Ecofeminism K - Michigan7 2014

CCHJPV ECOFEM
1NC
The aff sees nature as an endless supply of resources for them to exploit this
produces a paradigm of development that sustains violence against women, the
poor, and the environment
Nhanenge, 2007- M.A. in Development Studies from the University of South Africa (Jytte,
February 2007, Ecofeminisim: Towards Integrating the Concerns of Women, Poor People, and
Nature into Development,
http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/570/dissertation.pdf?sequence=1, Accessed:
7/8/14 FG)
Evidence also shows that women often bear a greater environmental burden than men do.
According to Heyzer (1995: 3) in ecological fragile zones, women and children are 75% of the affected
and displaced people. Hence, we need also to be concerned with environmental sexism . According
to Gaard (2001: 161) nature is , in the Euro-American culture, seen both as an endless supply of
resources and as a place that eternally will clean up the human made waste. This idea is
also applied to women. Women are perceived as being an instrument to satisfy
the needs of husbands, children and other family members. Women are also expected
to be cleaning up after them. Many women therefore find that there is a connection between the
way the modern culture perceives women and perceives nature. (Gaard 2001: 161). Women's involvement in
the environmental movement started due to the intimate relationship recognized between the health of nature and the health of
women and their families. As Penny 79 Newman says (Shiva 1994a: 2) the environment is the place in which we live, it includes
everything that affects our lives. Environmental problems therefore become health problems because there is continuity between the
earth body and the human body through the processes that maintain life. Many rural women in the South are
directly dependent on natural resources due to their location on the fringes and their gender role
in producing family sustenance. For them a healthy nature is a matter of survival. Thus when the
health of the environment is deteriorating so is the health of women. Hence, when economic activities are causing
degradation of the environment, they also negatively affect women. With its focus on economic growth,
development consequently is often making women poor, while it is drawing men into its profit-seeking activities. (Shiva 1994a: 1-2,
9; Des Jardins 2001: 240). The connection between the health of women and the health of nature has
created new social movements all over the world with the aim to confront environmental
hazards. Many are almost exclusively led by women. Penny Newman was part of forming the Movement for Environmental
Justice in USA. The movement comprise of the people who have suffered most. These include the
women and children, the poor and people of colour. They step forward to demand change. These
women, often ridiculed by politicians as "hysterical housewives", recognise that environmental hazards are health hazards, which are
killing children and adults in the local communities. Their focus is on survival and the demand is that there will be no more
pollution. They fight for a clean and healthy place to live and work in. Hence for "the hysterical housewives", as they now call
themselves, enough is enough. The organisation has expanded their network globally to prevent toxic dumping in the Third World as
well. They know that corporate "criminals" do not recognize national borders. (Newman 1994: 43, 53, 56, 58).
Extinction is inevitable without embracing ecofeminism root cause of war and

environmental collapse
7/8/14 FG)
The causes of wars relate to perception of threat, insecurity and aggression. When one country
has increased security, the other feels threatened and hence needs to increase its security. Thus,
when each seeks its own security by weapons a vicious circle of increased arms is created. The
result is diminished overall security together with missed social opportunities. One must believe that the
weapons of mass destruction will be used sooner or later. Different races, ideologies and religious beliefs have always
been subjects of conflicts. Wars are therefore likely to increase as long as security is perceived as coming
from the barrel of a gun. (Ekins 1992: 7). According to UK's Saferworld Foundation to increase security, we do not need
more arms, instead we need to remove elements that are perceived as threats. What really threatens the well-being
and security of countries, societies and individuals are issues like economic under-development;
overpopulation; environmental degradation; political oppression; ethnic and religious rivalries;
terrorism and crime. These are either causing or contributing to multiple levels of conflict and
violence. An implicit means to achieve peace is for the North to end their over-consumption of natural resources. This will free
them from the endless competition for the world's scarce resources and hence also from accelerating conflicts over access to these.
The military proliferation in the North is needed to secure access to resources. It is not possible for 20% of the world's people,
including the ruling Southern elite, to go on taking 80% of the world's wealth without having threatening arms on a vast scale.
Peace in the world consequently requires a fair distribution of the global wealth. It means that
the overdeveloped Northern countries must shift to a much lower per capita resource use rates.
A just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable world order depends on how soon we can shift
from the present consumer oriented, economic growth model to a conserver society. From this, it
follows that real security depends on non-military concerns like economic well-being, social justice, material sufficiency and
ecological stability. Moreover, we need to talk together. Differences between people and groups must be
discussed so that each understands the other. With compromises and agreements on common aims, peaceful
solutions to disagreements can be found. (Ekins 1992: 58-59, 156; Rowe 1997: 234; Trainer 1997: 590-591). We also cannot feel
secure and enjoy life if others are deprived. The imbalance may at best make us feel uncomfortable, but
more likely we may fear that they may come and take from us what they lack. Thus to build real
security is to strive to make our neighbours fell more secure, rather than less . This is so whether we
discuss at the scale of the village or the globe. It therefore becomes a contradiction to pursuit security by means,
which undermine our security. We rather need to deal with the problems that are underlying war. According to the
Americans Amory and Hunter Lovins, these include "the 50psychic premises of aeons of homocentric, patriarchal, imperial culture".
It is exactly these premises, which are considered to cause the four crises. (Ekins 1992: 20-21). The above advices are sensible, but
they seem not to impress the global political leaders. In their ideology, security is reached by military activity. This
has other unforeseen consequences as well. When the government makes a public choice for
violence, violent values easily become part of society at large. When the government choose to
silence opponents with force, then the citizens may also approach each other with similar
aggression.
The alternative is to endorse an ecofeminist ethic this expands the conceptual

frameworks capable of valuing women and nature beyond a rational utilitarian
lens and is a prerequisite to ethical decisionmaking capable of valuing life
Warren, 1990- Chair of Philosophy at Malcaster College and author of tons of books on
feminism (Karen J., The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism, Published in the
Trumpeter Journal of Ecosophy FG)
As I conceive feminist ethics in the pre-feminist present, it rejects attempts to conceive of ethical theory in terms of necessary and
sufficient conditions, because it assumes that there is no essence (in the sense of some transhistorical, universal, absolute
abstraction) of feminist ethics. While attempts to formulate joint necessary and sufficient conditions of a feminist ethic are
unfruitful, nonetheless, there are some necessary conditions, what I prefer to call "boundary conditions," of a
feminist ethic. These boundary conditions clarify some of the minimal conditions of a feminist ethic without suggesting that
feminist ethics has some ahistorical essence. They are like the boundaries of a quilt or collage. They delimit the territory of
the piece without dictating what the interior, the design, the actual pattern of the piece looks
like. Because the actual design of the quilt emerges from the multiplicity of voices of women in a
cross-cultural context, the design will change over time. It is not something static. What are some of
the boundary conditions of a feminist ethic? First, nothing can become part of a feminist ethic ---can be part of the
quilt-that promotes sexism, racism, classism, or any other "isms" of social domination. Of course,
people may disagree about what counts as a sexist act, racist attitude, classist behavior. What counts as sexism, racism, or classism
may vary cross-culturally. Still, because a feminist ethic aims at eliminating sexism and sexist bias, and (as I have already shown)
sexism is intimately connected in conceptualization and in practice to racism, classism, and naturism, a feminist ethic must
be anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-naturist and opposed to any "ism" which
presupposes or advances a logic of domination. Second, a feminist ethic is a contextualist ethic.

A contextualist ethic is one which sees ethical discourse and practice as emerging from the
voices of people located in different historical circumstances . A contextualist ethic is properly viewed as a
collage or mosaic, a tapestry of voices that emerges out of felt experiences. Like any collage or mosaic, the
point is not to have one picture based on a unity of voices, but a pattern which emerges out of
the very different voices of people located in different circumstances. When a contextualist ethic
is feminist, it gives central place to the voices of women. Third, since a feminist ethic gives
central significance to the diversity of women's voices, a feminist ethic must be structurally
pluralistic rather than unitary or reductionistic. It rejects the assumption that there is "one
voice" in terms of which ethical values, beliefs, attitudes, and conduct can be assessed. Fourth, a
feminist ethic reconceives ethical theory as theory in process which will change over time. Like all
theory, a feminist ethic is based on some generalizations.24 Nevertheless, the generalizations associated with it are themselves a
pattern of voices within which the different voices emerging out of concrete and alternative descriptions of ethical situations have
meaning. The coherence of a feminist theory so conceived is given within a historical and
conceptual context, i.e., within a set of historical, socioeconomic circumstances (including circumstances of race, class, age,
and affectional orientation) and within a set of basic beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions about the world. Fifth, because
a feminist ethic is contextualist, structurally pluralistic, and "in-process," one way to evaluate
the claims of a feminist ethic is in terms of their inclusiveness: those claims (voices, patterns of voices)
are morally and epistemologically favored (preferred, better, less partial, less biased) which are more
inclusive of the felt experiences and perspectives of oppressed persons. The condition of inclusiveness
requires and ensures that the diverse voices of women (as oppressed persons) will be given legitimacy in
ethical theory building. It thereby helps to minimize empirical bias, e.g., bias rising from faulty or false generalizations
based on stereotyping, too small a sample size, or a skewed sample. It does so by ensuring that any generalizations which are made
about ethics and ethical decision making include-indeed cohere with-the patterned voices of women. 25 Sixth, a feminist
ethic makes no attempt to provide an "objective" point of view , since it assumes that in contemporary culture
there really is no such point of view. As such, it does not claim to be "unbiased" in the sense of valueneutral or "objective." However, it does assume that whatever bias it has as an ethic
centralizing the voices of oppressed persons is a better bias-"better" because it is more inclusive
and therefore less partial-than those which exclude those voices. 26 Seventh, a feminist ethic
provides a central place for values typically unnoticed, underplayed, or misrepresented in
traditional ethics, e.g., values of care, love, friendship, and appropriate trust. 27 Again, it need not do
this at the exclusion of considerations of rights, rules, or utility. There may be many contexts in
which talk of rights or of utility is useful or appropriate. For instance, in contracts or property relationships,
talk of rights may be useful and appropriate. In deciding what is cost-effective or advantageous to the most people, talk of utility may
be useful and appropriate. In a feminist qua contextualist ethic, whether or not such talk is useful or
appropriate depends on the context; other values (e.g., values of care, trust, friendship) are not viewed as reducible to
or captured solely in terms of such talk. 28 Eighth, a feminist ethic also involves a reconception of what it is
to be human and what it is for humans to engage in ethical decision making , since it rejects as either
meaningless or currently untenable any gender-free or gender-neutral description of humans, ethics, and ethical decision making. It
thereby rejects what Alison Jaggar calls "abstract individualism," i.e., the position that it is possible to identify a
human essence or human nature that exists independently of any particular historical context .29
Humans and human moral conduct are properly understood essentially (and not merely accidentally) in terms of networks or webs
of historical and concrete relationships. All the props are now in place for seeing how ecofeminism provides the framework for a
distinctively feminist and environmental ethic. It is a feminism that critiques
(including environmental ethics) and
male bias wherever it occurs in ethics

aims at providing an ethic (including an environmental ethic) which is not
male biased-and it does so in a way that satisfies the preliminary boundary conditions of a feminist ethic.
LINKS
LINK -- GENERIC (STATE, MILITARISM &

DEVELOPMENT)
the 1ACs development/exploration without consideration for the enviroment
serves to reproduce oppression of women, militarism and flawed systems
Plan 97 feminist theorist, edited by Karen Warren (Professor and Chair of Philosophy at
Macalester College) (Judith, Ch. 7 Learning to Live with Differences: The Challenge of
Ecofeminist Community, Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen Warren,
Book) */LEA
*ablest modified*
So it continues todaythis Old World notion that there is only one right way to do things and all others
must succumb or be wiped out. Today this attitude has perhaps reached its pinnacle of absurdity with the
"New World Order." Powerover is the order of the day. And if nationstates don't have the
economic clout to wield such power (as do Japan and Germany), then military might and a vast arsenal
of deadly weapons will suffice. So it was that George Bush planned to enable the United States to continue to play with
the powerful, in spite of a failing economy, by ensuring that less powerful nations do things the "right" wayall in the service of the
transnational corporations. The goal of this unholy alliance of corporate policemen and megacorporations is complete control of the
global economic and political order. Thus what has logically evolved since the Haudenosaunee and the newcomers
talked democracy and the newcomers couldn't hear crucial parts of the message is
a system based on tyranny, selfinterest, profit, and rampant exploitation. Any regard for the well being of humanity is, at best,
secondary. For today's socalled democratic governments and institutions do not work for the
wellbeing of people and place. Today's political leaders have become the handmaidens of not just
corporations, or even multinational corporations, but of transnational corporations. Corporations that, by definition, are
from no place or nation. In Canada, the move toward free tradethe socalled level playing field demanded by the transnationalsis
systematically proceeding. Vast forests are being handed over to Japanese firms to pulp or, in the case of the cottonwood forests of
northern British Columbia, made into disposable chopsticks for the international market. In Alberta, an area of public land almost
the size of Great Britain has been leased to twelve firms. Two Japanesecontrolled companies secured leased rights to tracts covering
15 percent of the province. Much of this socalled economic development is hugely underwritten by eager
governments doling out millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to ensure the success of the
industrythe destruction of vast "places"and thus making the area desirable for the
transnationals. As many learned people have said, if the planet is sick, so are the people. Western civilization's
blindness {ignorance}to the sensitive web of relations and differences that constitutes the natural
world (and humankind as a part of that), as seen so clearly by the First Peoples and increasingly reinforced by
scientists, ecologists, radical theologists, and others, cannot continue. At the current rate of extinction of
species, the next five hundred years of our inhabitation of the planet will wipe out all
differences, different species of flora and fauna, and, if the New World Order takes hold,
different cultures and societies of people. Is this what we want to leave for future generations?
EcofeminismA Response to Fear and Alienation Ursula LeGuin, in "Women/Wilderness" from Healing the Wounds, encapsulates
the attitude brought from the Old World to Turtle Island, an attitude which continues to propel this society: " Civilized Man
says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is otheroutside, below, underneath, subservient. I
own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I
am, and the rest is women and the wilderness, to be used as I see fit ." With God, and his righthand Man, at
the "center of the universe"conceived of as the hierarchical Chain of Beingthere is no room for anyone or anything else in the
driver's seat. Thus decisions made from this lofty position reflect only hima lonely and isolated character, dissociated from all the
rest of life by his own selfimportance. There are always consequences to decisionssometimes quite different in the short term than
in the long term. So, in the immediate, man might gain power and prestige from exploitation of women or nature; in the long term
what may well be revealed is that he has bitten the hand that feeds him. And this is just what is being seen today as a growing
number of people are waking up to the fact that everything is connected and that there are profound
consequences
to human behavior, particularly oppressive and exploitative activities which

threaten nature's natural economy, that delicate balance of relationships that makes life possible. Today the voices of
many native and nonnative people are responding to the New World Order and the oppression and violence that underlie it.
Among the many strands of thought and action helping to uncover the lies and half baked truths
of Western civilization is ecofeminism. Susan Griffin, a leading ecofeminist writer, peace activist, and poet, insists
with the might of a passionate pen that we stop deluding ourselves, that we stop defending this civilization that has shaped our
minds and which is now destroying the earth: We say there is no way to see his dying as separate from her living, or what he had
done to her, or what part of her he had used. We say if you change the course of this river you change the shape of the whole place.
And we say that what she did then could not be separated from what she held sacred in herself, what she had felt when he did that to
her, what we hold sacred to ourselves, what we feel we could not go on without, and we say if this river leaves this place, nothing will
grow and the mountain will crumble away, and we say what he did to her could not be separated from the way that he looked at her,
and what he felt was right to do to her, and what they do to us, we say, shapes how they see us. That once the trees are cut down, the
water will wash the mountain away and the river be heavy with mud, and there will be a flood. And we say that what he did to her he
did to all of us. And that one act cannot be separated from another. And had he seen more clearly, we say, he might have predicted
his own death. How if the trees grew on the hillside there would be no flood. And you cannot divert this river. We say look how the
water flows from this place and returns as rainfall, everything returns, we say, and one thing follows another, there are limits, we
say, on what can be done and everything moves. We are all part of this motion, we say, and the way of the river is sacred, and this
grove of trees is sacred, and we ourselves, we tell you, are sacred. If only Griffin's words could be more widely heard and understood,
the elk, the caribou, the Inuit and the Cree, and all the rest of the sacred life of James Bay could be spared.
LINK -- DEVELOPMENT
The 1ACs claims of sustainable development are a lie created by developers to
maintain the status quo.
Wells and Wirth 97 Vagina Warrior and Legendary Feminist News Artist and Iowa State
Professor of Ecology (Betty and Danielle, Eighteen Remediating Development through an
Ecofeminist Lens, Ch. 18 Ecofeminism : Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J Warren,
Book) */LEA
Many of the inconsistencies and inequities of international development arise from the world view of the
developer. Today's dominant world view accords neither respect nor reciprocity to women, nor
to the earth. To cast development in more inclusive terms and processes requires that developers sensitize their
world view as they apply their interventions. To this end, we begin by addressing three voids in development
as conventionally practiced: nature, local culture, and women (and other oppressed people). We offer
ecological feminism as a counterbalance to today's dominant world view. Nature: Can There Be Renewal
in Development? The deterioration of the world's environment, primarily the result of human
activities, has been accelerated by development. The pursuit of development through
colonialism, industrialization, and urbanization has extracted a huge cost from the environment.
Unsound agricultural practices typify the exploitation of natural resources. Conventional Western agriculture is imposed on the land
in a seeming effort to control and subdue nature with the monoculture cropin contrast to integrated multicrop, multilevel family
and community farming systems which work in partnership with the land and natural cycles. The failure of development
programs as guided by the dominant world view has led to a revised paradigm, called
sustainable development. Sustainable development seeks a balance between resource use and the satisfaction of human
needs based on continuing and renewable processes, not on the exploitation and exhaustion of the principal or the capital of the
living resource base (Loening, 1990). The World Commission on the Environment and Development (1987, 43) stresses meeting "the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Sustainable development
requires living within our physical and biological carrying capacity. Sustainable development, although generally conceptualized in
natural science terms of environment and natural resources, increasingly encompasses social, political, and economic elements
(such as social justice and economic viability) because to live within our carrying capacity requires new ways of thinking, leading,
solving problems, organizing and doing business. Old approaches will further abuse our diminishing, fragile
resource base. The concept, although resonating with apparent good intention, is not easily
operationalized at the local, perhaps most significant, level. Is sustainable development a
contradiction in terms? If not, can the same be said of sustainable economic
development? That this new discourse for development can be so readily
appropriated into the mainstream vernacular offers little compelling hope that it
will in practice be more respectful of nature, indigenous cultures, and women and
children.
LINK -- EXPLORATION
Unrelentless pursuit of technological exploration and development compromises
the environment and women
Loer 97 Chemical Engineer and Feminist Author (Joseph, Ecofeminism in Kenya: A
Chemical Engineer's Perspective, Ch. 16, Ecofeminism : Women, Culture, Nature, edited by
Karen J Warren, Book) */LEA
*we dont endorse the ablest language in this evidence*
Although some of the science and technologyrelated issues faced here at home may be more complicated, the problems created by
our level of progress and the resulting impact on the environment may still require that this marriage (section *) work to solve them.
Jacques Cousteau (1981) has written: Born of the legitimate struggle for survival, ironically, the pursuit of
technology and progress may today endanger the very survival of the human species, as well as
that of practically all life on earth and in the ocean. However, those who would denounce
technology and progress altogether in an attempt to solve the problem have only a limited
vision; and limited vision is sometimes more dangerous than {complete ignorance} blindness. We
must not forget that the same civilization that has clouded our view with toxic smog has also given us the satellite to help us view the
planet from high above. The technology that we use to abuse the planet is the same technology that can help us to heal it. (xviii)
Technology's role in change is to push us along, to show what is possibleas a stimulus, an illuminator of the path ahead. However,
technology isn't magical and doesn't hold any meaning or value until it impacts our lives. The
ecology movement has raised and debated the issue of science, technology, and society for decades. In "The Death of Nature"
Carolyn Merchant (1993) discusses how feminism and the ecology movement could naturally combine: Juxtaposing the goals of the
two movements can suggest new values and social structures, based not on the domination of women and nature as resources but on
the full expression of both male and female talent and on the maintenance of environmental integrity (268)
An
ecofeminist position is one that seeks to help us create options for our own
progress and development by recognizing that the way dominators view nature
as a resource and as inferior morally to human culture and reasonis
fundamentally connected to, and indeed caused by, the way a male dominated
society views female values . Ecological feminism fits into this essay with science because it "is a feminism which
attempts to unite the demands of the women's movement with those of the ecological movement" (Warren and Cheney 1991, 179).
And the ecological movement isn't fully valid unless it rests on good science. Ecofeminism, as one type of feminism, has as a
fundamental tenet the belief that our conceptual world views are shaped by our social structure. Though perhaps less extreme than
in Kenya, our social structure is also patriarchy, "an oppressive, malegender privileged conceptual framework and the sorts of power
relations and behaviors it legitimizes" (Warren 1991, 87 ).
Only if we perceive and acknowledge harmful
practices can we then empower ourselves to positive change, to creation of

alternatives like integration of science and technology with our own "local" voices
to take realistic looks at our notions of progress. Though new ecological directions devoid of scientific
understanding are limited, perhaps even threatening, in their narrowmindedness, a larger vision is also impossible through a narrow
scientific approach. None of us can be so well educated and experienced as to have an expert's depth of understanding of enough
individual disciplines to truly see a whole picture. Which makes seeing the connections across disciplines and to our everyday lives
which only the local voice can doand acknowledging them as legitimate all the more important. Here the insights of feminists, local
people, and science become equally important (section *).
LINK AGRICULTURE
Industrialized agriculture makes life worse for women- theyre forced to move to
less fertile areas to leave the best places for mens cash crops
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Overall Third World women are oppressed both by family systems and by national and
international injustice. Women hold only 10% of parliamentary seats, merely 6% of cabinet
positions and a minor 1% of the chief executive positions worldwide. Rural development even
worsened women's situation. By introduction of modern agriculture , with the aim to increase
economic growth,
it increased women's workload and dependency status. When there is

possibility to earn money in agriculture men often take over the most fertile land. The result is
that women lose control over land for food production. Women are generally also excluded from
access to new technology, capital and training. These inputs are directed to men's cash crops.
Cash crops are normally non-food products for export like tobacco or animal fodder. Thus, priority for cash crops means
scarcity of sufficient food for the household as well as national food insecurity. As a result, the whole
family suffers negative health consequences. Hence, rural development has not, in Momsen's opinion, brought along
any unequivocally positive changes for rural women. This picture is similar for urban industrial
development. According to Madhu Bhushan, there is a pervasive marginalisation of female employment
in the process of industrialisation: Women are prevented from entering attractive jobs; their
work is concentrated in the informal and lowest paid sectors; a women's job automatically gives
a low status; women endure low payment and poor working conditions; and they lack job
security and fringe benefits . The unfair distribution of resources, power and
responsibilities are traditionalised and socialised into women, they are enshrined
in laws and enforced, if necessary by male violence. Bhushan therefore concludes that the trends
"modernisation" and "progress" have brought along increasingly make women victims of new forms of direct and structural violence.
(Kelly 1990: 116; Ekins 1992: 74-75; Heyzer 1995: 2-3). In the North, women are also unequally treated
compared to men. According to Morgan (1984) women in industrialized countries are still paid only
to 3/4 of what men earn at the same jobs; they are still ghettorized into lower-paying, "femaleintensive" job categories; and they are still the last hired and the first fired. In fact, there is no
country in the world where women fare as well as men. However, the Buddhist societies overall do
better. Buddha encouraged women to seek enlightenment and girls have long attended school at much the same rate as boys. (Kelly
1990: 115; Rowe 1997: 247).
The discrimination against women is immensely complex. It is a
domination that negatively affects women in all aspects of their lives. It is multilevelled and intertwined, including economic, social, cultural and structural
issues. This domination will be the main focus in the preceding chapters. Especially the issue of women's work will be dealt
with in details in Chapter 5 and 6. (Ekins 1992: 75).
Agriculture is a site of oppression women are rendered invisible, despite the fact
that they provide the bulk of food for humanity
Warren, 00 feminist philosopher, pioneer ecofeminist, former Professor and Chair of
Philosophy at Macalester College (Karen, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on
What It Is and Why It Matters, Rowman & Littlefield,
http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/nr6/Readings/Warren_ecofeminism_article.pdf)//schnall
WOMEN, FOOD, AND FARMING It is estimated that
food.
women farmers grow at least half of the world's
According to Mayra Buvinic and Sally Yudelman, between one-third and one-half of the agricultural laborers in the Third
World are women. They claim that: As a rule, women
farmers work longer hours, have fewer assets and

lower incomes than men farmers do, and have almost as many dependents to support. The disparity
is not due to lack of education or competence. Women farmers are poorer because their access to credit is
limited. Without credit they cannot acquire productive assets, such as cattle, fertilizer or
improved seeds, to improve the productivity of their labor. Women's share in farming varies widely crossculturally, but in general men do more of the actual fieldwork when access to machinery or large farm
animals is involved (such as in the United States or India), and women do more when the work is done by
hand (such as in Amazonia and sub-Saharan Africa). Women in Africa produce more than 70 percent of
Africa's food, typically without tractors, oxen, or even plows. "When one speaks today of 'the African farmer,' one is talking
about a woman. The Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek poignantly expresses this view in his "Song of Ocol." Woman of Africa Sweeper
Smearing floors and walls With cow dung and black soil Cook, ayah, the baby on your back Washer of dishes, Planting, weeding,
harvesting Store-keeper, builder Runner of errands, Cart, lorry, donkey... Woman of Africa What are you not? To illustrate the plight
of women farmers in Africa, consider the root crop cassava. Women do 70 to 80 percent of the growing and
harvesting of cassava, and 100 percent of the processing, which includes washing out the natural
cyanide found in it (a process that takes eighteen five-hour days). Yet little money has been
devoted to research on cassava and the development of processing technologies that would
increase both the productivity of women farmers and the demand and price for cassava. The socalled feminization of agriculture refers to the increasing proportion of women in the agricultural
labor force. Women are farm owners and farm managers, with major decision-making responsibilities about production and
most agricultural tasks. Women are farm partners, sharing responsibility for agricultural production, typically with another
household member. Women are farm workers, either as unpaid family laborers or as wage laborers. The number of women
for each 100 men working in agriculture is seventy-one in Africa, fifty-four in Western Europe,
forty-seven in Asia and the Pacific, and eighty-four in Eastern Europe. However, a failure to
realize the extent of women's contribution to agriculture (e.g., by First World development policies and
practices) has contributed historically to the invisibility of women in all aspects of agricultural
work: in ploughing, planting, caring for farm animals, harvesting, weeding, processing, and the storing of crops. It also has
contributed to a failure to see ways in which women and their families have been deeply affected
by development decisions and projects that have depleted the resource bases on which their
productive activities depend (e.g., subsistence agriculture, food processing). This is exacerbated by the fact
that women historically have often had little input into those decisions and projects. Chris Cuomo
argues that farms are sites of human oppression in the United States as well: Eighty to ninety
percent of the approximately two million hired farmworkers are Latino , followed by African-Americans,
Caribbeans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Jamaicans. It is estimated that as many as 313,000 farmworkers
experience pesticide-related illnesses each year. Not surprisingly, Hispanic women generally show higher levels of pesticides in their
milk than white women do. Although it is not known how many of the agricultural workforce in the United States, including the
percentage of migrant and seasonal farmworkers, are women, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ( USDA) has determined
that 22 percent of all hired farmworkers in the United States are women. Of this 22 percent, 9 percent
are classified as migrant workers, and 45 percent of migrant farm-working women were
Hispanic, 45 percent were white, and 6 percent were classified by the USDA as "Black and
Other. This sort of empirical data shows why fanning, agriculture, and food are important to
ecofeminist philosophers.
LINK AQUACULTURE
The aff colonizes the ocean for its own commercial exploitation and gain. The aff
regenerates fish stocks out of a desire for more resource extraction.
Nhanenge 7 International Development Consultant, Independent Researcher (Jytte,
Ecofeminism: Towards Integrating the Concerns of Women, Poor, People and Nature
into Development, February 2007, pg 350-353, University of South Africa,
http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/570/dissertation.pdf?
sequence=1)//SKY
Regeneration is the central principle guiding sustainable societies. Without renewability there
can be no sustainability. Modem society, however, devaluate the process of regeneration. This
has led to unsustainability and environmental crises. After the industrial revolution man became
separate from nature. His focus was to control nature and its regeneration. This was seen as
production, in which men engage. Women oppositely deal with reproduction, which is
considered to be non-production. This is the patriarchal dualised, non-ecological view of nature.
The earth is passive, the activity lies in the seed, which is controlled by men. This confirms
mans domination over nature. The relationship between men and women is similar. Active man
produces, while passive woman reproduces. This confirms the domination of men over women.
(Shiva 1994b: 128).
Biotechnology is reproducing such patriarchal dualism. Its purpose is to colonialize the
regeneration of plants and human beings. The land, forests, rivers, oceans and the atmosphere
have all been colonised, exploited, eroded and polluted. Thus patriarchy and its ever-expanding
capitalism need to look for new colonies to invade and exploit for further profit. These new
colonies are the bodies of reproductive plants, animals and women. Technological development
has the aim to search for new areas to control and profit from. This is now done by genetic
engineering. Biotechnology want to control what used to be free and self-generating. Hence the
plant seeds and womens bodies, which are the sites of regenerative power, are among the last
colonies. (Shiva l994b: 129).
From its beginning scientific development denied nature its reproductive capacity. In doing that
it created an agricultural system, which could not sustain itself. Sustainable agriculture is based
on recycling of soil nutrients. The Green Revolution substituted this regenerative cycle with
linear flows of chemical fertilizers, high yielding seeds varieties and pesticide. The earth was
seen as being passive, activity lay in the miracle seed. Modem agriculture produces for the
market but in the process it has created soil disaster, micronutrient deficiency and
desertification. Chemical fertilizers and artificial seeds cannot substitute natural processes. Thus
technology destroyed land. It is also causing global warming. Its nitrogen-based fertilizers are
releasing the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. lis pesticide and herbicides are
also polluting soils and water. Hence the Green Revolution contributed to erosion of food
security through pollution of land, water and the atmosphere, but it has been profitable for the
corporations. (Shiva 1994b: 13 l-132).
Biotechnology is an expansion of the Green Revolution. It has invaded agriculture with a high
speed.
The global area covered by trans-genetic crops increased from 7 million acres in 1996 to 74
million acres in 199g. This massive release of genetically modified organisms has added a new
category of ecological and human dangers to the already existing problems. But since the new
global capitalism prioritizes profit making over all other values any ethical considerations is
removed from the development and distribution of biotechnology. The overriding motivation for
genetic engineering is not the advancement of science, the curing of diseases, or the feeding of
the hungry: it is the desire to secure unprecedented financial gains. (Capia 2002: 140).
The biotechnology advertisements portray a brave new world in which nature will be brought
under control. Its plants will be genetically engineered commodities, tailored to consumers
needs. New crop varieties will be drought tolerant and resistant to insects and weeds.
Agricuhure will no longer be dependent on chemicals, thus there will be no more damage to the
environment. Food will be better and safer than ever before and world hunger will disappear.
Similar language was used when the Green Revolution was promoted. Since that time the dark
side of chemical agriculture has become painfully evident. (Capia 2002: 163).
But facts are different from the fine words:
First biotechnology will increase the need for chemicals in agriculture. Genetical modification
has made the seed ecologically incomplete so that it cannot produce by itself alone. It needs help
from purchased fertilizer and pesticide. For example soya beans, engineered by Monsanto, was
developed to require the companys herbicide to grow. This will increase the sales and use of
that specific chemical product. Hence the shift from an ecological process of productive
renewability to a technological process of non-renewability production has reduced biological
diversity in agriculture, it has increased farmers dependency on expensive patented products,
and it has created poverty and non-sustainability in agriculture. But it has generated wealth to
the corporations. (Shiva 1994b: 33; Capra 2002: 163).
Secondly, the agro-chemical corporations plan to introduce versions of genetically sterilized
seeds.
This hybridization robs the seed of its fertility. It also takes over ownership of the regeneration
through property rights. Hence the seeds self-regenerative capacity has been colonised and it
has become merely raw commodified material. Thus farmers can no longer select their own seed
from previous harvests. Instead they are forced to buy new seeds every year, which means an
end to their ability to develop new crops. This is devastating in the South where 80% of crops
are grown from saved seeds. In this way private industry controls plant breeding, that is, our
food. The corporations consequently represent a structure of power, control and domination
based on narrow self-interested and linear views, where ethical concerns have no place. (Shiva
1994b: 132; Capta 2002: 164).
Thirdly, the claim that world hunger will be solved by food biotechnology is also false. First
world hunger is not caused by global food shortage. Secondly it is highly doubtful that
biotechnology will increase food production:
Re 1) According to Frances Moore Lapp and her colleagues at the Institute for Food and
Development Policy the reasons for hunger are political. There is enough food supply in todays
world. During the past three decades. increase in global food production has outstripped world
population growth by 16%. Increase of food supply has kept ahead of population growth in every
region of the world, except in Africa, during the past 50 years. Research also shows that there is
no direct relationship between the prevalence of hunger and a countrys population size.
Moreover a 1997-study found that 78% of all malnourished children under five years in the
South live in countries with food surpluses. Many of these countries export more agricultural
goods than they import. The root causes of hunger are consequently unrelated to food
production. Famine is caused by poverty, inequality and lack of access to food and land. People
go hungry because the means to produce and distribute food are controlled by the rich and
powerful. Thus world hunger is not a technical but a political problem. If we do not address the
root causes, hunger will persist no matter which technologies we apply. (Capra 2002: 164-165).
352
Re 2) Experiments show that genetically modified (GM) seeds do not increase crop yields
significantly. GM seeds may even aggravate hunger. Poor farmers will not be able to buy the
expensive seeds and their implements, neither will they be allowed to store and trade seed. Thus
poor farmers will become dependent and those who cannot pay will be marginalized. In this way
GM seeds are creating the classical preconditions for hunger and famine. Ownership of
resources concentrated in a few hands and food supply based on too few varieties of crops are
the worst options for food security. (Capra 2002: 165).
LINK -- ECON
the modern jobs system the aff strives to maintain perpetuates gender, class and
race inequality and ecocide
Sessions 97 Author of Positive Freedom and Autonomy (Robert, Ecofeminism and Work,
Ch. 10, Ecofeminism : Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J Warren, Book) */LEA
Seen
through the eyes of women, minorities, and social classes, our jobs system was
dysfunctional from the beginning. For at the heart of the belief system that underlies and
rationalizes this system is precisely what Warren sees as constitutive of patriarchy as a
dysfunctional system: hierarchical thinking and the logic of dominataion. F rom the outset, women,
people of color, and poor people have been disenfranchised from economic, social, and political power , as can
be seen in the theoretical rationalizations of the system found in classical works such as Locke's Second Treatise, Smith's magnum opus, or the stillpopular Social Darwinism, or if one looks at the realities of modern industrial societies. Seen through
the lens of ecofeminism, our

jobs system and the larger economicideologicalsocialcultural system of which it is a part are
patriarchal. According to Warren (1990), this patriarchy has five interrelated features: (1) Valuehierarchical ("UpDown") thinking, which places higher value, status, or prestige on what is "Up" (men) or what is genderidentified with
what is "Up" ... than with what is "Down" (women) or what is genderidentified with what is ''Down." . (2) Value dualisms... which organize reality into
oppositional (rather than complementary) and exclusive (rather than inclusive) pairs. . . (3) Powerover
conceptions of power,
which function to maintain relations of domination and subordination. (4) Conceptions of privilege, which
function to maintain powerover relations of domination and subordination by "Ups" and "Downs." (5) A logic of domination, an argumentative
structure that "justifies" the power and privilege of those who are "Up." (12223) These features simultaneously are sexist and naturist: these
characteristics of "patriarchal conceptual frameworks ... sanction the twin exploitations of

