As we learned from our readings on Understanding Place, our identities and the way we experience the world are shaped by our surroundings.  I think this can create a close-minded take on the world, when we aren’t aware of others experiences shaping the way they lived.  It’s easy to see from an egotistical point of view when you are only seeing the world through your eyes, and so much of our government and society and based upon the perspectives of a homogeneous group of people, often leaving out critical standpoints of the many different identities that make up our communities.  Beverly Daniel Tatum says, “Dominant groups, by definition, set the parameters within which the subordinates operate,” (The Complexity of Identity 11).  Ecofeminism has the potential to be a movement for everyone, because of its opposition to a natural hierarchy where, “human hierarchy is projected onto nature and then used to justify social domination,” (King).  But, according to The Necessity of Black Women’s Standpoint, ecofeminism has been largely a white women’s movement, often leaving out critical perspectives of other women whose experiences differ from theirs.  This is similar to the natural hierarchy that they are working to dismantle.  So, within the ecofeminist movement there is social domination that need to be addressed and fixed in order to make one single and totally inclusive social and political movement.  A major example of environmental racism and sexism would be the Flint water crisis in Michigan.  This is poor, black community that has been largely ignored by our government.  The women of this community are particularly affected through reproductive injustice.  The contaminated water causes infertility and miscarriages (Cain).

It’s interesting because ecofeminism understands the interlocking of oppression under the web of patriarchy.  Each oppression like racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and so on are all tied together because they deviate from the standard white, heterosexual, upper-middle class, able-bodied male.  Yet, it fails to look at how these oppression still operate within these subordinated groups.  There is still racism within feminism, there is still sexism within racially oppressed communities.  They say, “The critique of ecofeminism and fact that the environmental justice movement does not focus on how sexism affects black women in its intersectional approaches supports the argument that there needs to be an environmental movement centered around black women’s standpoint,” (Cain).  I would go further and say that the ecofeminist movement needs to have a standpoint from all kinds of people, poor or rich, black or white, disabled or not, lesbian or straight, male or female.  In order for the movement to be a movement for all, it needs to dismantle each oppression and not focus on the perspective of one oppressed group.

Gender Equality and State Environmentalism studies the connection between a state’s oppression of women and it’s contribution to environmental degradation.  Their initial thoughts were that women have more pro-environmental values, are less risk averse, and are more involved in environmental movements than their male counterparts.  They compared the gender equality and environmental ranks of different countries and noticed a positive correlation between a nation’s treatment of women and it’s global environmental impact.  There is no definitive answer as to why, but there research findings show how any kind of general social oppression within a country is going to silence those being hurt, and since women and nature have a similar oppression, women are starting to become nature’s voice.  For example, the study looks at Norway, which is a very developed and modernized country.  One of it’s most influential and female leaders, Gro Harlem Bruntland, lead the country towards gender equality and environmentally safe policies (11).  I think this goes to show that more female involvement in politics and social movements means more environmental change because of the interconnections of the oppression of women and nature.  I think it also shows how important it is to involve people of oppressed groups in politics,” these reasons include the fact that women…. typically suffer disproportionately from environmental degradation, and sexism and environmental degradation can be mutually reinforcing processes,” (519).  Their expriences give them a greater voice to bring awareness to different issues, and gives them an overall greater influence within society.  As oppressed, marginalized women become more involved in politics and social movements, they bring their concerns over climate change and a greener future with them.

I searched the internet for ways in which women with political power have influenced environmental change, and I found a lot of information from the United Nations Women.  The UN Women does research on sustainable development for our planet after learning about the detrimental affects our way of life has led to climate change.  They also study how women are affected by climate change and ways in which a better environment can solve different women’s issues.  For example, by supporting the Barefoot College in India, the UN has been able to help illiterate women learn engineering skills to install solar lamp kits in their communities.  That way they are changing the lives of this women and their environment a the same time.  This is reflective of the empowerment that comes from the United Nations Women.  A group of female leaders making positive political change from the issues they raise on a global and respected platform.  It’s a subgroup of the United Nations that understands the importance of giving a voice to those who are voiceless.

http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/economic-empowerment/sustainable-development-and-climate-change

