Ecological Feminism: Connecting Women’s Liberation and Environmentalism

What does a woman gathering firewood in the Himalayas have in common with the rapid clearing of a forest for commercial profit? Ecological feminism, or ecofeminism, argues that the two are deeply connected. It claims that the systems which exploit nature are the same systems that subordinate women. This idea links two of the most powerful movements of the modern age, feminism and environmentalism, and asks us to see them as a single struggle rather than two separate causes.

What is ecological feminism? 🔗

Ecological feminism is a school of thought that draws a direct line between the oppression of women and the degradation of the environment. The core argument is straightforward: the domination of women and the domination of nature spring from the same root, which is a patriarchal and hierarchical worldview. According to this view, you cannot solve one problem while ignoring the other. Social justice and environmental justice are bound together.

The term itself was coined by the French writer and activist Françoise d’Eaubonne in her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death). She was the first to use and theorise the notion of ecofeminism, arguing that the patriarchal suppression of women and the suppression of nature share a common origin and together produce environmental destruction. For d’Eaubonne, that common origin was patriarchal capitalism, a system in which men took control over the fertility of both the land and women’s bodies.

When and how the movement grew 🔗

While the term appeared in the 1970s, the movement gained real momentum in the 1980s. It arose alongside second-wave feminism and a rising global awareness of pollution, resource depletion, and ecological collapse. A series of disasters gave the idea urgency. Events like the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984 sharpened the sense that industrial and technological excess was harming both communities and the planet. The first major ecofeminist conference, titled “Women and Life on Earth,” was held in the United States in 1980, marking the moment the movement found an organised public voice.

The problem of dualistic thinking 🔗

To understand ecofeminism, you have to understand its central target: dualistic, hierarchical thinking. A dualism is a way of splitting the world into opposing pairs. Western thought, ecofeminists argue, is built on pairs like culture versus nature, man versus woman, mind versus body, and reason versus emotion.

The problem is not just that these categories are separated. It is that they are ranked. One side is treated as superior and the other as inferior. Culture is placed above nature. Man is placed above woman. Mind is placed above body. In each pair, women and nature consistently end up on the lower, dominated side.

The theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether was one of the most influential thinkers to expose this structure. She argued that ecofeminism represents the union of the radical ecology movement and feminism. Ruether showed that the same logic which lets men claim superiority over women also lets human beings claim the right to dominate nature as something inferior and subordinate. This “dominator hierarchy,” as she described it, extends outward into a whole web of further hierarchies, such as spirit over matter and the so-called civilised over the so-called primitive.

Why this matters for the environment 🔗

If you accept that nature exists only to be used and controlled, environmental destruction becomes logical rather than shocking. Forests become timber. Rivers become resources. Soil becomes a thing to be extracted from until it is exhausted. Ecofeminists argue that this attitude is not an accident of modern industry but a direct outcome of a worldview that values domination over relationship. Dismantling the binaries, therefore, is not just an intellectual exercise. It is a precondition for treating the planet differently.

Vandana Shiva and the view from the Global South 🔗

No discussion of ecofeminism in the Indian context is complete without Vandana Shiva. A physicist, philosopher, and environmental activist, she became one of the world’s most prominent critics of dominant models of development and globalisation. Shiva sees modern development as a continuation of the colonial project of dominating the “other,” which includes nature, women, indigenous peoples, and subordinate classes.

Her contribution is important because she shifts the focus away from the concerns of wealthy Western women and toward the realities of the Global South. In her co-authored book Ecofeminism (1993), written with the German sociologist Maria Mies, she argues that women in many parts of the world are the principal farmers, food providers, and gatherers of fuel and water. As a result, they are the hardest hit by technological excess and environmental damage. When a forest is cleared or a water source dries up, it is often women who must walk further and work harder to survive.

Seeds, monocultures, and “two-way theft” 🔗

Shiva’s activism centres on agriculture and biodiversity. She is a fierce critic of industrial farming and genetically modified crops. She argues that the spread of monoculture, where vast fields grow a single dominant crop, depletes soil nutrients and poses serious risks to biodiversity. She also condemns the way multinational corporations seek to patent seeds and indigenous crops, treating living things as private property. Shiva calls this a form of “two-way theft,” in which corporations steal biodiversity from producers in the developing world and treat seeds as their own creation. For Shiva, defending seeds is inseparable from defending both women’s livelihoods and the earth.