women and nonhuman nature" (123). Thus, she argues, ecofeminism is a liberation movement that believes feminism should be
ecological and ecology feminist." 22 This intimate link between women and nature is manifest in concrete reality. In another article, Warren (1992)
gives a num ber of examples to show not only the linked domination of women and nature, but also that liberating women would enhance
environmental relations and health. Probably the quickest way to show a final central feature of our dysfunctional jobs system is to return to our
farming example. We said that one of the central tragic ironies of contemporary farm life is that farmers in significant ways knowingly participate in the
destruction of their ways of life and that this irony results from their seemingly unavoidable participation in the agribusiness model. To have a job
farming, they seem to have to "choose" environmental destruction as a "natural" course of events. Town and city dwellers are caught in the same trap:
the ways of life we have "chosen,'' wrapped as they are around our jobs system, predictably will also destroy the cultural and natural grounds upon
which they are built. We
cannot continue this way. But to suggest that we consume less threatens people
at a most vulnerable point: already in a mobile and rapidly changing society where traditional
supports such as religion, a stable social and economic order, family continuity, and the like are
disappearing or gone, to suggest that people give up on our jobs system and its concomitant
consumerism is very threatening. Clearly such suggestions must be accompanied by viable alternatives, and it is to this more positive
vision that we now turn.
Their pursuit of jobs at the cost of the environment harms women and destroys the
ecosystems
Environmentalists, while growing in numbers, are a rather weak voice in this conflict. In America no politician could rise to national
prominence who advocated reducing jobs or a nogrowth economy in order to preserve or recreate a healthy environment . Our
dominant economic paradigm is one where growth ("within certain limits," it is said) is an automatic
good and development is the main fuel that stokes the fires of this growth. For most people the
practical bottom line is jobs: developers take the raw materials of the earth, be it minerals or air,
land or ideas, and turn them into jobs. In this valueadded process, through human labor something of
lesser value is turned into a product (or used to produce a product) of greater value. In the supercharged and too often
unanalyzed system of values built into our economic reckoning, the revered bottom line dominates: things are valued for their
contribution to the economy. From within this system we tend to think of economic values such as costs
and benefits, profits and efficiency, instead of environmental values such as biodiversity, ecosystemic
health, homeostasis or the inherent worth of natural beings. Thus even when the "environment" in some
sense wins, environmentalists find themselves in the awkward position of being perceived as
against development and jobs, and hence perceived as being against the wellbeing of workers and their families. 2 The
conceptual framework of jobs versus the environment is so widely used and is such a powerful
ideological tool that clearheadedness about the issues involved is precluded and practical solutions that do more than create an
uneasy truce or "pragmatic compromise" are as rare as members of an endangered species. Even most environmentally conscious
people, who realize that industrial economies are the major source of environmental degradation in the modern world, still feel the
pull of jobs against the environment; and although increasing numbers of people see that excesses such as
consumerism, mindless technological use, and viewing growth economics as an automatic good
must be ended if environmental health is to be preserved, few are able to extract themselves from the force of
this framework of choice. I believe the reason this dualism is so powerful is that the peculiar jobs system found in the United States
and other industrialized nations, and the economic and social systems of which it is a part, are the loci of many of the central values
and conceptual frameworks of our culture. Without satisfactory conceptual and practical resolutions of the jobs/environment
conflict, the outlook for convivial communities that include healthy natural environments is dim. Jobs versus the Environment: A
False Dichotomy... and Dangerous Besides Practically, our environmental destructiveness is absurd. In the
pursuit of the good life our way of living and working destroys the very basis of the good life we
seek.3 For example, in Iowa, where I live, farmers for a century have been "mining" the soil in such a way that the "gold" (topsoil)
literally has been washed to the sea. The tall grass prairie that covered Iowa for eons laid up two to six feet of rich topsoil, and in
most places that legacy has been reduced to a few inches (in some areas only subsoil remains). Iowa farmers have always cared
deeply about themselves, their families, and their offspring, and about the land that supports their lives. Yet they have become a part
of a way of working that requires them to destroy the "ground of their being," the soil that sustains their livelihood and their lives.
Iowa farms, like farms everywhere in industrialized societies, have, as Marx predicted nearly a century and a half ago, become
industrialized. Wendell Berry calls this great transformation in farm culture the change from agriculture to agribusiness,4 and
agribusiness has the farm version of what I call the modern jobs system. My Iowa illustration can help us see further dimensions of
the practical and conceptual issues that underlie the jobs/environment conflict. The farming practices of Iowa farmers, especially
since the rise of chemical farming after the Second World War, have sullied the waters farmers, their families, and their livestock
drink (and, of course, drinking water for nonfarmers has been poisoned as well). Many farmers 5 and their helpers and families have
become ill from being near these "necessary ingredients" in this way of farming. Furthermore, in rural America, as in
Third World countries everywhere,6 women (and children), especially poor women and women
of color, are harmed disproportionately to the rest of the population. Thus, as I shall argue in the next
section, agricultural practices are feminist issues.
Valuing the economy above all else fails to address the flawed logic of
overconsumption
A second point that this example illustrates is that the modern jobs system, which pits jobs against the
environment, is a recent invention. Other people at other times, and farmers within and outside of American
agribusiness today, have made their livings in ways that did not generate the degree of alienation
from people and land, nor the environmental degradation, that our modern agricultural jobs system tends to
produce. Furthermore, the fact that this system is an invention, however intractable it might seem at the moment, can
give us real hope: we could, if properly organized and clearheaded, create a different system. Before turning to
the task of attempting to describe an environmentally and socially more satisfactory work system, I believe we will be better
equipped to do so if we can comprehend how bizarre our modern jobs system actually is. The Modern Jobs System:
Environmentally, Socially, and Economically Dysfunctional Karen J. Warren (1990) describes patriarchy as a
dysfunctional system: In a functional system, the rules and roles tend to be clear, respectful, negotiable; they can be revised,
negotiated, changed. Problems tend to be openly acknowledged and resolved. In a dysfunctional system, the rules tend to be
confused and covert, rigid and unchanging. A high value tends to be placed on control; dysfunctional systems tend to display an
exaggerated rationality and focus on rulegoverned reason.... Dysfunctional systems are often maintained through systematic
denial ... [and] this denial need not be conscious, intentional, or malicious... furthermore, dysfunctional social systems often leave
their members feeling powerless or helpless to make any significant changes. (125) I would add that a dysfunctional system is
marked by its inability to meet the real needs of those whom it is meant to serveit is an inherently flawed system. Warren alludes
to this striking feature (striking because even though a dysfunctional system fails over and over to deliver what it promises, people
keep the system) when she says, "When patriarchy is understood as a dysfunctional system, this
'unmanageability' [patriarchy cannot 'manage its affairs equitably and justly'] can be seen for what it isa
predictable consequence of patriarchy" (129). As a first attempt to comprehend the dysfunctionality of our jobs
system, consider what Andre Gorz calls "compensatory consumption" (chap. 1). Each of us has practiced
compensatory consumption. Some of us compensate for the pain of a conflict by eating some "sinful"
food or drinking a soothing beverage. Others go shopping and compensate for a loss or some suffering with an item of
clothing, a new record, or an automobile. Not all of our compensatory behavior is undesirable, of course, and by no means are we
always compensating for what happens (or does not happen) on our jobs. Nevertheless, according to Gorz, a great deal of what
people today compensate for is work related, whether from stress or lack of meaning on the job or from other problematic
dimensions of their lives that are related to work. Furthermore, since much compensatory behavior is consumptive
and therefore usually costs money, the amount of work we must do increases as we engage in
further compensatory consumption. The circle of work and consumption comes full around and speeds up with every
turn. Add to this psychologic of work and compensatory consumption the huge motivational machinery of modern public relations,
18 which from the perspective of dysfunctionality plays the dual roles of the enabler and the tempter, and we have a powerful trap. If
modern workers want to participate in the goods of their society and culture, they must do work
that is to a great measure inherently unsatisfying of their real needs, and advertising tells them
what they should want to meet those needs, even though what they thus come to want cannot do
so. It seems that on the one hand advertisers do not want people actually to be satisfied; rather, they want people continually to
have the insatiable desires of the modern economic myth and to buy their products. But on the other hand, it is crucial that
compensatory consumers feel their wants are their own. How else could people believe they were "free" when they were acting like
addicts in a dysfunctional system? (In her discussion of patriarchy as a dysfunctional system, Warren focuses on how such a set of
beliefs is crucial for the overall system to operate.) Thus without this enabling belief structure ("consuming frees me to express and
create myself"), people might begin to see how contrary to their real needs compensatory consumption really is. Although both
men and women in America practice compensatory consumption, not surprisingly women are the
chief targets of advertisers. This happens, I believe, both because women have been given the
support rolethey are assigned to play "back up" (Illich calls this "shadow work")and because women's exclusions
from male sources of meaning and power have left them especially vulnerable to compensatory
consumption. As a result of their supportive and secondary roles in this system, women not only buy most of the goods needed
for running the household, but also are the main consumers of diets, plastic surgery, cosmetics, and other forms of personal feelbetter consumption. A second way to probe the dysfunctionality of our jobs system is to look at what leisure has become for us. In an
essay in this volume (chapter 9), Karen Fox shows that the conception and practice of leisure can reveal a great deal about a culture's
work. In our patriarchal jobs system, work that is typically done by women as supporters of men commonly is not viewed as real
(paid) work at all but as "women's" (unpaid) work, thus giving men "freedom" from work called leisure, but leaving women's work
and leisure in the shadows of unclarity. Leisure within this patriarchal system becomes a form of hegemony: since only men work,
then only men need leisure because women never really work (and thus have to "work" while men are at leisure). In certain respects
this changes when women join the jobsforpay part of our jobs system, but women often clearly are damned if they do work on paying
jobs as well as if they do not: working women continue to do most of the shadow work (all the work needed to run a household and
to keep the family's workers on the job) after their jobs are done, and often they still feel as if they are slighting the children (child
care is ''women's work," after all). This system is not only dysfunctional for women, however; men, too, suffer from lack of real
leisure. Fox argues that real leisure should not be defined and valued in terms of "freedom" from working; instead we should define
it and gauge its worth in terms of caring relationships, play, and meaning (including selfexpression). Many students of contemporary
culture have noted that for alltoomany men as well as women, our leisure is more like putting salve on wounds than it is like play. 19
Judith McGaw contends, in an article on the social history of modern work, that even though the modern jobs system is friendlier in
many ways to men than to women, men also are wounded and stunted by it. McGaw believes that a major feature of industrialization
was to change the geography of work from a situation where men and women both were "housebound," where they worked together
in a home economics, to work done in "separate spheres" (men at the factory and women at home). She continues by saying that
even though men's work done in their separate sphere was propped up by wages, relative to working at home, men suffered great
loss: they lost the flexibility, interest, diversity, and craftsmanship of home work, and they gained industrial byproducts such as
boredom, alienation, and lack of opportunity to socialize and develop themselves. At the same time women, in their "inferior sphere"
(which it wasand isin terms of status, pay, respect, etc.), worked in highly relational ways on diverse tasks requiring advanced
skills, and thus their personal and social strengths persisted while men's were weakened. McGaw makes the same point as Warren
concerning the contribution indigenous women could make if taken seriously instead of being dominated: if men (and women) could
learn from what women still remember about working, communities, and nature, we would have the basis for much healthier
communities (including nonhuman nature). And if Fox is correct that leisure should be based on caring relationships rather than on
consumption and separation ("freedom"), women have a great deal to teach men about leisure. Fox's greatest challenge, though, is to
the work/leisure dichotomy itself. She points out that in many societies work and leisure were/are not separate. Both play time and
work time were spent in social and playful ways, 20 thus cutting through our dichotomy of work and leisure. I will return to this
suggestive point in the final section of this essay. A third way to see the dysfunctionality of our jobs system is
to think of how it distributes wealth. Adam Smith, surely a main architect of our current economic world, was a moral
philosopher who, contrary to many advocates and opponents of capitalism, held no fancy for entrepreneurs. He granted mostly
unlimited accumulation of wealth to capitalists in order that the poor be made better off; for Smith, the only virtue of unbridled
material selfishness was as a means to the end of material betterment for ordinary people. Smith and the system he helped create
gave a kind of promissory note: if you will be willing to put up with the hardships of work within
industrial society, you will receive a substantial (and increasing?)21 share of the wealth . For a short
while in the United States and other industrialized societies, Smith's system seemed to work: access to goodpaying jobs was fairly
easy for "most" workers (except, of course, women, people of color, the handicapped, etc.) during several decades of this century. But
with the onset of automation and the internationalization of the economy, the system's payoff on this promissory note was short
lived. Today fewer and fewer people in American and other industrialized societies have access,
through jobs, to the evergrowing wealth produced. Thus at the heart of this system is an increasingly bizarre and
unacceptable (even to Smith?) result: the central end toward which this system is a means is not being served. Seen through this
lens, if Smith's jobs system was not dysfunctional from the outset, it has become dysfunctional even for white men. The chief way
apologists for this system rationalize this fatal divergence from Smith's putative goal of improving "mankind's" lot is to change the
goal: now what counts simply is the everincreasing generation of wealth. Does
the fact that the modern jobs system

is failing to meet the needs of its workers mean either that people lack the initiative and
ingenuity to make things or that we are running out of work to be done ? On the contrary, anyone who is
half awake can see that we have tremendous work to be done (both in terms of importance and sheer volume) and that in every
industrial society there are countless people ready and able to do that work. Not only is there the obvious infrastructure work of
repairing and rebuilding roads, bridges, waterworks, and the like, but there is incalculable work needed to repair our natural and
social environments: to rebuild our biotic and social communities, to raise our children well, etc. The problem is that this work falls
outside the jobs system; it is not rewarded by those who control the wealth. Putting the issue in these terms shows finally what ails
our way of working: we face a powerful crisis of values. A society as vastly wealthy as the United States that cannot manage to see
that its children are safe, healthy, and welleducated and cannot provide its people with the basic amenities and securities of life has
either an impoverished set of values, a sorry lack of imagination, or both.
LINK NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Nuclear weapons are favored to demonstrate mens domination over each other
and over nature.
Cohn 87 founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights (Carol,
Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4, Within
and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. JSTOR) */LEA
In light of the imagery of male birth, the extraordinary names given to the bombs that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash and
rubble- "Little Boy" and "Fat Man"-at last become intelligible. These ultimate destroyers were the progeny of the
atomic scientists-and emphatically not just any progeny but male progeny . In early tests, before they
were certain that the bombs would work, the scientists expressed their concern by saying that they hoped
the baby was a boy, not a girl-that is, not a dud.29 General Grove's triumphant cable to Secretary of War Henry
Stim- son at the Potsdam conference, informing him that the first atomic bomb test was successful read, after decoding: "Doctor has
just returned most enthusiastic and confidenthat the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from
here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams from here to my farm."30 Stimson, in turn, informed Churchill by writing him
a note that read, "Babies satisfactorily born."31 In 1952, Teller's exultant telegram to Los Alamos announcing the
successful test of the hydrogen bomb, "Mike," at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, read, "It's a boy."32
The nuclear scientists gave birth to male progeny with the ultimate power of violent domination
over female Na- ture. The defense intellectuals' project is the creation of abstract formula- tions
to control the forces the scientists created-and to participate thereby in their worldcreating/destroying power. The entire history of the bomb project, in fact, seems
permeated with imagery that confounds man's overwhelming technological
power to destroy nature with the power to create-imagery that inverts men's
destruction and asserts in its place the power to create new life and a new world.
It converts men's destruction into their rebirth . William L. Laurence witnessed the Trinity test of the
first atomic bomb and wrote: "The big boom came about a hundred seconds after the great flash-the first cry of a new-born world....
They clapped their hands as they leaped from the ground-earthbound man symbolising the birth of a new force. "33 Watching "Fat
Man" being assembled the day before it was dropped on Nagasaki, he described seeing the bomb as "being fashioned into a living
thing. "34 Decades later, General Bruce K. Holloway, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1968 to 1972,
described a nuclear war as involving "a big bang, like the start of the universe. "
Sexual metaphors, euphemisms and insistence on abstract discussion
demonstrate the inherent sexism in nuclear war and its justifications
Cohn and Ruddick 3 - *founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and ** Winner of the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the Year Award by the Society
for Women in Philosophy and author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Carol
and Sara, A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction, Working Paper No.
104 Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights, 2003,
http://genderandsecurity.org/sites/default/files/carol_cohn_and_sara_ruddick_working_pap
er_104.pdf) */LEA
Question Two The second question asks us whether it is ever morally permissible to use weapons of
mass destruction. We are tempted to answer with only three words: of course not. Rather than pondering the question of
when, if ever, it is morally justified to use WMD, we move in two directions. First, we note that anti- war feminists energies have not
been focused on when to use these weapons, but rather on attempting to explain why, over many years, there has been widespread
acceptance of the deployment of nuclear weapons and of the stated willingness to use them. Second, we move to question the
question itself. Anti-war feminist attention to WMD has largely focused on nuclear weapons their
horrors, the urgency of abolishing them, and the question of how anyone could think it sane to
develop and deploy them. In this chapter, we, too, write primarily about nuclear weapons as a reflection of the tradition
on which we report, but also because they are the weapons whose magnitude of 12 Carol Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper
No. 104 destructive power seems distinctive, and to best warrant the description weapons of mass destruction. However, as we
learned in the course of our research, many elements of the anti- war feminist critique of nuclear weapons hold for chemical and
biological weapons as well. Rather than seeing acceptance of nuclear weapons as a realistic
acknowledgment of the technologically inevitable, anti-war feminists have seen the political
and intellectual acceptance of nuclear weapons deployment as something to be explained. Some
feminists have noted the allure of nuclear weapons , particularly the excitement and awe
evoked by actual or imagined nuclear explosions. Some have seen the appeal of exploding
or launching nuclear weapons as reflecting and reinforcing masculine desires and
identities.
22 Several anti-war feminists have focused less on the weapons themselves, and more on the discourse through
which the weapons (and their use) are theorized and legitimated.
They have written about both the sexual
and domestic metaphors that turn the minds eye toward the pleasant and
familiar, rather than toward images of indescribable devastation.
nuclear discourse techniques of denial and conceptual fragmentation. They have emphasized the ways that
They have identified in
the abstraction
and euphemism of nuclear discourse protect nuclear planners and politicians

from the grisly realities behind their words. Speaking generally, anti- war feminists
invite women and men to attend to the identities, emotions and discourses that allow us to
accept the possible use of nuclear weapons.23 Perhaps the most general feminist concern is the willingness of
intellectuals to talk-as- usual about nuclear weapons (or about any atrocity). And this brings us back to the issue of the framing of
Question Two. The question as it is posed seems in some ways similar to the abstract, distancing thinking that we have criticized
but in which we also participate. There is no mention of the horror, let alone a pause to rest with it. We move, or are moved, quickly
to an abstract moral tone: any circumstances might be morally permissible.... and then to comparisons. Abstract language and a
penchant for distinctions are typical of philosophy, intrinsically unobjectionable, often a pleasure. It is continuous abstraction while
speaking of actual or imagined horror that disturbs us. Abstract discussion of warfare is both the tool and the
privilege of those who imagine themselves as the (potential) users of weapons. The victims, if
they can speak at all, speak quite differently: An account of a nuclear blasts effects by a US defense intellectual:
[You have to have ways to maintain communications in a] nuclear environment, a situation bound to include EMP blackout, brute
force damage to systems, a heavy jamming environment, and so on. 24 An account by a Hiroshima survivor: 13 Carol Cohn and
Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No. 104 Everything was black, had vanished into the black dust, was destroyed. Only the flames that
were beginning to lick their way up had any color. From the dust that was like a fog, figures began to loom up, black, hairless,
faceless. They screamed with voices that were no longer human. Their screams drowned out the groans rising everywhere from the
rubble, groans that seemed to rise from the very earth itself. 25 It should become apparent then, that our concern about abstract
language is not only relevant to the framing of Question Two, but to its content the justifiability of nuclear weapons use as well.
It is easier to contemplate and justify the use of nuclear weapons in the abstract language of
defense intellectuals than in the descriptive, emotionally resonant language of the victim; from
the perspective of the user rather than the victim. Anti- war feminists note that detailed, focal attention to
the human impact of weapons use is not only considered out of bounds in security professionals discourse; it is also
delegitimated by its association with the feminine, with insufficient masculinity , as is evident in this
excerpt of an interview with a physicist: Several colleagues and I were working on modeling counterforce nuclear attacks, trying to
get realistic estimates of the number of immediate fatalities that would result from different deployments. At one point, we remodeled a particular attack, using slightly different assumptions, and found that instead of there being 36 million immediate
fatalities, there would only be 30 million. And everybody was sitting around nodding, saying, Oh yeh, thats great, only 30 million,
when all of a sudden, I heard what we were saying. And I blurted out, Wait, Ive just heard how were talking -- Only 30 million!
Only 30 million human beings killed instantly? Silence fell upon the room. Nobody said a word. They didnt even look at me. It was
awful. I felt like a woman. After telling this story to one of the authors, the physicist added that he was careful to never blurt out
anything indicating that he was thinking about the victims again. 26 Fear of feeling like a woman (or being seen as
unmanly) silently works to maintain the boundaries of a distanced, abstract discourse, and to
sustain the tone of Question Two a tone which invites us to think abstractly, objectively
about WMD use, without pausing with human particularities, passions and suffering .
Nuclear weapons are the ultimate assertion of mens power over each other
through phallic imagery and focus on domination
White men in ties discussing missile size Feminists
have often suggested that an important aspect of the

arms race is phallic worship, that "missile envy" is a significant motivating force in the nuclear
build-up.12 I have always found this an uncomfortably reductionist explanation and hoped that my research at the Center would
yield a more complex analysis. But still, I was curious about the extent to which I might find a sexual subtext in the defense
professionals' discourse. I was not prepared for what I found. 692 I think I had naively imagined myself as a feminist spy in the
house of death-that I would need to sneak around and eavesdrop on what men said in unguarded moments, using all my subtlety
and cunning to unearth whatever sexual imagery might be underneath how they thought and spoke. I had naively believed
that these men, at least in public, would appear to be aware of feminist critiques . If they had not
changed their language, I thought that at least at some point in a long talk about "penetration aids," someone would suddenly look
up, slightly embarrassed to be caught in such blatant confirmation of feminist analyses of What's Going On Here.'3 Of course, I was
wrong. There was no evidence that any feminist critiques had ever reached the ears, much less the minds, of these men.
American military dependence on nuclear weapons was explained as "irresistible, because you
get more bang for the buck." Another lecturer solemnly and scientifically announced "to disarm is to get
rid of all your stuff." (This may, in turn, explain why they see serious talk of nuclear disarmament as perfectly resistable, not
to mention foolish. If disarmament is emasculation, how could any real man even consider it?) A professor's explanation of why the
MX missile is to be placed in the silos of the newest Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less accurate ones, was
"because they're in the nicest hole-you're not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole." Other
lectures were filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay
downs, deep penetration, and the comparative advantages of pro- tracted versus spasm attacks or what one military adviser to the National Security Council has called "releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one
orgasmic whump."14 There was serious concern about the need to harden our missiles and the need to "face it, the Russians are a
little harder than we are." Disbelieving glances would occasionally pass between me and my one ally in the summer progtam,
another woman, but no one else seemed to notice. If the imagery is transparent, its significance may be less so .
The temptation is to draw some conclusions about the defense intellectuals themselves-about what they are really talking about, or
their motivations; but the temptation is worth resisting. Individual motivations cannot necessarily be read directly from imagery;
the imagery itself does not originate in these particular individuals but in a broader cultural context. Sexual imagery has, of course,
been a part of the world of warfare since long before nuclear weapons were even a gleam in a physicist's eye. The history of the
atomic bomb project itself is rife with overt images of competitive male sexualit y, as is the discourse of
the early nuclear physi- cists, strategists, and SAC commanders.'5 Both the military itself and the arms manufacturers
are constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and promise of sexual domination that their
weapons so conveniently suggest. A quick glance at the publications that constitute some of the research sources for
defense intellectuals makes the depth and pervasiveness of the imagery evident. Air Force Magazine's advertisements for new
weapons, for example, rival Playboy as a catalog of men's sexual anxieties and fantasies. Consider the following, from the June 1985
issue: emblazoned in bold letters across the top of a two-page advertisement for the AV-8B Harrier II-"Speak Softly and Carry a Big
Stick." The copy below boasts "an exceptional thrust to weight ratio" and "vectored thrust capability that makes the . .. unique rapid
response possible." Then, just in case we've failed to get the message, the last line reminds us, "Just the sort of'Big Stick' Teddy
Roosevelt had in mind way back in 1901. "16 An ad for the BKEP (BLU-106/B) reads: The Only Way to Solve Some Problems is to
Dig Deep. THE BOMB, KINETIC ENERGY PENETRATOR "Will provide the tactical air commander with efficient power to deny or
significantly delay enemy airfield operations." "Designed to maximize runway cratering by optimizing penetration dynamics and
utilizing the most efficient warhead yet designed."17 (In case the symbolism of "cratering" seems far-fetched, I must point out that I
am not the first to see it. The French use the Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific for their nuclear tests and assign a woman's name to
each of the craters they gouge out of the earth.) Another,
truly extraordinary, source of phallic imagery is

to be found in descriptions of nuclear blasts themselves . Here, for example, is one by journalist William
Laurence, who was brought to Nagasaki by the Air Force to witness the bombing. "Then, just when it appeared as though the thing
had settled down in to a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the size of the
pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy
foam, sizzling upward and then descending earthward, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It kept struggling in an elemental fury,
like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down."'8 Given the degree to which it suffuses their
world, that defense intellectuals themselves use a lot of sexual imagery does not seem
especially surprising. Nor does it, by itself, constitute grounds for imputing motivation. For me, the interesting
issue is not so much the imagery's psychody- namic origins, as how it functions. How does it
serve to make it possible for strategic planners and other defense intellectuals to do their
macabre work? How does it function in their construction of a work world that feels tenable? Several stories illustrate the
complexity. During the summer program, a group of us visited the New London Navy base where nuclear submarines are
homeported and the General Dynamics Electric Boat boatyards where a new Trident submarine was being constructed. At one point
during the trip we took a tour of a nuclear powered submarine. When we reached the part of the sub where the missiles are housed,
the officer accompanying us turned with a grin and asked if we wanted to stick our hands through a hole to "pat the missile." Pat the
missile? The image reappeared the next week, when a lecturer scornfully declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and
Pershing II missiles in Western Europe was "so that our allies can pat them." Some months later, another group of us went to be
briefed at NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command). On the way back, our plane went to refuel at Offut Air Force
Base, the Strategic Air Command head- quarters near Omaha, Nebraska. When word leaked out that our landing would be delayed
because the new B-1 bomber was in the area, the plane became charged with a tangible excitement that built as we flew in our
holding pattern, people craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of the B-1 in the skies, and climaxed as we touched down on the
runway and hurtled past it. Later, when I returned to the Center I encountered a man who, unable to go on the trip, said to me
enviously, "I hear you got to pat a B-I." What is all this "patting"? What are men doing when they "pat"
these high-tech phalluses? Patting is an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession,

affectionate domination. The thrill and pleasure of "patting the missile" is the
proximity of all that phallic power, the possibility of vicariously appro- priating it
as one's own. But if the predilection for patting phallic objects indicates
something of the homoerotic excitement suggested by the language , it also has
another side. For patting is not only an act of sexual intimacy. It is also what one does to babies,
small children, the pet dog. One pats that which is small, cute, and harmless-not terrifyingly
destructive. Pat it, and its lethality disappears. Much of the sexual imagery I heard was rife with the sort of
ambiguity suggested by "patting the missiles." The imagery can be construed as a deadly serious display of
the connections between masculine sexuality and the arms race. At the same time, it can also be
heard as a way of minimizing the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying
their deadly consequences. A former Pentagon target analyst, in telling me why he thought plans for "limited
nuclear war" were ridiculous, said, "Look, you gotta understand that it's a pissing contest-you gotta expect them to use everything
they've got." What does this image say? Most obviously, that this is all about competition for manhood, and thus
there is tremendous danger. But at the same time, the image diminishes the contest and its
outcomes, by representing it as an act of boyish mischief.
their trivialization of nuclear weapons through technostrategic discourse leads to
desensitization and allows them to view their weapons as extensions of
themselves, not threats to all people, including themselves
In other words,
what I learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun . I am serious.
They are quick,
clean, light; they trip off the tongue. You can reel off dozens of them in seconds, forgetting about
how one might just interfere with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them . I am not
The words are fun to say; they are racy, sexy, snappy. You can throw them around in rapid-fire succession.
describing a phenomenon experienced only by the perverse, although the phenomenon itself may be perverse indeed. Nearly
everyone I observed clearly took pleasure in using the words. It mattered little whether we were lecturers or students, hawks or
doves, men or women- we all learned it, and we all spoke it. Some of us may have spoken with a self-consciously
ironic edge, but the pleasure was there nonetheless. Part of the appeal was the thrill of being
able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom, being
someone in the know. It is a glow that is a significant part of learning about nuclear weaponry .
Few know, and those who do are powerful. You can rub elbows with them, perhaps even be one
yourself. That feeling, of course, does not come solely from the language. The whole set-up of the summer
program itself, for example, communicated the allures of power and the benefits of white male
privileges. We were provided with luxurious accommodations, complete with young black women who came in to clean up after
us each day; generous funding paid not only our transportation and food but also a large honorarium for attending; we met in
lavishly appointed classrooms and lounges. Access to excellent athletic facilities was guaranteed by a "Temporary Privilege Card,"
which seemed to me to sum up the essence of the experience. Perhaps most important of all were the endless allusions by our
lecturers to "what I told John [Kennedy]" and "and then Henry [Kissinger] said," or the lunches where we could sit next to a
prominent political figure and listen to Washington gossip. A more subtle, but perhaps more important, element of
learning the language is that, when you speak it, you feel in control. The experience of mastering the
words infuses your relation to the material. You can get so good at manipulating the words that it almost feels as
though the whole thing is under control. Learning the language gives a sense of what I would call cognitive
mastery; the feeling of mastery of technology that is finally not controllable but is instead powerful
beyond human comprehension, powerful in a way that stretches and even thrills the imagination. The more
conversations I participated in using this language, the less frightened I was of
nuclear war . How can learning to speak a language have such a powerful effect? One answer,
I believe, is that the process of learning the language is itself a part of what removes you from
the reality of nuclear war. I entered a world where people spoke what amounted to a foreign language, a language I had to
learn if we were to communicate with one another. So I became engaged in the challenge of it-of decoding the acronyms and figuring
out which were the proper verbs to use. My focus was on the task of solving the puzzles, developing
language competency- not on the weapons and wars behind the words. Although my interest
was in thinking about nuclear war and its prevention, my energy was elsewhere. By the time I was
through, I had learned far more than a set of abstract words that refers to grisly subjects, for even when the subjects of a standard
English and nukespeak description seem to be the same, they are, in fact, about utterly different phenomena. Consider the following
descriptions, in each of which the subject is the aftermath of a nuclear attack: Everything was black, had vanished into the black
dust, was destroyed. Only the flames that were beginning to lick their way up had any color. From the dust that was like a fog,
figures began to loom up, black, hairless, faceless. They screamed with voices that were no longer human. Their screams drowned
out the groans rising everywhere from the rubble, groans that seemed to rise from the very earth itself.37 [You have to have ways to
maintain communications in a] nuclear environment, a situation bound to include EMP blackout, brute force damage to systems, a
heavy jamming environment, and so on.38 There are no ways to describe the phenomena represented in the first with the language
of the second. Learning to speak the language of defense analysts is not a conscious, cold-blooded
decision to ignore the effects of nuclear weapons on real live human beings, to ignore the sensory, the
emotional experience, the human impact. It is simply learning a new language, but by the time you are
through, the content of what you can talk about is monumentally different, as is the perspective
from which you speak. In the example above, the differences in the two descriptions of a "nuclear environment" stem partly
from a difference in the vividness of the words themselves-the words of the first intensely immediate and evoca- 37 Hisako
Matsubara, Cranes at Dusk (Garden City, N.Y.: Dial Press, 1985). The author was a child in Kyoto at the time the atomic bomb was
dropped. Her description is based on the memories of survivors. tive, the words of the second abstract and distancing. The passages
also differ in their content; the first describes the effects of a nuclear blast on human beings, the second describes the impact of a
nuclear blast on technical systems designed to assure the "command and control" of nuclear weapons. Both of these differences may
stem from the difference of perspective: the speaker in the first is a victim of nuclear weapons, the speaker in the second is a user.
The speaker in the first is using words to try to name and contain the horror of human suffering all around her; the speaker in the
second is using words to ensure the possibility of launching the next nuclear attack. Technostrategic language can be used only to
articulate the perspective of the users of nuclear weapons, not that of the victims.39 Thus, speaking the expert language not only
offers distance, a feeling of control, and an alternative focus for one's energies; it also offers escape- escape from thinking of oneself
as a victim of nuclear war. I do not mean this on the level of individual consciousness; it is not that defense analysts somehow
convince themselves that they would not be among the victims of nuclear war, should it occur. But I do mean it in terms of the
structural position the speakers of the language occupy and the perspective they get from that position. Structurally
, speaking
technostrategic language removes them from the position of victim and puts
them in the position of the planner, the user, the actor . From that position, there is
neither need nor way to see oneself as a victim; no matter what one deeply knows or believes
about the likelihood of nuclear war, and no matter what sort of terror or despair the knowledge
of nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers of technostrategic language are positionally
allowed, even forced, to escape that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the position
of the victim, by virtue of their linguistic stance as users, rather than victims, of nuclear
weaponry. Finally, then, I suspect that much of the reduced anxiety about nuclear war commonly
experienced by both new speakers of the language and long-time experts comes from
characteristics of the language itself: the distance afforded by its abstraction; the sense of
control afforded by mastering it; and the fact that its content and concerns are that of the users
rather than the victims of nuclear weapons. In learning the language, one goes from being the passive, powerless
victim to the competent, wily, powerful purveyor of nuclear threats and nuclear explosive power. The enormous
destructive effects of nuclear weapons systems become extensions of the self,
rather than threats to it.
LINK PROLIF/DETERRENCE
The production alone of weapons of mass destruction creates massive
environmental destruction and violence that uniquely affects women.
Cohn and Ruddick 3 - *founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and
Human Rights and ** Winner of the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the Year Award by
the Society for Women in Philosophy and author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of
Peace (Carol and Sara, A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
Working Paper No. 104 Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights, 2003,
er_104.pdf) */LEA
Question Three asks whether it is ethical to develop and deploy WMD as deterrents only. That is, it asks the classic question of
whether it is ethical to have weapons and threaten to use then, even if it is not ethical to use those weapons militarily. As the
question is framed, then, development and deployment appear not as phenomena subject to ethical scrutiny unto themselves,
but merely as way-stations, as adjuncts subsumed under what is taken to be the core ethical issue, which is seen as deterrence. 14
Carol Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No. 104 This formulation does not work for us. We need to pause and recognize that
there are really several questions enfolded in that one. We must not only ask about the ethical status of
deterrence, but also whether its entailments development and deployment are themselves
ethical. 27 One of the constitutive positions of anti-war feminism is that in thinking about
weapons and wars, we must accord full weight to their daily effects on the lives of women. We then
find that the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, even when they are not used in warfare,
exacts immense economic costs that particularly affect women . In the words of a recent Indian feminist
essay: The social costs of nuclear weaponisation in a country where the basic needs of shelter,
food and water, electricity, health and education have not been met are obvious.. .. [S]ince
patriarchal family norms place the task of looking after the daily needs of the family mainly
upon women, scarcity of resources always hits women the hardest. Less food for the family inevitably
means an even smaller share for women and female children just as water shortages mean an increase in womens labour who have
to spend more time and energy in fetching water from distant places at odd hours of the day. 28 While the US is not as poor a
nation as India, Pakistan, or Russia, it has remained, throughout the nuclear age, a country in which poverty and hunger are rife,
health care still unaffordable to many, low-cost housing unavailable, with crumbling public schools and infrastructure, all while the
American nuclear weapons program has come at the cost of 4.5 trillion dollars.29 In addition to being economically costly,
nuclear weapons development has medical and political costs. In the US program, many people have been
exposed to high levels of radiation, including uranium miners; workers at reactors and processing facilities; the quarter of a million
military personnel who took place in atomic battlefield exercises; downwinders from test sites; and Marshallese Islanders. 30
Politically, nuclear regimes require a level of secrecy and security measures that exclude the
majority of citizens, and in most countries, all women, from defense policy and decisionmaking. 31 From the perspective of womens lives, we see not only the costs of the development of nuclear weapons, but also the
spiritual, social and psychological costs of deployment. One cost, according to some feminists, is that Nuclearisation produces social
consent for increasing levels of violence. 32 Another cost, for many, is that nuclear weapons create high levels of tension, insecurity
and fear. As Arundhati Roy puts it, nuclear weapons [i]nform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of
our brains. 33 Further, feminists are concerned about the effect of nuclear policy on moral thought, on
ideas about gender, and how the two intersect. Nuclear deve lopment may legitimize male aggression, 15
Carol Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No. 104 and breed the idea that nuclear explosions give a virility to the nation which
men as individuals can somehow also share. [T]he strange character of nuclear policymaking not only sidelines moral and ethical
questions, but genders them. This elite gets to be represented as rational , scientific, modern, and of course
masculine, while ethical questions, questions about the social and environmental costs are made
to seem emotional, effeminate, regressive and not modern. This rather dangerous way of thinking, which
suggests that questions about human life and welfare are somehow neither modern nor properly masculine questions, or that men
have no capacity and concern for peace and morality, can have disastrous consequences for both men and women. 34 All in all,
we find the daily costs of WMD development and deployment staggeringly high
in and of themselves sufficient to prevent deterrence from being an ethical moral
option. A so-called realist response to this jud gement might well pay lip-service to the
moral niceties it embodies, but then argue that deterrence is worth those costs. Or, perhaps to be more
accurate, it might argue that the results of a nuclear attack would be so catastrophic that the rest of these considerations are really an
irrelevant distraction; deterring a WMD attack on our homeland is the precondition on which political freedom and social life
depend, and so it must be thought about in a class by itself. We make two rejoinders to this claim. First, we note that in the
culture of nuclear defense intellectuals, even raising the issue of costs is delegitimized, in large
part through its association with the feminine. It is the kind of thing that hysterical housewives do; something
done by people not tough and hard enough to look harsh reality in the eye, unsentimentally; not strong enough to separate their
feelings from theorizing mass death; people who dont have the stones for war. Feminist analysis rejects the cultural
division of meaning which devalues anything associated with women or femininity . It sees in that
same cultural valuing of the so-called masculine over the so-called feminine an explanation of why it appears so self-evident to
many that what is called military necessity should appropriately be prioritized over all other human necessities. And it
questions the assumptions that bestow the mantle of realism on such a constrained focus on
weapons and state power. Rather than simply being an objective reflection of
political reality, we understand this thought system as 1) a partial and distorted
picture of reality, and 2) a major contributor to creating the very circumstances it
purports to describe and protect against.
Second, just as feminists tend to be skeptical about the efficacy of
violence, they might be equally skeptical about the efficacy of deterrence. Or, to put it another way, if
war is a lie, so is
deterrence. This is not, of course, to say that deterrence as a phenomena never occurs; no doubt one opponent is sometimes
deterred from attacking another by the fear of retaliation. But rather deterrence as a theory, a discourse and set
of practices underwritten by that discourse, is a fiction. 16 Carol Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No.
104 Deterrence theory is an elaborate, abstract conceptual edifice, which posits a hypothetical relation between two different sets of
weapons systems or rather, between abstractions of two different sets of weapons systems, for in fact, as both common sense and
military expertise tells us, human error and technological imperfection mean that one could not actually expect real weapons to
function in the ways simply assumed in deterrence theory. Because deterrence theory sets in play the hypothetical
representations of various weapons systems, rather than assessments of how they would actually
perform or fail to perform in warfare, it can be nearly infinitely elaborated, in a never ending
regression of intercontinental ballistic missile gaps and theater warfare gaps and tactical mini- nuke gaps, ad
infinitum, thus legitimating both massive vertical proliferation and arms racing. Deterrence theory
is also a fiction in that it depends upon rational actors, for whom what counts as rational is
the same, independent of culture, history, or individual difference . It depends on those rational actors
perfectly understanding the meaning of signals communicated by military actions, despite dependence on technologies that
sometimes malfunction; despite cultural difference and the lack of communication that is part of being political enemies; despite the
difficulties of ensuring mutual understanding even when best friends make direct face-to- face statements to each other. It
depends on those same rational actors engaging in a very specific kind of calculus that
includes one set of variables (e.g., weapons size, deliverability, survivability, as well as the credibility of their and their
opponents threats), and excludes other variables (such as domestic political pressures, economics, or
individual subjectivity). What is striking from a feminist perspective is that even while realists
may worry that some opponents are so insufficiently rational as to be undeterrable, this does
not lead them to search for a more reliable form of ensuring security, or an approach that is not
so weapons-dependent. Cynthia Cockburn, in her study of womens peace projects in conflict zones, describes one of the
womens activities as helping each other give up dangerous day dreams. 35 From a feminist anti-war perspective, having
WMD as deterrents is a dangerous dream. The dream of perfect rationality and control which
underwrites deterrence theory is a dangerous dream, since it legitimates constructing a system
that only could be (relatively) safe if that perfect rationa lity and control were actually possible.
Deterrence theory itself is a dangerous dream because it justifies producing and deploying WMD, thereby
making their accidental or purposive use possible (and far more likely) than if they were not produced at all, nor deployed
in such numbers. Realists are quick to point out the dangers of not having WMD for deterrence when other states have them .
Feminist perspectives suggest that that danger only appears so self-evidently greater than the
danger of having WMD if you discount as soft serious attention to the costs of development
and deployment. 17 Carol Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No. 104
Deterrence reinforces the self/other dualism, which ensures the utilitarian

construct of an eternal state of war all morality is suspended when
homogenization devalues the other
Davion, 96 Professor, Department Head, Ethics & the Environment editor, University of
Georgia (Victoria, When Lives Become Logic Problems: Nuclear Deterrence, an Ecological
Feminist Critique, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 188-190
edited by Karen Warren)//schnall
Hobbes argued that in the international arena, without an international sovereign, each nation is in a state of
nature with respect to every other nation. Because there is no international sovereign, there can be no morality in force
between nations. Nations are in a state of war with respect to each other, and thus may do
whatever is necessary to survive (Hobbes 1968, ch.13). Plumwood's ecological feminist critique applies fairly
straightforwardly to the Hobbesian account of rationality and motivation. The only rational motivation for entering into society is
that the state of nature is a state of war. However, because people are rational egoists, they cannot be trusted
to keep agreements to exit the state of nature unless they are motivated to do so in strongly
egoistic terms. Thus, the construction of the state of nature as one of war and the account of the
self in egoistic terms makes use of a strict self/other dualism in which the other is radically
separated from the self and is of only instrumental value to the self. The self backgrounds and incorporates
the other; the other's projects are seen as unimportant and the other is not encountered as independent and
important in its own right. The self homogenizes particular others by seeing all of them as the
same, as simply other. What is important for this analysis is that actual justifications for nuclear deterrence
make use of the kind of self suggested by Hobbes and critiqued by Plumwood. Christopher Morris
attempts to modify the Hobbesian account of the social contract for the international arena
(Morris 1985, 490). Morris argues that although it may be wrong intentionally to aim at innocents when a
morality is in force, a contractarian approach can be used to argue that there may be times when
there is no morality in force and, therefore, no moral constraints against killing innocents.
Basically, Morris attempts to show that if one nation launches a nuclear attack upon another, this places
both nations in a state of nature with respect to one another, a state in which there are no moral
obligations at all. In such a state it would not be morally wrong to kill the citizens of the
attacking country. Nothing would be morally wrong . Because it would not be morally wrong to retaliate
under such circumstances, it is not wrong to threaten to retaliate should such circumstances occur (Morris 1985, 490-91). Morris
attempts to modify the Hobbesian account by replacing the sovereign with mutual threats of annihilation. He suggests that most
nations today are in circumstances of justice with respect to each other in that (1) they are interdependent, (2) resources are scarce,
and (3) mutually beneficial interaction is possible. It would therefore be rational for such nations to wish to exit a state of nature
with respect to each other by seeking cooperative interaction. However, there can be no morality in force without
some system of enforcement analogous to Hobbes's sovereign. This is needed to make