Another great organization I found was, Women Deliver, that advocates for and invests in the rights for women around the world.  They have laid out different reasons on how climate change has affected women, and they are actively working towards attainable solutions.  One project they are working on is actually funded by the United Nations, and they are educating the local women of Bolivia on how to properly care for their crop production with the changes in the weather due to climate change.  Providing them this education will make their lives easier and sustainable with the changing environment they are forced to live with.

https://womendeliver.org/investment/invest-women-tackle-climate-change-conserve-environment/

“Today, the median female share of the global workforce is 45.4 percent. Women’s formal and informal labor can transform a community from a relatively autonomous society to a participant in the national economy,” (The Role of Women in the Workforce). I like this statistics because its reflective of the growing participation among women in the global economy.  With more female global participation we can create a larger change in different aspects, including the environment.

“I don’t believe in abortion, but if I became pregnant right now, I would have one,” – teenage me.  I remember the confusion as a teenage girl, learning about sex and hearing everyone was having it, then eventually having it myself.  I remember struggling with what I would do if I were to become accidentally pregnant at a young age.  It was this battle I would have with myself over right from wrong.  Am I supposed to have sex?  It’s all anyone ever talks about.  Boys are expected to, but girls have to take responsibility.  So, should girls not have sex this young?  But how are boys going to have sex if the girls aren’t?  Growing up Catholic, but also living in a time where abortion was still hush-hush, was tough.  I’m taught abortion is wrong, by my parents, my church, but also my community.  Yet, I still know that everyone at my high school is “doing it”.  On the inside, I knew I would get an abortion if I needed to.  I knew I could not face a teenage pregnancy for practical reasons but also emotional reasons as well- I was not old enough to become a mother, a provider, a caregiver!  My life was still starting.  But when I said it out loud, I felt shame.  

Now, as a twenty-four-year-old woman living in 2019, I’ve learned how abortion is not only an issue of morality, but it also takes on environmental concerns.  With climate change becoming more of a serious recognized issue in our society, the argument of abortion has taken on more of a legitimacy.  I believe Hawkins ideas are just practical based on real world issues we face.  For example, as a teenager I knew that if the time ever came, I would be able to get an abortion.  It would be expensive, but I would do it because I would have accessibility based on where I lived, and I knew I could pull together the money.  But I know that not all women have that luxury.  Hawkins says, “at least 1.2 billion people are presently estimated to be living in absolute poverty around the world, of which about half are thought to be trapped in such a self- reinforcing process,” (690).  Abortion restriction is thought to be systematically maintaining, if not expanding, world poverty and therefore, heightening our effect on climate change.  More people mean more environmental degradation.  Hawkins says that we have an issue of overpopulation in the world and there aren’t enough resources to sufficiently provide for everyone.  She states, “… tomorrow, the overall needs will be greater, while the resources for meeting them will be proportionately less,” (691).  So, from an environmentalist perspective, abortion and other birth control options are not only okay but necessary. 

She raises a great point about how living in a first-world country makes population overgrowth seem like distant issue that is not an actual threat to our society.  I think that this also contributes to why our country has such a moral stance on abortion.  We are able to look at it from a human perspective rather than as a solution to environmental and social issues like poverty.  Yet, I think it’s interesting how people can argue for example, that killing animals for consumption is necessary for human survival, yet birth control used for the survival of our planet and therefore the human race is wrong.  Maybe if we highlighted this reason for abortion, the social stance on this issue would change and become more accepting.  With more people understanding climate change and making the necessary changes, like recycling or solar energy, maybe we can use this environmental perspective as an effective argument in favor of abortion.  Hawkins believes that abortion can help our environment in a logical way by simply reducing the amount of our planet’s natural resources we consume (692).  It’s an easy way to limit the amount of environmental degradation made by humans.  Can our first-world society change its moral stance on abortion for the greater good of the planet?

Hawkins, Ronnie Zoe. “Reproductive Choices: The Ecological Dimension”,  Environmentalism, Accessed: 8 March 2019. https://umassd.umassonline.net/bbcswebdav/pid-1227086-dt-content-rid-11913333_1/courses/D2830-12796_MASTER/Scanned%20from%20a%20Xerox%20multifunction%20device001%282%29.pdf

We are taught that humans are the dominant species and that animals are meant for human consumption.  We say things like, “eating meat is natural,” because we are taught to believe in a natural hierarchy of species.  So, by eating meat we are continuing speciesism and the devaluation of animals lives.  Also, by using women’s bodies to sexualize meat we are socially normalizing this idea that women’s bodies are meant for male consumption.  This lowers women’s status on the hierarchy of species to the same level as animals and instills this notion that what is here on this earth is here for the utilization of men.  To compare women to the consumption of meat is to figuratively annihilate women of their free will and to separate them of any personal identities (Adams 14).