The Chipko movement: ecofeminism in action 🔗

The most famous example of ecofeminism on the ground comes from the hills of Uttarakhand. The Chipko movement of the 1970s saw villagers, many of them women, wrap their arms around trees to stop loggers from felling them. The word “chipko” means “to hug” or “to cling.” When commercial contractors arrived to cut the forest, the women physically placed their bodies between the axes and the trees.

The reason women led this resistance is practical as much as symbolic. As the backbone of the region’s agrarian economy, women were the ones most directly affected by deforestation, which caused shortages of firewood, fodder, and water. The destruction of the forest was not an abstract loss for them. It was a daily threat to their families and their work. Their environmentalism grew directly out of their lived experience.

An older root: the Bishnoi sacrifice 🔗

The spirit of Chipko stretches back centuries. In 1730, in the village of Khejarli in Rajasthan, members of the Bishnoi community resisted the king’s men who had come to cut Khejri trees for a palace construction. Led by a woman named Amrita Devi, around 363 villagers embraced the trees and were killed rather than allow them to be felled. Although the word ecofeminism would not exist for another two centuries, Amrita Devi’s stand against both royal authority and the limits placed on women captures the movement’s essence: resistance to systems that exploit nature and silence women at the same time.

Different strands within ecofeminism 🔗

Ecofeminism is not a single, unified theory. It is better understood as a broad family of ideas with internal debates. One useful way to see the spread is to distinguish between two broad tendencies.

Cultural or affinity ecofeminism emphasises a special, even spiritual, connection between women and nature. It often celebrates qualities such as nurturing and care, and treats the woman-nature bond as something positive to be reclaimed.

Social or materialist ecofeminism rejects the idea of a natural bond and instead looks at social and economic structures. Thinkers in this tradition argue that women are tied to nature not by biology but by the gendered division of labour, which assigns them the work of feeding families and managing natural resources. Shiva’s idea of “subsistence feminism” leans in this direction, focusing on the real material relationship between women’s basic needs and the environment.

The criticism of essentialism 🔗

The most serious criticism levelled at ecofeminism is the charge of essentialism. Critics argue that claiming women are naturally closer to nature simply reinforces the old stereotype that women are emotional, bodily, and instinctive rather than rational. This, they warn, traps women in the very category that patriarchy used to subordinate them in the first place. Vandana Shiva’s own work has been described by some scholars as essentialist for this reason. Even d’Eaubonne’s founding text has been critiqued for its lack of intersectionality and its essentialist conceptions of womanhood and nature. Defenders respond that materialist ecofeminism avoids this trap entirely by grounding the woman-nature link in social roles rather than in nature itself.

Why ecofeminism still matters 🔗

Ecofeminism offers more than a critique. It proposes a different value system, one built on partnership and cooperation rather than domination and control. It insists that the climate crisis is not gender-neutral, because the people who suffer first and worst are often poor women in agrarian communities. By connecting social and environmental justice, it pushes us to ask whether we can ever heal the planet without also addressing the inequalities among the people who live on it.

Whether or not one accepts every claim of the movement, its central insight is hard to ignore. The way a society treats its environment and the way it treats its most vulnerable members often follow the same logic. Change one, and you may have to change the other.

What do you think? Do you believe the link between women and nature is a powerful tool for change, or does it risk reinforcing the very stereotypes feminism set out to dismantle? And in a country where so many women depend directly on forests, farms, and rivers, can environmental policy succeed if it ignores gender altogether?

References

1. https://www.environmentandsociety.org/tools/keywords/francoise-deaubonnes-le-feminisme-ou-la-mort
2. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ecofeminism:-Symbolic-and-Social-Connections-of-the-Ruether/3085bd0832af10055ff125708c3d19c52fcce879
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/ecofeminism
4. https://impakter.com/what-is-ecofeminism-3-key-takeaways-from-vandana-shivas-activism/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipko_movement
6. https://www.shethepeople.tv/inspiration/ecofeminism-in-india-11754789
7. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003195610-16/francophone-literature-ecofeminism-giulia-champion