cooperation rational and thus to create moral obligations. Morris argues that a system of
enforcement weaker than an absolute sovereign (world government) can do the job. He maintains that
mutual threats of retaliation can provide the needed system of enforcement. The punishment for failing
to abide by moral rules can come from the carrying out of these threats. There is no need for a sovereign. In many
relations between individuals, where police protection is unavailable, norms of cooperation are
adequately enforced by the parties themselves. The threat to retaliate can , in many situations, provide
the requisite enforcement mechanism. (Morris 1985, 490) Hence, we may be able to understand the moral obligations
among and between nations as guaranteed through the knowledge that if agreements are not kept, war will be the
result. Morris argues that in the event of any enemy attack, cooperative relations have in fact ended. Once such
relations end, nations return to a state of nature with respect to one another. At that time, nothing that nations do to one another
can be considered morally wrong; all morality is suspended. However, even in the state of nature, the fundamental law of
nature requires people to seek peace if this is possible. Morris maintains that a massive attack not only ends cooperative relations,
but ends the possibility of rational cooperation: In the event of an enemy nuclear attack (or a massive attack on NATO
forces), not
only have cooperative relations in fact ended, but cooperative relations are no longer
possible on terms acceptable to rational agents. (Morris 1985, 491) Morris insists that while cooperation
would still be possible in the event of many conflicts, a nuclear attack ends this possibility. Thus
it would no longer be obligatory to seek peace and therefore would be permissible to use all the advantages of
war. Because it would not be morally wrong (or right) to retaliate should deterrence fail, it is morally permissible to threaten to
retaliate should deterrence fail, thus counter-value deterrence policies can be justified. Morris offers the following principle to show
this: A sincere threat to do X in circumstances C is morally permissible only if doing X in C is not morally impermissible. (Morris
1985, 490) Hence, once it is established that actual retaliation is permissible, by this principle it can also be established that
intending to retaliate is permissible. I find this account extremely disturbing from an ecological feminist
perspective for several reasons. Obviously, on this account, the potential moral community is limited to those
capable of contracting, which leaves out most, if not all, of nonhuman nature and leaves certain
human beings with questionable status as well. However, my purpose here is to examine Morris's position through
the lens of Plumwood's ecological feminist critique of the self/other dualism. The self/other dualism implicit in
Hobbes's account is expanded here so that the self becomes the nation attempting deterrence,
and the other becomes the potential aggressor. Proceeding from Hobbes's model of egoism as rationality, the
nation attempting deterrence views the relation between itself and the other nation in terms of
hyperseparation, seeing strict boundaries between self and other. The only motivation for
cooperation is self-interest; thus, the other is only of instrumental value. The values and goals of the
civilians in the aggressing nation are backgrounded, as their projects and goals are not seen as important factors
in the equation. Individual citizens are incorporated into the larger self of the aggressing nation,
which is in turn incorporated into the self of the nation seeking deterrence. This picture also involves
homogenization, seeing all the individual citizens of an aggressing nation as the same, simply as
other , rather than as particular individuals. Morris's threat principle is disturbing as well. First, it seems just
plain false to say that if it is permissible to do something under certain circumstances, it is permissible to threaten to do that thing
should those circumstances occur. It may be morally permissible to take a child to the doctor if he or she becomes ill, but
impermissible to frighten the child into doing something with threats of a visit to the doctor. The threat itself has consequences that
are different from the consequences of doing the action which is threatened. Of course, deterrence theorists realize this, for it is
precisely one of these other consequences, namely deterrence, that is sought in deterrence policy. The threat, however, takes place
from within a morality according to Morris. Thus, the question becomes whether it is morally permissible to view people purely
instrumentally from within a morality. Making such a threat shows clearly that the other nation and its
citizens are viewed in terms of a strict self/other dualism, in which they are seen as having
purely instrumental value, along with everything else that goes with this. However, treating others in this
way is the opposite of treating them morally. It is to treat them purely as a means. I have argued that Morris's account fails
to justify the threat of retaliation, for it requires treating other moral agents purely
instrumentally. Morris tries to justify the sincere threat to retaliate by showing that actual retaliation would not be morally
wrong. It would not be morally right either, for no morality would be in force, given the end of cooperative relations. However,
whether right, wrong, or neutral, actually retaliating against civilians because of the actions engaged in by their governments
requires extreme homogenization.
LINK -- TECH
Technology is at the root of womens domination- it prioritizes masculine scientific
knowledge over ours
ERKAL 97 Professor of Economic at the University of Melbourne (Nisvan, Women's
Knowledge as Expert Knowledge :Indian Women and Ecodevelopment edited by Karen J.
Warren, book( */LEA
Technological innovations, such as irrigation and plant monoculture, are typical of men's agriculture. The
impact of these and other Green Revolution techniques has often been devastating for women. The scarcity of
water in the Third World reveals much. Though 73 percent of the world's water use is dedicated to irrigation, only 2030 percent gets
to its destination. Such waste has a tragic impact on women's lives. Women are still overwhelmingly responsible for collecting water
for drinking and cooking. Yet in India 23,000 villages are without drinking water due to deforestation and irrigation. Seventy
percent of the ground water that is available is polluted (Dankelman and Davidson, 21 and 33). Water collection increasingly
demands women's time. The need to carry water over greater distances affects women's health, particularly the health of girls whose
bodies are still developing. The experiences of Chipko women in the Himalayan foothills are justly celebrated. Their experiences with
the effects of technology were typical. The modern Chipko movement began as a response to flooding due to deforestation in the
mountains above Chipko villages. The response to deforestation varied by gender. Men were drawn to wagelabor jobs in the forestry
industry. Women were drawn to reforestation, since their concerns were different. These include the entire cycle of concerns that
depend on forests, from adequate water supplies to fuel and fodder and sources of traditional medicines. A healthy
ecosystem is a necessity for the safety of children and for the possibility of future generations.
When villagers were asked about which trees should be planted as part of a reforestation plan, the men immediately chose fruit
trees. The women responded: "The men would take the fruits and sell them by the roadside. The cash will only go to buy liquor and
tobacco. We women prefer fuel and fodder trees" (Dankelman and Davidson, 5051) We can see that social forestry is a
feminist issue. Tree hugging by Chipko women is more than the simple attempt to save trees
from logging companies. It is a distinctively feminist political act growing out of typically
women's knowledge of the forest. The circling of trees can be understood as representing the broad circle of concerns
that women understand. Trees mean water for Chipko women. Trees mean safety from flooding . Forests, not simply plant
monoculture, mean food, fodder, building materials, and medicines. Hugging trees is as much a
defense of culture and future generations as it is a defense of nature . Consider, as well, the issue of
intellectual property rights debated at the Rio Summit and embodied in the GATT and NAFTA agreements. The government of the
United States and First World medical technology corporations demanded the right to financial reward for medicines derived from
the Third World's biological diversity. Yet, whereas medical science has examined less than one percent of these resources for
potential medical benefit, indigenous women's medical knowledge has developed over forty centuries. Women's medical
knowledge is a vast storehouse of expertise, yet it goes unrecognized because of the biases of
modern science against traditional, indigenous forms of knowledge. The debate over whether northern
science should gain its financial reward remains immune to the rights of indigenous women. Epistemic biases like this
cannot be addressed simply by adding a new fact to the dominant paradigm of masculinized
knowledge. Women's knowledge is not valued when it challenges the paradigm. Development
theory has progressed from what can only be described as racist and sexist beginnings. 5
Nevertheless, contemporary programs that are advertised as profamily often remain antiwoman. M asculinity and the
culture of high technology are connected through the division of labor. Men's cultural status
tends to increase under the influence of technology, while women's status tends to decrease.
Young men, in particular, can insist on becoming "modern," often wearing Western clothes and sporting Western electronic goods.
Women are expected to maintain traditional values and dress (Mies 1988, 138) Many international agentseven the World Bank
now include women's issues in their programs. Yet programs directed at the male "head of household" are conceptually flawed when
they assume equity and identity of interests within the family. Because equity is rare, these programs pull the family apart. The effort
to involve Third World communities in international markets through introduction of technologies to produce cash crops is one
example. This tends to cause dual economies, with men working in the forprofit sector while women continue with traditional
agriculture to meet the needs of the family. Such programs rarely improve the lives of women and children. This tendency of
traditional development schemes to elevate men while further marginalizing women depends on
a familiar set of normative categories. These prioritize mind over body, reason over feeling, and
theory over practice. In the case of women's agricultural knowledge, however, the most powerful tool for marginalization is
the nature/culture distinction. While the distinction varies widely within indigenous cultures, a common theme across cultures is
their need to respond to the demands of masculinist models of development. The masculine bias in these dualisms
favors the ''modern," scientific, rational, global, and high tech over the traditional, smallscale,
and lowtech. Men are constructed by these dualisms as independent, autonomous, and rational;
women are constructed as dependent or interdependent. Men's agriculture, which can hardly be understood as
anything but a practical activity, is nevertheless represented as a "theoretical practice," that is, as an applied science. Women's
expert knowledge of soil, climate, and seeds is marginalized as anecdotal; it is often dismissed as mere "wives' tales." Patriarchal
cultures tend to locate women's practices on the border between nature and culture. These
involve caring for others, e.g., mothering, cooking, health care, and certain kinds of simple, traditional
agricultural labor that are low paid or unpaid, such as weeding and tending to livestock.
Women's work is the everyday work of translation between the needs of the environment and
the needs of the human community. Such depictions of a woman's "proper" role create a
dilemma: while such labor is often experienced by women as an oppressive demand, the
environment and the human community cannot survive without it. Children's health and safety depend on
regular access to clean water. Traditional medicine and agriculture depend on the biodiversity of an
environment that can supply medicines as well as fuel, fodder, and food. Caring labor holds together the family and the
environment and is inherently interested in future generations. Third World development, therefore, is a feminist
project. Its success requires the revaluation of women's caring labor. The issue, then, is how an epistemology can be constructed
that is faithful to what Third World women know as well as to the ways in which they know. First, some clarifications. In
emphasizing gender bias in the construction of what is counted as knowledge, I am speaking about the construction of gender
categories, not about particular individuals. While gender does have a powerful hold on individuals, there are other forces that
intersect in the individual as well, including race, caste, class, and religion. This means that some men are nonsexist despite sexist
constructions ofgender; some women are implicated in the destruction of the environment even
though women's praxis involves caring. Consequently, my argument is that recognition of

gender is a necessary conditionnot a sufficient conditionfor sustainable development.
Even there renewable, sustainable energy development impoverishes nations,

and destroys the environment
Potiguara 97 - President and founder of the Indigenous Women's Educational Group
(GRUMIN) in Brazil (Eliane, "The Earth Is the Indian's Mother, Nhndecy" Ch. 8 Ecofeminism :
Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J Warren, Book) */LEA
Energy: A Challenge to Nature "These lands belong to us now. You have twentyfour hours to clear out." The politics of
development in Brazil evolved in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1964, the military government then in power,
in an effort to transform a Third World country into a First World country overnight, put into action a development
plan financed with foreign loans that we'll be paying off until who knows when. This resulted in the impoverishment
of the entire Brazilian nation . With the implementation of these grand projects, we have
witnessed enormous assaults upon nature and the environment. The powers that be have
flooded lands, poisoned rivers and seas, devastated whole regions, and spread sickness and
ethnic and social disorder. Mercury and sugarcane waste products have contaminated the Indians' rivers, and their flora
and fauna have died. The Indians have suffered the most from the authorities' neglect of their future and the disrespect with which
they deal with their issues. Development, yes. Massacre, no! There are four types of energy available to us. First, there
is hydroelectric energy. Dams built on large rivers generate energy for lights for factories, for cities, and so
on. When they flood the areas behind the dams, cities, indigenous settlements, and riverbank populations must
leave. The flora and fauna of the flooded areas die and decompose, and the results are diseases like malaria and leishmaniasis.
More than ninety hydroelectric projects are planned in the Amazonian basin and in the south. Second, there is mineral
energy. Petroleum is the basis for this energy source. Gasoline and other thousands of
derivatives (plastics, foam rubber, diesel fuel, kerosene, etc.) come from petroleum. The national petroleum
conglomerate Petrobras is responsible for the exploration for and production of petroleum. In addition, there are other subsidiary
concerns that operate refineries and conduct research (Shell, Esso, British Petroleum, Ida Mitsu, and Elf Equitaine). Third, there
is energy derived from the atom, from matter itself, nuclear energy. This source is highly
controversial because it is a powerful and dangerous form of energy that, if it escapes, can
contaminate the population with its radioactivity. A disaster of this type occurred in Goinia, where many people
died. Finally there are alternative sources of energy. One is energy derived from sugarcane. It
appeared in response to the gasoline shortage. The ProAlcohol Program was created for the
development of this source of energy. Now, tons of vinhoto (a sugarcane waste product) poison
the rivers. When the sugar refineries appeared, everything began to die. They drained the wetlands, and the black and green
chameleon, the freshwater turtle and the cayman died off. The snakes also died. I remember themthe maracatifa, the salamantabois, the howling snake and the rattlesnake. The river fish.... What can I say? Today everything's polluted. The camurim, the saina,
the traira and the pitu are gone. Our land used to give us everything: fruits and nuts like capi, mango, mangaba, guava, pine nuts,
graviola, jack fruit, bananas, canacaiana and pineapple. The sweet potato and the yam would grow to an immense size in the earth.
With the sugarcane residue from the refineries, together with deforestation, the Potiguara lands diminished. Now we must rebuild
what remains. It's a shame. Brazilian society will respect Indians only when it recognizes them as a part of its own culture, language,
and traditions. When Brazilian society, in a nonpaternalistic way, looks upon the Indian as a brother, as the head of a family, and not
as an indigent but as a Brazilian in need like anyone else, then Indians will have respect. After all, they have the great fortune of
nature and all the wealth that it encompasses.
LINK -- WAR
their trivialization of nuclear weapons through technostrategic discourse
culminates in apathy towards atrocious tragedies with great consequences
Incentive to launch a nuclear war arises from a particular configuration of weapons and their hypothetical mathematical interaction .
Incentive can only be so narrowly defined because the referents of technostrategic paradigms
are weapons-not human lives, not even states and state power. The fact that the subjects of strategic
paradigms are weapons has several important implications. First, and perhaps most critically, there simply
is no way to talk about human death or human societies when you are using a language designed
to talk about weapons. Human death simply is "collateral damage"-collateral to the real subject,
which is the weapons themselves. Second, if human lives are not the reference point, then it is not only
impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to
reflect human concerns. Hence, questions that break through the numbing language of strategic analysis and raise issues in
human terms can be dismissed easily. No one will claim that the questions are unimportant, but they are inexpert, unprofessional,
irrelevanto the business at hand to ask. The discourse among the experts remains hermetically sealed. The problem, then, is not only
that the language is narrow but also that it is seen by its speakers as complete or whole unto itself-as representing a body of truths
that exist independently of any other truth or knowledge. The isolation of this technical knowledge from social or
psychological or
moral thought, or feelings, is all seen as legitimate and necessary. The outcome is
that defense intellectuals can talk about the weapons that are supposed to protect particular
political entities, particular peoples and their way of life, without actually asking if weapons can do it, or if
they are the best way to do it, or whether they may even damage the entities you are supposedly
protecting. It is not that the men I spoke with would say that these are invalid questions. They would, however, simply say that
they are separate questions, questions that are outside what they do, outside their realm of expertise. So their deliberations go on
quite independently, as though with a life of their own, disconnected from the functions and values they are supposedly to serve.
Finally, the third problem is that this discourse has become virtually the only legitimate form of response to the question of how to
achieve security. If the language of weaponry was one competing voice in the discussion, or one that was integrated with others, the
fact that the referents of strategic paradigms are only weapons would be of little note. But when we realize that the only language
and expertise offered to those interested in pursuing peace refers to nothing but weapons, its limits become staggering, and its
entrapping qualities-the way in which, once you adopt it, it becomes so hard to stay connected to human concerns- become more
comprehensible.
Justifications for weapons of mass destruction rely on gender based otherization.

Cohn and Ruddick 3 - *founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and
Human Rights and ** Winner of the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the Year Award by
the Society for Women in Philosophy and author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of
Peace (Carol and Sara, A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
Working Paper No. 104 Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights, 2003,
er_104.pdf) */LEA
Question four asks: If some nations possess weapons of mass destruction (either licitly or illicitly) for defensive and deterrent
purposes, is it proper to deny such possession to others for the same purposes?. We believe that the rampant
proliferation of weapons of all kinds, from hand guns to nuclear weapons, is a massive tragedy,
the direct and indirect source of great human suffering. Given this starting point, we of course oppose the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But our opposition does not allow us to give a simple yes answer to
Question Four as it is posed. Before turning to proliferation as a phenomenon, we must first consider current proliferation discourse.
Proliferation as a Discourse Proliferation is not a mere description or mirror of a phenomenon that is out there, but rather a very
specific way of identifying and constructing a problem. Proliferation, as used in Western political discourse, does not simply refer
to the multiplication of weapons of mass destruction on the planet. Rather, it constructs some WMD as a problem, and others as
unproblematic. It does so by assuming pre-existing, legitimate possessors of the weapons, implicitly not only entitled to those
weapons, but to modernize and develop new generations of them as well. The problematic WMD are only those that spread
into the arsenals of other, formerly non-possessor states. This is presumably the basis for the licit/illicit distinction in the question;
it does not refer to the nature of the weapons themselves, nor even to the purposes for which they are intended only, in the case of
nuclear weapons, to who the possessor is, where licitness is based on the treaty-enshrined we got there first. Thus, use of the
term proliferation tends to locate the person who uses it within a possessor state, and aligns him or her with the political stance
favoring the hierarchy of state power enshrined in the current distribution of WMD. The framing of Question Four. ... is it proper to
deny [WMD] possession to others for the same purposes?, seems similarly based in a possessor state perspective, as it is
presumably the possessor states who must decide whether it is proper to deny possession to others. As we have already stated, we
find WMD themselves intrinsically morally indefensible, no matter who possesses them, and we are concerned about the wide array
of costs to any state of development and deployment. We therefore reject the discourses implicit division of good and bad, safe
and unsafe WMD, (defined as good or bad depending on who possesses them). Our concern is to understand how some WMD are
rendered invisible (o urs) and some visible (theirs); some rendered malignant and others benign. 18 Carol Cohn and Sarah
Ruddick Working Paper No. 104 Here, we join others in noting that the language in which the case against
proliferation is made is ethno-racist and contemptuous. Generally, in Western proliferation

discourse as a whole, a distinction is drawn between the Self(seen as responsible) vs the nonWestern Unruly Other. 36 The US represents itself as a rational actor, while representing the
Unruly Other as emotional, unpredictable, irrational, immature, misbehaving. Not only does this draw on and
reconstruct an Orientalist portrayal of third world actors 37; it does so through the medium of
gendered terminology. By drawing the relations between possessors and non-possessors in gendered terms the
prudential, rational, advanced, mature, restrained, technologically- and bureaucratically- competent (and
thus masculine) Self, versus the emotional, irrational, unpredictable, uncontrolled, immature, primitive,
undisciplined, technologically- incompetent (and thus feminine) Unruly Other the discourse
naturalizes and legitimates the Self/possessor states having weapons which the Other does not.
By drawing on and evoking gendered imagery and resonances, the discourse naturalizes the idea
that We / the US / the responsible father must protect, must control and limit her, the
emotional, out-of-control state, for her own good, as well as for ours. This Western proliferation discourse
has had a function in the wider context of US national security politics. With the end of the Evil Empire in the late 1980s, until the
attacks of September 11th , 2001, the US appeared to be without an enemy of grand enough proportions to justify maintaining its
sprawling military- industrial establishment. This difficulty was forestalled by the construction of the category of rogue states
states seen as uncontrollable, irresponsible, irrational, malevolent, and antagonistic to the West. 38 Their unruliness and
antagonism was represented as intrinsic to their irrational nature; if it were not in their nature, the US would have needed to ask
more seriously if actions on the part of the West had had any role in producing that hostility and disorder. The discourse of
WMD proliferation has been one of the principal means of producing these states as major
threats. To say this is neither to back away from our position opposing weapons of mass
destruction, nor to assess the degree to which WMD in the hands of Other states actually do
threaten the US, the Other states regional opponents, or their own population. But it is an assessment of the role
of WMD proliferation discourse in naturalizing and legitimating otherwise-difficult-to- make-appear-rational programs and
expenditures such as National Missile Defense. 39 Proliferation as a phenomenon Within the logic of deterrence theory and
proliferation discourse, the phenomenon of WMD proliferation is understandable in two main ways. States either acquire WMD for
purposes of aggression i.e., to use WMD or to threaten their use in acts of aggression, intimidation and/or coercion against other
states or populations within their own state. Or states acquire WMD to enhance their own security by deterring an opponent from
attack. Within a strategic calculus, either is understood as a rational motivation for WMD possession, even if not everyone would
view these reasons as equally morally defensible. 19 Carol Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No. 104 Some in the security
community have argued that this realist consensus about states motivations for development of WMD is dange rously
inadequate. They argue that nuclear weapons, like other weapons, are more than tools of national security; they are political
objects of considerable importance in domestic debates and internal bureaucratic struggles and can also serve as international
normative symbols of modernity and identity. 40 We agree, but would add that the understanding any of those motivations will be
incomplete without gender analysis. We argue that gendered terms and images are an integral part of the
ways national security issues are thought about and represented and that it matters . During the
Gulf War, for example, the mass media speculated whether George Bush had finally beat the wimp factor. When in the spring of
1998 India exploded five nuclear devices, Hind u nationalist leader Balasaheb Thackeray explained we had to prove that we are not
eunuchs. An Indian newspaper cartoon depicted Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee propping up his coalition government with a
nuclear bomb. Made with Viagra, the captio n read. 41 Feminists argue that these images are not trivial, but instead deserve
analysis. Metaphors which equate political and military power with sexual potency and
masculinity serve to both shape and limit the ways in which national security is conceptualized.
42 Political actors incorporate sexual metaphors in their representations of nuclear weapons as a
way to mobilize gendered associations and symbols in creating assent, excitement, support for, and
identification with the weapons and their own political regime. Moreover, gendered metaphor is not only an integral part of
accomplishing domestic power aims. The use of these metaphors also appropriates the test of a nuclear
weapon into the occasion for reinforcing patriarchal gender relations.
Women are uniquely effected by nuclear war- they become another causality on
the never ending search for state security
er_104.pdf) */LEA
Anti-war feminists opposition to the practice of war is simultaneously pragmatic and moral. We have
an abiding suspicion of the use of violence, even in the best of causes. The ability of violence to achieve its stated
aims is routinely over-estimated, while the complexity of its costs are overlooked. Our opposition also
stems from the perception that the practice of war entails far more than the killing and destroying of armed combat itself. It
requires the creation of a war system, which entails: arming , training, and organizing for possible
wars; allocating the resources these preparations require; creating a culture in which wars are seen as
morally legitimate, even alluring; and shaping and fostering the masculinities and femininities which
undergird mens and womens acquiescence to war. Even when it appears to achieve its aims,
war is a source of enormous individual suffering and loss. Modern warfare is also predictably
destructive to societies, civil liberties and democratic processes, and the non-human world.
State security may sometimes be served by war, but too often human security is
not. Though they oppose war as a practice, and some individual anti- war feminists are committed to non-violence, the tradition
as a whole is not typically pacifist as that term is usually understood. It neither rejects all wars as wrong in principle, nor condemns
others just because they resort to violence. Some anti-war feminists support particular military campaigns. As a Northern Irish
woman explained to Cynthia Cockburn, Weve always given each other a lot of leeway on [violence]. We continue to call these
temporary militarists anti- war, because they continue to oppose war- making as a practice, mourn the suffering of all of wars
victims, and, in the midst of war, imagine the details of a future culture of peace. Although they do not reject violence in principle
they are committed to translating or transfiguring violence into creative militant nonviolence. This requires letting go of
dangerous day dreams whether of promised homes of our own or of an apocalyptic demolition of all walls... [replacing these
dreams] with the idea of something we could perhaps really have: a careful and a caring struggle in a well lit space. iv Nor is the
feminist anti-war tradition a version of just war theory. In contrast to anti-war feminists who oppose war as a practice even if they
support a particular military campaign, just war theorists implicitly accept war as a practice even when condemning particular wars.
Just war theory accepts war only as a defense against serious attacks on ones state or ones people, or intervention on behalf of other
states or people who suffer such aggression (jus ad bellum). Anti-war feminists may agree that the cause is just, but for us it does not
automatically follow that war is therefore justified for at least two reasons. First, while just war theorists claim that
war must be a last resort after all non-violent alternatives have failed, in our view they barely
explore non-violent alternatives once just cause is determined, nor seek to return to non-violent
struggle once war has begun. Anti- war feminists continue to explore non- violent alternatives even after war starts, and
seek every opportunity to return to nonviolent means of fighting. Secondly, just war theorists tend to abstract particular wars from
the war-system on which they rely and which they strengthen, whereas anti- war feminists are acutely critical of the political,
economic, social and moral costs of that system. However just the cause, just war theorists set moral limits to permissible strategies
of war (jus in bello). Ideally only armed combatants, or at most, people contributing directly to combat, should be targeted. Weapons
must be able to target discriminately and then should cause only the suffering required to render combatants harmless. Anti- war
feminists are skeptical of these rules of war. Some argue that they depend upon unworkable abstractions, including, in much
contemporary warfare, the central distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Others document the routine, often willful,
violation of these rules, beginning with the use of weapons that cannot discriminate. Generally, anti- war feminists, like many
pacifists, do not so much argue as point insistently to the facts of suffering and destruction which cannot be limited, in place or time,
to battlefield and soldier. v To suggest the distinctive character of our tradition as contrasted with just war and pacifism, we identify
four of its constitutive positions. 1. War is a gendered practice It is a common perception that war- making is an
activity primarily engaged in by men, and governed by norms of masculinity. Anti-war feminism
both asserts and challenges the association of war and masculinity in at least three ways. First, anti-war feminists
insistently underline the gendered character of war, stressing its domination by men and masculinity, thus making visible what has
been taken for granted. But they also stress that womens labor has always been central to war-making
although it has also consistently been either unacknowledged, or represented as tangential, in order to protect
wars masculinity. vi Secondly, they challenge the view that war is inherently gendered in particular, the view that biology
renders men naturally war-like and war therefore a natural male activity. They stress that multiple masculinities (and
femininities) are required by the mobilization for war, and argue that the simple link of some innate male aggression to the
conduct of war is belied both by what men actually do in war 7 and by many men's reluctance to fight. 8 Whatever the role of biology
in gender, and gender in war, anti-war feminists identify the association of manliness with militarized
violence as the product of specific social processes which they try to analyze and change. 9 Finally,
anti-war feminists not only explore the multiple gendered identities needed for and shaped by the practice of war- making; they also
analyze the ways that war- making is shaped by a gendered system of meanings. We understand
gender not just as a characteristic of individuals, but as a symbolic system a central organizing discourse in
our culture, a set of ways of thinking, images, categories and beliefs which not only shape how we experience,
understand and represent ourselves as men and women, but which also provide a familiar set of metaphors,
dichotomies and values which structure ways of thinking about other aspects of the world, including war
and security. In other words, we see the ways in which human characteristics and endeavors are culturally
divided into those seen as masculine and those seen as feminine, (e.g., mind is opposed to body; culture to
nature; thought to feeling; logic to intuition; objectivity to subjectivity; aggression to passivity; confrontation to accommodation; war
to peace; 6 Carol Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No. 104 abstraction to particularity; public to private; political to
personal; realism to moral reflection, etc.), and the terms coded male are valued more highly than those coded female. Once the
gender-coding takes place once certain ways of thinking are marked as masculine and feminine, entwining metaphors of
masculinity with judgements of legitimacy and power then any system of thought or action comes to have gendered positions
within it. For example, we see the devaluation and exclusion of the feminine as shaping and distorting basic national security
paradigms and policies. And once the devaluation-by-association-with-the- feminine takes place, it becomes extremely difficult for
anyone, female or male, to take the devalued position, to express concerns or ideas marked as feminine. What then gets left out is
the emotional, the concrete, the particular, human bodies and their vulnerability, human lives and their subjectivity. 10 The
characteristics that are excluded as feminine are characteristics of women and men. They are also characteristics that women often
ascribe to themselves as women and that feminists also sometimes ascribe to women. There is considerable disagreement among
feminists, in print and casual conversation, about the degree to which women and men differ from each other, how these differences
arise, and whether they are subject to change. Our own understanding of gender has changed over time and is affected by the
circumstances in which we reflect and speak. In the circumstances of this discussion we allude to womens actual differences from
men only when describing the distinctive effects of war on women and the particular experiences and insights women themselves
say that they would bring to peace negotiations. 2. Start from womens lives Our second position applies a central tenet of feminist
methodology to the particular case of weapons of mass destruction. We attempt to look at war and weapons from
the perspective of womens lives, making womens experiences a central rather than marginal
concern. In the context of war, womens lives has two primary referents: the work women do
and the distinctive bodily assaults war inflicts on women. Womens work traditionally includes life-shaping
responsibilities of caring labor: giving birth to and caring for children, protecting and sustaining ill, frail, or other dependents,
maintaining households, and fostering and protecting kin, village, and neighborhood relations. Seen from the standpoint of caring
labor, war is at least disruptive and usually destructive. In war women often cant get or keep the
goods on which they depend, whether medicine, cattle, or food. War threatens the well-being,
and even existence, of the people, relations, and homes that women maintain. 11 Caring labor may be
intertwined with or depend upon other labor. In many economies, women work to secure the cash to get the goods that womens
work requires. Whether or not they are responsible for care, women work for wages in jobs that are lower paid and often in the
service of others. In war womens work typically expands to include comfort and prostitution , 7 Carol
Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No. 104 low skilled workers/servants, secretaries and many others who keep militaries
functioning. Notoriously, war gives some women special job opportunities, training, and experience unavailable elsewhere. Some
survive post-war downsizing and the return of men to their jobs. But other women are in effect conscripted for dangerous or
demeaning work whose effects may also survive the official end of war. The practice of war implies a willingness to inflict pain and
damage on bodies, to outinjure in pursuit of wars aim. 12 Women are no more or less embodied than men; but their bodies are
differently at risk. There has been a quantitative shift in the ratio of women to men sufferers as
civilian casualties come to outnumber those of the military. Women also suffer sexually more than men, and
distinctly. Rape is the conquerors reward and taunt. It is a weapon against woman and also
against the men and community to whom she belongs. The woman who becomes pregnant by rape may be
seen by the rapist, or may see herself, as forced to join the enemy, to create him. She may fear, and her rapist may hope, that she is
contributing to the destruction of her own people. 13 Given the effects of war on womens work and the multiple ways that war
commits violence against women, it is suspect, at the least, to look for security from militaries.
Conceptions of
security based in the military defense of state borders and interests often mean
greater insecurity for women.
the irrational militarism of the 1AC is united with mistreatment of the

environment and patriarchy
Leger 97 - Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Farmington (Gretchen,
Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, Ch. 13 Ecofeminism : Women, Culture, Nature, edited by
Karen J Warren, Book) */LEA
A major tenet of ecofeminism is that seemingly disparate and unrelated entities are in fact connected, for example, that the
treatment of women in this society is integrally related to the treatment of nonhuman nature. Ynestra King, in "The Ecofeminist
Imperative," elaborates on this sense of "connection" and extends it to concerns about militarism:
Ecofeminism is about connectedness and wholeness of theory and practice. It asserts the special strength and integrity of every
living thing.... We are a womanidentified movement, and we believe that we have special work to do in these imperilled times.
We
see the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors, and the
threat of nuclear annihilation by the military warriors, as feminist concerns. It is
the same masculinist mentality which would deny us our right to our own bodies
and our own sexuality and which depends on multiple systems of dominance and
state power to have its way . (1983: 10) King is not alone in her belief that aggressive sexuality,
militarism, and mistreatment of the environment are thematically united . A variety of writers have
approached this question from different perspectives and with differing results. 5 Precisely articulating the nature of the relationship
is a task for feminist scholars and is undertaken by Karen J. Warren and Duane Cady in an introductory essay to a special Feminism
and Peace issue of Hypatia. In their article, "Feminism and Peace: Seeing Connections," they argue that these topics are connected
by conceptual frameworks, empirical evidence, historical fact, political praxis, linguistic usage, and psychological systems (1994). In
this chapter, I bring forth new evidence that demonstrates how the oppression of women, degradation of the
environment, warfare, and "isms of domination" are integrally related. 6 In doing so, the project of
ecofeminism is both strengthened and extended. A case study of many wars could provide the evidence necessary
to demonstrate ecofeminist issues. However, six qualities of the Persian Gulf War make it uniquely suited to show both
the importance of ecofeminist concerns and how the expectations of contemporary public discourse maintain traditional relations
between women, war, "isms of domination," and the environment. These six qualities are: (1) the Bush Administration's use of raped
Kuwaiti women as a persuasive device to generate U.S. support for sending troops to the Persian Gulf. (2) Some 32,000 U.S. women
served as soldiers in the war. They comprised approximately 11 percent of the U.S. troop strength (Beck, 1990). (3) The percentages
of AfricanAmerican women (and men) serving in the Gulf were far higher than what one might expect given their percentage in the
general population.7 (4) The House of Representatives had more female representation than at any other time in American history.
All but six of the women spoke during the debate on whether or not to authorize military force against Iraq. Some women spoke
many times. (5) Before it became unpopular to do so, President Bush argued that maintaining the flow of oil, what he called "the
American way of life," justified military aggression against Iraq. (6) When retreating Iraqi forces burned more than seven hundred
oil wells and dumped millions of barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf and onto the sand, their actions finally drew
international attention to what many scientists and environmentalists have referred to as

"ecocide" or "ecowarfare" and what the Bush Administration referred to as ''ecoterrorism."
IMPACTS
ROOT CAUSE
Only we solve the root cause of their impacts- the patriarchal practice of
dominating the female body led men in power to enslave anyone they considered
an Other
Caputi, 2011- Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic
University (Jane, Fall 2011, Re-Creating Patriarchy: Connecting Religion and Pornography,
Published in the Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy, Accessed in Lexis FG)
In her work, The Creation of Patriarchy, historian Gerda Lerner investigates the inception of patriarchy as it developed in the
ancient Near East in its earliest form as an archaic state some five to seven thousand years ago. n29 This is the milieu that produced
the Abrahamic patriarchal religions, and one of these, Christianity, will be my focus here. n30 Lerner starts by looking at common
economic questions but quickly begins to see that she "needed to focus more on the control of women's sexuality and procreativity."
n31 In doing so, she determines that men's appropriation of women's sexual and reproductive capacity
occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society; the invention of private
property derives from the model provided by the commoditization of female sexuality (through
such means as the exchange of women and sale of brides, slavery, prostitution, installation of
codes of female virginity, forced reproduction, and women being corralled into patriarchal
marriage and family). n32 I would argue that modern pornography is a continuation of this basic stratagem of controlling
and commoditizing female sexuality and turning it into a form of wealth for men. From its inception, the patriarchal power
structure had an essential interest in the maintenance of a father-dominated family. Instituting
dominance over women provided, Lerner writes, "the model out of which slavery developed as a
social institution." n33 Men learned stratagems of subordination--paradigmatically, rape--as a way to
break body and spirit, and went on to enslave women, and later men, from outside "groups who
could be defined as strangers." n34 "Thus," Lerner concludes, "the enslavement of women, combining both racism and
sexism, preceded the formation of classes [*299] and class oppression." n35 Un-enslaved women's cooperation with patriarchy also
was secured by domination, including rape and abuse in the family, and by the promise of class privilege and protection against
external male aggression. n36 Women were divided against one another by artificially constituted,
invidious race and class distinctions and the equally fabricated "division of women into
'respectable' (that is, attached to one man) and 'not-respectable' (this is, not attached to one
man or free of all men)." n37 All women were defined by their relationship to a man and hence,
under the protection, or not, of men. Depending on race, class, and age status, women were defined as private or
public, n38 expensive or cheap, n39 brand new (i.e., virginal) or used, n40 and perhaps worst of all, useless--marginalized and
socially annihilated. n41 All women were mandated [*300] to be heterosexual. n42 Lesbians were deemed non-respectable or
simply non-existent. n43
Intersection provides for a more powerful movement that will challenge the
system itself
Cuomo, 96 Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of
Cincinnati and a Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Science and Technology
at Cornell University (Chris, Toward Thoughtful Ecofeminist Activism, Ecological Feminist
Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 49-50 edited by Karen Warren)//schnall
III. Ecofeminist Activism As is the case with most political movements, the possibilities for ecofeminist
activism are nearly limitless. Individuals make personal choices in light of their ecofeminist politics and may consider
their recycling, their vegetarianism, their work against sexual assault, their antiracist work, or their protests against toxic dumping
to be part of their ecofeminist activism. Insofar as ecofeminism influences personal choice, it is a contributor to
social, ecological change. But
ecofeminists also organize together to identify and work against

interlocking systems of oppression that are harmful to women, people of color, the poor, the
environment, and animals. If ecofeminist analyses and agendas are to have a wide-scale effect on contemporary
understandings of the mechanisms and causes of oppression, and the interrelatedness of various social and environmental issues,
these agendas must be presented and pursued in ways that make these connections clear. If
ecofeminism is to have a prominent place in contemporary global politics and to significantly
affect social and political decisions, ecofeminist activism must be identifiable, powerful, and
complex. Hence I am calling for a multifaceted, decentered, loud, empowering ecofeminist
activist movement. Though I do not know, nor would I want to dictate, the profile of such a movement, I believe helpful
historical and contemporary models of such movements exist. The recent activities of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash
Power) and the Lesbian Avengers, two direct-action political groups based in the United States, offer interesting
models of activist movements that explicitly address the existence of interlocking systems of
oppression and which have been effective in educating, annoying, or recruiting target audiences
(as appropriate). Both ACT-UP and the Lesbian Avengers effectively locate themselves at the
intersections among various forms of oppression. This is accomplished through selfrepresentation as well as political posturing. For example, an ACT-UP poster proclaiming, "Kissing Doesn't Kill
Greed and Indifference Do," pictures three biracial kissing couples: one lesbian, one gay, and one heterosexual. As these images
confront racism and homophobia, the slogan locates contemporary racism and homophobia in the United States in the context of
corporate, capitalist greed and social and political attempts to keep lesbians, the poor, and gay men invisible. The text also names
the fact that these interlocking forces and silences have resulted in death. It is impossible to characterize this widely disseminated
piece of political art as about just one issue; the basic message is that racism, greed, and homophobia are intrinsically related in
contemporary, capitalist America. Likewise, the work of the Lesbian Avengers, though far less slick and widely disseminated than
that of ACT-UP, evidences the complexity of their analysis of the causes of lesbian invisibility (including
homophobia, misogyny, classism, housing and health issues, and patriarchal fear of the radical potential of lesbian existence).
Theater, humor, deconstructions and transgressions of gender and sexuality, and methodologies that
are decidedly "in your face" contribute to the effective destabilization of the notion of singleissue politics. Activist approaches grounded in multiplicity question not only their obvious
targets, but also standard notions of activism and political movement. The Lesbian Avengers emphasize
that they are a "direct-action, activist group ... for women want to be involved in activism, work in community, be creative, do shitwork, take responsibility on a regular basis, have their minds blown, change their opinions and share organizing skills" (1993). It is
no simple task to organize multidimensional, political, direct-action groups or events. In fact, complex political analyses
and agendas are more likely than single-issue campaigns to spark conflict and disagreement.
The activist model put forth by the Lesbian Avengers is particularly interesting in this regard,
because although their overarching priority is to directly confront lesbian invisibility, they feel
their abstract goals are best met by prioritizing action. In closing, I do not want to neglect the fact that
ecofeminists would be wise to remember the many lessons about political strategizing and
organizing learned through histories of feminist movements , including points of interest ranging from
methods of conflict resolution and fund-raising to spray-painting and wheat-pasting techniques. Ultimately, it is feminist insight
that motivates ecofeminism and which demands meaningful action. As Bickford sums up: For feminists, it is the relation to practice
(to women's lives and our attempts to change the world) that gives theory meaning. . . theorists can self-consciously counter their
role as "privileged interpreters of society" by critiquing the "power of experts". . . . Theorists do have access to diffuse social, and
specific institutional, resources----We have the responsibility to use those resources in the service of what we say we believe (to
paraphrase Audre Lorde) and in collaboration with those with whom we both claim and are trying to create solidarity. (Bickford
1993, 113)
Domination of nature translates to domination of everything ecofeminism is

able to overcome
Mills, 91 Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Patricia, Feminism and Ecology: On the Domination
of Nature, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 211-213 edited by
Karen Warren)//schnall
The most insightful political interventions of the 1960s were directed to the problems and possibilities of a post-industrial society.
The social critiques done by the first generation of the Frankfurt School (Herbert Marcuse, Max
Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno) and
the social ecology movement (developed primarily by Murray Bookchin) are

two influential strains of radical social thought that contributed to and maintain the innovative politics of the
sixties. In both these intellectual perspectives the major conflict is seen as that between industrial
society and nature, rather than between classes within industrial society, with the focus on
"domination" rather than "exploitation." These critiques, based on the domination of nature, go
beyond the mere condemnation of the ecological crisis to reveal a connection between the
domination of nonhuman nature, social domination, and psychological domination. They argue that
as nature comes to be viewed as nothing more than the material for human domination, we
develop an anthropocentric view in which we see ourselves as "the measure of all things." In this
way we lose an awareness of the dialectical relation between nature and history, as we lose an awareness of ourselves as part of
nature.1 Nature becomes an external Other, merely the "stuff of domination," and we become blind
to our true goals, those that will lead to self-realization and liberation. Both perspectives then point to that which is left out or
denied by the domination of nature, as Otherness is extended to particular social groups. In this sense, the problem of the
domination of nature is seen as theoretically central to women's liberation, Afro-American and Third World liberation, sexual
liberation, native struggles, and the peace and ecology movements: all these movements are centrally formed by the
repressive power of industrial society on what is perceived and formed by it as the external
Other. The New Left neo-Hegelianism of Isaac Balbus and the ecofeminism of Ynestra King each seek to use the
concept of the domination of nature as a theoretical point of unification to clarify and unite
contemporary political struggles. For both thinkers a form of Hegelian reconciliation is central to the
realization of freedom insofar as this reconciliation is said to overcome the dualisms of mind
and matter, nature and history, subject and object, self and Other. In this paper I challenge the adequacy of
their projects through a focus on what I term their "abstract pro-nature" stance. This stance entails a highly selective approach both
to theory, by assuming that one can simply extract parts from several theoretical traditions and fuse them into a new whole, and to
contemporary politics, by sidestepping the feminist issue of reproductive freedom as it relates to the issue of abortion. I will argue
that the abstract pro-nature stance of Balbus and King develops a political program that views "Nature" as benign, cooperative, and
sharing with humans a form of consciousness or subjectivity that is to be emulated; it leaves out of consideration its opposite or
contradictory momentthe moment of nature "red in tooth and claw." I conclude that their abstract pro-nature stance ignores
important elements of women's liberation by depoliticizing feminism, making it merely a handmaid of the ecology movement.2
Central to my argument is a consideration of the distortion and misappropriation by both Balbus and King of the work of
Horkheimer and Adorno on the domination of nature. It is with the tradition of critical theory developed by Horkheimer and Adorno
that the domination of nature emerges as the fundamental problem for a critique of society. With their work, Marx's critique of
capitalist exploitation is renewed and extended in a critique of the domination of nature that attempts to uncover the psychic and
social basis of the solidification of repressive society. Horkheimer and Adorno, however, do not romanticize nature or leave out of
consideration the regressive moment of nature, "the revolt of nature" that characterized German fascism. Hegel Reconsidered:
Balbus and the Frankfurt School In Marxism and Domination: A Neo-Hegelian, Feminist, Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political,
and Technological Liberation, Isaac Balbus asserts that his project is to find a unifying principle for all the liberation movements in
contemporary society. This principle is identified in terms of the domination of nature, which grounds the process of objectification
in society. The domination of nature is shown to entail social and psychic consequences that result
in ecological crises, patriarchal domination, and repressive political forms in both capitalist and
socialist societies. Instrumental reason (what Balbus calls the "instrumental mode of symbolization") is revealed as the
specific form of reason through which nature is mastered. As a rationality of means, instrumental reason
eliminates the question of ends, and in doing so it distorts not only the ends but also the means
or techniques it uses by exalting them to ends. The unconscious roots of this instrumental logic or mode of
symbolization are said to develop within a specific form of childcare in which women are the primary nurturers of infants (Balbus
1982, 269-302).3
IMPACT LAUNDRY LIST