In this first image, I see three men smiling obliviously to the fact that they are following the hegemonic influence of patriarchy in our society through the exploitation of women’s bodies to unnecessarily sell dead animals that were unwillingly killed, not only for human consumption, but to feed the masculinity in men.  They smile as they wear the image of a woman’s body with a cow head.  The individual human woman and nonhuman female cow have been lost to the mass term, meat, where their identities has been taken and they are now used as an object of male desired consumption.  Their smiles either show a blissful ignorance or a complicit understanding of patriarchal domination, which do you think?

When I see this picture, I think of how humans profit off of animals bodies the same way they profit off of women’s bodies.  The breasts, bottoms, thighs, abdomens are all of their own value, some prized more than the others, but everyone has their own taste.  Are you a tasty bottom man or a breast man? Do you like girls with thick thighs? ….Wait, are we talking about animal meat or women?!  Women’s bodies are sold through advertisement in a similar manner to how animals are sold in a meat market.  We sexualize our products in order to make sales, and we sexualize our meat in order to make sales.  To refer to this animal only in it’s parts, is to make the cow’s previous life disappear.  They become the absent referent, as Adams would say (23).  When we refer to women only in their body parts, aren’t we doing the same thing?  Aren’t we minimizing her life down to what part of her can be (figuratively) consumed?

This picture makes me so uncomfortable.  Carol Adam’s would refer to this as an example of anthropornography, the sexualization of animals for human consumption that is similar to how we sexualize women.  To have a chicken dressed as a woman in a suggestive sexual pose is meant to make you think the chicken is, “asking for it,” as we tend to say.  She is flaunting her stuff because she knows, “you want it”.  Did the chicken really want you to take it’s life for a meal? No.  Just like women don’t ask to be raped or beaten.  Adam’s relates this kind of provocative advertisement to a females degraded status.  The dead animal ready for consumption from the more powerful human consumer, is reflective of a woman being sexualized for the pleasure of a more powerful man in pornography. Degradation is hot and fun, and she likes it!  “So, just as through pornography inequality is made sexy; through meat eating, inequality is made tasty,” (15).

I found this last picture to be interesting.  It’s a Carl’s Jr. ad that is notoriously known for sexualizing women in the media.  The woman has been crowned “Miss Turkey” from a beauty pageant and she poses in a bikini to hold a hamburger.  From what I can see, the advertisement is implying she has won the title because of her body.  Her body is the best for male consumption because of the meat she has.  If a man were to buy the hamburger they are trying to sell, they will be just as satisfied as they would be with her body!  It’s simple, her body is meant for a man to use as he pleases just like this hamburger was made just for him to eat as he pleases.  The woman and dead animal have no other purpose but to help feed masculinity.  Eating this burger would be like saying you slept with this woman, and that is suppose to make you feel more like a man.

All of these images reiterate Adam’s belief that depriving animals of their right to life in order to reassure our self-declared human superiority is no different from oppressing women for male superiority, and both are a result of a patriarchal dominance (14).  She brilliantly writes, “consumption is the fulfillment of oppression,” and I see how women and animals are the targets of this consumption by and for men.

Adams, Carol J. and Annie Potts. “The Politics of Carol J. Adams.” Antennae, no. 14, 2010. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54792ff7e4b0674c74cb719d/t/55dc8dace4b0ad76d7277cb7/1440517548517/ANTENNAE+ISSUE+14.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2019.

Adams, Carol J. “Examples of The Sexual Politics of Meat.” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54792ff7e4b0674c74cb719d/t/55dc8dace4b0ad76d7277cb7/1440517548517/ANTENNAE+ISSUE+14.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2019.

Tschorn, Adam. “New Carl’s Jr. Ad.” LA Times Blogs, 2011. https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/alltherage/2011/03/carls-jr-taps-reigning-miss-turkey-to-promote-its-new-burger.html. Accessed 3 March 2019.