it at the time. And many of my good friends in Toronto gave much needed moral (and sometimes IT) support for which I am very thankful, especially Olga Kits, Jen Cypher, Kara Lysne-Paris, Richard Milgrom, John Sandlos, and Adrian Ivakhiv. Several people have helped and encouraged me more recently as I was com- pleting this book, a task that has largely taken place at Lancaster University x Acknowledgments and in my new home in the English Lake District. Thanks especially to Andy Dobson and Derek Bell for welcoming me into the UK environmental politics and citizenship loop, and to Richard Twine for keeping at least one of my feet firmly planted in the field of ecofeminism. I owe a great deal of thanks to Randy Schmidt, my editor at UBC Press, for supporting the manuscript with enthusiasm from the beginning and for being generous with encouragement while I was preparing the book. Holly Keller and Joanne Richardson at UBC Press also deserve thanks for their skilled and sympathetic editing. I am grateful to Maureen Reed and John Barry who reviewed the manuscript and gave extremely helpful comments and advice on how to improve it. I owe John Barry a special note of thanks for supporting my book even though he disagrees with some of my arguments about “green men.” I have taken his comments seriously and I look forward to future conversations. Finally, I want to thank my family for caring for and about me throughout my many years of academic work, and my partner Simon Pardoe, not only for his love, patience, and good humour (which seem remarkably limitless) but also for making swift walks up the hill non-negotiable during the final stages of this project. My research has been generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humani- ties Research Council of Canada. I held a doctoral fellowship from 1996 to 1999 and a Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2002 to 2004. An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published (with the same title) in Ethics and the Environment 9 (1), 2004. Parts of Chapter 5 appear in “No Sustainability without Justice: A Feminist Critique of Environmental Citizenship,” in Environmental Citizenship, edited by Derek Bell and Andrew Dobson (MIT Press, 2006). An excerpt from Chapter 6 appears as “A Matter of Interpretation: The Place of ‘Lived Experi- ence’ in Ecofeminist Research” in Women and Environments International (Fall 2001). My chapter entitled “The Public, the Private, the Planet and the Prov- ince: Women’s Quality-of-Life Activism in Urban Southern Ontario,” which appears in This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment, edited by Melody Hessing, Rebecca Raglan, and Catriona Sandilands (UBC Press, 2005), is based on material that appears in Chapters 7 and 8 of this book. BEYOND MOTHERING EARTH 1 Introduction: Earthcare or Feminist Ecological Citizenship? Women have had no voice, but ecofeminism is a radical new language. Women must provide the moral energy and determination for both the First and Third Worlds. They are the future and hope in the struggle over life. – Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment Ecological feminism has a history of deliberating such difficult questions as: Are women more “naturally” connected to nature than men? Do women’s gendered roles and experiences give them unique insight into human-nature relationships? Why is it that women around the world seem to demonstrate relatively more concern for the quality of their environments than men? Where do the roots of this concern lie? These questions, and the answers they pro- voke, are the focus of Beyond Mothering Earth, in which I critically interrogate “ecofeminist” discourses that make connections between women’s caring and ecological politics. I question why it is that many ecofeminists assert a special role for women as environmental caretakers without considering their lives as political subjects or what it might mean for women in inegalitarian societies to bear such an enormous responsibility. The position that animates the discus- sion that follows is that feminist ecological citizenship is a more promising, and more radical, language for articulating the goals of ecofeminist politics than the language of care. In 1996 Berkeley historian and pioneering ecofeminist theorist Carolyn Merchant published Earthcare: Women and the Environment. Since Merchant is a big-name environmental scholar, it is not surprising that the book quickly made its way onto environmental studies and women’s studies reading lists. 4 Introduction Earthcare contains numerous examples of women’s efforts to protect the environment and human health throughout history and around the world. From the “moral mothers” of nineteenth-century New England to the “hysterical housewives” at Love Canal in the 1970s, to the Planeta Fêmea tent at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Merchant celebrates the contributions of women to the struggle for ecological sustainability. In fact, her dedication reads: “To the women who will care for and defend the earth in the third millennium from those who have done so in the recent and deep past.” The book offers an important glimpse into discourses of ecofeminism and has in- spired my ten-year-long engagement with a dominant line of ecofeminist ar- gumentation about women’s role in grassroots environmental movements. Like many ecofeminist scholars, Merchant places great hope in the myriad material and moral connections that women qua women seem to have to nature.

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