Patriarchy leads to ecological catastrophe, nuclear war and functions as the
institution root of all other oppressions.
Kelly 92 Founder of the German Green Party (Petra, Women and Power, Ch. 6, Ecofeminism:
Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen Warren, Book) */LEA
Men's domination of women is deep and systemic, and it is accepted around the world by most men and many women as "natural,"
as something that somehow cannot be changed. But norms of human behavior do change. Because the oppression of
women is so deeply embedded in our societies and our psyches, it continues to be invisible, even to
those who are working to overcome other forms of injustice. Feminism is considered by many people to be
one aspect of social justice, but to me it is a principle in and of itself To rid the world of nuclear weapons and
poverty, we must end racism and sexism. As long as white males hold all of the social and
economic power, women and people of color will continue to be discriminated against, and
poverty and the military mentality will continue unabated. We cannot just analyze structures of domination
and oppression. We must also practice disobedience in our own lives, starting by disobeying all systems of male domination. The
system in which men have more value and more social and economic power than women is found
throughout the worldEast and West, North and South. Women suffer both from structural oppression
and from individual men. Too many movements for social justice accept the assumptions of male dominance and ignore
the oppression of women, but patriarchy pervades both our political and our personal lives. Feminism rejects all forms of
male dominance and affirms the value of women's lives and experiences. It recognizes that no pattern of
domination is necessary and seeks to liberate women and men from the structures of dominance that characterize patriarchy. Many
women are beginning to reject the existing systems and styles of male politics . Whether at Greenham
Common, Comiso, Australia, Belau, protecting the Himalayan forests, or working for peace in Eastern Europe, women have been
stirred to action. Motivated to act on our own, not only as mothers and nurturers but also as leaders in a changing world, we must
stand up as women and become elected to political and economic offices throughout the world, so we can change the policies and
structures from those of death to those of life. We do not need to abrogate our positive, feminist principles of loving, caring, showing
emotions, and nurturing. Every individual has both feminine and masculine qualities. We should not relieve men of their
responsibility to transform themselves, to develop caring human qualities and become responsible for child care, housework, and all
other essential support work. We will never be able to reclaim the earth if men do not give up their privileges and share these basic
tasks with women. Children are not just the responsibility of their mothers. The scientific revolution of the
seventeenth century contained in it the seeds of today's oppressive technologies. If we trace the
myths and metaphors associated with the conquest of nature, we will realize how much we are
under the sway of masculine institutions and ideologies. Masculine technology and
patriarchal values have prevailed in Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam,
Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other parts of the world. The ultimate result of unchecked,
terminal patriarchy will be ecological catastrophe or nuclear holocaust. Feminism is
about alleviating women's powerlessness. Women must share half the earth and half the sky, on our own terms and with our own
selfdetermined values. Feminism seeks to redefine our very modes of existence and to transform nonviolently the structures of male
dominance. I am not saying that women are inherently better than men. Overturning patriarchy does not mean
replacing men's dominance with women's dominance. That would merely maintain the patriarchal pattern of
dominance. We need to transform the pattern itself. The work of feminist women and profeminist men is to liberate
everyone from a system that is oppressive to women and restrictive to men, and to restore balance and harmony between women
and men and between masculine and feminine values in society and within each of us. Feminists working in the peace and ecology
movements are sometimes viewed as kind, nurturing earth mothers, but that is too comfortable a stereotype. We are not meek and
we are not weak. We are angryon our own behalf, for our sisters and children who suffer, and for the entire planetand we are
determined to protect life on Earth. Green women work together with men on issues like ecology and disarmament. But we must
also assert women's oppression as a central concern, for our experience is that men do not take women's oppression as seriously as
other causes. There is a clear and profound relationship between militarism, environmental
degradation, and sexism. Any commitment to social justice and nonviolence that does not
address the structures of male domination of women is incomplete . We will work with our Green brothers,
but we will not be subservient to them. They must demonstrate their willingness to give up the privileges of membership in the male
caste. There is a saying: where power is, women are not. Women must be willing to be powerful. Because we bear
scars from the ways men have used their power over us, women often want no part of power. To a certain extent, this is good sense .
Patriarchal power has brought us acid rain, global warming, military states, and
countless cases of private suffering . We have all seen men whose power has caused them to lose all sense of
reality, decency, and imagination, and we are right to fear such power. But playing an active part in society, on an
equal footing with men, does not mean adopting the old thought patterns and strategies of the patriarchal
world. It means putting our own ideas of an emancipatory society into practic e. Rather than emulating
Margaret Thatcher and others who loyally adapt themselves to male values of hierarchy, we must find our own definitions of power
that reflect women's values and women's experience. Jean Baker Miller points out how women, though closed out of male
dominions of power, experience
great power in the daily work of nurturing others. 2 This is not power over
others, but power with others, the kind of shared power that has to replace patriarchal power.
Women in the Green movement are committed to fighting the big warsthe destruction of
nature, imperial politics, militarism, and the like. But we are just as determined to end the little
wars that take place against women every day, often invisibly . Women's suffering seems so normal
and is so pervasive that it is scarcely noticed. These restrictions, degradations, and acts of violence are so embedded in
our societies that they appear natural, but they are not natural. The system of which these are a part has been
constructed over centuries by laws and through institutions that were developed by men and
excluded women. We want to end these forms of oppression by doing away with the power and mentality that produced and
maintains them. There are many structures of dominationnation over nation, class over class, race over race, humans over nature.
But domination of women by men is a constant feature within every other aspect of oppression.
Male dominance is typical of other patterns of domination across all cultural divides. It is the
basis of the systems of politics that have brought the world to its present, extreme state. It is the
pattern that connects acts of individual rape with the ecological rape of our planet .
IMPACT AGENCY
Patriarchal worldviews dehumanize women and deny them agency
7/8/14 FG)
In the Western world the oppressive conceptual frameworks that have justified domination of
women, Others and nature have been patriarchal. Women have historically been identified with
nature, emotion and the realm of the physical, while men have been identified with culture,
reason and the realm of the mental. Culture is defined as that which is human or made by humans. Nature is defined as
that which is not human nor made by humans. When women are seen as closer to nature, they also
become less human than men. Women merge with nature. Women as nature are mechanical.
Women becoming part of the non-human means that they are only semi-human. The public
realm of politics and business is thus seen as being superior and it is associated with men. The
private realm of the home, the family and childcare is seen as inferior and hence associated with
women. This justifies the inferior status of women. Such justification is often related to an exaggerated emphasis
on the superiority of reason and its separation to inferior emotions. In this way, nature and women are inferior to
men and culture. It should however be added that some women belong to the Ups . They are often
seen not as real women, but as women who think like men.
52).
(Roach 1991: 51; Warren 2000: 50,
IMPACT ENVIRONMENT
Patriarchal exploitation of women, children, minorities, and natures culminates in
extinction
7/8/14 FG)
By this chapter, I want to introduce the reader to the subsequent study that discusses ecofeminism and development. The purpose
with the introduction is primarily to create interest for the topic. Although the dissertation is comprehensive, it is also discussing a
highly relevant subject. Since it is written in a plain language, easily understandable for English spoken people, my hope is that
many will read it. Because the study is directed to all who are concerned about the increasing global crises of poverty and inequality;
violence and war; environmental destruction; and human rights abuses. The research focuses on the dualised
patriarchal structure of modern society and how its science, economics and technology
dominates and exploits women, children, poor people, traditional people, black people and
nature. This patriarchal structure is at the moment in history manifested in the neo-liberal political
model, which promotes free global economic markets and free trade. These programmes are
created to generate profits to the Northern and Southern elites, while they are having devastating results
for people and nature globally, especially in the South. Unless we increase our awareness and demand
changes , this patriarchal structure will eventually eradicate life on planet Earth. It is
for this reason that I invite you to take a moment with ecofeminism and me in order to increase our common awareness so that we
together can integrate the concerns of women, poor people and nature into the international development debate.
IMPACT GENOCIDE
Separation of the masculine civilized and feminine natural worlds is done using
the same mindset used to justify fascism and genocide
Patriarchal "civilization" then defines progress just as patriarchal religion has defined holiness-as being in complete control over and distanced from the earthy and the material (including
bodily functions, sexuality, and the animal and elemental world). Elites define themselves as "clean" and
those they oppress as "dirty," hyper-sexual, smelly, and so on. n135 Those who are defined as "unclean"
then have to do the "s work," the menial labor, which includes sexual labor. n136 All women, but particularly
prostitutes, are [*314] targeted for abuse, from harassment and rape all the way up to murder; some sex
killers explicitly justify their activities by claiming that they are just "cleaning up" the streets. n137 Authoritarian,
fascist, and genocidal regimes legitimate their horrors within the same
framework: they claim to be restoring purity, keeping us safe from social "filth,"
and "cleansing" their regions of those they define as intrinsically "dirty." n138 A major
feature of straight pornography is "girl-girl" performances. Pictures of real lesbians kissing at gay pride rallies might elicit disgust for
many porn consumers. But showcasing "normal girls" who are paid to perform those especially "dirty," deviant, and degrading
lesbian acts n139 is wildly popular. Also reflecting that pervasive homophobia is the dearth of any equivalent "boy-boy" sexuality in
straight porn. n140 This equation of homosexuality with filth and taboo derives, again, from patriarchal religion. In March of 2005,
an extraordinary interfaith alliance of male religious leaders in Jerusalem formed to try to stop an international gay pride festival in
Jerusalem. n141 One Islamic leader stated the group's aim: "We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty." n142
Calvin Hernton deems the way that racist Southern culture defined white "ladies" as pure and chaste and black women as dirty
[*315] and whorish as a kind of "pious pornograph[y]." n143 The original model for pious pornography is the Catholic Church's
reverence for the supposedly immaculate state of the Virgin Mary. Mary Daly radically reinterprets the dogma of Mary's
"immaculate conception," which means she is born without Eve's stain, "original sin." n144 Daly traces the etymology of the word
"sin" to a root that means "to be," and argues that under patriarchy, the genuine original and courageous "Sin" for women is to
=manifest "elemental be-ing." n145 By instituting worship of the Virgin Mary, the Church sought to satisfy
the populace's demand for a Goddess, but simultaneously disempowered her by purifying her of
original being, selfhood, sovereignty, voice, sexuality, integrity, and all connection to the
elemental Earth. This violation of the teenaged Virgin Madonna, who is put forth as a simulation of the
original Sex Goddess and Earth Mother, theologically legitimates the violation of all female selfhood, as
well as all flesh, all matter, and the Earth itself.
IMPACT PATRIARCHY
Patriarchy causes militarism and environmental destruction that culminates in
extinction
In November of 1994, vandals broke into the library at the University of New Mexico, targeting books and journals in women's and
gay and lesbian studies sections. n161 They took an issue of the journal Lesbian Ethics and replaced the title with "God's Ethics,"
scrawled a swastika on the cover, and avowed that "God Made Women for Men." n162 The same sentiments motivating this hateful
pronouncement can be discerned in the words of Pope Benedict XVI when, in 2004, writing then as Cardinal Ratzinger, n163 he
deplored "[t]he obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes" and those "ideologies which . . . call into question the family, in its
natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model
of polymorphous sexuality." n164 These supposedly unnatural "ideologies" contravene what Ratzinger
deemed to be women's most wonderful and supposedly natural feminine trait, which he calls a
"capacity for the other." n165 He criticizes as especially egregious "a certain type of feminist rhetoric [that] makes demands
'for ourselves.'" n166 What Pope Benedict euphemistically calls the "capacity for the other" n167
actually designates the ways that women have been denied "Self-affirming be-ing" n168 --by being
defined and treated by patriarchal men, and complicit women, as domestic drudges, sexual
objects, decorative objects, disposable objects, "selfless 'mammies,' " n169 submissive wives,
dutiful daughters, adoring mothers, and filthy (but simultaneously, gold-hearted) "whores." In other
words, Pope Benedict's "capacity for the other" designates women as domestic and [*319] sexual
servants, if not slaves, who must habitually put others' needs above their own. The heterosexist
gender roles the Pope proselytizes provide the very foundation for the system of male supremacy.
Lerner concludes that at the origin of patriarchy, men took the sexual difference between men and
women and made it into a "distinguishing mark between the conquered and the conquerors."
n170 Because the "difference" that women had was sexual and reproductive, conquest itself and
hierarchy were identified, and experienced, as sexual. n171 This sexualized domination and
submission, institutionalized as compulsory heterosexuality, creates gender and, as MacKinnon contends,
continually recreates "woman and man in the social forms in which we know them," n172 including
the social construction of a sexual desire in women "as that by which we come to want our own self-annihilation." n173 Women,
thus, are made for men, not really by the God who does not exist, n174 but by the patriarchal men
who made the God who made women for men. Pope Benedict, who supposedly directly channels this God, returned
to these themes in his 2008 Christmas address to the world, once again censuring all those who challenge traditional gender and
linking this challenge, ironically enough, to the devastations that patriarchal societies are now visiting upon nonhuman nature. If the
Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected, this is
not some antiquated metaphysics. What is involved here is faith in the Creator and a readiness to listen to the "language" of creation.
To disregard this would be the self-destruction of man himself, and hence the destruction of God's own work. What is often
expressed and understood by the term 'gender' ends [*320] up being man's attempt at self-emancipation from creation and from
the Creator. n175 Pope Benedict continued, "Rain forests deserve, yes, our protection but the human
being . . . does not deserve it less." n176 All of this is extremely deceptive. The top-down,
masculine-feminine, heterosexist gender roles Pope Benedict defends constitute a core threat against
the rain forests and the indigenous people and creatures who inhabit them. In truth, these gender
roles threaten just about every living organism, a few bacteria excluded, as they are inextricably linked,
as Lerner asserts, to manhood-making violence n177 as well as to "militarism, hierarchy, and racism,"
thereby imperiling "the very existence of life on earth." n178 James Gilligan, who is a psychiatrist,
educator, and former director of mental health for the Massachusetts prison system, after having treated the most violent of men,
agrees. He concludes his impassioned and definitive study of the psychology of violence with this call: The fundamental
challenge for our time, I believe, is to break the link between civilization and patriarchy . . . . If
humanity is to evolve beyond the propensity toward violence that now threatens our very
survival as a species , then it can only do so by recognizing the extent to which the patriarchal
code of honor and shame generates and obligates male violence. If we wish to bring this violence
under control, we need to begin by reconstituting what we mean by both masculinity and
femininity. n179
IMPACT RACISM
Patriarchy is the root cause of racism- it provided elite white men with the
justification to dominate and rule over so called lesser humans and the Earth
Lester, 1997- Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern (Rita Marie, June 1997, Ecofeminism in
a Postmodern Landscape: The Body of God, Gaia, and the Cyborg, Accessed in ProQuest FG)
Ecotheology and other liberation theologies suggest that the global environmental crisis is deeply rooted in the
institutions of fear and oppression of anything or anyone perceived as "natural, non-white
and/or female. Many white feminist scholars, such as Carolyn Merchant, Andree Collard, Mary Daly, and Rosemary Ruether,
explore the relationship of women to nature as it was constructed in ancient classical societies and the European scientific
revolution. Ecofeminism, as a movement, has paid a great deal of attention to the connection between hetero-patriarchal gender
hierarchies and ecological destruction. Less attention, however, has been paid to the role racism and classism have played in the
destruction of nature, as well as the role racism has played in shaping white feminism's understanding of the relationship between
women and nature. Blackness and whiteness are symbolic categories shaped historically by gender. For
example, whiteness and white femininity are historically constructed, and must be understood as such, to develop a theological ethic
which advocates feminism, anti-racism, and ecological concerns without reifying essentialist ontologies. Race and gender are
categories by which to analyze social, political, theological, and ethical dynamics. Discussions of race, in this instance, is a discussion
not of genetic characteristics but of historical, constructed categories. In a culture where the Other is often burdened with a racial
category (always in relation to the dominant category), "race" is attached, at least partially, to skin pigmentation.28 "Race" itself and
"racial consciousness,"according to Michael Omi and Howard Winant, is a modern phenomenon, but the meaning of race has shifted
historically.29 My interest here is to denaturalize the category of whiteness and white femininity by
focusing upon the historical contestations of femininity and nature as seen in the daily realities
of black women slaves. Marginalized and exploited women carve out spaces for themselves in
society. Ignoring the human agency and resistance of marginalized women would reduce them
to passive victims. The study of marginalized people, whether based on race, class, gender, or an interlocking combination of
each (as was the case with African-American slave women of the Old South), offers insight into the creation and maintenance of
power structures and the resistance to those structures . Blackness and whiteness as gendered categories are
not
simply binary. These categories call for a more complex disassembling to help ensure that contemporary feminism and
environmental movements can unite women across existing divisions of class, race, and culture, into what June Jordan calls a
partnership for change.3 Though the concepts of matter, nature, and body have been associated with women, as Rosemary Radford
Ruether articulates in her essay entitled "Ecofeminism," human slavery took the connection of women to nature
one step further. In the enslavement of other humans, both nature and particular humans were
"seen as a realm, not on which (dominant) men depend, but which men dominate and rule over
with coercive power."3i The enslaved Other is often depicted as bodily or as untamed, uncivilized
animals, whose resources or labor are to be used, "developed," or exploited. Racism shaped the white
American colonial relationship to African Americans, as well as to Native Americans and the land. Elly Haney suggests in her essay,
"Towards a White Feminist Ecological Ethic," that for white American ecofeminists to "understand the role of racism in ecological
ethics, we must go back to the colonial invasion and also the institution of slavery."32 In other words, though the impact of the
scientific and industrial revolutions in Europe and England is significant, it is also important to reflect upon the ways in which the
white ancestry of America and their racist treatment of Native and African-Americans has shaped the vision of the contemporary
environmental movement in this country. The European conquest of the Native peoples of America was founded upon and served to
legitimate the conviction that white, Christian, European civilization was culturally and theologically superior to any other human
community. The Judeo-Christian biblical image of wilderness supported and framed the image of
wilderness exemplified by the early colonists. They saw themselves as a chosen people on a
faith-testing journey to conquer and settle the Promised Land. In this paradigm, land and its
indigenous people "existed to be used, to have something done to them, they must be cultivated and controlled by
Europeans."33 Native Americans were considered "heathens" and "savages" of the wilderness; that is, they belonged to a realm
outside of redeemed civilization. In this context, wilderness was considered unredeemed and uncultivated earth; wilderness was
"empty" and available for possession. Colonists rationalized the dispossession of Native Americans from the land through the
language of labor and discipline. David Roediger writes that settler ideology held that improvident, sexually
abandoned 'lazy Indians' were failing to 'husband' or 'subdue' the resources God had provided
and, thus, should forfeit those resources.3* It was only through the labor of animals and humans
that earth was turned into desirable land; according to John Locke in his Second Treatise of Civil
Government, only labor turned land into valued property, and only white men were properly "property owners."35 Unlike the image
of the African American slave, male or female, the mythical image of the Native American, male or female, was of independence, a
symbol of American freedom. David Roediger posits that it was this mythical independence, as well as the disappearing of Native
populations, which prevented white working class men in the nineteenth century from speaking of being a "wage Indian." Instead,
they adopted the term, "wage slave."36 A white working class man could not complain of having to "work like an Indian" but could
and would complain of having to "work like a slave." Blackness was almost completely linked to servitude. The
use of the word "slavery" as a threat, in contrast to freedom, took on special meaning in America, with its actual history of Black
slavery. Class was also a mediating factor for women , northern and southern. For example, poor non-slave-holding
whites in the southern upcountry and on the fringes of southern society and economy were looked down upon, even by some
slaves.37 To be poor was even more shameful for white women because it violated norms of white
femininity; that is, poor white women were not seen as "ladies" innocent, dependent, and
worthy of male protection. * Like the growing numbers of women in the expanding industrial work force of the North,
poor southern women had a role in the family economy, not because of a myth of domesticity,
but because like slave women, their labor gave them some security within the family and
community. In this way, working so-called "native" (Anglo) women in the North may have enjoyed a more positive image than
working poor white women in the South.38 The latter's physical proximity to and compassion with both the image of white
womanhood and the image of the degraded black woman slave was a double negative. Also, in the North, according to Christine
Stansell, alternatives to bourgeois ideals of femininity emerged in working class Bowery women of pre-Civil War New York.39 in the
South, white-defined femininity, because it was more fully based on property, class, and slave holding, excluded poorer yeoman and
upcountry Piedmont women who were responsible for the housework, food processing and storing, cloth making, and other
domestic tasks of their families. The yeoman class was more likely than the plantation class to be anti-slavery (as well as critical of
the conscription and taxes enforced by the Confederate government during the Civil War) but this was not necessarily for moral
reasons. The yeoman class was ambivalent about the moral status of slavery. Like abolitionists, they were concerned more about the
bondage of blacks as a touchstone by which degradation could be measured in a society prizing itself on independence and
democracy. The experience of women in this historical period was complex and multi-layered both in its affirmations and in its
limitations. White planter women were to represent civilization and cultivate the civilization of
others in the social order, particularly their children. Yet white women also were seen as
embodied, closer to nature, and more susceptible to evil than men. White women were
hierarchically placed below white men of their class, but above natives and above black men and
women, with whom they most likely dealt with on a daily basis in the domestic sphere. As Katie Cannon suggests, white
women within slave- holding households most likely vented their own frustration at being
considered the property of white men of their class in violent, vindictive behavior towards black women.40 In the
South, most whites interacted with blacks only within the confines of the institution of slavery. And, like Natives, blacks were
associated with nature and animals. But instead of being associated with wild animals, as Natives were, slaves were more likely
associated with work animals and beasts of burden.41 Like animals, or even worse than animals, slaves were worked constantly,
regardless of weather and personal safety, coerced into laboring to turn earth into property they were not allowed to own. African
American women in particular, as suggested by Delores Williams, were exploited not only for their labor of production, but for their
reproduction as well. These women were not seen as human mothers but as "breeders. "42 Breeding slaves was less expensive for
white owners than buying new slaves, and breeding was regularly practiced after the early 1800s when the external slave trade to the
South was halted by law. Black slave women were expected to give birth, the labor of reproduction, without interrupting their other
labor, the labor of production. Delores Williams compares this practice of breeding female slaves to the ways in which strip-mining
exhausts the earths body. Ignoring black mothers' humanity denied them the protection and satisfaction of black families and
kinship networks. As possessions, slaves were not permitted to enter into officially recognized marriages or family bonds, even
though the stability of the black family unit was vital to the planter class. Slavery and the plantation system, according to Eugene
Genovese, led to agricultural methods which exhausted the soil. 44 Without crop rotation or diversification or the capital to invest in
fertilizer, the land had to be worked harder and harder for fewer returns, a financial problem offset only by a dependence on more
intensive labor supplied by the slave trade. Black women and the very earth they worked, alongside black men,
were worked at an intensive, destructive, and unsustainable rate unsustainable for both
workers and the land they were forced to work. Delores Williams writes: Just as technology' s rapid and often
unchecked contribution to the destruction of nature is rationalized on the basis of technology providing greater profits, comfort, and
leisure for more Americans, the exploitation of the black woman s body was rationalized to the advantage of white slave owners. 45
IMPACT RATIONALITY
Patriarchal focus on rationality creates a spiritual gap which is filled by
militarism, totalitarian governments, and infinite economic greed
7/8/14 FG)
Modern institutions have consequently universalized rational scientific knowledge while intuitive
knowledge is being dismissed as not acceptable. The emphasis on rational thought has taught people to identify
with their minds only, rather than with their whole organism. This dualism of mind and body has spread throughout modern
culture. It has led people to believe that the universe is a mechanical system, consisting of separate parts, put together as building
blocks. The view has been extended to living organisms, which are regarded as machines constructed from separate parts. Although
new physics has taught us that reality is different, this out-dated view is still the basis of most of modern
society's scientific and economic activity. It has led to fragmentation in modern academic
discipline, in government agencies, in its decision and policymaking. It has led human beings to
exploit nature, which has gone hand in hand with the exploitation of women, who have been identified
with nature throughout ages. (Capra 1982: 22-23). From earliest time the Earth and nature were seen as the kind and nurturing
mother, although nature also had a rough side to it. However, in pre-patriarchal era the many aspects of nature were identified with
that of the Goddess. Under patriarchy, the gentle image of nature changed. It became a wild, dangerous female
that had to be controlled by men. Thus, nature and women became subservient to men. This
association of nature and women has been used by patriarchal society to legitimize the
exploitation of both. Nature, because it is associated with the feminine, women, because they are associated with nature.
Both are of a lower order, which exists to serve man's physical needs. Man is consequently seen as being both separate
from, but also above nature and women, which he therefore can dominate. It was mainly with the rise of
modern science and its capitalism that nature changed from being organic and alive to become a dead machine that could be
manipulated and exploited. This happened parallel to the domination and exploitation of women. Thus, there is an ancient
association of women and nature. (Capra 1982: 24; Birkeland 1995: 56). Feminists find that the Western world's
identification of maleness with rationality and femaleness with nature has provided the
intellectual basis for the domination of women. The masculine sphere of reason includes public,
social and cultural life, together with production and justice. These are contrasted to the
feminine sphere of emotion, which includes the private, domestic and reproductive life. The
masculine sphere is the active one where affairs and nature is controlled via science. The feminine sphere represents passiveness and
the unchangeable human nature and natural necessity. Rationality is a highly regarded part of the human character as are the
characteristics of control and freedom. These characteristics are seen as making men superior and separate from inferior nature and
animals. Hence, also natural women emerge as inferior, imperfect human beings, lacking these characteristics. Thus, the dualism of
rationality-nature is a major tool to keeping women "in their place". It is therefore allegedly the use of the concept nature, rather
than social arrangements, that determines the lot of women and it is nature that justifies inequality. This ancient association of
women and nature has resulted in a contemporary kinship between feminism and ecology. It is manifested in their common
opposition against the patriarchal, rational, reductionist and scientific world-view; its domination of both women and nature; and
the damage its actions causes to life itself. (Capra 1982: 24; Plumwood 1992: 8). It is therefore increasingly apparent that
the
patriarchal emphasis on rational, linear and analytic thinking has led to antiecological attitudes. Ecosystems sustain themselves in a non-linear dynamic
balance based on cycles and fluctuations. However, such understanding is hindered by the
rational mind, which can only think in linear terms. Thus linear enterprises, like indefinite
economic growth and eternal technological development, will necessarily interfere with nature's
balance and eventually cause severe damage. To comprehend non-linear systems we need to apply our intuition. True
ecological awareness can come about only by applying the intuitive yin wisdom. Such wisdom is characteristic of many traditional
cultures, where life was organised around a highly refined awareness of nature. However, this intuition and its wisdom have been
neglected by the Western culture. Instead, the environment was modified to such an extent that people lost touch with their
biological and ecological base. Human separation from nature manifests itself in a disparity between
developments of intellectual ability; scientific knowledge; technological skills and personal

growth, wisdom; spirituality; ethics. While technological knowledge has grown immensely, there
has hardly been any progress in the conduct of social and moral affairs, during more than two thousand
years. The spiritual and ethical standards of Buddha from the sixth century BC are not inferior to the current ones, maybe rather the
opposite. This is because human progress has been seen in rational, intellectual, linear and quantitative
terms only. However, the denial of spiritual needs is potentially as dangerous as extreme religious
dogmatism or superstition. It seems that something will always fill a spiritual vacuum. This could , in a yang
scheme, very well be infinite economic greed, absolute political power or the cruelty of militarism.
(Capra 1982: 24-26; Birkeland 1995: 57).
ALTERNATIVES
2NC FEMINIST ETHICS SOLVE

The alternative to reject male-biased ethics and the logic of domination and
instead allows us to embrace an ecofeminist method which questions our role as
humans and our relationship to the natural environment
First, ecofeminism is quintessentially anti-naturist. Its anti-naturism consists in the rejection of
any way of thinking about or acting toward nonhuman nature that reflects a logic, values, or
attitude of domination. Its anti-naturist, anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-classist (and so forth, for all
other "isms" of social domination) stance forms the outer boundary of the quilt: nothing gets on the quilt which is
naturist, sexist, racist, classist, and so forth. Second, ecofeminism is a contextualist ethic. It involves a shift
from a conception of ethics as primarily a matter of rights, rules, or principles predetermined
and applied in specific cases to entities viewed as competitors in the contest of moral standing, to a
conception of ethics as growing out of what Jim Cheney calls "defining relationships," i.e., relationships
conceived in some sense as defining who one is. 30 As a contextualist ethic, it is not that rights, or rules, or
principles are not relevant or important. Clearly they are in certain contexts and for certain purposes.31 It is just that what makes
them relevant or important is that those to whom they apply are entities in relationship with others. Ecofeminism also involves an
ethical shift from granting moral consideration to nonhumans exclusively on the grounds of some similarity they share with humans
(e.g., rationality, interests, moral agency, sentiency, right-holder status) to "a highly contextual account to see clearly what a human
being is and what the nonhuman world might be, morally speaking, tor human beings."32 For an ecofeminist, how a
moral agent is in relationship to another becomes of central significance, not simply that a moral
agent is a moral agent or is bound by rights, duties, virtue, or utility to act in a certain way. Third,
ecofeminism is structurally pluralistic in that it presupposes and maintains differenc e--difference
among humans as weIl as between humans and at least some elements of nonhuman nature.
Thus, while ecofeminism denies the "nature/culture" split, it affirms that humans are both members of an
ecological community (in some respects) and different from it (in other respects). Ecofeminism's
attention to relationships and community is not, therefore, an erasure of difference but a respectful acknowledgement of it. Fourth,
ecofeminism reconceives theory as theory in process. It focuses on patterns of meaning which

emerge, for instance, from the storytelling and first-person narratives of women (and others) who deplore the twin dominations of
women and nature. The use of narrative is one way to ensure that the content of the ethic-the pattern of the quilt-may/will
change over time, as the historical and material realities of women's lives change and as more is
learned about women-nature connections and the destruction of the nonhuman world .3 Fifth,
ecofeminism is inclusivist. It emerges from the voices of women who experience the harmful
domination of nature and the way that domination is tied to their domination as women. It
emerges from listening to the voices of indigenous peoples such as Native Americans who have been
dislocated from their land and have witnessed the attendant undermining of such values as appropriate reciprocity,
sharing, and kinship that characterize traditional Indian culture. It emerges from listening to voices of those who,
like Nathan Hare, critique traditional approaches to environmental ethics as white and bourgeois,
and as failing to address issues of "black ecology" and the "ecology" of the inner city and urban
spaces.34 It also emerges out of the voices of Chipko women who see the destruction of "earth,
soil, and water" as intimately connected with their own inability to survive economically. 35 With its
emphasis on inclusivity and difference, ecofeminism provides a framework for recognizing that what counts as ecology and what
counts as appropriate conduct toward both human and nonhuman environments is largely a matter of context. Sixth, as a feminism,
ecofeminism makes no attempt to provide an "objective" point .of view. It is a social ecology. It
recognizes the twin dominations of women and nature as social problems rooted both in very
concrete, historical, socioeconomic circumstances and in oppressive patriarchal conceptual
frameworks which maintain and sanction these circumstances. Seventh, ecofeminism makes a
central place for values of care, love, friendship, trust, and appropriate reciprocity-values that
presuppose that our relationships to others are central to our understanding of who we are. 36 It
thereby gives voice to the sensitivity that in climbing a mountain, one is doing something in relationship with an "other," an "other"
whom one can come to care about and treat respectfully. Lastly, an
ecofeminist ethic involves a reconception of

what it means to be human, and in what human ethical behavior consists . Ecofeminism denies abstract
individualism. Humans are who we are in large part by virtue of the historical and social contexts
and the relationships we are in, including our relationships with nonhuman nature.
Relationships are not something extrinsic to who we are , not an "add on" feature of human nature; they play
an essential role in shaping what it is to be human. Relationships of humans to the nonhuman environment are,
in part, constitutive of what it is to be a human.
Ecofeminism offers new perspectives and radical alternatives to environmental

degradation through inclusiveness and women-focus
Berg 9 Master of Philosophy Graduate Thesis (Human Rights Law) (Emerald, The Value of
Ecofeminism for Environmental Regulation, University of Cape Town, 2009,
http://uctscholar.uct.ac.za/PDF/10473_Berg_IB.pdf) */LEA
The radiation seepage from Chernobyl, the prospect of global warming, the discovery of an ozone hole , the
ugliness of medical waste on ocean beaches, and the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill have lent a new sense of
urgency to the environmental crisis. Real people all over the world are fighting ecological battles. Ecofeminism is
a largely unknown part of the solution, and an excellent resource for lawmakers, lawyers, and average citizens concerned
with the environmental degradation happening in their community. Today, people all over the world, and the grassroots
organizations in which they are involved, are more concerned than ever about the fate of their environment
and the linkages among declining ecosystems, degraded resources, and their increasing poverty. By
inquiring into the arena wherein the subordination of women by men and the domination of
nature by humans intersect, ecofeminism can be part of the solution for environmental ethics to
thrive. 297 Ibid. University of Cape Town 74 Together, this investigation could establish an ecologically and ethically appropriate
relationship between human beings and the natural world. Ecofeminism offers a new perspective on structures
and processes of social change. Through its recognition of threats to equity and diversity, and its promotion of social and
environmental justices, it helps to strengthen the balance between mens and womens rights and responsibilities in local
communities. It clarifies linkages among gender, environment, livelihoods, and poverty, in ways
that benefit both women and men. In doing so, it addresses economic and political barriers to
environmental sustainability and social justice. Ecofeminism gives a voice to women's rich and
varied relationships with both society and nature. This diverse voice and inclusive spirit gives
ecofeminism an advantage in finding solutions for environmental degradation. By
listening to local populations it can help find specialised solutions for regional environmental degradations. It can examine the way
different communities think about property and land and the rule of law. In drawing on the creative legal methods of feminism it can
provide environmental advocates different avenues for thinking about regulation. In eradicating patriarchy and other
forms of oppression it can incorporate the missing ethical foundation into environmental
regulation. It can learn from countries and communities who decide to give value to nature in their constitutions or laws and
spread and expand those ideas. In advocating an inclusive voice it can offer environmental permitting procedures a new way to
examine how to incorporate local communities into development projects that affect them. It can incorporate those traditionally
marginalized from law into todays jurisprudence. Not all of ecofeminists principles and methods need to be used all the time to
make a difference. But, as this theory spreads and gains momentum, people will begin to change the way they think about nature,
and insist that law-makers do the same. Those in Third World and low-income communities have already learned of their
dependence on a clean, healthy University of Cape Town 75 Earth, and have begun to use ecofeminist methods unconsciously in
their fight for survival. People in Ecuador and small towns across the globe have realized the inherent value and power of finding
local solutions for their environmental problems. Women understand the connection between corporations, pollution, and their
children. Environmental law do not provide an adequate solution to the problems of environmental injustices. An ecofeminist
perspective offers several reforms to fill these legal gaps. By fully developing the scope of legal
remedies to include an ecofeminist analysis, environmental regulation, nature, and humankind
can only benefit.
The alternative is to reject the aff to sensitize our world view and lead by example
in endorsing a new ecopolitic and ecoeconomics
Book) */LEA
Practical work is an important component of a feminist's contribution to theory. This is consistent with the concept of praxis (the
integration of theory and action) put forth by the Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire (1968): the educational process is not
considered complete until learners take concrete steps to apply what is learned for change. Action is an educational process, an
opportunity to test and develop theory. It is praxis because the practitioner elevates her methods of practice into a critical framework
which embraces wisdom, ethics, and responsibility. The ecofeminist developeras practitioner helps local people further their own
development by supporting their agendas and facilitating the twoway flow of information. The ecofeministasdeveloper is thus
variously theorist, researcher, and practitioner. Bawden (1991) suggests that participatory action research leads to an improved
situation in which the practice is practiced and to improved practice by the practitionerresearcher, improved understanding of the
practice by the practitioner, and improved understanding by the practitioner of the situation in which the practice was practiced,
thus eliciting the shift in thinking and action among researchers, practitionerdevelopers, and local people needed to transform
development programs. Ecofeminist Interventions/Implications To use the term international development to refer to doing
development in communities other than one's own perpetuates the illusion (or perhaps even worse, the reality) that it is the
international system that is being developed. We choose to reconceptualize international development as it must be done in today's
world as remediation. The consequences of past abuse must be remediated in the same way that
ecologists remediate damaged ecosystems. Remediation means to go back to predamaged conditions, for example,
restoring potholes in Iowa's prairies. By protecting biodiversity, storing floodwaters, and providing a natural filter for cleaning
polluting water, this action benefits human life, not only wildlife. This ecological praxis of remediation must be
feminist to ensure the incorporation of the very perspectives and actions upon which such
remediation is predicated, for example, the recognition that while we are different from wildlife, we
are not separate. We cannot remediate ecological messes without reconsidering our
purpose, analyzing the results of our past actions, and sensitizing our world view.
We must recast our research and praxis as conversation with a world only
partially known (Haraway, 1988), drawing upon detailed and nuanced localized
knowledge to add essential substance and texture to this conversation. Changing
the patterns of actions that are embedded in and reinforce gender stereotypes requires
developing the language framework for naming what is happening (Gray, 1992) and making
takenforgranted patterns explicit (Frye, 1990). Careful observation and documentation of patterns of interaction can
make visible patterns which are invisible to the person who lives them everyday W e must examine both theory and
methods of dominant science to identify gendercentered biases and to make appropriate
substitutes. When organizations and institutions are part of the problem rather than part of the
solution (as they increasingly are), we must change, redesign, or create them anew. Institutions
the embodiments of the belief systems and technologies prevailing at the time of their origin
are unlikely to reform themselves. Change is likely to come slowly as the numbers of women in
decisionmaking positions reach a critical proportion. Because women as a social category are unique both in
quantity and in dispersion through society (Verba, 1990, 560), multiplesector and multilevel strategies are essential (Chafetz, 1990,
108). Spretnak (1990, 14) suggests that the most effective, though not the easiest, strategy is to lead by example:
"to contribute to the new philosophical base and to work in its new ecopolitics and
ecoeconomics; to organize around the concrete issues of suffering and exploitation; to speak out
clearly but without malice against those who further policies of injustice and ecological
ignorance." The struggle against a science that does not respect nature and a development that does not respect people requires
challenging fundamental conceptions of nature and women and of science and development . An ecofeminist effort to free
nature from ceaseless exploitation and women from limitless marginalization transcends
gender. Its praxis is humanly inclusive, replacing ideological claims to universalism with
diversity (Vandana Shiva, cited in Rodda, 1991, 5).
2NC ALT SOLVES SCIENTIFIC DUALISM

