Feminist Environmental Geographies

Nature, Culture, and Gender

Feminist environmental geographers, like feminist environmentalists, see a connection between the treatment of women and the treatment of the natural world by male-dominated systems. Feminist environmental geographies, however, differ from the strands of ecofeminist theory that argue that women are essentially, or inherently, closer to nature than are men. Instead, within geography this relationship is seen as one that is mediated by a variety of social and economic factors; so while it is important to uncover the geography of women's experiences with the natural world, it is also crucial to put those experiences in larger, structural contexts. Perhaps no one has been more influential within geography in making explicit the link between nature, culture, and gender than Joni Seager, who was one of the first geographers to articulate a comprehensive feminist and environmental analysis. Her research revealed the [Page 1093]structural contexts of environmental harm by highlighting how ordinary people are not degrading the environment and that it is specifically a patriarchal capitalist system that continues to view nature (and women) as expendable commodities. Research in this area has exposed practices such as global militarization, international resource extraction in mining and timber, and food production through international patriarchal capitalist systems—all of which endanger the health of humans and the planet.

In addition to a more straightforward political-economic analysis of gendered environmental issues, another active strand of feminist environmental geography focuses on the nature, culture, and gender intersection specifically through the context of human-animal relationships. In the growing subfield of animal geographies, feminist geographers were the first to call for the opening of the black box of nature to reveal the myriad sentient beings on the planet and humans’ relationships to them, which have long been overlooked within geography. The argument is twofold. First, nonhumans have been “othered” by a human-centered society (and geography), that is, seen as objects and/or background to human actions instead of as agents or actors in their own right, and this has resulted in horrific treatment of food, companions, and wild animals. Second, this othering is heavily gendered. Jody Emel's research on gender and wolf eradication is an influential example of this intersection. She highlights how the project of wolf eradication (and return) in the United States was directly correlated to the white male project of eradicating Native Americans and laying claim to dominating the land and removing competitors (both human and nonhuman). The literal and attitudinal violence shown toward wolves dramatically reversed itself with the rise of a men's environmental perspective in the 20th century that suddenly saw wolves as emblematic of the “wild” man—something to be embraced instead of exterminated.

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