Reject the aff as a rejection of the dualism of science. This is a first step to
deconstructing the societal construct of dualism.
sequence=1)//SKY
In order to end the purely quantitative approach in science and its androcentrism one
transformation would be to reject the dualist demarcation. In reality the private bears on the
public, feelings are interacting with reason, quality, quantity cannot be kept separate, and
women and men are interdependent. Dualism is not real. It is created to secure the autonomy of
science. It blurs the fact that science has been produced almost entirely by white, middle-class
men; that it evolved under a particular ideal of masculinity; that it is based on domination and
control; that it consequently is a deeply subjective, personal and social activity. Without dualism
science changes. It becomes both public and personal and scientists are not only rational but
also emotional human actors. The reason some theories are found more persuasive than others
are in part because these conform to scientists personal desires, commitments and
expectations. Scientists are consequently motivated by social, political and emotional issues, be
they conscious or not. However, to avoid these facts scientists appeal to objectivity which
imposes a veil over the ideology in science. Apparent self-evidence renders the scientific
practices invisible and hence inaccessible to criticism. Universality completes the picture, thus
the privileges of science are protected. Thus, in so far as science claims to be objective, neutral,
and verifiable it misconceives and misrepresents itself. Ideological science belies its own aims,
inverting the meaning and potential of objective inquiry. (Keller 1985: 7-12; Reitzes 1993: 45;
Braidoni et al 1994: 37).
Feminists consequently reject the claims to objectivity and universalism. Both are created by
dualism. Such concepts suggest that the general human (masculine) standpoint is objective and
universally valid, while the feminine is subjective and particular. Thus, the masculine is the
norm, while the feminine is the difference, the other. Claiming objectivity and universality
makes men and their knowledge system detached, disembodied, transcendent and eternal.
Women and their knowledge oppositely become confined to the body, the physical and related
to change and nature. Feminists refuse to accept such one-sided perspective and call for
flexibility in the making of knowledge. A greater attention must be given to the complexity of
diversity and situated knowledge. This would give space for knowledge related to differences of
race, class, sex, age, culture and nationality. This is an intellectual recognition, which the
universalist mode does not permit. (Keller 1985: 12; Braidotti et al 1994: 37).
Conclusively science is the name we give to a set of practices and a body of knowledge delineated
by a community. It explains reality, but as a product of human thought determined by culture. It
is not defined by logic proof and experimental verification, but by social agreements, emotions
and power. The dualised masculine and feminine categories are similarly defined by a culture,
not by biological necessity. Scientific universalism and objectivity are false perspectives. Both
are ideological expressions of white, male, hegemonic thinking. Such thinking is not neutral,
neither value-free but highly contextualized. Hence, women, men and science are created from a
complex dynamic of cognitive, emotional, political and social forces based on power. Therefore,
with its dualist focus and the ideal of domination science cannot be objective, value-free and
universal. It is a masculine knowledge system based on power over and aggression against
nature, women and the non-west. It is as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (18891976) said; Western philosophy has since Descartes been concerned with power. (Merchant
1980: 228; Keller 1985: 4; Shiva 1989: 16; Braidotti et al 1994: 30).
1NC DECONSTRUCTION
The alternative is to deconstruct the current patriarchal system and the conditions
that created it in favor of developing a caring relationship with nature and the
Other
7/8/14 FG)
The modern world has trapped us inside theoretical words, but the post-modern deconstruction
of these words can free us. We can re-connect via the narratives and stories expressed from various contexts and human
beings. Such stories bridge the object and the subject. These narratives are based on history,
believes and values. They can help us to better understand the self, the world, the community, the land and the ethical
responsibility between all. This is where ecofeminism comes in. Its focus on context, narratives and
situated knowledge gives a renewed access to the discourse of traditional cultures. Their mythical
images are able to locate us in a moral space, which at the same time is the space where we live physically. Thus, morality becomes
the lived reality of facts. Often in tribal communities, nature is included within the moral community.
The land speaks to people and vice versa. Both shape the interaction. Each defines the other. Such tales are not universal truth, they
are local truth. It may be voices of multiple women deconstructing the totalizing and domineering
patriarchal discourse. Those stories are important for the deconstructing process. (Cheney 1994: 171-175).
Deconstruction regenerates diversity, which leads to non-domination. The belief in sameness is
not universal, nor is it desirable. Instead, it gives a certain kind of self-sufficiency with no interest in others.
Difference oppositely inspires a healthy interest in others. When we respect difference, we try to
understand the other. The result is not to gain "power-over" the other. Instead, we become
empowered when we know the other, the world around us and our inter-connection. Difference
between knowers necessitates interactive construction and a forum to negotiate reality and the values implicit in that construction.
This is a voluntary and non-domineering process. Hence in order to be non-domineering we need to develop a
genuine relationship with nature founded on a un-dualised self-other recognition and a healthy
interaction based on care for the other. Consequently, ecofeminism and postmodernism are in Cheney's opinion a
natural combination. (Cheney 1994: 116, 166, 168).
Reject the aff as a rejection of the dualism of science. This is a first step to
deconstructing the societal construct of dualism.
sequence=1)//SKY
In order to end the purely quantitative approach in science and its androcentrism one
transformation would be to reject the dualist demarcation . In reality the private bears on the public, feelings
are interacting with reason, quality, quantity cannot be kept separate, and women and men are interdependent. Dualism is not
real. It is created to secure the autonomy of science. It blurs the fact that science has been
produced almost entirely by white, middle-class men; that it evolved under a particular ideal of
masculinity; that it is based on domination and control; that it consequently is a deeply
subjective, personal and social activity. Without dualism science changes. It becomes both public
and personal and scientists are not only rational but also emotional human actors . The reason some
theories are found more persuasive than others are in part because these conform to scientists personal desires, commitments and
expectations. Scientists are consequently motivated by social, political and emotional issues, be they
conscious or not. However, to avoid these facts scientists appeal to objectivity which imposes a
veil over the ideology in science. Apparent self-evidence renders the scientific practices invisible
and hence inaccessible to criticism. Universality completes the picture, thus the privileges of
science are protected. Thus, in so far as science claims to be objective, neutral, and verifiable it misconceives and
misrepresents itself. Ideological science belies its own aims, inverting the meaning and potential of
objective inquiry. (Keller 1985: 7-12; Reitzes 1993: 45; Braidoni et al 1994: 37). Feminists consequently reject the
claims to objectivity and universalism. Both are created by dualism. Such concepts suggest that
the general human (masculine) standpoint is objective and universally valid, while the feminine
is subjective and particular. Thus, the masculine is the norm, while the feminine is the
difference, the other. Claiming objectivity and universality makes men and their knowledge system detached, disembodied,
transcendent and eternal. Women and their knowledge oppositely become confined to the body, the physical and related to change
and nature. Feminists refuse to accept such one-sided perspective and call for flexibility in the making of knowledge. A greater
attention must be given to the complexity of diversity and situated knowledge. This would give
space for knowledge related to differences of race, class, sex, age, culture and nationality. This is
an intellectual recognition, which the universalist mode does not permit. (Keller 1985: 12; Braidotti et al
1994: 37). Conclusively science is the name we give to a set of practices and a body of knowledge delineated by a community. It
explains reality, but as a product of human thought determined by culture. It is not defined by logic proof and experimental
verification, but by social agreements, emotions and power. The dualised masculine and feminine categories are
similarly defined by a culture, not by biological necessity. Scientific universalism and objectivity
are false perspectives. Both are ideological expressions of white, male, hegemonic thinking. Such thinking is not neutral,
neither value-free but highly contextualized. Hence, women, men and science are created from a complex dynamic of cognitive,
emotional, political and social forces based on power. Therefore, with its dualist focus and the ideal of domination
science cannot be objective, value-free and universal. It is a masculine knowledge system based
on power over and aggression against nature, women and the non-west. It is as the German philosopher
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) said; Western philosophy has since Descartes been concerned with power. (Merchant 1980: 228;
Keller 1985: 4; Shiva 1989: 16; Braidotti et al 1994: 30).
The Alt is to reject the dichotomy of subject/object and view nature as both, fitting
ourselves into this new paradigm
Lahar, 91 Academic Dean at Woodbury College, is a founding member and former chair of
the Burlington Conservation Board (Stephanie, Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroot Politics,
Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 9-11 edited by Karen
Warren)//schnall
Basically, we are looking to develop a better alternative to a classically Western, atomistic,
materialist worldviewwithout simply flipping to its polar opposite, a holistic, idealist one with
a mirror-image set of problems. Ultimately, an atomistic view that reduces life to its smallest increments endangers our
lives through a fascination with the manipulation of genes and nuclear power, ignoring the interlocking relations, functions, and
activities of natural and social communities. And yet holism as a principle that gives superior explanatory power and/or value to a
collective entity or community can also endanger our lives by undermining the integrity of individuals and their specific needs and
interests. Women and other oppressed categories of people should be especially wary of paradigms that could be construed as
advocating the sacrifice of individual needs to a "greater whole"whether that be the family, society, or "Gaia," a planetary entity.
The latter has made its appearance as an ideal in some ecofeminist writing after James Lovelock took the ancient Greek earth
goddess's name to describe his scientific theory of the earth as a self-regulating organism, and this was taken up by various poets,
philosophers, and ethicists as a paradigm for nature. I believe, along with Marti Kheel, who writes from the context of animal
liberation, that ecofeminist theory must be especially careful in outlining its guiding principles to "address the importance of
individual beings as well as the larger whole" (1990, 9). The key to incorporating the integrity of individual and
collective realities is an expanded concept of nature that we, as gendered human beings, can
then find a place in. We must understand "natural" and "social" histories (as well as our personal lives)
as processes of differentiation and incorporation that are expressions of nature rather than
emerging out of nature. This way we neither annihilate ourselves in nature (reducing ourselves
to a small and therefore expendable part) nor sever ourselves from the nonhuman environment
and from those aspects of ourselves unmediated by social processes. At the core of the expanded
concept of nature that I advocate is the rejection of a subject/object split at its rootthe
opposition of human consciousness and a mechanical natureand the adoption, instead, of an
ontology of nature as fundamentally material and subjective. This acknowledges different types
of subjectivity in natural phenomena that include (but are not limited to) human life and mental
processes. In these terms human consciousness is a specialized form of subjectivity but in no way
exclusive or original. Imbuing nature with both materiality and subjectivity provides a
substantial basis for commonality as well as differences between human beings and nonhuman
life, without the mystification of a discontinuous conceptual leap from nature to human
existence. In a realm of human possibilities that exists continuously with, and as an aspect of,
nature, we can proceed to explore gender, race, and other categories of human difference as
particulars rather than as oppositional qualities. They are specific elaborations of the human
species, complex constructs of biological givens and subjective mediations. In actuality, biological sex or genetic
heritage is only a small part of what we experience as gender or race. As Donna Haraway reminds us,
"race and gender are the world-changing products of specific, but very large and durable histories" (1989, 8).
An expanded concept of nature affects our thinking and experience of human diversity in terms such as gender and race
in two important ways: first, it prevents our collapsing them into purely biological/materialist
explanations, thereby dismissing our own subjective creation and participation in those
differences; second, it renders nonsensical the total detachment that characterizes extreme
processes of objectification by providing us with an irrefutable basis for mutual identification
with others, in a shared natural heritage and physical/subjective existence. The purpose of
working out an integrated philosophy of humanity and nature is not only to challenge dualisms
to reflect more clearly our lived experience in theory but also to describe relations among women, men,
society, and nonhuman nature in a way that is conducive to a high quality of life and antithetical
to oppression and exploitation. There are a few potential pitfalls we need to be cognizant of as we develop a synthesis
that relates an expanded sensibility of nature and specific social agendas. In outlining parameters for ecofeminism
that are aimed at transforming personal sensibilities as well as deconstructing conceptual splits,
it is important to acknowledge and integrate rational, emotional, visceral, imaginative, and
intuitive modes of experience and expression. It is also critical, however, to distinguish
ontological and phenomenological descriptions and emphasize a necessary discrimination
between symbolic and literal existence.
1NC EROTIC SPIRITUALITY

The alternative is to interrupt the patriarchal domination and exploitation of
women and nature by cultivating and expressing erotic spirituality
But there
really is an outside. In her classic essay, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Professor Audre Lorde
identifies sexuality not with irrationality, the devil, filth, sin, and punishment, but with sacred
cosmic and generative forces, ones "that can provide energy for change." n193 Cultivating and
expressing the erotic, then, means interrupting its patriarchal distortion and exploitation in
pornography as well as its persecution by religion. For the erotic corrupted in either of these ways becomes energy not for change
but for stasis, energy channeled into the very life support of the oppressive system. The "power grid" for patriarchy is
the pornographic-religious paradigm that exploits sex/spirit to make women and men into the
kind of social beings whose sense of self, spirituality, and sexuality is wedded to the continuing
re-creation of patriarchy. The embrace of this understanding of the erotic as a manifestation of
the life force, theologian and activist elias farajaj-jones avows, is "profoundly transgressive [sic], for it
challenges many intersecting oppressions (white supremacy, hatred of women, homophobia,
etc.)"--all of which are rooted in fear and loathing, all [*324] of which cultivate a habit of splitting
and a practice of punishment, all of which construct an "other" by projecting onto them all
(denied and demonized) dirt, sex, wildness, nature, darkness, and death . n194 The embrace of the
erotic leads to new politics, sexualities, or spiritualities, ones that bring all of these
interconnecting forces back together and thus are capable of healing mind-body, male-female,
and other related splittings. Some might find such talk of spirituality as too suggestive of a theocracy. But, if we take Mary
Daly's point that patriarchy itself is the global religion, n195 we might already be living in a theocracy and just not know it, a
theocracy found not just in the Vatican and related "Men's Associations," n196 but also in the corporate- militarist alliance that is
laying waste to life on Earth. Despite Pope Benedict's reference to the rainforests, n197 the patriarchal theocracy is an
erotocidal one, "cleansing" the wild spaces, outside and inside, where the rival to the patriarchal
God abides. An erotic spirituality thus goes outside, literally into nonhuman nature, seeking to
reestablish respectful relations with life. Erotic spirituality also goes inside, activating the
"animal beauty" n198 and intelligence of the body, and, if so inclined, freely venturing into that
"polymorphous sexuality" the Pope finds unacceptable. n199 That sexuality is always one where women, as well
as men who have been used as women, n200 refuse the prescribed self-annihilation and instead
blasphemously discover and make demands for our Selves.
1NC LOVING EYE

The alternative is to look at nature with a loving eye as opposed to an arrogant
one- we need to look at nature as something we coexist with rather than
something we need to conquer or exploit
In an essay entitled "In and Out of Harm's Way: Arrogance and Love," feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye
distinguishes between "arrogant" and loving perception as one way of getting at this difference
in the ethical attitudes of care and conquest. 18 Frye writes: The loving eye is a contrary of the
arrogant eye. The loving eye knows the independence of the other. It is the eye of a seer who
knows that nature is indifferent. It is the eye of one who knows that to know the seen, one must
consult something other than one's own will and interests and fears and imagination. One must
look at the thing. One must look and listen and check and question. The loving eye is one that
pays a certain sort of attention. This attention can require a discipline but not a self-denial. The discipline is one of selfknowledge, knowledge of the scope and boundary of the self. ...In particular, it is a matter of being able to tell one's
own interests from those of others and of knowing where one's self leaves off and another
begins. . . . The loving eye does not make the object of perception into something edible, does
not try to assimilate it, does not reduce it to the size of the seer's desire, fear and imagination,
and hence does not have to simplify. It knows the complexity of the other as something which
will forever present new things to be known. The science of the loving eye would favor The Complexity Theory of
Truth [in contrast to The Simplicity Theory of Truth] and presuppose The Endless Interestingness of the Universe. 19 According to
Frye, the loving eye is not an invasive, coercive eye which annexes others to itself, but one which
"knows the complexity of the other as something which will forever present new things to be
known." When one climbs a rock as a conqueror, one climbs with an arrogant eye. When one
climbs with a loving eye, one constantly "must look and listen and check and question." One recognizes the rock
as something very different, something perhaps totally indifferent to one's own presence, and finds in that
difference joyous occasion for celebration. One knows "the boundary of the self," where the selfthe "I," the climber-Ieaves off and the rock begins. There is no fusion of two into one, but a
complement of two entities acknowledged as separate, different, independent, yet in
relationship,. they are in relationship if only because the loving eye is perceiving it, responding to it, noticing it, attending to it.
An ecofeminist perspective about both women and nature involves this shift in attitude from
"arrogant perception" to "loving perception" of the nonhuman world. Arrogant perception of
nonhumans by humans presupposes and maintains sameness in such a way that it expands the
moral community to those beings who are thought to resemble (be like, similar to, or the same as)
humans in some morally significant way. Any environmental movement or ethic based on arrogant
perception builds a moral hierarchy of beings and assumes some common denominator of moral
considerability in virtue of which like beings deserve similar treatment or moral consideration
and unlike beings do not. Such environmental ethics are or generate a "unity in sameness." In
contrast, "loving perception presupposes and maintains difference-a distinction between the
self and other, between human and at least some nonhumans-in such a way that perception of
the other as other is an expression of love for one who/which is recognized at the outset as
independent, dissimilar, different. As Maria Lugones says, in loving perception, "Love is seen not as fusion and erasure
of difference but as incompatible with them. "20 "Unity in sameness" alone is an erasure of difference. "Loving perception"
of the nonhuman natural world is an attempt to understand what it means for humans to care
about the nonhuman world, a world acknowledged as being independent, different, perhaps
even indifferent to humans. Humans are different from rocks in important ways, even if they are also
both members of some ecological community. A moral community based on loving perception of
oneself in relationship with a rock, or with the natural environment as a whole, is one which
acknowledges and respects difference, whatever "sameness" also exists. 21 The limits of loving perception
are determined only by the limits of one's (e.g., a person's, a community's) ability to respond lovingly (or with appropriate care,
trust, or friendship)-whether it is to other humans or to the nonhuman world and elements of it.22 If what I have said so far is
correct, then there are very different ways to climb a mountain and how one climbs it and how one narrates the experience of
climbing it matter ethically. If one climbs with "arrogant perception," with an attitude of "conquer and
control," one keeps intact the very sorts of thinking that characterize a logic of domination and
an oppressive conceptual framework. Since the oppressive conceptual framework which
sanctions the domination of nature is a patriarchal one, one also thereby keeps intact, even if
unwittingly, a patriarchal conceptual framework. Because the dismantling of patriarchal conceptual
frameworks is a feminist issue, how one climbs a mountain and how one narra tes--or tells the storyabout the experience of climbing also are feminist issues. In this way, ecofeminism makes visible
why, at a conceptual level, environmental ethics is a feminist issue. I turn now to a consideration
of ecofeminism as a distinctively feminist and environmental ethic.
1NC METAPHYSICAL FEMALE POWER

The alternative is affirm metaphysical female power as a method of resistance
against the dominant patriarchal structure that sees both women and the natural
world as irrational and inferior to men
The most enduring resistance to patriarchy formed around a pre-existing religious tradition, based in what Lerner calls
"metaphysical female power," and focused on potent sexual and sexually sovereign Goddesses. n44
These Goddesses were maternal and sexual, young and old, and sometimes understood as
gynandrous, containing both the female and the male. n45 They were identified with material
reality--animals, elements, natural processes, and forces n46 --and were understood as immanent
in matter (i.e., the Earth, moon, sun and stars, seasons, trees, springs, rivers, our human bodies,
and so on). n47 Concepts and associated practices linked to Goddesses included: nakedness to
indicate potency; displays or symbolic representations of the vulva as a sign of power; sensual,
sexual or naked dance; group sex, including homosexual sex; and ceremonial transvestitism. n48
Their adherents, and their priestesses and priests, were [*301] often gender and sexually diverse. n49
Reverence from both women and men for these Goddesses continued long after women had been subordinated and the Goddesses were variously straightened, domesticated, and demoted to suit the new ruling
order. n50 Lerner further notes,
"We may be justified in regarding the extraordinary persistence of
fertility and Goddess cults as an expression of female resistance to the

predominance of male god figures." n51 The emergence of Hebrew monotheism, focusing
not only on a male God but also on an erotophobic and bodiless father God --the one whom Andrea Dworkin calls the "God
who does not exist" n52 --similarly and variously required the denial, revision, and demonization of these rival female
divinities. To make this new, heavenly, de-sexed father God credible, it was essential that the
rival earthy sex-mother-grandmother Goddess(es) and associated sexual signs and practices be
denied, trivialized, and, in some cases, demonized. n53 As part of this process, I would argue, as Margaret Miles has done, that "in the
Christian West female nakedness became a cipher for sin, sex, and death." n54 "This symbolic
devaluing of women in relation to the divine," Lerner writes, "becomes one of the founding metaphors of
Western civilization." n55 The other founding metaphor was supplied by Aristotelian philosophy,
the notion that women are incomplete, irrational, and "damaged human beings of an entirely
different order than men." n56 Lerner notes that it is with the investiture of these metaphors "into the very
foundations of the symbol systems of Western civilization, that the subordination of women comes to be [*302]
seen as 'natural,' hence it becomes invisible. It is this which finally establishes patriarchy thoroughly as actuality and as an ideology." n57 For centuries now
men have defined themselves as superior by conceptually separating themselves from and
lording over what previously was sacred--including women, sexuality, the given or natural
world, the animal, and the body. n58 As (elite) men identified themselves with a supposedly separate and abstract mind, God was now transcendent, male, immaterial,
asexual, and static, separate from and even antagonistic toward "things on the Earth." n59 Theologian elias farajaj-jones describes a formative early Christianity, where outright hostility toward the body
continued to shape attitudes toward women (considered as the very incarnation of body and lust) and sex. . . . 'Aberrant' sexualities were often portrayed as being linked to religious error . . . and therefore to evil.
The end result is that, today, very few people find it possible to think of sex and the sacred together, in a positive way. n60 For one highly influential church father, St. Augustine of Hippo, women were less rational
than men and sexual lust was [*303] directly connected to loss of rationality. n61 For St. Augustine, and the Western patriarchal religious tradition in particular, women represented basically all that God (who
does not exist n62) was not. n63 And it is this foundational precept that is demonstrated over and over in pornography.
ALT EV FOR SATELLITE KS

this flawed rhetoric must be rejected in all instances to give room for alternative
voices.
One of the most intriguing options opened by learning the language is that it suggests a basis upon which to challenge
the legitimacy of the defense intellectuals' dominance of the discourse on nuclear issues. When
defense intellectuals are criticized for the cold-blooded inhumanity of the scenarios they plan,
their response is to claim the high ground of rationality; they are the only ones whose response to the
existence of nuclear weapons is objective and realistic. They portray those who are radically opposed to the
nuclear status quo as irrational, unrealistic, too emotional. "Idealistic activists" is the pejorative they set against
their own hard-nosed professionalism. Much of their claim to legitimacy, then, is a claim to objectivity born of
technical expertise and to the disciplined purging of the emotional valences that might threaten their objectivity. But i f the
surface of their discourse- its abstraction and technical jargon-appears [seems] at first to support these
claims, a look just below the surface does not. There we find currents of homoerotic excitement,
heterosexual domination, the drive toward competency and mastery, the pleasures of
membership in an elite and privileged group, the ultimate importance and meaning of
membership in the priesthood, and the thrilling power of becoming Death, shatterer of worlds.
How is it possible to hold this up as a paragon of cool-headed objectivity? I do not wish here to discuss or
judge the holding of "objectivity" as an epistemological goal. I would simply point out that, as defense intellectuals rest their claims
to legitimacy on the untainted rationality of their discourse, their project fails according to its own criteria. Deconstructing
strategic discourse's claims to rationality is, then, in and of itself, an important way to challenge its
hegemony as the sole legitimate language for public debate about nuclear policy. I believe that
feminists, and others who seek a more just and peaceful world, have a dual task before us-a
deconstructive project and a reconstructive project that are intimately linked. 51 Our
deconstructive task requires close attention to, and the dismantling of, technostrategic discourse. The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextual- ized rationality speaks
so loudly in our culture, it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard until that voice
loses some of its power to define what we hear and how we name the world-until that voice is delegitimated.
Our reconstructive task is a task of creating compelling alternative visions of
possible futures, a task of recognizing and developing alternative conceptions of
rationality, a task of creating rich and imaginative alternative voices-diverse
voices whose conversations with each other will in- vent those futures.
Ethical conversations about nuclear war must begin from the position of women.
er_104.pdf) */LEA
4. Alternative Epistemology / The Inadequacy of Dominant Ways of Thinking about War. Both in philosophy and in western
thought more generally, objective knowledge is produced by socially autonomous reasoners who
have transcended institutional constraints, gender identifications, and emotion. Many feminists
propose an alternative epistemology which stresses that all thinkers are situated within
epistemic communities which ask some but not other questions, and legitimate some but not other ways of knowing.
We are each of us also situated by social identities and personal histories . To take an example at hand:
some of us address the volumes questions as heirs of the victims of nuclear weapons, or associate ourselves with them. 17 Others
are heirs of the attackers. Some address the issue of proliferation of nuclear weapons from the situation of a possessor state, others
from a situation in which they would find the term proliferation inappropriate. None of us speaks from nowhere; there is no
phenomenon including nuclear attack or proliferation that can be seen independently of the situation of the seers.18 Three
tenets of this alternative epistemology seem especially relevant to our work. Knowing is never wholly separated from feelings.
Indeed, in many kinds of inquiry the capacity to feel and to account for ones feelings is both a source and a test of knowledge.
Secondly, as useful as hypothetical thought experiments and imagined scenarios may be, we begin with and return to concrete openended questions about actual people in actual situations. Finally, we measure arguments, and ideals of objectivity, partly in terms of
the goods which they yield, the pleasures they make possible and the suffering they prevent. Grounded in this alternative
epistemology, anti-war feminists criticize the dominant political/strategic paradigm for thinking
about weapons of mass destruction, which we call technostrategic discourse . 19 In contrast to just war
theory, this discourse is explicitly not centered on the ethics of warfare, but on its material and political practicalities. As a tool for
thinking about weapons of mass destruction, it essentially restricts the thinker to three issues: the actual use, i.e. the detonation, of
these weapons in state warfare or by terrorists; the physical and 9 Carol Cohn and Sarah Ruddick Working Paper No. 104 geopolitical effects of this use; the deployment of these weapons to deter attacks involving either conventional weapons or weapons of
mass destruction. In other words, the concerns of the dominant strategic discourse are limited to the destructive effects of the
weapons when, and only when, they are detonated, and to the possible deterrent effects of possessing these weapons. There is scant
attention to the potential suffering of targeted societies, and no attempt to evaluate complicated effects on possessor societies of
deploying and developing these weapons, nor to grapple with the moral significance of willingly risking such massive, total
destruction. When anti-war feminists think about wars, they take into consideration the political,
social, economic, psychological and moral consequences of accepting the practice of war. When
assessing weapons, they do not single out or isolate weapons physical, military and strategic effects from their embeddedness in and
impact upon social and political life as a whole, nor from the effects of the discourses which constitute knowledge about these
weapons. Hence when asked to think about weapons of mass destruction, w e strive to consider the totality of the web
of social, economic, political, and environmental relationships within which weapons of mass destruction are
developed, deployed, used and disposed of all the while starting from the perspective of
womens lives. It is not possible to do so from within the bounds of just war and/or
technostrategic frameworks yet those are the very discourses which have shaped the
questions we are asked to answer in this volume. Thus, as we respond to the editors questions, we find we need to
both think inside their frame, and about the frame itself.
NARRATIVES GOOD
The notion that only relationships between so called moral agents are valuable is
fundamentally incompatible with ecofeminism
There are at least four reasons why use of such a first-person narrative is important to feminism
and environmental ethics. First, such a narrative gives voice to a felt sensitivity often lacking in
traditional analytical ethical discourse, viz., a sensitivity to conceiving of oneself as fundamentally
"in relationship with" others, including the nonhuman environment. It is a modality which takes
relationships themselves seriously. It thereby stands in contrast to a strictly reductionist modality that takes
relationships seriously only or primarily because of the nature of the relators or parties to those
relationships (e.g., relators conceived as moral agents, right holders, interest carriers, or sentient beings).
In the rock-climbing narrative above, it is the climber's relationship with the rock she climbs
which takes on special significance-which is itself a locus of value-in addition to whatever moral status or moral
considerability she or the rock or any other parties to the relationship may also have. 15
The difference between conquering and caring attitudes and behaviors in relation to the natural
environment provides a third reason why the use of first-person narrative is important to feminism and environmental
ethics: it provides a way of conceiving of ethics and ethical meaning as emerging out of particular
situations moral agents find themselves in, rather than as being imposed on those situations (e.g.,
as a derivation or instantiation of some pre-determined abstract principle or rule). This emergent feature of narrative centralizes the
importance of voice. When a multiplicity of cross-cultural voices are centralized, narrative is able to give expression to a range of
attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors which may be overlooked or silenced by imposed ethical meaning and theory. As a reflection
of and on felt, lived experiences, the use of narrative in ethics provides a stance from which ethical discourse can be held accountable
to the historical, material, and social realities in which moral subjects find themselves.
Personal narratives are important specifically in the context of ecofeminism

There are at least four reasons why use of such a first-person narrative is important to feminism
and environmental ethics. First, such a narrative gives voice to a felt sensitivity often lacking in
traditional analytical ethical discourse, viz., a sensitivity to conceiving of oneself as fundamentally
"in relationship with" others, including the nonhuman environment. It is a modality which takes
relationships themselves seriously. It thereby stands in contrast to a strictly reductionist modality that takes
relationships seriously only or primarily because of the nature of the relators or parties to those
relationships (e.g., relators conceived as moral agents, right holders, interest carriers, or sentient beings).
In the rock-climbing narrative above, it is the climber's relationship with the rock she climbs
which takes on special significance-which is itself a locus of value-in addition to whatever moral status or moral
considerability she or the rock or any other parties to the relationship may also have. 15 Second, such a first-person
narrative gives expression to a variety of ethical attitudes and behaviors often overlooked or
underplayed in mainstream Western ethics, e.g., the difference in attitudes and behaviors toward a rock when one is
"making it to the top" and when one thinks of oneself as "friends with" or "caring about" the rock one climbs. 16 These different
attitudes and behaviors suggest an ethically germane contrast between two different types of
relationship humans or climbers may have toward a rock: an imposed conqueror-type
relationship, and an emergent caring-type relationship. This contrast grows out of , and is faithful to,
felt, lived experience. The difference between conquering and caring attitudes and behaviors in
relation to the natural environment provides a third reason why the use of first-person narrative is
important to feminism and environmental ethics: it provides a way of conceiving of ethics and
ethical meaning as emerging out of particular situations moral agents find themselves in, rather
than as being imposed on those situations (e.g., as a derivation or instantiation of some pre-determined abstract
principle or rule). This emergent feature of narrative centralizes the importance of voice. When a
multiplicity of cross-cultural voices are centralized, narrative is able to give expression to a range of attitudes,
values, beliefs, and behaviors which may be overlooked or silenced by imposed ethical meaning
and theory. As a reflection of and on felt, lived experiences, the use of narrative in ethics provides a stance from
which ethical discourse can be held accountable to the historical, material, and social realities in which moral subjects
find themselves. Lastly, and for our purposes perhaps most importantly, the use of narrative has
argumentative significance. Jim Cheney calls attention to this feature of narrative when he claims, "To contextualize
ethical deliberation is, in some sense, to provide a narrative or story, from which the solution to the ethical dilemma emerges as the
fitting conclusion."17 Narrative has argumentative force by suggesting what counts as an appropriate
conclusion to an ethical situation. One ethical conclusion suggested by the climbing narrative is
that what counts as a proper ethical attitude toward mountains and rocks is an attitude of
respect and care (whatever that turns out to be or involve), not one of domination and conquest.
AT: ANTHRO
Ecofeminism explicitly challenges anthropocentrism
Adams, 91 author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory,
former Executive Director of the Chautauqua County Rural Ministry, Inc., in Dunkirk, New
York, an advocacy and service not-for-profit agency addressing issues of poverty, racism, and
sexism, started a Hotline for Battered Women, served as Chairperson of the Housing Committee
of the New York Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence (Carol, Ecofeminism and the
Eating of Animals, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 114-115
edited by Karen Warren)//schnall
Ecofeminism identifies a series of dualisms: culture/nature; male/female; self/ other;
rationality/emotion. Some include humans/animals in this series. According to ecofeminist theory, nature
has been dominated by culture; female has been dominated by male; emotion has been dominated by rationality; animals . . . Where
are animals in ecofeminist theory and practice? Six Ecofeminist Options Animals are a part of nature. Ecofeminism
posits that the domination of nature is linked to the domination of women and that both
dominations must be eradicated. If animals are a part of nature, then why are they not
intrinsically a part of ecofeminist analysis and their freedom from being instruments of humans an integral part of
ecofeminist theory? Six answers suggest themselves. I discuss each in turn. 1. Ecofeminism Explicitly Challenges the
Domination of Animals A strong case can be made for the fact that ecofeminism confronts the issue of
animals' suffering and incorporates it into a larger critique of the maltreatment of the natural
world. Consider the "Nature" issue of Woman of Power: A Magazine of Feminism, Spirituality,
and Politics (1988). In it we find articles on animal rights (Newkirk); guidelines for raising children as vegetarians (Moran); a
feminist critique of the notion of animal "rights" that argues that the best way to help animals is by adopting broad ecofeminist
values (Salamone); an interview with the coordinator of a grassroots animal rights organization (Albino); and Alice Walker's moving
description of what it means for a human animal to perceive the beingness of a nonhuman animal.3 In addition to these articles, a
resource section lists companies to boycott because they test their products on animals , identifies
cruelty-free products, and gives the addresses of organizations that are vegetarian, antivivisection, and multi-issue animal advocacy
groups. This resource list implicitly announces that praxis is an important aspect of ecofeminism.
Or consider
one of the earliest anthologies on ecofeminism and one of the latest. Reclaim the Earth
(1983) contains essays that speak to some of the major forms of environmental degradation, such as women's health, chemical
plants, the nuclear age and public health, black ghetto ecology, greening the cities, and the Chipko movement. The anthology also
includes an essay on animal rights (Benney 1983). The more recent anthology, Reweaving the World (1990),
contains an essay proposing that "ritual and religion themselves might have been brought to birth by the necessity of propitiation for
the killing of animals" (Abbott 1990, 36), as well as Marti Kheel's essay that explores the way hunting uses animals as instruments of
human (male) self-definition (Kheel 1990). This was followed in 1993 by an anthology that placed animals central to ecofeminist
theory, Greta Gaard's Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (1993). Still other signs of ecofeminism's commitment
to animalsas beings who ought not to be used as instrumentscan be found. Greta Gaard
identifies vegetarianism as one of the qualities of ecofeminist praxis, along with antimilitarism,
sustainable agriculture, holistic health practices, and maintaining diversity (Gaard 1989).
Ecofeminists carried a banner at the 1990 March for the Animals in Washington, D. C. Ecofeminist
caucuses within feminist organizations have begun to articulate the issue of animal liberation as an essential aspect of their program.
The Ecofeminist Task Force of the National Women's Studies Association recommended at the 1990 NWSA meeting that the
Coordinating Council adopt a policy that no animal products be served at any future conferences, citing ecological, health, and
humane issues.
Native American cultures prove that using the resources the Earth provides us
doesnt have to be anthropocentric
A Sioux eIder once told me a story about his son. He sent his seven-year-old son to live with the
child's grandparents on a Sioux reservation so that he could "learn the Indian ways." Part of
what the grandparents taught the son was how to hunt the four leggeds of the forest . As I heard the
story, the boy was taught, "to shoot your four-Iegged brother in his hind area, slowing it down but
not kiIling it. Then, take the four legged's head in your hands, and look into his eyes. The eyes
are where all the suffering is. Look into your brother's eyes and feel his pain. Then, take your
knife and cut the four-Iegged under his chin, here, on his neck, so that he dies quickly. And as
you do, ask your brother, the four-Iegged, for forgiveness for what you do. Offer also a prayer of
thanks to your four-Iegged kin for offering his body to you just now, when you need food to eat
and clothing to wear. And promise the four-Iegged that you will put yourself back into the earth
when you die, to become nourishment for the earth, and for the sister flowers, and for the
brother deer. It is appropriate that you should offer this blessing for the four-Iegged and, in due
time, reciprocate in turn with your body in this way, as the four-Iegged gives life to you for your
survival." As I reflect upon that story, I am struck by the power of the environmental ethic that grows out of and takes seriously
narrative, context, and such values and relational attitudes as care, loving perception, and appropriate reciprocity, and doing what is
appropriate in a given situation-however that notion of appropriateness eventually gets filled out. I am also struck by what one is
able to see, once one begins to explore some of the historical and conceptual connections between the dominations of women and of
nature. A re-conceiving and re-visioning of both feminism and environmental ethics, is, I think, the power and promise of
ecofeminism.
AT: ESSENTIALISM
Ecofeminism isnt essentialist- it makes room for the voices of marginalized people
from different countries, races, and socioeconomic statuses
7/8/14 FG)
Since its start in the beginning of the 1970s, ecofeminism has spread throughout the world. All ecofeminists agree that
there are important connections between the unjustified dominations of women, Others and
nature, but they disagree about the attributes of those connections. There is also no agreement about
whether some of those connections are potentially liberating or if they are reinforcing the harmful stereotyping of women. Hence,
just like there is not one version of feminism, there is also not one version of ecofeminism. Some
positions are mutually compatible and some are not. (Warren 2000: 21).
Consequently, ecofeminism consists
of a diversity of positions, including work of mainly women from different

countries and social situations . The work does not adhere to a single form or outlook.
Ecofeminism's diversity is also reflected by its presence in a variety of arenas such as academia,
grassroots movements, conferences, books, journals and art. Because of this diversity, it is more useful,
according to Carolyn D'Cruz, to consider ecofeminism as a discourse . As a discourse, it makes room for the
voices of a variety of positions and people that share political and ethical
concerns. However, there is no shared epistemological position. Ecofeminism instead derives its cohesion from
the shared desire of its proponents to resist domination for the sake of human liberation and
planetary survival. (Carlassare 1994: 52). According to the definition of ecofeminism, nature is "a feminist issue". What makes
something "a feminist issue" is that an understanding of it, contributes in some important way to an understanding of the
subordination of women. Thus, an increased conception of the domination and exploitation of nature
will help us to comprehend the domination and oppression of women. Therefore, racism,
classism, ableism, ageism, heterosexism, anti-semitism and colonialism ("isms of domination")
are also feminist issues. Understanding these issues help us understand how the domination of
women, Others and nature are interconnected . The reason for the feminist
embracement of all forms of domination is straightforward: Women are both
white, black, poor, lesbian, young, colonised etc. (Warren 1990: 127; Warren 2000: 1, 62). Because
ecofeminism in its analysis includes interconnections among all social systems of domination, it becomes multicultural. Analyses are reflecting the historical, material, socio-economic realities of a given situation, which vary culturally,
temporally and geographically. Thus walking long distance for water and fuel-wood is a feminist issue, when the performance of
these tasks by a woman, contributes to her subordination in her society. Hence, w hat counts as a feminist issue
depends on the context, particularly the historical and material condition of women's lived
experience. (Buege 1994: 47; Warren 1994: 2).
Ecofeminism isnt essentialist- we dont say that all women ever are associated
with nature, we says that elements characterized as feminine are seen as inferior
to masculine elements
7/8/14 FG)
It is important to understand what the logic of domination does not assert. It does not assert that there are no relevant differences
between groups that may make some groups superior or inferior in some relevant respect. For example, race car drivers may be
superior to ordinary drivers with regard to their ability to drive cars. However, nothing follows morally from that fact about who
deserves what sort of treatment. Rational human beings may be superior to any other animals. However, it does not follow what the
rational human being is allowed to do to the non-rational animal. For this to happen one needs the logic of domination.
argument
also
The
does not assert that women are closer to nature, nor that all women
are always, everywhere associated with nature, while men are related to culture. The argument,
show how elements related to the feminine category are conceptualized as inferior
to those related to the masculine. Thus, the kind of logic used to justify domination of women is
the same that justify the domination of nature. Hence, feminism must embrace ecological feminism if it hopes to
however, does
end domination of women because it is tied conceptually and historically to the domination of nature. In this way, naturism becomes
an integral part of any feminist solidarity movement. The framework also connects all other isms of domination
like gender, race or class etc. That consequently gives a good reason to require that feminism is
expanded to include the elimination of all systems of domination. One may then want to call
ecofeminism for "anti-domination". However, Warren (2000: 62) disagrees. The prefix feminism is important
analytically. All analysis is seen through a feminist lens. One can in fact only access this information when one starts from a feminist
position. The concept feminism also has a critical bite to it in a contemporary context. It reminds us that there are some groups,
which are privileged. It puts issues of gender on the table immediately and that is where it belongs. Without the prefix, we would be
prevented from noticing the male gender bias in the modern world. Concepts like anti-domination cannot express this serious bias.
(Warren 1990: 132, 143; Warren 2000: 50-51, 54, 62-63, 92).
Ecofeminism is not essentialist- they fail to recognize that escaping dichotomies is

the root of our mission
Griffin 97 Ecofeminist author and finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book
Critics Award (Susan, Ecofeminism and Meaning, Ch. 12 Ecofeminism : Women, Culture,
Nature, edited by Karen J Warren, Book) */LEA
In the last decade, a problem has threatened feminist theory. The crisis is in language. Questions have been raised about
the word woman. On close examination, the word begins to dissolve. What is she? Who are we? And which we are we? The
use of this word opens up a series of chasms. By each of these descents one is led to a world of
fiction. The term conjures up a creature who does not really exist, who is an absence, a social
construct: the fantasy of cultural and political structures of power . Existing in and marked by these
structures, the word woman is inseparable from them. And then there is the problem of nomination itself. How can
one say anything is anything? For one defines words with other words, so by a tautological chase, the definitive meaning of meaning
is deferred to a future that can never exist solely within language. Along with the word woman, language is doomed to failure. But
here is the core of the crisis. How can a feminist movement exist without the words, especially the word woman? A regrettable and
yet still predictable solution has been to create a divide. It is an old story. To survive internal crises, one creates
enemies. Enter a new animal: essentialism, a category in thought by which some feminists are
accused of using the word woman, as pure idea or pure matter without the more sophisticated knowledge that woman is
a fiction of the social construction of gender. This creation becomes all the more possible since there is already a divide in language.
Poststructural feminists have a unique vocabulary which other feminists do not understand. Yet the solution to the problem has
become in itself an even worse problem. No such animal as an essentialist really exists. Neither is this
name one which any feminist theorist has chosen for herself, nor does essentialism accurately
describe any major trend in feminist thought. It is instead a kind of bte, a creature of dreams who contains the
fearsome thoughts and feelings which belong to the accuser. Since feminism began in this century as an
understanding of the social construction of gender, the idea of essentialism is , to borrow a phrase from
Teresa de Lauretis, a "reductive opposition." 1 The word woman has not been used naively by feminist
theorists but with the intention of transforming the constructions that define it within the
Western philosophical tradition (what Derrida calls logos). To accuse early feminists of essentialism is oddly a historical,
since the work of feminist thinkers in this century created the very ground on which gender is
visible as a social construct. And if within this range a small number of women once put forward the possibility of a
determining biological difference which makes women socially superior to men, or if some feminists still question whether or not
biology may play a significant role along with socialization, even these notions (with which most feminist thinkers, myself included,
disagree) sprang up, paradoxically, in the context of an understanding of the social construction of gender, which had created a
fictional and derogatory notion of "woman." Even the idea of a separate and different culture belonging to
women was neither biologically determined nor metaphysically defined , but sprang again from the
observation of the social construction of gender, which as part of that construction created separate spheres of labor, separate forms
of schooling, of childrearing, so that girls were raised differently than boys, given different models of behavior, different sexual
codes, different skills, crafts, even modes of knowledge, different ways of relating, roles within families, difference. That there is wide
difference within that difference, small and extreme variations, does not contradict the observation that not only are women treated
differently in society than men, but that women, by virtue of that different treatment, have different lives. Finally this difference is
not always regarded as negative. Escaping a dualistic (or binary) simplicity, difference can be
predominantly negative and yet at the same time contain positive characteristics. As Angela Davis
points out in her work on the role of African American women under slavery, forms of resistance, valuable not only to women, but
for everyone's survival under slavery, could be found within that difference even in the ways that it constrained women under
slavery. And survival is significant in this discourse. Not the least of which is that now, when the word essentialist
disappears, one is still left with the very crisis that the bte was created to contain. That is the crisis of the
dissolving woman. One might wish to hasten the death of this word.2 The air around it is thin, its dimensions suffocating. It
seems too narrow. What was once a liberation becomes a confinement. What was once a revelation becomes another form of silence.
And yet with a premature death, we lose too much. We still need the word. And so the problem would appear to be insoluble. Except
if one dives under it. Because to see other aspects of the construct, one must leave the interior to find a way to view language and
culture from beneath. If such is said to be impossible because of the power of language to enclose consciousness, the answer can only
be that it is no less impossible for poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction, even if they place the focus inside, rather
than outside, language. And what may be the only solution will be the recognition of many varieties of women within the word
woman and at the same time the acceptance of various approaches, viewpoints, starting points, perspectives in discourse. So a
problem raised by poststructuralist language philosophy might find the beginnings of an answer in ecofeminism. But even to begin
this beginning, one must correct a misreading of ecofeminism, which has at times also been accused of
essentialism. Not wishing to revive this self reflective beast, before using the approach of ecofeminism, it is important to clarify
what ecofeminism is and what it is not. What is critical in the emergence of ecofeminism is the meeting
between ecology and feminism. Concepts of ecosystems, of natural processes which precede and
yet also include human consciousness are at the heart of the ecofeminist approach. And these
concepts accompany and illuminate the ecofeminist understanding of both the oppression of
women and the social construction of gender. This approach has been confused by both its detractors and some of
its admirers with the very social construct it delineates: mainly the fiction that women are either biologically or metaphysically (if
such is not an oxymoron) closer to nature. The confusion becomes more complex when ecofeminist thinkers speak about traditional
women's cultures which are in practice, in modes of consciousness, and also sometimes even in ideas of themselves, less alienated
from nature and more in concert with the processes of ecosystems. This is quite another meaning of "closer to nature." If and when
ecofeminism suggests that some women may at times be closer to nature than men, this closeness is understood as a result of the
social construction of gender and of the socialization and division of labor which precede from those constructions. Just as
poststructural feminism has criticized the dominant culture's use of the words woman and
nature, so ecofeminism criticizes those uses from another perspective. And like poststructuralism,
ecofeminism sees both words as belonging to a system of thought in which hidden significance
makes the meaning of the word woman dependent on a certain idea of nature. Like
poststructuralists, ecofeminists argue that neither the word woman nor the word nature can be
read apart from each other and both are shaped by, marked by, and contain traces of a larger
system, a philosophy that is also a submerged psychology.
Our version of ecofeminism isnt essentialist- the association between women and
nature grew out of the patriarchal value system in the modern world
Darling, 2012- Project Developer for the International Development Program at the Canadian
Bar Association (Kate, June 2012, An Ecological Feminist Critique of Emerging Norms and
Trends in Global Water Governance, Published in the Melbourne Journal of International Law,
Accessed in Lexis FG)
Secondly, the framework relies on a diverse understanding of both women and nature. A critique of
'nature' and 'spiritual' ecological feminisms is that they have a tendency to essentialise all 'women' and
'nature' in an effort to celebrate the metaphysical interconnectedness between the two. n14 In contrast, the present
framework aligns with Deane Curtin's view that women are no closer to nature than are men and
that nature is no more feminine than it is masculine. n15 The association of women's practices
with lesser-valued nature is the result of a patriarchal value system rather than anything innate
to women or nature or the inherent capacity of either. n16 Such a view risks neglecting men as 'natural
beings' and women as dominators and oppressors. Further, by ascribing attributes and ahistorical functions in
this way, gender essentialism limits the potential for change and necessary social reorganisation. n17 Rather than focusing
on the object of oppression -- the woman, who stands for all women and the natural world, which is immutable -- the
present version of ecological feminism focuses upon the 'patterns among the treatment of oppressed,
exploited or undervalued beings and entities ... and [the] common ethical and ontological bases for maltreatment'.
n18
We dont essentialism what it means to be a woman- ecofeminism recognizes that

gender is fluid
Darling, 2012- Project Developer for the International Development Program at the Canadian
Bar Association (Kate, June 2012, An Ecological Feminist Critique of Emerging Norms and
Trends in Global Water Governance, Published in the Melbourne Journal of International Law,
[*372] Thirdly, the framework houses the belief that 'woman' does not constitute a unified category. n19 Rather,
as a term denoting a particular gender, it is socially constructed in an infinitely complex context.
It seeks to explain the differences between women, men and others residing along the gender
spectrum as well as ideas about 'femininity' and 'masculinity'. n20 Any focus on gender or concepts
relating to femininity or masculinity requires an acknowledgement, as far as possible, of the social, cultural and
historical context in which those terms are used. This framework remains alive to Chandra Mohanty's observation
that 'women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture,
religion and other ideological institutions and frameworks'. n21 The fear is that generalisations concerning the
concept of women 'efface the problems, perspectives, and political concerns of women marginalized because of their class, race,
religion, ethnicity, and/or sexual orientation'. n22 On the other hand, an understanding that recognises social complexities and
contingencies helps sensitise the analysis, particularly in a discussion about global governance.
AT: INEVITABLE
Masculine power relations arent inevitable- the affs insistence that they are
causes serial policy failure
7/8/14 FG)
These yang premises have consequences for society. Since they are presented as universal truths, a priori, there is no reason to
question them. They are assumed innate, gender neutral and absolute. Hence, dominant hierarchies and power relations are
inevitably a part of human society due to man's inherent nature. Therefore, militarism, colonialism, racism, sexism,
classism, capitalism and other pathological "isms" of modernity become legitimate. Or said differently:
If humankind by nature is egoistic, autonomous, aggressive and competitive - i.e. masculine - then control,
coercion and hierarchical structures are necessary to manage conflicts and maintain social order.
Furthermore, cooperative relationships, which are found in tribal cultures and among women,
are by definition unrealistic and utopian. In this way, power relations are removed from the political realm and social
debate, because the power structure cannot be otherwise. Thus, militarism is justified as being unavoidable,
regardless of its patent irrationality. Likewise, if humans will always compete for a greater share
of resources, then the rational response to scarce natural resources is "dog-eat-dog" survivalism.
This results in violence, environmental destruction and poverty. Or said differently: It
creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which nature and society cannot survive.
(Birkeland 1995: 59). The premises also have consequences for social policymaking. When the rational is prioritized
and the emotional marginalized public policies can never fulfil people's needs. Denial of the
emotional blocks an understanding of human needs and motivation , because what really
motivates people is satisfaction of emotional needs. Few people are motivated by reason. If
reason could persuade human actions, nobody would pollute the air, the water and the soils,
since these are the foundation of their own survival. But in spite of this rationality prevails, which means that
social policies only can meet physical, tangible needs like food, clothing and shelter. Overlooked
are satisfaction of emotional human needs like community, self-reliance and sustainable
lifestyles. Thus, the yang concepts and policies alienate Southern women and tribal people from their community and their
natural resources, which disrupt their possibility to live sustainable lives as an integral part of nature. Therefore, when rational
development policies exploit natural resources for economic growth purposes and replace local people,
they take away nature's ability to regenerate itself and the possibility of local communities to live
sustainable lives. The consequence is that villagers end up being both psychologically and physically destitute, depending on
development policies for satisfaction of their material needs. (Birkeland 1995: 63, 68).
AT: POSITIVISM
Endorse a feminine epistemology focused on eliminating power imbalances in
knowledge production positivism fails and centers around a masculine
epistemology with its focus on objectivity and control
7/8/14 FG)
An important underlying principle in feminist research is its opposition to positivist
assumptions. Positivism is seen as a male perception that is objective, logic, task-oriented and
instrumental. It reflects a masculine emphasis on individual competition, hard facts,
domination and control. Positivist methods are therefore perceived as patriarchal because they attempt to
understand the world in order to control, dominate and exploit its resources. In contrast,
feminist researchers are committed to eradicating power imbalances in generation of
knowledge. It includes an open, interactive and flexible research situation that allows for the researcher's
bias. This manifests the feminist researchers' refusal to create artificial dualist distinctions between the subject and the object, the
private and the public, the personal and the political domains. Feminist research is consequently committed to a
feminist epistemology. It comprises theoretical and political analyses that critique dominant
conceptions and gendered criteria of knowledge. Feminist research is therefore concerned with both the
content and the process of research. Or said differently, it reflects both ontological and epistemological
concerns. It is this connection between being and knowing that defines feminine research. Hence,
it is important. It relates to what should be researched and how it should be done in order to be
called knowledge. Feminist researchers conclusively find that women's direct experiences of
reality are a valid basis from which to develop an epistemological theory. (Terre Blanche and Durrheim
1999: 442-443).
AT: PERM
Full criticism a prerequisite to achieve political resistance bringing into the
debate space solves
Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 8 edited by Karen
Warren)//schnall
Ecofeminism is highly critical of most current social and political institutions and thereby serves
a deconstructive or dissembling function that supports political resistance. To fulfill this
deconstructive potential, its criticisms must continue to be acted upon by the expression of
resistance through direct action on life-threatening issues (militarism, violence against women,
the nuclear industry, pollution and toxics, environmental destruction). Ecofeminism also aspires
to a creative and reconstructive function in society, as King's "practice of hope." To fulfill a
reconstructive potential, a social philosophy must extend a social critique and Utopian vision
into imperatives for action. This means that life-preserving values and policies must be
promoted and carried out beyond circles of personal affinity and academic philosophy and
brought into public arenas. Reconstructive projects that ecofeminist theory and activism have
contributed to include, for example, community forums on social or environmental issues and
those at intersections such as biotechnology; state legislation supporting the civil rights and
safety of groups that historically have had little political power; the reallocation of private and
public resources and funds to socially responsible uses; alternative housing and land-use
arrangements; and local alternative economic systems.6 Unlike the largely mental politics of
postmodern, poststructuralist social critiques in the academy as well as some systems of
environmental ethics, ecofeminism's popular and political base in grassroots organizing and
direct action has fanned the will to personal and collective action from its inception.
AT: DEEP ECOLOGY PERM

Deep ecology and ecofeminism incompatible must appreciate differences
between species
King, 91 Department of Philosophy, University of Maine (Roger, Caring about Nature:
Feminist Ethics and the Environment, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University
Press, pp. 86 edited by Karen Warren)//schnall
Some of the same objections
that ecofeminists raise for deontological and consequentialist forms of

environmental ethics apply also to the theorizing of the deep ecology movement .4 Ecofeminists
have been critical of this movement's analysis of the origins of human domination of nature.
According to deep ecologists, the root cause lies in anthropocentric ways of thinking and acting that
are intrinsically inimical to the well-being of the nonhuman community. Their solution is to promote ways of being
that will recognize and respect the intrinsic, rather than merely instrumental, value of the environment
and its denizens. But ecofeminists reject both the analysis and the form of deep ecology's
proposed solution. By focusing on anthropocentrism, deep ecologists ignore the role of
androcentric thinking and acting central to an ecofeminist understanding of the environmental
crisis. In this criticism, both essentialists and conceptualists are united. Moreover, the deep
ecologists' proposal to replace anthropocentrism with a form of personal and community
renewal that fuses the individual self with the larger Self of the whole biotic community is too
abstract (Cheney 1987). In seeking to form a different kind of relationship with nature, deep ecologists seem to seek
an erasure of the differences among the individual members of the natural community, a kind of
identity of each in the life of the whole. No matter how this program might be fleshed out, from the ecofeminist
standpoint it remains simply the abstract negation of the original patriarchal dualism: a move from
abstractly demarcated difference to abstract identity. What is needed is not the recovery of a
sense of oneness but an understanding of the real difficulties in the way of fostering the growth
of concrete, multifaceted, caring relations among individuals, societies, and the nonhuman
beings and systems among whom they live. Fruitful inquiry in environmental ethics, therefore,
emphasizes difference as much as continuity in the attempt to break through the species barrier.
The moral theory of ecofeminism is motivated, then, by a dissatisfaction with approaches that either
impose abstract lines of demarcation or submerge them in a quest for unity. Starting with
plurality and difference as our basic assumptions, environmental ethics need acknowledge no
conceptual limits to the extension of the moral domain. Those limits that exist at any given time are purely
historical, particular, and subject to change by the actions of concrete individuals. It is hoped that an ecofeminist
environmental ethics may better promote this project than have other forms of environmental
ethics.
FRAMEWORK
1NC CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

The alternative is to reject the affs hierarchical thinking and logic of dominationthats the only way to end the domination of women and the environment
A conceptual framework is a set of basic beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions which shape
and reflect how one views oneself and one's world. It is a socially constructed lens through which we perceive
ourselves and others. It is affected by such factors as gender, race, class, age, affectional orientation, nationality, and religious
background. Some conceptual frameworks are oppressive. An oppressive conceptual framework
is
one that explains, justifies, and maintains relationships of domination and subordination. When
an oppressive conceptual framework is patriarchal, it explains, justifies, and maintains the subordination of women by men. I
have argued elsewhere that there are three significant features of oppressive conceptual
frameworks: (1) value-hierarchical thinking, i.e., "up-down" thinking which places higher value, status,
or prestige on what is "up" rather than on what is "down"; (2) value dualisms, i.e., disjunctive
pairs in which the disjuncts are seen as oppositional (rather than as complementary) and exclusive (rather
than as inclusive), and which place higher value (status, prestige) on one disjunct rather than the other (e.g., dualisms which
give higher value or status to that which has historically been identified as "mind," "reason," and
"male" than to that which has historically been identified as "body," "emotion," and "female");
and (3) logic of domination, i.e., a structure of argumentation which leads to a justification of
subordination.4 The third feature of oppressive conceptual frameworks is the most significant . A logic of domination
is not just a logical structure. It also involves a substantive value system, since an ethical
premise is needed to permit or sanction the "just" subordination of that which is subordinate.
This justification typically is given on grounds of some alleged characteristic (e.g., rationality)
which the dominant (e.g., men) have and the subordinate (e.g., women) lack. Contrary to what many feminists
and ecofeminists have said or suggested, there may be nothing inherently problematic about "hierarchical thinking" or even "valuehierarchical thinking" in contexts other than contexts of oppression. Hierarchical thinking is important in daily living for classifying
data, comparing information, and organizing material. Taxonomies (e.g., plant taxonomies) and biological nomenclature seem to
require some form of "hierarchical thinking." Even "value-hierarchical thinking" may be quite acceptable in certain contexts. (The
same may be said of "value dualisms" in non-oppressive contexts.) For example, suppose it is true that what is unique about humans
is our conscious capacity to radically reshape our social environments (or "societies"), as Murray Bookchin suggests. 5 Then one
could truthfully say that humans are better equipped to radically reshape their environments than are rocks or plants-a "valuehierarchical" way of speaking. The problem is not simply that value-hierarchical thinking and value
dualisms are used, but the way in which each has been used in oppressive conceptual
frameworks to establish inferiority and to justify subordination. 6 It is the logic of domination, coupled with
value-hierarchical thinking and value dualisms, which "justifies" subordination. What is explanatorily basic, then, about the nature
of oppressive conceptual frameworks is the logic of domination. For ecofeminism, that a logic of domination is explanatorily basic is
important for at least three reasons. First, without a logic of domination, a description of similarities and
differences would be just that-a description of similarities and differences. Consider the claim, "Humans are
different from plants and rocks in that humans can (and plants and rocks cannot) consciously and radically
reshape the communities in which they live; humans are similar to plants and rocks in that they
are both members of an ecological community." Even if humans are "better" than plants and
rocks with respect to the conscious ability of humans to radically transform communities, one
does not thereby get any morally relevant distinction between humans and nonhumans, or an
argument for the domination of plants and rocks by humans. To get those conclusions one needs to add at least two powerful
assumptions, viz., (A2) and (A4) in argument A below: (Al) Humans do, and plants and rocks do not, have the capacity to
consciously and radically change the community in which they live. (A2) Whatever has the capacity to consciously and radically
change the community in which it lives is morally superior to whatever lacks this capacity. (A3) Thus, humans are morally superior
to plants and rocks. (A4) For any X and Y, if X is morally superior to Y, then X is morally justified in subordinating Y. (A5) Thus,
humans are morally justified in subordinating plants and rocks. Without the two assumptions that humans are morally superior to
(at least some) nonhumans, (A2), and that superiority justifies subordination, (A4), all one has is some difference between humans
and some nonhumans. This is true even if that difference is given in terms of superiority. Thus, it is the logic of domination, (A4),
which is the bottom line in ecofeminist discussions of oppression. Second, ecofeminists argue that, at least in
Western societies, the oppressive conceptual framework which sanctions the twin dominations
of women and nature is a patriarchal one characterized by all three features of an oppressive
conceptual framework. Many ecofeminists claim that, historically, within at least the dominant Western culture, a
patriarchal conceptual framework has sanctioned the following argument B: (B1) Women are
identified with nature and the realm of the physical; men are identified with the "human" and
the realm of the mental. (B2) Whatever is identified with nature and the realm of the physical is
inferior to ("below") whatever is identified with the "human" and the realm of the mental; or, conversely, the
latter is superior to ("above") the former. (B3) Thus, women are inferior to ("below") men; or, conversely, men are
superior to ("above") women. (B4) For any X and Y, if X is superior to Y, then X is justified in
subordinating Y. (B5) Thus, men are justified in subordinating women. If sound, argument B
establishes patriarchy, i.e., the conclusion given at (B5) that the systematic domination of women by men is
justified. But according to ecofeminists, (B5) is justified by just those three features of an oppressive conceptual framework
identified earlier: value-hierarchical thinking, the assumption at (B2); value dualisms, the assumed dualism of the mental and the
physical at (B1) and the assumed inferiority of the physical vis-a-vis the mental at (B2); and a logic of domination, the assumption at
(B4), the same as the previous premise (A4). Hence, according
to ecofeminists, insofar as an oppressive
patriarchal conceptual framework has functioned historically

Western culture)
(within at least dominant
to sanction the twin dominations of women and nature
(argument B),
both
argument B and the patriarchal conceptual framework, from whence it comes,

ought to be rejected.
FW
Womens analysis has historically been excluded from policy debates- the alt is key
to check back against horrifically violent policies
Warren 97 Chair of Philosophy at Macalester College (Karen, Fourteen Rhetoric, Rape, and
Ecowarfare in the Persian Gulf, Ch. 14 Ecofeminism : Women, Culture, Nature, Book) */LEA
Any female member of Congress who wanted to discuss how war would affect women or the
environment would face a dizzying array of rhetorical barriers. 12 While none of these obstacles would be as blatant as
eighteenthand nineteenthcentury prohibitions against women speaking in public, the obstacles would include social
beliefs about what are the appropriate roles for men and women in times of war, the "feminine style" of rhetoric being
at odds with the norms for "war talk" in deliberative bodies, and the general denigration of
issues that challenge the premises of "powerover" political decision making. Social attitudes and
beliefs that men and women are fundamentally different create the most entrenched rhetorical
obstacles that limit a woman's ability to discuss women and the environment in congressional
debates about war. For centuries, women have been depicted as constitutionally peace loving where men
are war loving.13 Men fight one another at the war's front, but women are supposed to be passive,
supportive observers on the home front. Women are supposed to abhor war because our procreative abilities make us
"closer to nature." Since men cannot give birth to another human being, they are said to be "closer to culture," which includes the
development of munitions and other technological advances.14 In contrast to human procreation, men "give
birth" to new social orders by creating and using sophisticated instruments of death and
destruction. As William J. Broyles put it in an article entitled "Why Men Love War," "at some terrible level [it] is the closest
thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death" (55). Carol Cohn (1987) also found a strong
relationship between "giving birth" and creating atomic bombs in the language of the defense intellectuals she studied: The
entire history of the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with imagery that confounds
humanity's overwhelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to create:
imagery that converts men's destruction into their rebirth. Lawrence wrote of the Trinity test of the first atomic
bomb: "One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World." In a 1985 interview, General Bruce K.
Holloway, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1968 to 1972, described a nuclear war as involving "a big
bang, like the start of the universe." In addition to having to deal with the illogic that equates human birth with wartime death and
destruction, female members of Congress have little authority to speak about wargiven longstanding attitudes that women are to
be passive and silent during these times. Women's primary roles are restricted to being patriotic supporters, griefstricken widows or
family members, civilian casualties, or rape victims/war booty. Jean Bethke Elshtain has observed that the expectation that
women are to fill passive roles during times of war even extends to passivity in articulating their
concerns about war: In the matter of women and war we [women] are invited to turn away. War is men's: men are the
historic authors of organized violence. Yes, women have been drawn inand they have been required to observe, suffer, cope, mourn,
honor, adore, witness, work. But men have done the describing and defining of war, and the women are
"affected" by it: they mostly react. (1987: 164) Another limitation on women's ability to speak authentically about war
occurs because of their historic exclusion from military service and their continuing exclusion from combat positions. Since the
earliest days of this country's existence, a powerful conceptual relationship has existed between military service and ideas about
citizenship (Kerber 1990). This relationship is not unique to the United States and can be traced back to the beliefs and writings of
the ancient Greeks (Segal, Kinzer and Woalfel, 1977). Women's political ambitions have been thwarted by their
inability to serve in military combat positions, resulting in obvious difficulties in speaking about
war. The women who do get elected are unquestionably handicapped when their male colleagues use military service as an
authorizing device for their political arguments. Sheila Tobias has established through historical example that during times when
heroism in warfare and leadership in politics are strongly linked, women experience great difficulties in getting elected to public
office. When military service is claimed to be a necessary precursor to public service, women lose out (Tobias, 1990). This was
certainly the case during the 1988 presidential election between George Bush and Michael Dukakis. Bush repeatedly pointed to his
military service as a Navy pilot to bolster his credentials for the presidency. He ridiculed Dukakis's wellknown ride in an Army tank.
Bush's derision stemmed not merely from the fact that the ride was an electiontime publicity stunt but that it was obscene for
Dukakis to take on the mantle and perquisites of soldiering when he had no previous military service. During the Persian Gulf War
debates, female members of Congress were negatively affected by the attitude that prior military service was the only legitimate
precursor for discussing war. Whereas their male counterparts repeatedly referred to their own military service and sacrifice, the
women had to draw upon their connections to other people in the service. For example, several of the congresswomen mentioned
their male family members who were servicemen or their congressional employees who were connected to the military. For some of
the female representatives, their connection to the military was only that they were there to speak "on behalf" of their constituents
who were in the Gulf or had family members in the Gulf. 15 Elshtain claims that our society's belief that women ought always to
remain in the "private sphere" of the home limits their ability to speak authentically about war in a deliberative body like Congress:
Politics as policy formulation and implementation is not for amateurs. Women,

too, are well advised to keep their noses out of this complex business unless they
have learned not to think and speak "like women" that is, like human beings
picturing decimated homes and mangled bodies when strategies for nuclear or
other war fighting are discussed. The worlds of "victims"overwhelmingly one of
women and childrenand of "warriors" ... have become nearly incommensurable
universes to one another. (1987: 154)16 Had they wanted to discuss issues of women and the environment, the
female members of Congress would have faced other restrictive obstaclesattitudes about the impropriety of women speaking in
public. Prohibitions against women speaking in public have a long and welldocumented history. Saint Paul's biblical edict for women
to "remain silent" in church has been taken to mean that women should remain silent in all public spaces. By the very act of standing
and addressing a group of people, a female speaker claims to have ideas worthy of an audience. She literally asserts her own
authority and legitimacy In part because of this powerful self validating and selfauthorizing action, women in the nineteenth century
endured sanctions that included being criticized from the pulpit by clergy members, suffering ridicule in editorials and cartoons,
being refused in their request to rent auditoriums, having to defend themselves from claims that they were sexual deviants and
monsters, having to face angry mobs, and being repeatedly threatened with bodily harm (Campbell, 1990; Jamieson, 1988). Clearly,
contemporary female members of Congress did not face these social sanctions when speaking during the Gulf War debates.
However, each woman had to contend with the belief (reflected in numbers of women elected to the House) that the public sphere of
government "belongs" to men and that she was usurping her socially defined position. Similarly, each woman had to face a
prejudiced assumption that she was ignorant or incompetent about war simply because this
culture defines war as a quintessentially masculine activity . Like contemporary female soldiers who are
accused of being lesbians because they have violated assigned sex roles and have asserted their competence in military matters,
female members of Congress risked having their qualifications as women called into question. Having to demonstrate
their competence and authority while reassuring audiences that they are feminine women is an
ageold dichotomy for female public speakers. Current examples of this phenomenon are provided by Geraldine
Ferraro's unsuccessful run for the vice presidency (Campbell, 1988), the round of criticism Attorney General Janet Reno received
when she was nominated for her cabinet post, and the ongoing, vitriolic criticism of Hillary Clinton's public policy roles. The
rhetorical obstacles to legitimacy that female members of Congress face as public speakers are quite daunting by themselves. When
the subject is as significant and deadly as going to war, the rhetorical obstacles loom even larger for women. It is as if, in our fear and
awe, we resort to our most ancient and entrenched beliefs about sex roles. In these times, female members of Congress face their
greatest rhetorical challenges.
their scholarship is tainted with masculine bias- reject it

Book) */LEA
Ecological feminism, an emerging minority tradition and praxis within Western philosophy, is a world view with
potential to positively influence the course of development. To Jim Cheney (1987), concerns for the
environment and women's concerns may be parallel, bound up with one another, perhaps even one and the same, since both women
and the environment have been treated with ambivalence and disrespect by the dominant culture. Ecological feminism is a feminism
1 which attempts to bring about a world and a world view that are not based on socioeconomic and conceptual structures of
domination (Warren and Cheney, 1991). According to Karen J. Warren (1989), oppressive conceptual frameworks share at least the
following characteristics: 1. Value hierarchies(updown) thinking; ranking diversity. 2. Value dualismsa set of paired disjuncts in
which one disjunct is valued more than the other. Examples: male/female where males are always valued more; nature/culture
where human culture is valued more. 3. A logic of dominationwhere differences justify oppression. While there are many varieties
of ecofeminism, "all ecofeminists agree that the wrongful and interconnected dominations of women and nature exist and must be
eliminated" (Warren, 1991, 1). Warren (1989) also provides a useful schematic for conceptualizing
ecological feminism. The intersecting and complementary spheres of feminism, indigenous

knowledge, and appropriate science, development, and technology create an ecofeminist
development rationale which takes seriously epistemic privilege, women's issues, and
technologies which work in partnership with natural systems. Science and technology are needed to solve
environmental problems. Ecofeminism not only welcomes appropriate science and technology but, as an ecological feminism,
requires the inclusion of appropriate insights and data of scientific ecology (Warren and Cheney, 1991, 19093). However, as a
feminism, ecofeminism also insists that data about the historical and in terconnected exploitations
of nature and women and other oppressed peoples (i ncluding their perspectives) be recognized and
brought to bear in solutions. Ecological feminism and the science of ecology are engaged in complementary, mutually supportive
projects; ecological feminism opposes the practice of one without the other . Integrating a feminist perspective requires identifying
gendercentered biases in theory, methods of empirical inquiry, and practice and making appropriate corrections or substitutions
(Levy, 1988, 143). Gender bias enters during the selection of research topics, extends to the specification of variables and domain
assumptions that form the theoretical constructs, and continues throughout research operations and the application of the research
results. Men have traditionally defined knowledge and constructed reality by virtue of having their
theories accepted as legitimate (Smith, 1974; Spender, 1983; Gray, 1992). The maledominated scientific
enterprise has limited inquiry to the study of what males do and what men value and dismissed
as trivial scholarship by women and about women (Levy, 1988, 143). As we come to understand
theoretical constructs as social products which reflect the scientific training and the personal
biases of their creators, we must question whether the social and symbolic worlds of women can
be understood using the theories and methods that explain the social relations of males ( Levy,
1988,146).
the <aff/neg> is locked in the failed epistemology of the self-constructed rational

man, which will always remain an outsider to the worldview of women absent the
alt.
ERKAL 97 Professor of Economic at the University of Melbourne (Nisvan, Women's
Knowledge as Expert Knowledge :Indian Women and Ecodevelopment edited by Karen J.
Warren, book) */LEA
What, then, is distinctive about women's ecological knowledge? Based on the cases previously considered, I offer
several generalizations. Since we are talking of constructions of gender, we need to keep in mind that
these are, indeed, generalizations, not universal rules. No set of generalizations can capture the complexity of
women's lives. Because women have been charged with many kinds of caring labor, women's knowledge is relational.
Women tend to locate knowledge in the concrete, relational space between individuals, not in
the abstraction of isolated, autonomous individuals. The relations that define community are broader than the
human community. They include the entire ecological community, this place. Women's knowledge is inherently collaborative. It is
the project of the whole ecological community that is engaged by caring practices. A familiar example of this is home cooking. We
tend not to think of cooking as an epistemic practice that has its own rules and procedures. Yet sharing family and community
culinary traditions is a perfect example of a collaborative epistemic community. A less familiar example is sharing seeds over
generations of women farmers. Such patient development of ecological knowledge reflects the complexity of local ecosystems.
Within a single valley women often plant dozens of genetically different strains of a single crop to take advantage of subtle changes
in growing conditions. Women's knowledge is also transparently situated, not abstract and rulebound.
To form an opinion, women need to know the life histories of the people and contexts they are
speaking about. Concretely, we have seen this often means that what the outsider dismisses as waste has value within a
context, for example, grasses at the edges of a field or commons areas used by an entire village. Women's knowledge is
temporal. If it grows out of actual contexts and histories, it is also future directed. As those who have
been defined in terms of their responsibility for children and future generations, women cannot help but test their knowledge
against a criterion of sustainability. Women's knowledge is knowledge that operates not only in the spaces
between individuals but also in the times between generations. Finally, women's knowledge is
bodily knowledge. Because cultural dualisms have defined women in terms of the body and
nature, women tend to cultivate knowledge that integrates head and hand. Their knowledge
consists more in "thoughtful ways of doing" than in "ways of thinking about." We can understand why it
is easy to miss women's knowledge and thereby to abuse it. To those who look for knowledge as a decisive
intervention from above, a selfconfident declaration, women's relational knowledge can appear
indecisive. It appears to the outsider as what Plato would have called "accidentally true belief"
rather than knowledge. Women often have difficulty saying what they know about all situations. Growing out of practices
that cannot escape their temporality, women's knowledge has the appearance to outsiders of being qualified or tentative. One task
required by the revaluation of caring labor is to value this apparent tentativeness as a positive quality. Since women's knowledge is
marked by its group collaboration, for example, we should expect that Third World women's knowledge is expressed through the
group rather than through the individual. Because knowledge varies in relation to different forms of
practice, moving between forms of knowledge involves what Mara Lugones calls "world travelling" (see Lugones). Her term is useful because it emphasizes that entire worlds must be traversed for communication to
occur. If we assume, for example, that the epistemic world of the outsider, the (male)
scientific expert, is the standard against which all others are measured, it is
impossible to cross over into the world of handson expertise that is characteristic
of women's ecological knowledge. Since we are talking about different worlds of
discourse, each having its own standards for knowledge and success, there is an important
distinction between those who function as insiders to the practice and those who come to it as
outsiders. The rules of the practice are, by definition, known to the insiders, those who engage in the practice. To outsiders,
it may appear there is no knowledge at all. The outsider, particularly when motivated by conceptual biases, can easily
dismiss the real inside knowledge that motivates and sustains the practice as mere superstition or old wives' tales. Genderbiased
development programs, therefore, are not always reducible to simple malice. It may well be that from another "world" the insider's
knowledge is not or cannot be revealed. The work of those concerned with the lives of Third World women is a matter of devising
strategies for making these forms of practice and knowledge visible. While the insider's knowledge may be initially
invisible to the outsider, that does not mean it lacks power. If it is true that "real knowledge is
history that comes from below" (Rose, 162), then we must learn to recognize the intersection of forces in tribal or dalit
women that makes their forms of knowledge conceptually central to the task of reconstructing caring labor. In the "lowest of the
low," in those who must care for others without being cared for themselves, there is a praxis that is the key to sustainable
development. Those who are marginalized and charged with responsibility for caring labor cannot fail to know the lives of those who
marginalize them. The converse is not true. The master need not know the servant. Simply stated, because of their caring practices,
Third World women of low caste and class know things that othersincluding outside development expertsdo not know. Poor
Third World women cannot even pretend to escape the temporal reality of life that is demanded by caring labor. They do not have
secretaries to reschedule appointments; they do not have servants to whom work can be delegated when they are tired or busy.
Meals must come with predictable regularity, therefore food and fuel must be gathered now. Need for medical care is unpredictable;
the need is immediate and cannot wait. Women cannot afford the illusion that it is possible to escape time
and place. This is one reason for calling typically women's knowledge expert knowledge. Caring
labor produces transparent knowledge; such knowledge is superior just because it is
transparent, situated between nature and culture. Survival depends on it . In contrast, there is delusion in
constructions of life that claim to be free of time and place. While men are inevitably dependent on many forms of caring labor,
they have the power to construct the selfserving myth of themselves as independent, autonomous,
and atemporal. Patriarchal constructions work to bolster this delusive self construction.
.
2NC FRAMEWORK
Vote neg on presumption- the affs decision-making model ignores that we can
choose not to act. More often that not, short term solutions make the problem
worse in the long run
7/8/14 FG)
Furthermore, a yang perspective cannot address long-term issues, neither can it choose wu-wei, active in-action, or to conserve.
The idea of modern decision-making is to choose among proposals. Thus, the choice not to act is
not available. Hence, land use options will not be the no-use option for long-term preservation. In this way, a hidden
imperative is created: chose one action out of the presented ones, but "not to act" is not
available. This prevents a decision-making that cares about nature's long-term
reproduction and sustainability for future generations. Normally decision-making tries
to balance competing interests. However, the interest of nature and future generations are not
considered. The reason is that consumers and producers are seen as having a higher stake than
nature, future generations and tribal people, all of whom are seen as having little to loose. Since the consumers'
needs are pressing, decisions are taken in their favour. Thus in a yang perspective comparing the rights of humans against other
species, the rights of the dominant culture against indigenous people, the needs of the living against those of future generations, the
interests of development against that of nature, the politically weaker will always lose. It is in fact impossible for yang equally to
balance the rights of animals and nature against that of man. Only if we add feminine or yin concepts can we include such needs.
Harmony between yin and yang would give as much value to care for community, responsibility for nature and concern for future
generations as it would to individual rights. There is consequently a need to include interconnectedness, self-less
care, reciprocity, ethics and responsibility without having to justify these values in terms of
rights. Balancing rights and preferences are no more real or rational than the norm of preparing for a safe and secure future. Such
a change would require new concepts, institutions and practices that are based on both masculine and feminist ethics. It requires a
new and balanced way of thinking, new practices based on ecological principles, new structures and methods. Since institutions
embody and reinforce values, institutional change is an important way of stimulating such a cultural transformation. (Birkeland
1995: 69-70).
Governmental social policies favor rationality over emotion which guarantees

serial policy failure
7/8/14 FG)
These yang premises have consequences for society. Since they are presented as universal truths, a priori, there is no reason to
question them. They are assumed innate, gender neutral and absolute. Hence, dominant hierarchies and power relations are
inevitably a part of human society due to man's inherent nature. Therefore, militarism, colonialism, racism, sexism,
classism, capitalism and other pathological "isms" of modernity become legitimate. Or said differently:
If humankind by nature is egoistic, autonomous, aggressive and competitive - i.e. masculine - then control,
coercion and hierarchical structures are necessary to manage conflicts and maintain social order.
Furthermore, cooperative relationships, which are found in tribal cultures and among women,
are by definition unrealistic and utopian. In this way, power relations are removed from the political realm and social
debate, because the power structure cannot be otherwise. Thus, militarism is justified as being unavoidable,
regardless of its patent irrationality. Likewise, if humans will always compete for a greater share
of resources, then the rational response to scarce natural resources is "dog-eat-dog" survivalism.
This results in violence, environmental destruction and poverty. Or said differently: It
creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which nature and society cannot survive.
(Birkeland 1995: 59). The premises also have consequences for social policymaking. When
the rational is prioritized

and the emotional marginalized public policies can never fulfil people's needs. Denial of the
emotional blocks an understanding of human needs and motivation , because what really
motivates people is satisfaction of emotional needs. Few people are motivated by reason. If
reason could persuade human actions, nobody would pollute the air, the water and the soils,
since these are the foundation of their own survival. But in spite of this rationality prevails, which means that
social policies only can meet physical, tangible needs like food, clothing and shelter. Overlooked
are satisfaction of emotional human needs like community, self-reliance and sustainable
lifestyles. Thus, the yang concepts and policies alienate Southern women and tribal people from their community and their
natural resources, which disrupt their possibility to live sustainable lives as an integral part of nature. Therefore, when rational
development policies exploit natural resources for economic growth purposes and replace local people,
they take away nature's ability to regenerate itself and the possibility of local communities to live
sustainable lives. The consequence is that villagers end up being both psychologically and physically destitute, depending on
development policies for satisfaction of their material needs. (Birkeland 1995: 63, 68).
2NC TOOLBOX
TURNS ECO-COMMUNITIES
Ecofeminist is a prerequisite to establishing an ecologically sound community
Plan 97 feminist theorist, edited by Karen Warren (Professor and Chair of Philosophy at
Macalester College) (Judith, Ch. 7 Learning to Live with Differences: The Challenge of
Ecofeminist Community, Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen Warren,
Book) */LEA
There are many philosophers and thinkers more learned than I who could tell exactly why and how ecofeminism as a body of
thought has emerged among the many strands of feminism which exist today. What I bring to this work
is the committed belief that humanity must turn toward ecocommunity: the creation of vibrant and sustainable human
communities, a way of being in this world that reflects a respect and love for all of life and has these sentiments as fundamental
ethics. Practically speaking, this means learning to live with all the differences that are inherent and
indeed necessary for humanity's survival and for healthy and stable ecosystems. For in the
natural world, good health is sustained by a tolerance of diversity, and stability is a result of
ongoing mutual aid between and among species. Thus the notion of interdependence. This ideal of
ecocommunity must be feminist because if it is anything less I believe we will simply repeat the
same destructive patterns of the past in which someone is always better than or more deserving
than someone else. Perhaps the most essential feature of ecofeminist thought is that all
oppressionswhether men over women, First World over Third World, north over south, white over
black, adults over children, human beings over other species, society over naturehave their roots in
common. The basis of powerover, of domination of one over the other, comes from a
philosophical belief that has rationalized exploitation on such a massive scal e that we now not only have
extinguished other species but have also placed our own species on a trajectory toward selfdestruction. This philosophy that
undermines the present dominating worldview puts "man" (i.e., not woman) at the topor second to the top, second only to God the
Father. It is a hierarchical structure that repeats itself over and over again, in political and
economic organizations, in religious institutions, and in our most intimate relationships.
AFF ANSWERS
IGNORES RACE
Ecofeminism ignores the role race plays in domination and will never be able to
solve for the oppression of women of color.
Taylor 97 - Professor, Environmental Justice Field Of Studies Coordinator at the University of
Michigan (Dr. Dorceta E. Ecofeminism: women, culture, nature edited by Karen J. Warren,
Ch. 3 Women of Color, Environmental Justice, and Ecofeminism, Book) */LEA
Environmental justice activists argue that when certain environmental issues affected primarily
people of color, there was a tendency to claim that the issue was not environmental, therefore
not worthy of or suitable for discussion by environmentalists. A case in point involves the struggles of the
United Farm Workers to stop companies from spraying pesticides on workers, to document jobrelated illnesses (such as increased
incidences of birth defects), to be protected under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and to have employers provide toilets and
water in the fields. These struggles were not widely supported by environmentalists, who saw these issues as labor and health issues,
not environmental issues. Yet when there was an outbreak of Mediterranean fruit flies and the State of California decided to spray
malathion to stop the spread of the flies (i.e., in areas where white residents lived), there was a huge outcry from many in the
environmental community as well as other citizens outraged at the spraying. The issue of malathion spraying was then transformed
into an environmental issue, and claims of risks and potential birth defects became credible (claims that could be made because of
the availability of data gathered on Latina farmworkers). 26 Another aspect of this spraying that environmentalists and most of the
public failed to notice was its discriminatory nature. Environmental justice activists argue that the pattern of spraying was
discriminatory: residents in a Latino neighborhood claimed their neighborhood was sprayed more often than white
neighborhoods.27 Similarly, the case involving AsianAmerican women who work in Silicon Valley and have reproductive and other
health problems has been perceived as a labor and health issue. Consequently, the plight of these women has received scant
attention in environmental circles. However, environmental justice activist Pam Tau Lee and others consider the problems the
AsianAmerican women face as environmental problems and are collaborating with labor groups on the issue. Lead poisoning is
another case in point. When gasoline contained lead and the potential for lead poisoning was widespread, there were high levels of
public concern over lead. Now, with lead removed from gasoline, AfricanAmerican and Latino children are most at risk for exposure
to high levels of lead, 28 and lead is no longer a highpriority issue for many environmental groups. People of color have
pointed to such narrow, often inflexible definitions as types of discourses that have an
exclusionary or marginalizing effect on people who do not share the same perceptions,
experiences, and world view as those from the dominant, most powerful environmental
organizations. There is strong resistance to new ideas, new definitions, and new kinds of discourses from
these organizations.29 Because people of color define the environment more broadly, look at the
disproportionate effects of hazards on race, gender, age, and social class, and take innovative
alternative approaches to solving environmental problems, they are often excluded from crucial
environmental dialogues. Alternative Focus Recognizing that a narrow definition limits the discussion and the approach to
problem solving, environmental groups of color are attempting to change the way environmental
issues are looked at. They see peopleofcolor communities, urban and poor rural, as environments worthy of attention and
understanding. This is in contrast to other sectors of the environmental movement that focus primarily on wildlife habitats or
wildlands as the environments for which they seek health and sustainability. The ethnic minority environmental
groups see the human environment as being intricately linked to the physical environment, and
they believe the health of one depends on the health of the other.30 Therefore, if the human
environment is poisoned or has been targeted to be poisoned, if there are no opportunities for economic
survival or nutritional sustenance, or if there are no possibilities to be sheltered, then these human
environmental issues have to be dealt with before, or in conjunction with, other kinds of environmental
issues. This is not an attempt to make humans dominant over the rest of nature; it is a way to
say that humans, particularly people of color who have been ignored or thought of as expendable
by many capitalists and environmentalists, are a part of the ecosystem . It is a way of bringing
people of color back into the equation. People of color want to stop the destruction of the earth,
not dominate it. This position was clearly articulated in discussions and in the principles of environmental justice adopted at
the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, already listed. Environmental justice activists
are critical of the tendency to compartmentalize and fragment ideas and knowledge of the
environment, environmental problem definition, and problem resolution. Such fragmentation
has contributed to the neglect of minority communities. These activists do not partition the environment and
discuss it in separate spheres. They do not separate the home sphere from the work sphere, the leisure/recreation/outdoor sphere
from the religious/spiritual or political sphere. These spheres are all linked when they define a problem or fight or resolve issues.
This occurs because people of color often live, work, play, and worship in the same environment or community setting. A definition
of environment that requires the individual to focus on forest or wilderness protection without any consideration of health,
occupational safety, or recreation is not an option for people of color. In the communities from which they hail, one cannot
attempt to improve any aspect of environmental quality without trying to improve the human
quality of life and vice versa. This vision is more holistic than the disjointed approach taken by most
environmentalists. Although basic ecological principles and the rhetoric of most environmental groups advocate a holistic
approach to dealing with environmental issues, in practice many environmentalists think about the environment in fragmented
ways. Environmental justice activists are striving to be more holistic in their approach to environmental activism. Other sectors
of the movement, such as deep ecology and ecofeminism, also advocate a holistic approach to
environmental activism. 31 Building Alliances The alliances that were important in the civil rights movement have also
become important in the environmental justice movement. People of color have embarked on this quest for environmental justice in
close partnership with religious institutions. For example, the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ has
emerged as a major player in this movement through its involvement in the Warren County campaign, its production of the Toxic
Wastes and Race document (1987), and its cosponsorship of the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. In
addition, there is a strong alliance with labor and occupational health and safety groups. This being the case, issues that other
environmentalists would consider outside their domain are issues that environmental justice activists focus on. Civil and
Environmental Rights In 1962, Carson (Silent Spring) presented a chilling documentation of the effects of pesticide production and
use. In addition to reevaluating the use of pesticides, she argued that individuals had a right to be protected from poisons applied by
others to the environment and that they should have a right to legal redress when this right is violated. Thirty years later,
environmental justice groups are making a similar argument about harm and redress. They argue that individuals have a right to
safe jobs, housing, and environments. They say that civil rights cannot be separated from environmental rights and environmental
justice. 32 That is, when people of color are forced to live with disproportionate numbers of solid waste dumps, incinerators, and
toxic production facilities in their backyards and to take hazardous jobs, and when the patterns of siting dangerous facilities have
been shown to be discriminatory, then people's civil rights have been violated. They don't just fight for an end to toxic exposures;
they link this fight to increased opportunities for safer jobs, improved health, and safer communities. Political Strategies People
of color have not only brought the notions of civil rights and environmental rights to the
forefront of the environmental debate; they have also reintroduced civil rights strategies as a
means of accomplishing their goals. Grassroots demonstrations, toxic marches, civil disobedience, mass arrests,
lawsuits, community organizing and education, crafting legislation, and skillful use of the media are some of the more successful
strategies being used.33 Table 5 compares traditional and environmental justice political strategies. As one can see,
environmental justice groups are using radical and revolutionary directaction strategies in
combination with more mainstream and institutional tactics, such as filing lawsuits. It is striking how much
public education, research, and community organizing these groups engage in. In contrast, the traditional and
wellestablished environmental organizations rely on radical, directaction political strategies . Some
activists involved in these campaigns had little or no knowledge of environmental issues or had little training in political activism
and civil disobedience when they started their first campaigns, yet they were willing to advocate environmental causes. For example,
in South Central Los Angeles, AfricanAmerican women such as Shilela Cannon (of Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles)
and Latinas such as Juana Gutierrez (of Mothers of East Los Angeles) fought hard to stop an incinerator from being placed in their
neighborhood. In another example, AfricanAmerican women such as Dollie Burwell, along with men and children, stood and lay in
front of trucks in Warren County, North Carolina, to prevent them from taking toxics to the dump.34 Scenes like these have been
repeated all over the country, with people of various racial and ethnic groups participating. Environmental justice groups are critical
of industry and the way in which industrial activities affect minority communities, but they also criticize environmentalists for
ignoring the conditions in minority communities and for the way in which environmental agendas are set. Consequently,they have
embarked on a strategy to isolate the most powerful and influential environmental organizations and scutinize them publicly. This
strategy has left these highprofile environmental groups groping for responses to questions relating to the racial composition of their
membership, workforce, and boards; their hiring practices; and their past and present actions and agenda. People of color have also
demonstrated that alliances of progressive environmentalists, policymakers, religious organizations, social service organizations,
academics, and labor can make for a vibrant and healthy movement; the numerous conferences, workshops, and research projects
that have resulted from these alliances have enhanced the growth of the movement. People of color have used the spiritual,
intellectual, and political energies and the talents of activists to identify the needs of their communities and to chart a course of
action to meet these needs. Women of Color and the Environmental Movement The role of women of color in the environmental
justice movement cannot be understated. In no other sector of the environmental movement (not even in the more progressive or
radical sectors) can one find such high percentages of women of color occupying positions as founders and leaders of organizations,
workshop and conference organizers, researchers, strategists, lawyers, academics, policymakers, community organizers, and
environmental educators. As table 6 shows, 49% of 205 peopleofcolor environmental justice groups had women as founders,
presidents, or chief contact persons. In twentytwo of the thirtynine jurisdictions listed, more than 50 percent of the groups had
women leaders. A similar analysis in Malaspina et al. (1993) shows that 59 percent of the environmental justice groups profiled were
led by women, many of whom were women of color. Similarly, about 48 percent of the delegates attending the People of Color
Environmental Leadership Summit were women of color. 35 Table 7 shows that much lower percentages of the women are listed as
occupying leadership positions in the traditional, mainly mainstream, predominantly white organizations. Ecofeminism There is
no question that ecofeminists broke new ground when they began arguing that the capitalist
exploitation of resources was connected to the degradation of nature and women. They
introduced a feminist perspective to traditional ways of perceiving and relating to the
environment that was badly needed. This type of critique, long ignored in a maledominated
movement, opened up the discourse and expanded the environmental debates to some extent .
However, despite the ecofeminists' success in getting gender issues and alternative critiques of the
capitalist, patriarchal system into the environmental dialogue, they, like other
environmentalists, have done little to bring the issues of central concern to women of color (and
men of color) to the forefront of the environmental dialogue in a consistent and earnest way or
to make such issues a central part of their agenda. Although some ecofeminists are making an
effort to increase their awareness and deal with issues of immediate concern to women of color,
there is still much to be done to ameliorate the situation. This part of the chapter explores differences and
similarities between womenofcolor environmental justice activists and ecofeminists. It also discusses changes that will have to occur
within ecofeminism if it is to become more attractive to environmental justice activists of color. Ecofeminists match the
racial and socioeconomic profiles of traditional environmentalists, that is, they are
predominantly white and middle class. However, they differ significantly from members of traditional environmental
groups when it comes to the role of women. While males control the discourse (formulating theories and policies and setting
agendas) and leadership positions in most of the traditional and wellestablished sectors of the environmental movement, in
ecofeminism women define the movement and the theories, control and disseminate ideas, and craft political strategies. The white
women who consider themselves ecofeminists have founded, defined, and shaped a movement that reflects their perceptions of
reality, their experiences, and their cultural heritage. Consequently, it does not come as a surprise to most women
of color that as it is currently conceived, ecofeminism does not adequately consider the
experiences of women of color; neither does it fully understand or accept the differences
between white women and women of color. According to ecofeminist scholars, there are four
types of feminismliberal, Marxist, radical, and socialistand two kinds of ecofeminism arising
from them: radical ecofeminism is the more common. 36 While some feminist, including Simone de Beauvoir,
repudiate the womennature connection, claiming that such arguments have a negative impact on women,37 radical ecofeminists
affirm the womennature connection.38 Some womanists also associate the domination and destruction of nature with the abuse of
black women's bodies.39 The typology laid out by ecofeminists is not very helpful in trying to understand the lives, experiences, and
activism of women of color; it doesn't even recognize womanism or any of the other kinds of feminism with which women of color
strongly identify.40 Although AfricanAmerican women and other women of color have repeatedly
argued that the foregoing formulation does not adequately reflect their experiences,
ecofeminists still adhere to it. There is a slight glimmer of hope that change is possible. A few ecofeminists have started
making references to many feminisms and ecofeminisms, but even these ecofeminists do not attempt to make fundamental changes
in the definition.41 As long as this basic definition remains intact, women of color will not be lulled into thinking there has been
fundamental change and will continue to raise questions about typologies and definitions. Race and Domination One reality that
ecofeminists continue to miss is that women of color cannot simply aim their criticisms at
patriarchy or at men and cannot seek liberation only for themselves. The political activism of
women of color in the environmental justice movement is very complex. These women of color
will agree that they are fighting gender issues (e.g., toxics invading the home and workplace and threatening their
lives, health, reproduction, and families), but they will also argue that they are fighting much more than that. Their fight is
also about racial and sexual discrimination, inequality, civil rights, and labor rights. The
feminist and ecofeminist framework laid out by scholars fails to capture this complexity or the
uniqueness of womenofcolor environmental justice activism. Male domination and the institutions of
patriarchy are major components of the ecofeminist critique of society. While ecofeminists perceive that they are
dominated by white men and seek to eliminate patriarchal barriers, women of color perceive
their inequality differently. They are dominated not only by white men but also by men of color
and by white women. In addition, they work closely with men of color who are also dominated by
white men. So while ecofeminists perceive a unidirectional form of domination (in which females do not
dominate and in which their dominator is not dominated), women of color perceive sexual domination
differently. The domination is multidirectional, and both males and females are dominated or
are dominators. Therefore gender equality for women of color means something quite different
from what it means for white women. While both white women and women of color have some commonality in the fact
that both groups are oppressed by men, women of color have to deal with oppression from women, too. 42 Whereas there is much
discussion in ecofeminist writings about oppositesex oppression, there is a distinct reluctance to discuss samesex oppression.
ESSENTIALIZES NATIVES
Ecofeminisms conceptions of ecologically noble Arctic peoples is relies on
racism that is ingrained in the movement.
Buege 97- Environmentalist and author of If a Tree Falls (Douglas, Epistemic Responsibility
and the Inuit of Canadas Eastern Arctic, edited by Karen J. Warren, book) */LEA
Karen J. Warren's ecofeminist philosophy reconceptualizes theory as theoryinprogress; her metaphorical ecofeminist quilt is
stitched from a collection of individual ecofeminist narratives that combine to create ecoeminist theory (Warren 1990). Each patch
of the quilt is informed by three areas: feminism; science, development, and technology; and local and indigenous knowledge
(Warren 1992). The present work offers direction in creating patches for this quilt representing narratives of Inuit cultural groups.
Warren maintains that patches for the ecofeminist quilt must meet certain boundary conditions. In this chapter, I am further
explicating Warren's first boundary condition: "nothing gets on the quilt which is naturist, sexist, racist, classist, and so forth"
(Warren 1990, 141). Inuit ways of life need to be represented in ecofeminist theory, but EuropeanAmerican perceptions of the Inuit
must be examined in order to prevent these perceptions from being racist, classist, or sexist. I maintain that the Inuit are subject to
treatment that is not commonly understood as, yet is, racist, sexist, and classist. "Primitive" Ideologies In this section, I will
discuss some central issues involved in including indigenous peoples' knowledge in ecofeminist
theory. I think it is reasonable to say that before nonInuit people can understand any Arctic cultural
groups, we (nonInuit) must examine how our perceptions of these people are already structured .
We have preconceived notions of what life is like for dwellers of the Arctic. We also have
misconceptions of what the Arctic is as a physical environment. 4 It would go against our core
beliefs for those of us involved in ecofeminism to ignore misconceptions that may make our
theory problematic. In the 1920s, filmmaker Robert Joseph Flaherty made and released the documentary Nanook of the
North. This silent film was a boxoffice smash in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Flaherty described his intentions in making
the movie: "I wanted to show the Innuit. And I wanted to show them, not from the civilized point of view, but as they saw
themselves, as 'we the people' " (quoted in Griffith 1953). Despite Flaherty's intentions, people were drawn to the exotic culture of
the "Eskimos"5 depicted in the film and romanticized a lifestyle that was so incredibly different from the daytoday existence they
experienced in Cleveland, Paris, or wherever. Visions of Nanook standing on the ice in caribou skins thrusting a spear mesmerized
audiences and invited them to fantasize about life in the Arctic. This film did not present Nanook and his kin as political, intellectual
beings; it portrayed them as savages with subsistence lifestyles, emphasizing the severity of such existence. Audiences, stunned by
the harsh environmental conditions, could not avoid being awed by this severity. I contend that many of the perceptions of Nanook's
culture this film fostered are still alive today, more than seventy years after Nanook himself starved to death. Marianna Torgovnick
discusses perceptions of peoples such as the Inuit in her book Gone Primitive. She explains how the idea of primitive cultures elicits
many widely held preconceptions: Primitives are like children.... P rimitives are our untamed selves, our id forces -
libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies.
Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the "lowest cultural levels"; we occupy the "highest," in the
metaphors of stratification and hierarchy commonly used [by some anthropologists ]. (Torgovnick 1990, 8) She
argues that these conceptions of primitive people do not arise out of a knowledge of these people; instead, such ideologies a re
created by outsiders, European Americans, in order to shape the Inuit and other groups into something
we desire. Perhaps we are thrilled by the idea of savages living in a severe climate under the harshest of social and economic
conditions. If that is what we desire, that may be how we view the Inuit. 6 Our conceptions of indigenous people are not merely
descriptive; they also carry normative force. When I visited Baffin Island, NWT, in 1988, I was taken aback by the acned teenage
Inuit wearing acidwashed blue jeans and leather bomber jackets, playing video games. I didn't want the Inuit to be like people back
home in Wisconsin. I wanted them to be rugged, dressed in the native garb I had come to expect. My vision of what it means to be
Inuit involved my deciding what an Inuit should be. Such ideas, when expressed, tend to undermine the selfdetermination of the
Inuit people. They also expose prejudices that I have, prejudices that should not be included in ecofeminist theory, even though
ecofeminists do acknowledge the inevitability of these prejudices, given our social history. One particularly potent
ideology concerning indigenous peoples is the idea of the "ecologically noble savage." 7 We are led to
believe that the Inuit are particularly ecologically responsible people, that they are in harmony with their natural environments. But
such a viewpoint cannot stand up to the scrutiny it deserves. The Inuit took to guns and ammunition, steel pots and tools, Skidoos
and television, very quickly. Many are willing to exploit the natural resources on their land holdings. The North Slope Inupiat of
Alaska have taken strong prodevelopment stances, prompted by the possibility of gaining economically from the sale of oil from their
land (Eathorne 1991). The conception of the ecologically noble savage is challenged by much evidence, yet seems to be maintained.
One problem with the ideology of the ecologically noble Inuit is that it leads us to expect a
certain type of behavior from the Inuit, a behavior that they do not live up to and that often
proves damaging to their cultural integrity. To expect the Inuit to return to their traditional hunting ways is to
impose our values upon them, values that we obviously do not hold as strongly toward our own societies. Since ecofeminists
cannot knowingly perpetuate sexism, racism, or classism, we cannot expect the Inuit to abandon
their Skidoos and motorboats, along with all the other "luxuries" of a market economy, so that they live up to
our expectations. A more significant problem that stems from viewing the Inuit as primitive is that such a perspective
comprehends the Inuit as children, as people who need to be taken care of in this modern world, a world to which they are quite
foreign yet with which we EuropeanAmericans believe we are quite well acquainted. 8 The result of this view is that we find a need to
minister to their religious, political, educational, and economic needs. Thus the Inuit tend to become reliant upon the
systems we set up to benefit them, creating a self perpetuating cycle of dependence which seems
to confirm our original ideas of the primitive as child . In effect, the ideology of the primitive serves
as a seemingly irrefutable rationalization for patriarch. Warren maintains that any theory that is
considered ecofeminist must be antiracist, anticlassist, and antisexist (it rejects "all other 'isms' of social
domination as well") (Warren 1990, 141). Ecofeminism must also be antiprimitivist. An awareness of
primitivism is important for ecofeminist theory concerning the Inuit, as well as many other
cultural groups that have traditionally been stereotyped as primitive.
Ecofeminisms essentialization of American Indian women prevents effective

solutions to ecological problems, and exposes the contradiction in the so-called
connection between women and nature.
Sturgeon 97 Professor and Dean of Environmental Studies at York University (Nol, The
Nature of Race: Discourses of Racial Difference in Ecofeminism, Ch. 15 Ecofeminism : Women,
Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J Warren, Book) */LEA
In this section, I want to look specifically at the relation of American Indian women to a movement which so far has had
predominantly white participants. To say this is not to make invisible all of the feminist environmental activists who are American
Indians, several of whom are prominent ecofeminist activists and theorists. But ecofeminism has been primarilya
white women's political identification. As I have implied, it does not necessarily follow that the movement cannot be
antiracist because it has mostly white participants. It is an important and encouraging phenomenon that white activists take on the
responsibility of analyzing racism and acting against it without first requiring that people of color be present in a movement. But
much of ecofeminist discourse about Native American women silences their voices even while
idealizing them. This process, besides supporting racism, prevents ecofeminists from effectively
envisioning solutions to environmental problems. To give a few examples of this discourse, I will use as
representative artifacts of U.S. ecofeminism two anthologies, Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, edited by Judith
Plant and published by New Society Publishers in 1989 (hereafter HTW); and Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofemism,
edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein and published by Sierra Club Books in 1990 (hereafter RTW). While there are other
important ecofeminist books, and at least two more anthologies recently published, these books are exemplary representatives of the
diversity within ecofeminism, the many voices staking out the territory. However, in terms of racial or ethnic identification, this
diversity is represented in some problematic ways. HTW has twentyseven articles whose authors' racial or ethnic identification is as
follows: two Native American, one AfricanAmerican, four Indian (Asian), twenty EuropeanAmerican. RTW has twentysix articles:
one Native American, three AfricanAmerican, one Indian (Asian), and twentyone EuropeanAmerican. 26 Again, the fact that
EuropeanAmerican women are the most represented authors is not necessarily problematic in itself. But it brings up a question.
Why should American Indian cultures, their rituals, beliefs, and practices, be so frequently
referenced in the articles written by the EuropeanAmerican women? Native American cultures
appear so often in ecofeminist writings because they represent ecological cultures that in some
instances can also make claims to relative equality between men and women . The combination seems to
be ecofeminist by definition. Furthermore, imagining that American Indian women embody the "special
relation" between women and nature at the same time that they are portrayed as representing
nonpatriarchal cultures achieves an apparent resolution to one of the major contradictions
within ecofeminism which I identified at the start of this chapter. The figure of the Native American woman as
the "ultimate ecofeminist" mediates, for white ecofeminists, the conflict between the critique of
the patriarchal connection between women and nature and the desire for that very connection .
But there has been resistance among American Indian women to being identified as ecofeminist. Winona LaDuke, an Anishinabeg
feminist and environmental activist, when asked if she called herself an ecofeminist, stated that while she was glad there was an
ecofeminist movement developing, she thought of her activism as stemming from her acculturation as a member of her people. 27
Marie Wilson, a Gitksan woman who is interviewed in HTW, expresses a similar isolation from ecofeminism: "Though I agree with
the analysis, the differences must be because of where I come from. In my mind, when I speak about women, I speak about
humanity because there is equality in the Gitksan belief: the human is one species broken into two necessary parts, and they are
equal."28 Another uneasiness expressed by Native American women concerns the use of their
spirituality within ecofeminism, stemming from the intersection of ecofeminism and New Age feminist spirituality.
Though this is only one strand within ecofeminism as a political movement, the use of American Indian rituals and
the symbolic positioning of Native American women as white ecofeminists' spiritual teachers
comes close to what Andy Smith, a Cherokee woman, has characterized as "spiritual abuse."29 Smith has argued that
the use of American Indian spirituality in the New Age movement without a concomitant willingness to
get to know Native American communities and become allies of American Indian political struggles
constitutes a silencing of Native Americans. Furthermore, generalizing American Indian spirituality
to apply it to white ecofeminist concerns violates the very embedment, of spirituality in land and
tribe that attracts white ecofeminists. As Smith says, "Indian religions are communitybased, not proselytizing
religions. For this reason, there is no one Indian religion."30 Given that there are these problems in asking Native American women
to identify as ecofeminists, does this mean that ecofeminism cannot learn from American Indians a concept of nature and perhaps,
in some cases, examples of more equal relationships between women and men? Why shouldn't ecofeminists, as long as they
participate in Native American movements and treat Native American culture with respect, continue to point to the more ecological
cosmology, economic practices, and equal social relationships developed by some American Indians? Can ecofeminists use Native
American philosophy and practice as resources for constructing theory and creating strategies for action? The problem here
lies in the characterization of indigenous people as the "ultimate ecologists, " to use Calvin Martin's
phrase.31 This is a common feature of European American environmentalism and a legacy of that movement for ecofeminists.
Certainly, many Native American conceptions of nature seem to lend themselves to environmentalism in that they generally don't
make adversarial distinctions between humans and animals or humans and nature. The sense that life involves constant change
within a balanced system and that the interdependence of all living and nonliving beings constitutes the environment seems, in
comparison with Western beliefs, to be not only more ecological but also (at least potentially) more feminist. But there are several
problems with the valorization of Native American conceptualizations of nature. First, the idea that it is possible to borrow from
Native American culture without practicing an American Indian way of life once again does not respect the way in which Native
American concepts of nature are embedded in Native American cultural practice. Furthermore, such a conceptualization
places American Indians closer to nature in ways which some ecofeminists analyze as being
negative for women. To me, these problems are amusingly brought home by a remark made by a Native American man to
Judith Plant, who quotes him in her article in HTW. "You and us, we're different," this unnamed Indian man said to Plant, "but
we're sort of the same, too. You want to learn to live off this place, we can already do this. You value the salmon, we value the
salmon. You don't trust the government, neither do we. Not all Indian people are like us. Not all white people are like you. We're the
natives and you're the naturals." At which point, according to Plant, "he roared with laughter." 32 This labeling, this distinction
between ''natives" and "naturals," is very telling. A "native" is primarily identified with a very specific and fixed area of land; a
"natural" must have a preexisting distinction between culture and nature, and perhaps between civilization and primitivism, in order
to "return" to "nature." As long as ecofeminists rely on notions of Native Americans as more naturally
ecological, they will present access into Native American cultural practices only through a logic
of rejecting culture for nature. Ironically, this theoretical move contains notions of separation between the two concepts
which are radically different from much American Indian philosophy. A second problem lies in the dehistoricizing
and stereotypical results of the ecofeminist idealization of Native American culture. As the man in
Plant's article says, "Not all Indians are like us. Not all white people are like you." Discussions of American Indians as
the "ultimate ecologists" tend to generalize across tribal cultures and obscure the specific
problems and varied solutions which compound Indian struggles for cultural survival. What
happens when Native Americans choose strategies for their struggles which go against ecofeminist political theory and practice? Will
they then become "bad Indians" instead of "noble savages"? Marie Wilson expresses this fear when she says: "I have had the awful
feeling that when we are finished dealing with the courts and our land claims, we will then have to battle the environmentalists and
they will not understand why. I feel quite sick at this prospect because the environmentalists want these beautiful places kept in a
state of perfection. ... In a way this is like deny ing that life is happening constantly in these wild places, that change is always
occurring. Human life must be there too. Humans have requirements and they are going to have to use some of the life in these
places."" 33 Valorization of the ecological and feminist elements of Native American culture reinvigorates a noble savage stereotype
with a dangerous history in this country. Furthermore, the return of the this stereotype creates a conceptual paradox in which
ecological and feminist solutions are seen to reside in tribal huntingandgathering societies. Because of the way in which the
stereotyping of Indian culture prevents knowledge and analysis of the various ways in which Native American tribal cultures have
changed, have been both resistant and accommodating to the dominant EuropeanAmerican culture, the noblesavage stereotype
brings with it the myth of the "vanished Indian." The "ecological" tribal cultures held up for imitation are thus characterized as either
disappearing or preserved in some ideal state. Besides preventing white ecofeminists from really hearing what Native American
women think are serious issues in their communities, this characterization creates a stumbling block for ecofeminists trying to
imagine solutions to the complexity of contemporary ecological problems. If the only way we can live as ecofeminists is to "return'' to
a huntinggathering culture, we cannot begin to inspire people to take action now in the middle of their urban, industrialized, global,
environments. If white ecofeminists stopped ideologically separating nature from culture, they would not become tribal peoples
rather, they would be challenged to creatively deal with the politics of their daily technology, their cyborg natures.34 Ecofeminists
would have to start imagining nature as including the urban and constructed landscapes in which many of us live. This would put
ecofeminists in a position, once again, to ally themselves with antiracist environmental movements that are concentrated on urban
problems. Ecofeminists could then share in developing activist strategies that could provide the basis for an effective coalition
politics, not just between white ecofeminists and Native American women environmentalists but across the multitude of differences
that divide women. Earlier, I suggested that it is useful to think of the task of ecofeminist theory as developing strategic connections
between feminism and environmentalism, rather than between women and nature. The antiracist theories we use are one important
link between these political movements. I have argued that ecofeminism inherits a legacy of discourses about
racial difference from feminist antimilitarism and white environmentalism that needs to be
critically examined if ecofeminism is to be able to create an effective antiracist political strategy . I
have identified problems with a binary conception of race and with a valorization of Native American women as the "ultimate
ecofeminists." In both cases, I suggest two intertwined approaches to these problems. First, we need to acknowledge and
analyze the ways in which U.S. racism operates in multiple arenas, developing a historical
understanding of the ways in which racism is reproduced and maintained. Second, I believe that
we need to use the antiracist theory developed by people of color to examine the ways in which
racism constructs white as well as nonwhite subjects. Otherwise, "women of color" will remain
"natural resources" for white ecofeminists rather than feminist environmentalists with whom we
can have solidarity in political struggles. These suggestions do not, of course, exhaust the elements necessary for a
successful antiracist ecofeminist agenda. 35 But they are one place to start.
WAR BAD
Even if their arguments are true, the aff is still a good idea- women suffer the most
from wars which only the aff prevents
7/8/14 FG)
The negative consequences from war are tremendous. In Africa alone, economic losses
resulting from wars total 15 billion Euros per year. Such an amount of money could do much
social good if spend on poverty alleviation. Instead, the investments are causing horrendous
human losses. During the 1990's an estimated 5 million people died in violent conflicts. Of the total number of
people killed in conflicts since the end of the Cold War, 90% were civilians. Half of
these are children. Of all civilians killed in wars, 90% die at the hands of small firearms. The Congo war was the
deadliest since the 2nd World War. 1,000 people died every day. Half of them were children. 4 million people died during the last 6
years, 98% of these died from diseases and malnutrition. In 1994, UNICEF issued a report on the effects that wars and conflicts have
on children in the world: During the decade 1984-1994 2 million children died, 4 to 5 million were disabled, 5 million became
refugees and 12 million children were made homeless. Over 300,000 children under the age of 18 years serve in armies or in armed
gangs. Some are as young as 8 years. A 2006 report from Save the Children adds that 43 million children are unable to go to school
because of conflicts and wars. (Rowe 1997: 241; Ode September 2004: 11; BBC News 10.12.2004; BBC News 12.09.2006). According
to Heyzer, (1995: 13)
war is a gender-differentiated activity of which women are the worst
victims. Violence against women during war is common. They are being used, abused and
mistreated in wars. The cumulated effects give significant difficulties for women . It generates physical and
psychological suffering and gives obstacles for women's individual growth, their self-worth and
their ability to participate in society. In wars, there is consequently no victory for women, no
matter which side wins. (Heyzer 1995: 13; Rowe 2000: 369). Rape is routinely viewed as a privilege of
victors in war. During the mid to late 1990s, mass military rapes of women and children in
Rwanda, Somalia, Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina were common knowledge. According to
human rights, organization rape was used as an instrument of policy by Serbian forces and paramilitary groups in both Kosovo and
Bosnia. Rape was also official policy for the Hutus when they attacked their Tutsi neighbours in Rwanda in 1994. Similar policy is
currently applied in the Darfur region of Sudan. It is extremely difficult to quantify wartime rape. The estimates vary widely. In
former Yugoslavia, the figures are estimates to be between 11.900 and 20,000 victims. However, the systematic rape of
women by the Hutus in Rwanda amounts to hundreds of thousands of women, most of who
were murdered. Children were raped along with their mothers. It was also official policy to
infect the women with Aids. The idea was to let them live so that they would infect Tutsi men
before they died. Even though rape during war was recognized in 1995 as a prosecutable war crime, the military rape
continues. (BBC News December 2005; Rowe 2000: 371; Warren 2000: 208-209).
NO ALT
Theres no alternative lack of theory and plethora of contradictions ensures
failure
Mills, 91 Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Patricia, Feminism and Ecology: On the Domination
of Nature, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 220-221 edited by
Karen Warren)//schnall
While I agree with King's assessment of Daly and Griffin, I find that her "arguments" remain rhetorical and
polemical, so that this later work is no more sophisticated in its analysis and no closer to the
"precise political philosophy and program" that she calls for than is her earlier piece. King's
programmatic plundering of theories (the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Bookchin's anarchism, socialist
feminism, radical cultural feminism), which is meant to bolster the political project of ecofeminism,
remains rooted in an abstract pro-nature stance that continues to call for theory but rarely
provides it. She tells us over and over again that we must have a "truly dialectical theory" and a "reconciliation with
nature" in order to "get beyond dualism," but she refuses the difficult conceptual work that might get
us there. King's concern is first and foremost one of political practicetheory is the handmaid of practice for her, as feminism is
the handmaid of the ecology movement. In her search for the dialectical praxis that is to point the way to freedom, King refers to the
important political work done by the women's health movement in the West to rescue childbirth from "medical experts," thereby
reclaiming women's power over our bodies and our lives. But even as she reclaims a focus on women's procreational power she again
fails to delineate a politics of abortion, offering no principle for grounding the feminist struggle for reproductive freedom.13 She also
cites "the hugging movement" initiated by women in India who wrap themselves around trees to prevent the destruction of their
forests. These two movements represent the "nonoppositional opposition" that is the foundation of King's ecofeminist politics.
When King does turn to theory, she offers a critique of what she sees as the three dominant forms of feminism (liberal
feminism, radical feminism, and socialist feminism) in terms of the problem of the domination of nature. What she then puts
forward as a "solution" is an ecofeminism that is said to be a dialectical "synthesis" of radical cultural

feminism and socialist feminism.14 According to King this synthesis offers a "standpoint theory"15 that recognizes
biological difference and recognizes women as unique historical agents who do the mediating work ("mothering, cooking, healing,
farming, foraging") that bridges the relation between nature and culture (1989, 130). While critical of radical cultural feminism for
its biological determinism, King argues that it has at least recognized the importance of "natural" sexual difference for the social
world (1989, 129). And although King is critical of socialist feminism for its Marxist inclination to maintain the domination of nature
and the social construction of reality (to the detriment of the qualitative, imaginative, and spiritual aspects of human life), she sees it
as offering a resistance to the erasure of the subject by postmodernism. Beginning from the gynocentrism of radical cultural
feminism we are to move to a "greener" and more "spiritual" socialist feminism that recants the domination of nature. According
to King, "Separately [socialist feminism and radical cultural feminism] perpetuate the dualism
of 'mind' and 'nature.' Together they make possible a new ecological relationship between nature
and culture, in which mind and nature, heart and reason, join forces to transform the internal and
external systems of domination that threaten the existence of life on earth" (1989, 132). Just how is this dialectical
"synthesis" of socialist feminism and radical cultural feminism to take place? Is this merely another form of neo-Hegelianism that is
being called for? It seems so, insofar as King calls for a dialectical reconciliation of opposites in a final moment of identity-indifference. If King's ecofeminism is just another form of neo-Hegelianism, then the fact that Hegel's
philosophy remains committed to the domination of nature and all that is deemed Other
prevents the realization of her project. If this is not a form of neo-Hegelianism, then how are we
to understand King's project in which we are to take only what King deems "good" from each
form of feminism while leaving aside what is "bad"? Without a more profound analysis of the
contradictions that emerge out of the confrontation between these two forms of feminism, the
call for their synthesis remains conceptually incoherent. It returns us to the problem of extracting parts from
the whole, which was shown to be treacherous in my earlier critique of Balbus.
2AC PERMUTATION
The perm solves best- ecofeminist principles can help inform policy choices
Ellinger-Locke, 2010- Lawyer with a B.A. in Ecofeminism from Antioch College (Maggie,
Food Sovereignty is a Gendered Issue, Published in the Buffalo Environmental Law Journal,
Like feminism, ecological feminism or "ecofeminism," has many definitions. As discussed here, ecofeminism is considered
the study of the oppression of women, the study of the degradation of the Earth, how they are
interrelated and, more importantly, what steps can be taken to change this situation. n148 Ecofeminist
theory and practice, or praxis, have been linking these twin systems of power for years, and it appears that La Va Campesina and
other social movements have also made the connection. While certainly not without serious criticism, ecofeminism can
provide policy and law makers with the tools needed to reform the food system. Ecofeminist and law
professor Heather McLeod-Kilmurray states that "[f]eminst legal analysis has shown that the framework and
underlying concepts of law have tended to be part of the problem rather than the solution in
resolving inequality and discrimination... an ecofeminist analysis can do the same for
environmental law." n149 Another ecofeminist legal scholar, Elaine Hughes, explains the purpose of ecofeminism:
"ecofeminists take the radical feminist critique of male/female relationships and use it to illuminate the character of human/nature
relationships. In so doing, they reveal both the causes and characteristics of, and the interconnections between, the objectification of
women and the environment." n150 There are two main and one emerging branch of ecofeminism. The first is the cultural branch
embraced by such activists as Starhawk and exemplified by the women's action at the Pentagon in 1980. n151 These ecofeminists
believe that the [*188] women/nature connection is a good thing, something to be valued and honored. They see women's
differences as sources of power and believe that women are closer to the earth then men. n152 The second main branch is social
ecofeminism that rejects the essentialism of the cultural ecofeminist approach, arguing that viewing women as so connected to
nature is dangerous and reinscribes the power dynamics that feminists seek to escape. n153 Both of these branches have been
critiqued by poor women and women of color as not being inclusive enough of their identities and experiences. n154 Thus, the
emerging third way, as exemplified by third wave feminism, takes these analyses into account and rejects the privileging of one
identity over the others. n155 Third wave ecofeminism embraces strategic uses of essentialism n156 for the purposes of organizing,
and recognizes how careful one must be in this regard. Third wave ecofeminism is an approach that, if embraced, will mitigate the
damage being wrought across the globe to women, children, and all living things. For example, Vandana Shiva is representative of
this new approach. She writes: The feminist perspective is able to go beyond the categories of patriarchy
that structure power and meaning in nature and society. It is broader and deeper because it
locates production and consumption within the context of regeneration... [*189] by making these links,
ecological feminism creates the possibility of viewing the world as an active subject, not merely a
resource to be manipulated and appropriated... That search and experience of interdependence and integrity is the
basis for creating a science and knowledge that nurtures rather than violates nature's sustainable systems. n157 [emphasis in
original] Applying a feminist lens to the global food system illuminates the unequal power dynamics inherent in the current global
food system, both in terms of production and consumption. Using the ecofeminist principles of food sovereignty can
provide guidance towards constructing new policy proposals for law makers and regulators.
Perm do both- uniting masculine and feminine mindsets solves the aff and causes
a mindset shift like the alternative suggests
7/8/14 FG)
The one-sided yang evolution has now reached a highly alarming stage: Modern society can control spacecrafts landing on distant planets, but they
cannot control pollution from cars and factories. They produce little essential products like cosmetics and tinned pet food, but they cannot afford to
provide people with basic health and education facilities. Science was meant to improve life, but its intrusive technology and its
focus on economic profit endangers natural and human health and generates poverty. In addition, paradoxically, most "defence" ministries have
become the greatest threat to national security! This is the result of overemphasizing the yang or masculine side and neglecting the yin or feminine side.
(Capra 1982: 26). In reality, the mechanistic scientific paradigm has gone bankrupt. This means that also the modern culture is collapsing. And
according to Henderson, a collapse is a legitimate and proper behaviour under the circumstances. She refers to Thomas Kuhn who points out in his
book "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" that a
major paradigm shift leads to a major cultural shift. The modern world is
such a change may be painful,
Henderson finds that there is a yin-yang rebirth ready to flower. (Henderson 1978: 17, 329, 400). The focus
on yang is in opposition to the Chinese philosophy of change, where the masculine yang and the
consequently faced with an inevitable social, political and economic transition. Although
feminine yin are complimentary and in a dynamic balance. Hence, modern patriarchy destroyed the
necessary yin-yang balance. Due to the extent and size of the current crises, it has become a biological survival to reintegrate both. Hence, for
Capra, Birkeland and Henderson the solution is that yang must allow the re-emergence of yin to restore
balance. Both modes of cognition are equally important thus both need to be reintegrated. It is
therefore
time to reunite reason and emotion; rationality and intuition; head and heart; mind
and body; people and nature; analysis and synthesis; the public and the private; men and
women in order to create harmony . This should give a universal balance and a rich, new intellectual insight in reality.
According to the Chinese philosophy yang cannot go on forever without self-destruction. Thus having reached its climax, yang must retreat
in favour of yin. Both Henderson and Capra believe that this retreat is manifested in the ever-increasing global movements the world is
witnessing promoting counter-cultures, counter-economies, peace, gender-equality and ecological sustainability. They mark the reversal to the yin and
hence manifest what both call "the turning point". As Henderson says, "The
old instrumental yang is now turning into a

re-emergence of the subtler yin, intuitive consciousness, to restore the balance". This metaphor, of the
return to a dynamic balance between yin and yang, is parallel to what Western feminists are advocating. (Henderson 1978: 15-17, 330, 384, 400; Capra
1982: 30; Birkeland 1995: 56). Thus, the yang phase of modern culture can find many correctives in Eastern thought. The notion of yin and yang are
offering real opportunities of nuancing and subtilising modern harshness and balancing its antagonism. The Eastern
ideas serve to
remind the modern world of things that have been forgotten or have gone stale in its tradition, and to bring
new life to them. There was in the West a contemplative tradition, and people were pondering things in their hearts. This figure of
contemplation has in the modern culture always been feminine. Contemplation and meditative wisdom are therefore needed for the recovery of the yin,
for receptive inner growth against external manipulation and organisation. The way of the Tao is to be leaning back receptively on the wisdom that is
inherent in nature. There is often more wisdom in the human body than in the human mind. The self is so much more and so much wiser than an
abstracted pure intellect. (Versfeld 1979: 68-70).
Perm solves combination of criticism and policy action key

Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 8-9 edited by Karen
Warren)//schnall
Maintaining a balance of critical and creative directions is crucial to the continued political
potency of ecofeminism. Can we afford not to have an action-oriented philosophy at a crisis
point in social and natural history, when we are literally threatened on a global scale by
annihilation by nuclear war or ecological destruction? Ecofeminism's promise is that it provides not only an
it
is necessary to establish broad parameters that diverse ideas and actions can be referred to , and to
orientation and worldview but also a basis for responsible action. In order for the movement to fulfill this promise, I believe that
maintain critical and vitalizing links between theory and praxis. I offer the following four points of focus to help create and maintain
a firm ground for social and ecological responsibility and political participation. These are that we (1) treat ecofeminism as a moral
theory, (2) engage in the project of working out an integrated philosophy of humanity and nonhuman nature, (3) view this theory as
a living process inseparable from the individuals and groups who think and practice it, and (4) maintain an active political
and participatory emphasis that is both deconstructive (reactive to current injustices) and reconstructive
(proactive in creating new forms of thinking and doing) . The first parameter I have outlined is that ecofeminism
be treated as a moral theorya prescriptive psychological and social model that includes an idea
of future potential and how best to unfold it, not just an analysis of how things were in the past
or are currently. Philosopher Amlie Rorty defines such a theory and what it should do: Besides characterizing the varieties of
well-lived lives, and formulating general principles and ideals for regulating conduct, a moral theory should tell us something about
how to get from where we are to where we might better be. While it needn't prescribe a decision procedure for determining every
detail of every choice and action, it should, in a general way, be action-guiding: constructing a robust ethical theory requires an
astute understanding of psychology and of history. (1988,15; italics added) Furthermore, a moral theory must emerge out of a felt
sense of need and personal connection with the issues at hand, not just out of an abstract process of reasoning. Ethical systems
based only in abstracted values fail to draw real commitments and can too easily be used as tools
of manipulation and deceptionfor example, to rationalize military aggression on the basis of
furthering democracy. Ecofeminism must be adequately grounded and contextualized to be a
"robust" and action-guiding ethical theory. It should, therefore, have a foundational
characterization of reality (an ontology) and escape some of the traps of classical philosophy that
have helped to support conceptual splitting and dualisms. In particular, ecofeminism needs to avoid
assumptions of either classical materialism or classical idealism, with connotations of inanimate substance set in opposition to a
purely subjective, psychic, or spiritual quality. This
means that we must develop concepts and personal

sensibilities of self and world that move beyond conceptual dichotomies. Our paradigms and experiences
of self and world must be monistic but differentiated to reflect their real basis in earthly life, accounting for both the integrity of
individuals and collective realities and functions.
perm do both: scientific ecology and ecofeminism are compatible through their
ecosystem hierarchy theory
Warren 97 Chair of Philosophy at Macalester College (Karen, Scientific Ecology and
Ecological Feminism: The Potential for Dialogue, Ch. 19 Ecofeminism : Women, Culture,
Nature, Book) */LEA
While
ecofeminism and scientific ecology both endeavor to understand nature, ecofeminists

work toward an understanding of the social context of nature the metaphors used to describe nature,
society's attitudes toward nature, the relationship between nature and women, and how that relationship has been exploited to
subordinate nature and women. Ecology as a science embraces a mechanistic, materialist, reductionist approach to studying nature.
The questions asked and the methods of answering them fall within standards set by the scientific community. And as with most
sciences, selfreflection and an understanding of its social context are not goals of traditional ecological science. This leaves little
inherent overlap in the two fields' goals and approaches to studying nature. Warren and Cheney's analysis of the
meeting point of ecofeminism and ecology delves deeper than my analysis, and they find as common
ground for these two disparate fields the ideology expressed in ecosystem hierarchy theory (as
outlined by O'Neill et al., 1986). Simply put, both ecofeminism and ecosystem hierarchy theory are engaged in
the challenge of valuing multiple voices to inform their projects. With feminism, the goal is to
incorporate the diversity of women's voices into a richly textured tapestry. Likewise in scientific
ecology, the complexity of interactions and processes presents the ecologist with the challenge of
integrating ''voices" from multiple data sets. More specifically, Warren and Cheney identify ten
similarities between the goals of hierarchy theory and those of ecofeminism, including the
understanding of context dependent reference points; an appreciation of alternative reference
points and alternative data sets; an antireductionist, inclusivist approach that centralizes
diversity by recognizing and appreciating the unique contributions of alternative data sets; and a
recognition of the autonomous and relational existence of individuals . Warren and Cheney draw parallels
between the recognition by O'Neill et al. that alternative spatial and temporal scales yield different data sets and the ecofeminist goal
of integrating multiple perspectives on ecological and feminist issues.
WATER WARS TURNS ECOFEM

Accessibility to water disproportionally affects women
Warren, 00 feminist philosopher, pioneer ecofeminist, former Professor and Chair of
Philosophy at Macalester College (Karen, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on
What It Is and Why It Matters, Rowman & Littlefield,
http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/nr6/Readings/Warren_ecofeminism_article.pdf)//schnall
WOMEN, WATER, AND DROUGHT The
demand for water for agricultural irrigation in developing

countries accounted for 30 percent of the growth in water consumption in 1990 . World water use is
divided among irrigation uses (73 percent), industry uses (22 percent), and domestic uses (5 percent). But less than 3
percent of all water on earth is fresh. The atmosphere, rivers, streams, lakes, and underground
stores hold less than 1 percent of the earth's water. Furthermore, millions of humans have difficulty
getting sufficient water necessary for survival, about 5 liters per day. In more than half of the
developing countries, less than 50 percent of the population has a source of potable water or
facilities for sewage disposal. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 85 percent of all
sicknesses and diseases in developing countries, including diarrhea, trachoma, parasitic worms, and malaria, are
attributable to inadequate potable water or sanitation. It also estimates that as many as 25 million
deaths a year are due to water-related illnesses. The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund
(UNICEF) estimates that 15 million children die every year before they are five; half of them
could be saved if they had access to safe drinking water. Water scarcity is of special concern for
women and children. According to The World's Women, 1995, the majority of countries in Africa and many countries of Asia
and Latin America are considered water-scarcity countries. In these countries, women and children perform most of
the water collection work. Small-scale studies in Africa and Asia indicate that women and girls spend up to
forty-three hours per week collecting and carrying water (e.g., in Africa, approximately seventeen hours in
Senegal, five hours in rural areas of Botswana, and forty-three hours on northern farms in Ghana; in Asia, seven hours in the Baroda
region of India, one to five hours in Nepalese villages, depending on the ages of the girls, and three hours in Pakistan) . Because of
natural resource depletion, women also must walk farther for water (e.g., up to fifteen kilometers daily through rough terrain in
Uttarakhand, India). The effects on women in these countries is significant: The proportion of rural women
affected by water scarcity is estimated at 55 per cent in Africa, 32 per cent in Asia and 45 per cent in Latin America. Even where
water is abundant overall in countries, there still are significant parts of many countries where at least seasonal water scarcity
burdens women with added time for water collection. According to Joni Seager, approximately half the population in the Third
World is still without safe drinking water. There are 250 million cases of water- related diseases, resulting in ten million deaths,
reported each year. Drinking water is often drawn from public bathing and laundering places, and the
same water is frequently used as a public toilet. Lack of sanitary water is of special concern for
women and children since, as the primary providers of household water, they experience
disproportionately higher health risks in the presence of unsanitary water. Contaminated water
and its disproportionate effects on women, particularly among people of color and the poor, is
not just a problem in developing countries. In 1980, the United States produced 125 billion pounds of hazardous
waste, enough to fill approximately 3,000 Love Canals. By the mid-1990s, 38 percent of the rivers in the United
States were too polluted to swim in. Groundwater, the drinking water source for nearly half of
the population of the United States, is contaminated by leaking chemical wastes and other
substances. As an example, in Hardeman County, Tennessee, in 1964, the Velsicol Chemical Company dumped 300,000 fiftyfive gallon barrels of unknown chemicals on their 242-acre farm. Some of the barrels burst open, and their contents seeped into the
soil. In 1967 a U.S. Geological Survey report showed that the chemicals from the dump site were reaching local water wells. No
action was taken. By 1977 residents noticed that their drinking water had a foul odor and taste. Nell Grantham, a licensed practical
nurse, took samples of their water for testing. The results confirmed their suspicions: Their water contained harmful
chemicals, twelve clearly identified. Local residents were told the water was not safe to drink, cook with, bathe in;
vegetables and animals could not be raised on their land. Residents experienced a host of health problems: skin rashes, liver
damage, birth defects. A different sort of water issue that affects women , people of color, the poor, and children
are the so-called natural disasters of droughts and floods. A drought is too little water; a flood is
too much water. Traditionally, droughts and floods are considered "disasters" only when humans, human communities, and
property have been seriously affected. Humans make land more drought-prone and more flood-prone
(and, hence, more disaster-prone) by removing the vegetation and soil systems that absorb and
store water. As Anders Wijkman and Lloyd Timberlake claim about droughts, "reduced rainfall may trigger a
drought, but human pressure on the land is the primary cause. Wijkman and Timberlake argue that forces
of nature ("natural events") trigger disaster events, but they are not the main cause. In the developing world, they identify three
main causes of "natural disasters": human vulnerability resulting from poverty and inequality; environmental degradation owing to
poor land use; and rapid population growth, especially among the poor. But these three main causes involve a complex set of
institutional, economic, cultural, and political factors. According to Wijkman and Timberlake, these complex factors bear an
important and typically undernoticed causal role in the occurrence of "natural disasters," such as droughts and floods, that affect
millions of humans and animals. Economic or class interests head the list of human-induced factors that affect the occurrences and
locations of droughts as "natural disasters." Wijkman and Timberlake poignantly express this point when they claim that "no
wealthy person ever died in a drought," "no relief worker has starved to death during a drought,"
and "no journalist has died of hunger while covering a drought. Are droughts and floods-obvious environmental issues with class implications-also gender and age issues? Yes, especially
considering that it is poor women and children who are most significantly affected. This is due to a
constellation of interconnected factors--with poverty a major factor. No matter how poverty is measured, the poor
population is largely and increasingly comprised of women and children. Poverty differentials among
both groups are magnified by race, ethnicity, and age. For example, cross-culturally, women are paid less than men, and women in
most regions spend as much or more time working than men when unpaid housework is taken into account. Women
everywhere control fewer resources and reap a lesser share of the world's wealth than men:
Women do more than one-half of the world's work, but receive only 10 percent of the world's income and own only 1 percent of the
world's property. Women-headed households are a growing worldwide phenomenon, with between 80 and 90 percent of poor
families headed by women. When one remembers that the three elements that make up the major part
of Third World disasters are deforestation, desertification, and soil erosion, and that, among
humans, it is the poor who are most significantly affected by them, one can then understand
why women and children will be disproportionately victims of these disasters.
MOTHER EARTH
Mother Earth serves to further separate women from society dehumanization
Roach, 96 Professor of New College Affiliated Faculty in Dept. of Gender and Race Studies
(Catherine, Loving your Mother: On the Women-Nature Connection, Ecological Feminist
Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 56-57 edited by Karen Warren)//schnall
A second way we can look at the woman-nature link is to ask not just how nature is affected by its association with motherhood but
how women are affected by their association with nature. The "Love Your Mother" slogan helps perpetuate the
idea that women are closer to nature and, implicitly, that men are closer to culture. Here I use
traditional Western definitions of culture as "that which is human or made by humans" and
nature as "that which is not human nor made by humans." 5 Much work has been done in feminist and
ecofeminist theory to document how women have traditionally been perceived as closer to nature and men
as closer to culture and how women in patriarchal culture have suffered from these perceptions.
Sherry Ortner, Colette Guillaumin, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Carolyn Merchant, Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Susan Griffin, and others have
all contributed to our understanding of these points. The basic argument is that in patriarchal culture, when women
are seen as closer to nature than men, women are inevitably seen as less fully human than men.
Susan Griffin, for example, in her passionate and poetic book Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) juxtaposes
negative comments about women with those about nature in order to illustrate how the two are perceived to be on an equal and
lowly plane quite outside the properly human (that is, the male). In a series of evocative chapters Griffin shows how this
association, as it has functioned in patriarchal culture, has contributed to women's voicelessness and
powerlessness by assigning woman the roles of passive and obedient reproducer and nurturer (in
her chapter entitled "Cows"), obstinate and dull-witted drudge, bred for labor the breeders do not wish to do (in the "Mules"
chapter), and well-trained and well-groomed gratifier of her master (in "The Show Horse" chapter). One way to put this point about
the woman-nature connection is to say that in patriarchal culture nature is overpersonified and women are
underpersonified. Women are perceived to merge with nature, to be part of the nonhuman
surround and only semihuman. Similarly, nature is perceived as female, as virgin resource to be
exploited or raped, as sharing in woman's semihuman quality. Women are perceived "as a natural resource,"
Dinnerstein says, "as an asset to be owned and harnessed, harvested and mined, with no fellowfeeling for her depletion and no responsibility for her conservation or replenishment" (1976, 36-37).
Even when women are exalted as purer than men, as less bestial, and as the "guardians of culture and morals,"
Ortner points out that these seeming "inversions" merely place women "above" instead of "below"
culture and that women are still in both cases excluded from the realm of culture (1974, 86).
[end card here]
ECOFEM= ANTHRO
Ecofeminism is anthropocentric focuses on the connection between women and
the environment
What this suggests, however, is that the essentialist ecofeminist project is primarily
anthropocentric, that is, oriented to the welfare of human beings. Ecofeminism, like feminism
more generally conceived, is first and foremost a political movement against the forces of
patriarchy that harm and oppress women. The ecological insight is that the oppression of women takes on an
ecological dimension in contemporary industrial society through the augmented effects of environmental degradation on the wellbeing of women. But this ecological insight does not entail any turn toward nature in its own right. The anthropocentrism
of the essentialists' environmental stance is evident in Lee Quinby's comment about "the
significance of ecofeminism as resistance politics": Struggling against specific sites of power not only weakens the
junctures of power's networks but also empowers those who do the struggling. Two recent books [Caldecott and Leland (1983) and
Garland (1988)] show, for example, how contamination of women's wombs and breast milk leads to
struggle against chemical dumping; how compromises to our immunity systems, which render
our bodies vulnerable to a whole host of viruses that formerly we could withstand, lead to
challenges against late-capitalist food industries and the practices of Western medicine ; how
logging practices in India lead to women there struggling against the multinational destruction
of the culture ... Such episodes of activism show how feminism's struggle for women's freedom
and ecology's struggle for planetary well-being have come together in an alliance called
ecofeminism. (Quinby 1990, 124)
ECOFEM FAILS
Radical ecofeminism reciprocates dualisms of patriarchy and environment
The
link between women and biological reproduction leads ecofeminists to address the
consequences of nuclear radiation, toxic wastes, household chemicals, pesticides, and herbicides for women's
reproductive organs, for pregnant women, and for children. But as she also notes, "A politics
grounded in women's culture, experience, and values can be seen as reactionary" (1990, 102). The
essentialist strand of ecofeminism paradoxically makes the strongest claims about the connection between women's
lived experience and environmental care while at the same time replicating the dualisms of patriarchal thinking.
Essentialist, or radical, ecofeminism reproduces the dualism between what counts morally and
what does not. It sets up an essential opposition between male and female natures, and its logic
reveals an equally dualistic perception of nature, dividing it into those aspects that impinge on
women's well-being and those that do not. The "lived experience" of women , to which the essentialist
ecofeminist appeals in formulating her environmental ethics of care, is as parochial as the "lived experience" of
men that ecofeminists find so unpalatable in deep ecology and in arguments for hunting (Kheel
1990).5 There is nothing in the logic of the essentialists' environmental ethics that entails a care
for the wilderness and its inhabitants, for example, that is not ultimately self-referential. It is this
constant return to the welfare of human beings as the standard of moral evaluation that deep
ecologists such as Warwick Fox criticize as anthropocentric (Fox 1989, 25). The conceptualist strand of
In speaking of radical feminism's contribution to ecofeminism, Carolyn Merchant also points to the same kinds of concern.
ecofeminism, on the other hand, is critical of the dualism and the essentialism of radical feminism. In this view, the vocabulary of
conceived as moral agents, right holders, interest carriers, or sentient beings)" (Warren 1990, 135).
Conceptualist ecofeminism fails lived experience selective

The conceptualist
use of the vocabulary of care is an advance on that of the essentialist because it

avoids the latter's anthropocentric orientation and the accompanying dualism. Nonetheless, there are
two concerns that I think need to be raised even here. First, lived experience is selective in that it results from
cultural, as well as personal, interpretation of experience. Many people lack any concrete
awareness of the workings of the environment and do not care very deeply about the fate of
nonhuman beings and systems. But if this is so, then any reliance on lived experience and
personal narrative as a basis for constructing a moral perspective in environmental ethics
presupposes some reconstruction or education of lived experience that is not intrinsic to that
experience itself. Warren notes that first-person narrative "provides a way of conceiving of
ethics and ethical meaning as emerging out of particular situations moral agents find themselves
in, rather than as being imposed on those situations . . . This emergent feature of narrative centralizes the
importance of voice" (Warren 1990, 136). But whose voice should we be listening to: the resort developer's,
the agribusiness entrepreneur's, the hunter's, the tourist's, the weekend athelete's? These voices
are not all compatible with one another, nor are they all interested in the well-being of the
natural world. It might be argued that the importance of personal narrative is not simply that it gives
voice to a moral relationship to nature, but that it may be a vehicle for expressing and producing a
caring relationship to the environment. Narratives might give evidence of, and create, caring
relationships while bypassing the abstract question of whether the partners in the relationship
"deserve" their moral standing. But we must still ask which narratives express this caring
relationship; which narratives should we listen to and respect? Our choice of narratives will be
grounded in a prior moral understanding of human relationships with the natural world. Therefore,
any particular narrative of lived experience can only become a basis for moral reflection and conduct as a part of a general
interpretation and understanding of nature and its moral standing.6 If this is so, then we cannot give uncritical
credence to the view that normative force emerges from the personal narratives of lived
experience. This points to the need to concretize and particularize the reference to lived
experience in order to avoid yet another abstract ethics. My second concern about the conceptualist position is
that to see the importance of personal narrative in an ecofeminist ethics of care is not yet to know what it means to care about
nature. Indeed, Warren's own narrative reveals some of the difficulties here. Care in her narrative
appears to be a subjective feeling linked to her awareness of the sights and sounds around her
and her feelings of serenity. She suddenly feels "as if the rock and I were silent conversational partners in a longstanding
friendship." However, the narrative does not clarify in what sense the climber and the rock were either conversational partners or
friends, since no voice is given to the rock in the narrative. The rock is personified as a partner and
friend, yet it merely submits silently to being climbed upon, giving unilaterally what the climber
wants. In this particular narrative, therefore, the concepts of "conversational partner" and "friendship," as well as their moral
significance, remain unexplicated.
Conceptualist ecofeminism too dependent on caring

Warren's narrative does not clarify what care means or what its moral significance is. She
contrasts a climber who cares about the rock with one who seeks to conquer it, yet for the rock,
it is all the same thing; the rock does not care . Indeed, the fact that the climber cares for the
rock appears to have no practical consequences for the rock itself. What, then, is gained by the
metaphors of conversation, partnership, and friendship when these are taken out of their human
context and when the only speaker and ultimate beneficiary is still the human climber? I have
indicated in this section how both the essentialist and conceptualist strands of ecofeminism make use of
the vocabulary of an ethics of care. While the conceptualist strategy avoids the problems
associated with essentialism, it is still open to the objection that it relies too heavily on "lived
experience" and an indeterminate conception of caring. If an ethics of care is to have moral
significance for ecofeminism, some account of care needs to be given that shows how nature
itself benefits from human care. We need not argue that the object of care reciprocate or acknowledge the care we extend
to it.7 Nonetheless, if care has no practical implications for the welfare of the one who is cared for,
then it would seem to be little more than a subjective sense of aesthetic appreciation, with no
particular moral importance.
PERMS FOR K AFFS
ANTHRO
Perm do both- raises awareness the best
Warren 97 Chair of Philosophy at Macalester College (Karen, Androcentrism and
Anthropocentrism: Parallels and Politics, Ch. 20 Ecofeminism : Women, Culture, Nature,
Book) */LEA
Feminist and ecofeminist exposure of masculinism in environmental thinking is sometimes portrayed as carping, purely critical and
negative. This portrait overlooks not only the role of feminist criticism in developing a better theory but also the positive theoretical
improvements feminist theory can bring to environmental thought as it applies feminist models and understandings to the core
concepts of environmental philosophy. In this chapter I argue that the sophisticated understanding of
androcentrism which has emerged from feminism can help resolve some problems with the key
concept of anthropocentrism which threaten the foundations of environmental philosophy. S ince
women differ from individual to individual and are oppressed in multiple ways, a commitment to ending the
subordination of all women implies that feminism must address itself to many forms of
oppression and attempt to theorize some of the connections between them (Jaggar 1994).
Consequently some forms of feminist theory have been led to develop a more general account of what
I will call centrism, which discerns a common centric structure underlying different forms of
oppression (Hartsock 1990). Since ecofeminism insists that feminism must address not only the forms
of oppression which afflict humans but also those that afflict nature, the extension of feminist
insights and models of centrism to illuminate problems in the concept of anthropocentrism is a
core concern of the ecofeminist theoretical project. These insights from a feminist account of centrism can also, as
I argue in the last part of this chapter, cast some valuable light on how we are able, as ecofeminists, to speak for nature. Concepts of
centrism have been at the heart of modern liberation politics and theory. Feminism has focused on androcentrism, phallocentrism,
and phallogocentrism as theoretical refinements of its central concept of sexism; it has also focused on the connection between these
and other forms of centrism. Antiracist theory critiques ethnocentrism, movements against European colonization critique
Eurocentrism, gay and lesbian activists critique heterocentrism, and so on. The Green movement's flagship in this liberation armada
has been the notion of anthropocentrism, or humancenteredness. The critique of anthropocentrism, however, unlike the other
critiques of centrism, continues to be denied legitimacy in many quarters, including some Green quarters, and its usefulness to the
Green movement is under challenge. After two decades of intensive debate in ecophilosophy over the concept, the discussion seems
to be irretrievably bogged down in largely repetitious argument between two opposing camps. The concept of anthropocentrism,
which is so powerfully defended by some as the heart of environmental philosophy, continues to be seen by others as subject to fatal
objection and fit only for the dustbin. William Grey (1993) is just the latest of those who declare the search for a nonanthropocentric
ethic to be "a hopeless quest." The critique of anthropocentrism has been almost the defining task of
ecophilosophy, whose characteristic general thesis has been that our frameworks of morality
and rationality must be expanded to include the welfare of at least certain categories of
nonhumans; stopping these frameworks at the human species boundary is considered anthropocentric. But beyond this point of
agreement, ecophilosophy is deeply divided as to how best to accomplish this expansion and how far it should go; according to its
critics, it is suffering from what Andrew Dobson has called "the failure to make itself practical" (1990, 70). What Dobson means by
this is that ecophilosophy, as articulated by the thinkers he considersmainly deep ecologistsmay give personal uplift but appears
to provide little help with practical Green action, strategy, or politics. To the extent that the theory it has developed proscribes as
anthropocentric all prudential types of argument which adduce ill consequences for humans from current environmental practices
and attitudes, it seems to run counter to the practical politics of environmental activism. But abandonment of the critique of
anthropocentrism is also problematic, since its demise not only threatens the loss of the major revolutionary insights of
environmental thought but also appears to threaten the claim to autonomy of the Green movement and the independence of its
intellectual critique. So a major impasse seems to confront the foundations of environmental philosophyabandon the core critique
and risk absorption and cooptation into other movements (such as ecosocialism, which is waiting in the wings) or try to struggle on
with an embattled central concept which seems to be finding little support. Those who continue to believe that the concept of
anthropocentrism is fundamental to the Green critique (and I count myself among them) have a number of alternatives open to
them in the face of this seemingly implacable resistance to its core concept. We could interpret the embattled nature of this core
concept as showing that this form of centrism is more fiercely defended and perhaps deeper and more resistant to change than the
other forms. We could point to its farreaching implications and note that those who fail to see its relevance, and indeed those to
whom the case must be put as well as those who must articulate it, are from the group which, in terms of other liberatory critiques,
corresponds to the oppressor class. But an alternative (or additional) hypothesis which I shall explore here is
that the apparent failure of the critique of anthropocentrism to carry the same conviction as
other liberatory critiques may reflect problems and limitations not only in the understanding of
its critics but also in the way the concept of anthropocentrism has been developed by its major
exponents in ecophilosophy. In what follows, I attempt to resolve the dilemma outlined above by showing how certain
difficulties for the critique arise out of a specific, problematic understanding of anthropocentrism which I will call cosmic
anthropocentrism. Using concepts and models originating in feminine theory and other liberation critiques, I will outline an
alternative, feminist
rereading of the concept of humancenteredness which is theoretically

illuminating, of practical value to the Green movement, and capable of showing why anthropocentrism
might be a serious problem in contemporary life. I shall argue that it is this problematic understanding of
anthropocentrism as cosmic anthropocentrism which has invited the kinds of criticisms which have been widely seen as fatal to the
concept.
QUEERNESS
Perm do both- the alt and the aff arent mutually exclusive. Ecofeminism includes
queer bodies when it talks about the feminine Other
7/8/14 FG)
Ecological feminism or ecofeminism is an umbrella term for a variety of different positions concerned
with the connection between the unjustified domination of women, people of colour, traditional
people, poor people and the unjustified domination of nature. (Warren 2000: 1). Below these
connection will be called 'women-Others-nature'. "Others" is with a capital O in order to distinguish it from the
general word "others". "Others" conceptualises the diverse groups of subordinate people. These include
children, people of colour, poor people, traditional people, old, frail and sick people, homosexual
people, disabled people and other marginalised groups of people. Nature include all that which is not
human nor human made like non-human animals, plants, bio-organisms, water, air, soil, mountains etc.
(DIS)ABILITY
people with disabilities when it talks about the feminine Other
7/8/14 FG)
RACE
people of color when it talks about the feminine Other
7/8/14 FG)
CRITICISM OF IN-ROUND
GENDERED LANGUAGE
Their usage of the term you guys is a reason to reject the team- gendered
language perpetuates the violence against women by privileging the man in the
abstract in the abstract and the flesh and erases feminine specificity.
Gehlert 7 -- Communications Specialist at Berkeley Media Studies Group (Heather, Can the
Term "Guys" Refer to Women and Girls?, Alternet, February 27, 2007,
http://www.alternet.org/story/48527/can_the_term_%22guys
%22_refer_to_women_and_girls) */LEA
*edited for ablest language, we dont endorse ablest language*
Yet, for whatever reason, now that my dad and I live in different states and I see him only once or twice a year, I'm noticing
how often men and women use the phrase "you guys" to refer to both sexes . It happens in restaurants, at
council meetings -- even in grade-school classrooms. And so, a voice in the back of my head is starting to say, Maybe he has a point.
Maybe this isn't an arbitrary battle over an arbitrary word. A cursory glance at blog postings shows that the use
of the word "guys" is much more discussed and much more controversial than I had realized. Giving credence to my dad's
argument, dozens of postings read something like this: Try walking up to a group of men and women and saying, "Hey, girls, how's it
going?" The reaction won't be positive. The men in the group probably won't find the feminine label amusing -- and certainly not
arbitrary. So why is the reverse acceptable? Why is "girls" gender-specific, but "guys" is not? "Is it because
men are not considered gendered, like white people do not consider themselves a race or
European-Americans ethnic?" writes Farrah Ferriell, an instructor at the Women's Studies Program at Western Kentucky
University. "I say yes ..." A few posts down on the same site, Kathy Ferguson, a teacher from Hawaii, writes, "You know, I think
I find myself in the "get a life" camp on these questions. ... '[Y]ou guys' [can be said] with affection. Words don't have inherent
meanings, after all; they have the meanings that usage gives them, and are not necessarily stuck in past patriarchal contexts. I also
find that I have many more important struggles in my classrooms than these." Ferguson's point that words don't have inherent
meanings is a good one. "He" could easily be a feminine pronoun and "she" a masculine word if we used them that way. However,
"guys" is not a brand new term. And it's already gendered in many circumstances. "Guy" is
masculine (e.g. That guy over there is really attractive). "The guys" is too (e.g. Will the guys in the room please stand up?).
So, the distinction -- and the controversy -- seems to lie with the colloquial phrase, "you guys." That distinction makes me curious to
know how many people consciously think "you guys" is gender-neutral and how many are just so used to hearing and saying it that
they don't even notice its prevalence. In my case, I had never consciously thought the term was gender-neutral; rather, I had just
never carefully considered it until my dad brought it to my attention. E ven if the majority of people really have thought
deeply about this issue and still maintain
that "you guys" is gender-neutral, why are generic words always

male? I have a hard time seeing {recognizing} any difference between "guys" and words like
"mankind" or "Congressman." At one time, those words, too, were considered generic. But now
we know they're not -- they're laden with meaning . They make women invisible by
reinforcing the idea that men are the norm against which women are compared.
Why, then, would we want to risk repeating the same mistake? Especially when the solution is as simple as replacing "you guys" with
"you all." True, this issue is not as pressing as, say, the war in Iraq or homelessness in San Francisco. But that does not mean it is
not legitimate. Just because there's a war in Iraq, does that mean that the divorce someone is going through is any less real or
painful? That being fired suddenly feels great? That getting a traffic ticket sucks any less? Or perhaps a better example: Just because
slapping a woman isn't as serious as raping her, does that mean we should ignore the former? On its face, using the term
"you guys" seems harmless enough -- gendered or not. But as the number of people who see
{recognize} it as gendered grows, so does the phrase's power to influence ideas about identity -to perpetuate the subtle yet damaging belief that being male is more valuable than
being fema le.
dad.
And the consequences of that extend far beyond the momentary awkwardness of me having lunch with my
AT
Seriously, just apologize & make an honest effort not to misgender your opponents
again. I would not read any ev, or say anything else other than this because with an
apology, it would be a double turn.
DEEP ECOLOGY
PRO- DEEP ECOLOGY
CHALLENGES ANTHRO
Deep ecology is egalitarian in principle challenges anthropocentrism
Sessions, 91 retired philosophy and humanities professor from Iowa City, Iowa, works as an
ethics consultant for the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Community School District (Robert, Deep
Ecology versus Ecofeminism: Healthy Differences or Incompatible Philosophies?, Ecological
Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, pp. 138-139 edited by Karen
Warren)//schnall
Deep Ecology According to Arne Naess, who coined the "deep ecology" label and who is looked upon by most
deep ecologists as a seminal thinker in this tradition, deep ecology has eight basic characteristics, the first four
of which he claims are conceptually fundamental: "(1) The well-being and flourishing of human
and non-human Life on Earth have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the
non-human world for human purposes. (2) Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization
of these values and are also values in themselves. (3) Humans have no right to reduce this
richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. (4) The flourishing of human life and cultures is
compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires
such a decrease" (Naess 1986, 14). Naess and the many deep ecologists who agree with him begin by
asserting the fundamental equality and inherent value of all beings and then draw inferences for
human action from their original anti-anthropomorphism. Warwick Fox sums up deep ecology as
wanting to encourage an egalitarian attitude that "within obvious kinds of practical limits,
allows entities (including humans) the freedom to unfold in their own way unhindered by the various
forms of human domination" (Fox 1989, 6). This central concern with "ecocentric egalitarianism"
(Fox's label) leads deep ecologists to oppose, above all else, the historical Western propensity to
place humans at the center of the moral universe (to be anthropocentric). Deep ecologists trace most
environmental destruction to the anthropocentric attitude that says (1) nonhuman nature has no
value in itself, (2) humans (and/or God, if theistic) create what value there is, and (3) humans have the
right (some would say the obligation) to do as they please with and in the nonhuman world as long as
they do not harm other humans' interests. Thus deep ecologists criticize the human centeredness
of prevailing Western attitudes and ethics by claiming that there are no good reasons in general for valuing a member of
a species or a whole species over another individual or species or over any given ecosystem. They are not against human flourishing,
but deep ecologists believe that this flourishing can generally occur without the destructive domination of nonhuman nature by
humans, and insofar as it can, it should. Naess and other deep ecologists believe we need an ethic that is
not a mere extension of existing humanist ethics. Animal liberationist Peter Singer, for example, argues that we
can provide a theoretical basis for vegetarianism by extending utilitarianism to include all sentient beings. Deep ecologists criticize
Singer and other "extensionists" for holding onto "an increasingly arbitrary perspective in an age when the ecological imagination
can shift reference points within the system and imagine the world to some extent from the standpoint of the muskrat and its
environment" (Naess 1973, 96). Extensions of human-centered ethics perpetuate an unjustifiable bias
humans have toward their own. Thus, just as an ethic that begins with men as distinct from
women is sexist, utilitarianism (the best of the humanistic lot in this regard) and other Western
ethics are "speciesist." Deep ecology tries to begin with a foundation that does not arbitrarily set "man apart" (to borrow a
phrase from Robinson Jeffers). Hans Jonas puts the difference between shallow and deep ecology this way: "Only an ethic which is
grounded in the breadth of being, not merely in the singularity or oddness of man, can have significance in the scheme of things"
(Jonas 1983, 284).
ANTI- DEEP ECOLOGY
ANTHRO
Reject their connotation of the human prerequisite to abandoning
anthropocentrism and androcentrism
Plumwood, 91 Australian ecofeminist intellectual and activist, Australian Research Council
Fellow at the Australian National University (Val, Nature, Self, and Gender, Ecological
Warren)//schnall
V. THE PROBLEM IN TERMS OF THE CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM I now show how the problem of the inferiorization of nature
appears if it is viewed from the perspective of the critique of rationalism and seen as part of the general problem of revaluing and
reintegrating what rationalist culture has split apart, denied, and devalued. Such an account shifts the focus away from the
preoccupations of both mainstream ethical approaches and deep ecology, and although it does retain an emphasis on the account of
the self as central, it gives a different account from that offered by deep ecology. In section VI. I conclude by arguing that one of the
effects of this shift in focus is to make connections with other critiques, especially feminism, central rather than peripheral or
accidental, as they are currently viewed by deep ecologists in particular. First, what is missing from the accounts of
both the ethical philosophers and the deep
ecologists is an understanding of the problem of discontinuity

as created by a dualism linked to a network of related dualisms. Here I believe a good deal can be
learned from the critique of dualism feminist philosophy has developed and from the
understanding of the mechanisms of dualisms ecofeminists have produced. A dualistically construed
dichotomy typically polarizes difference and minimizes shared characteristics, construes difference along
lines of superiority/inferiority, and views the inferior side as a means to the higher ends of the superior side (the instrumental
thesis). Because its nature is defined oppositionally, the task of the superior side, that in which it realizes itself and expresses its true
nature, is to separate from, dominate, and control the lower side. This has happened both with the human/nature division and with
other related dualisms such as masculine/feminine, reason/body, and reason/emotion. Challenging these dualisms involves not just
a reevaluation of superiority/inferiority and a higher status for the underside of the dualisms (in this case nature) but also a
reexamination and reconceptualizing of the dualistically construed categories themselves. So in the case of the
human/nature dualism it is not just a question of improving the status of nature , moral or otherwise,
while everything else remains the same, but of reexamining and reconceptualizing the concept of the
human, and also the concept of the contrasting class of nature. For the concept of the human, of
what it is to be fully and authentically human, and of what is genuinely human in the set of characteristics typical
humans possess, has been defined oppositionally, by exclusion of what is associated with the inferior
natural sphere in very much the way that Lloyd (1983), for example, has shown in the case of the
categories of masculine and feminine, and of reason and its contrasts. Humans have both biological and mental
characteristics, but the mental rather than the biological have been taken to be characteristic of the human and to give what is "fully
and authentically" human. The term "human" is, of course, not merely descriptive here but very much an
evaluative term setting out an ideal: it is what is essential or worthwhile in the human that
excludes the natural. It is not necessarily denied that humans have some material or animal componentrather, it is seen in
this framework as alien or inessential to them, not part of their fully or truly human nature. The human essence is often
seen as lying in maximizing control over the natural sphere (both within and without) and in qualities
such as rationality, freedom, and transcendence of the material sphere. These qualities are also
identified as masculine, and hence the oppositional model of the human coincides or converges
with a masculine model, in which the characteristics attributed are those of the masculine ideal.
Part of a strategy for challenging this human/nature dualism, then, would involve recognition of
these excluded qualitiessplit off, denied, or construed as alien, or comprehended as the sphere
of supposedly inferior humans such as women and blacksas equally and fully human. This
would provide a basis for the recognition of continuities with the natural world. Thus
reproductivity, sensuality, emotionality would be taken to be as fully and authentically human
qualities as the capacity for abstract planning and calculation. This proceeds from the assumption that one
basis for discontinuity and alienation from nature is alienation from those qualities which provide continuity with nature in
ourselves. This connection between the rationalist account of nature within and nature without has powerful repercussions. So part
of what is involved is a challenge to the centrality and dominance of the rational in the account of the human self. Such a challenge
would have far-reaching implications for what is valuable in human society and culture, and it connects with the challenge to the
cultural legacy of rationalism made by other critiques of rationalism such as feminism, and by critiques of technocracy, bureaucracy,
and instrumentalism. What is involved here is a reconceptualization of the human side of the
human/nature dualism, to free it from the legacy of rationalism. Also in need of reconceptualization is the
underside of this dualism, the concept of nature, which is construed in polarized terms as bereft of qualities appropriated to the
human side, as passive and lacking in agency and teleology, as pure materiality, pure body, or pure mechanism. So what is
called for here is the development of alternatives to mechanistic ways of viewing the world , which
are also part of the legacy of rationalism.
FEM
Deep ecology ignores the oppression of women, thus exhibiting male-gender bias
Sessions, 91 retired philosophy and humanities professor from Iowa City, Iowa, works as an
ethics consultant for the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Community School District (Robert, Deep
Ecology versus Ecofeminism: Healthy Differences or Incompatible Philosophies?, Ecological
Warren)//schnall
While there are intimate ties between analysis and solution, let
us begin sorting out this dispute by

differentiating deep ecology's diagnosis from its prescriptions to see just where and how
ecofeminists find deep ecology lacking. Warren's analysis of the logic of domination concentrates on the diagnosis,
while Cheney's alternative to deep ecology's images of unity is concerned mainly with prescriptions. At first glance Warren's analysis
seems to add to or extend the basic critical analysis of deep ecology. Warwick Fox quotes "one ecofeminist-cum-deep ecologist" who
read Warren's 1987 article and wondered "why she doesn't just call it [Warren's transformative feminism] deep ecology?" (Fox
1989,14). For what Warren does, says Fox, is to show that the logic of domination that deep ecology sees
as the source of naturism has its parallels in sexism, racism, and classism. According to Fox,
anthropomorphism is what deep ecologists call this logic and attitude ("ideology") in human/nature relationships (Fox 1989, 19). He
further contends that deep ecologists encourage an attitude of egalitarianism "toward all entities in
the ecosphereincluding humans" (1989, 21). Moreover, deep ecologists "completely agree with ecofeminists that men
have been far more implicated in the history of ecological destruction than women. However, deep ecologists also agree with similar
charges derived from other social perspectives: for example, that capitalists, whites, and Westerners have been far more implicated
in the history of ecological destruction than pre-capitalist peoples, blacks, and non-Westerners" (1989,14). Human centeredness, not
a particular group of humans, is the target of deep ecology; thus, Fox claims that contrary to Cheney and other ecofeminists, deep
ecologists are not androcentric. Is Fox correct in his contention that the crucial difference between deep ecology and ecofeminism is
a matter of focusthat deep ecology has its eye on environmental relations while ecofeminism is more concerned with how the logic
of domination is also played out on women? Not according to Warren. She believes that the gendered nature of the logic
of domination is more than an accident of history. She believes that feminism should be ecological at
its core because the domination of nature and the domination of women are parts of a whole , and
she believes that any satisfactory environmental philosophy must be feminist for the same reasons. She gives three arguments for
the latter claim: (1) for the sake of historical accuracy we must "acknowledge the feminization of nature and the
naturalization of women as part of the exploitation of nature" ; (2) the oppressive dual dominations of women
and nature at least in the West are "located in [a] patriarchal conceptual framework," and to ignore this connection is to
give, at best, "an incomplete, inaccurate, and partial account of what is required of a
conceptually adequate environmental ethic"; and (3) at least in contemporary culture the word
feminist helps to clarify how the domination and liberation of nature are conceptually linked to
patriarchy and its demise. Warren adds that "without the addition of the word 'feminist,' one presents
environmental ethics as if it has no bias, including male-gender bias , which is just what ecofeminists deny:
failure to notice the connections between the twin oppressions of women and nature is malegender bias" (Warren 1990, 144). This exchange between Fox and Warren, who are in many ways quite close in their
concerns and analyses, helps to pinpoint what seems to be a critical difference between ecofeminism
and deep ecology with regard to their diagnoses of the philosophical sources of environmental
destructiveness. Warren and Cheney talk about this difference by emphasizing that the logic of domination is accompanied by
a set of values: The third feature of oppressive conceptual frameworks is the most significant. A logic
of domination is not just a logical structure. It also involves a substantive value system, since an
ethical premise is needed to permit or sanction the "just" subordination of that which is
subordinate. (Warren 1990, 128) According to this ecofeminist criticism, Fox, like Naess and other deep ecologists,
emphasizes an abstract equality between humans and all other beings, while ecofeminism is
against the logic of domination and the particular historical values that result in the domination
of a particular set of entities.

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CCHJPV ECOFEM

Extinction is inevitable without embracing ecofeminism root cause of war and

The alternative is to endorse an ecofeminist ethic this expands the conceptual

be anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-naturist and opposed to any "ism" which

presupposes or advances a logic of domination. Second, a feminist ethic is a contextualist ethic.

male bias wherever it occurs in ethics

LINK -- GENERIC (STATE, MILITARISM &

to human behavior, particularly oppressive and exploitative activities which

Only if we perceive and acknowledge harmful

practices can we then empower ourselves to positive change, to creation of

it increased women's workload and dependency status. When there is

The discrimination against women is immensely complex. It is a

women farmers grow at least half of the world's

World are women. They claim that: As a rule, women

farmers work longer hours, have fewer assets and

the lens of ecofeminism, our

characteristics of "patriarchal conceptual frameworks ... sanction the twin exploitations of

the fact that the modern jobs system

LINK NUCLEAR WEAPONS

They have written about both the sexual

They have identified in

and euphemism of nuclear discourse protect nuclear planners and politicians

have often suggested that an important aspect of the

truly extraordinary, source of phallic imagery is

these high-tech phalluses? Patting is an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession,

rather than threats to it.

Second, just as feminists tend to be skeptical about the efficacy of

Deterrence reinforces the self/other dualism, which ensures the utilitarian

some system of enforcement analogous to Hobbes's sovereign. This is needed to make

though women's praxis involves caring. Consequently, my argument is that recognition of

Even there renewable, sustainable energy development impoverishes nations,

Justifications for weapons of mass destruction rely on gender based otherization.

proliferation is made is ethno-racist and contemptuous. Generally, in Western proliferation

the irrational militarism of the 1AC is united with mistreatment of the

international attention to what many scientists and environmentalists have referred to as

ecofeminists also organize together to identify and work against

ecofeminism is to have a prominent place in contemporary global politics and to significantly

Domination of nature translates to domination of everything ecofeminism is

the social ecology movement (developed primarily by Murray Bookchin) are

IMPACT LAUNDRY LIST

(Roach 1991: 51; Warren 2000: 50,

developments of intellectual ability; scientific knowledge; technological skills and personal

2NC FEMINIST ETHICS SOLVE

ecofeminism reconceives theory as theory in process. It focuses on patterns of meaning which

ecofeminist ethic involves a reconception of

Ecofeminism offers new perspectives and radical alternatives to environmental

2NC ALT SOLVES SCIENTIFIC DUALISM

1NC EROTIC SPIRITUALITY

1NC LOVING EYE

1NC METAPHYSICAL FEMALE POWER

"We may be justified in regarding the extraordinary persistence of

fertility and Goddess cults as an expression of female resistance to the

ALT EV FOR SATELLITE KS

Personal narratives are important specifically in the context of ecofeminism

Consequently, ecofeminism consists

of a diversity of positions, including work of mainly women from different

Ecofeminism is not essentialist- they fail to recognize that escaping dichotomies is

We dont essentialism what it means to be a woman- ecofeminism recognizes that

AT: DEEP ECOLOGY PERM

that ecofeminists raise for deontological and consequentialist forms of

1NC CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

to ecofeminists, insofar as an oppressive

patriarchal conceptual framework has functioned historically

(within at least dominant