Natasha Walter
Writers Rebel: “Environmentalism without feminism,” you write, “is just the patriarchy in a forest. But feminism without environmentalism is a women’s centre on a dead planet.” Can you explain why the eco-crisis is a feminist crisis?
Natasha Walter: While I was writing this book I talked to many women at the frontline of the climate emergency, and I realised that the link between women’s suffering and environmental degradation is already only too real for so many women.
For instance, Ame works with women in flood-hit regions of Bangladesh. She herself had rebelled against traditional family expectations, become educated and gained independence, and wanted to help other women to achieve similar freedoms.
But she found that girls in flood hit areas now face a harsh reality: ‘They needed to harvest rainwater, but this is not a cheap solution, so they would walk miles and miles to find water. Collecting water is always the duty of women. That meant that they were missing school. And I saw girls married off early, to communities that still had drinkable water. And when the crops fail, many women were having to move to cities with their families, where there were no civic services. They would be living in slums. Then their education is lost, their livelihood is lost, their future is gone.’
Their future is gone.
This statement really hit home for me. Feminists across the world have been working so hard to build brighter futures for women, and the climate crisis is threatening to destroy those futures.
Indeed, if we look at the evidence, we can see that the climate crisis is amplifying all the other threats that women are facing. Women know that we are now in a time of unprecedented danger: hard won rights and freedoms for women are being threatened across the globe. Women are facing the threats we have always faced, from economic inequality to male violence, and the new threats of rising authoritarianism, misogyny and conflict. The climate emergency makes all these threats worse. When droughts hit and floods rise, women are most vulnerable: many studies have shown that more women than men die in climate disasters. When food is scarce, more women and girls go hungry than men and boys. When conflicts arise over scarce resources, women bear the brunt of the violence.
All this tells me that we cannot work towards women’s liberation without also healing our relationship with the environment. Women can only flourish on a flourishing planet.
In the course of the book you speak to many women both in Britain and in countries where oppression, war, and climate catastrophe are commonplace. Yet they always describe their homeland as beautiful. What conclusion do you draw from this?
I think that there is a deep connection between people and planet even though this is so often broken and ignored in contemporary life. If we step back into these connections and celebrate them, this provides us with some realistic paths forward for the future. The global issues can feel so enormous and so overwhelming, we can often find strength and energy in doing what we can close at hand. In the book I describe it in this way:
’Many of us might be able to step up to become carers for the environment. Even in cities, there are community gardening projects and river clean- ups, there are initiatives to rid local woodlands of invasive species or to defend ancient trees threatened by developers. Any of us and all of us can join such work. Personally, I’ve found that alongside helping with political campaigns or taking part in protests, doing such work locally with others has helped to root me in ways that I wasn’t expecting. As I’ve got involved in my area of London, to try to support community orchards and renewable energy projects, or to challenge the astroturfing of a local green area or encourage fellow gardeners to protect hedgehog populations, I’ve been rather shocked by how much work is already going on in my neighbourhood that I wasn’t aware of. This unsung, often mocked local work, frequently – though not always – carried on by women in the shrinking gaps between paid and unpaid work, needs to brought into the light. As Kate Knuth, an American politician who works on local climate initiatives, says, ‘This is noble and necessary work, and it is impossible to do alone.’
You quote James Lovelock’s collaborator Lynn Margulis writing: “Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.” Is this what you call “braided” feminism?
I do think that we need to rediscover a feminism that is based on co-operation and care. This is not just about care for the environment, but also for one another. Neoliberal societies always amplify and celebrate competition, and so an individualist feminism has grown up over recent years which centres aspiration and self empowerment. But in order to resist the huge threats that women are facing now, we need a feminism that can go beyond individual ambition.
We also need the women’s movement to connect with other movements for equality and justice. It is not enough just to bring a few women into unequal and patriarchal systems, if those unjust systems are left intact. One of the key inspirations for me over the last couple of decades has been working alongside refugee women (I founded the charity Women for Refugee Women). Refugee women have showed me how their struggles for liberation are bound up with struggles against racism, economic exploitation and colonialism. A feminism that can liberate all women must therefore also connect with these movements, it cannot stand apart.
You write about how the structures that put profit and growth above care and thriving are designed to exploit women, and those systems need to be radically rebalanced. You also make the point that “on a planet with limits, on which human life is deeply connected to non-human life, it’s also vital to ensure that we do not mistake selfishness for liberation, and destructiveness for freedom.” Can you go deeper into this?
Too often, women are told that their liberation relies on consumerism. I explore in my book how from the early days of western feminism, feminists were encouraged to channel their desires for freedom into shopping. I myself bought into this narrative, as I say in the book: ’Many of us in the 1980s and 1990s thought that we could join up the pleasures of fashion and the politics of feminism. When I went to work at Vogue in the 1990s, I believed that there was no longer any need for feminists to map out a separate space where we would have to say no to the joys of dressing up and shopping. I trusted that feminism was remaking the world so completely that women – and men – could feel free to enjoy the creative and colourful pleasures of fashion without being in thrall to them. But I was too optimistic. Instead of feminism remaking fashion, fashion has eaten feminism, grown fat on it, and now regurgitates it shamelessly.’
And now we can see where the reliance on consumerism as a route to happiness has brought us – into a world in which too much of the planet’s resources are being wasted and destroyed, and in which too many people are being exploited and dehumanised. We need a true rebalancing of our world, and that does mean reminding ourselves that we cannot shop our way into liberation.
If we recognise our connections with one another and with the world around us this can at times feel painful, I don’t sidestep the grief and anger that many of us feel. But it can also feel liberating, and the route towards a renewed feminism which can rise to the challenges of our times. So in the book, I also speak to women who are tracing paths forward and finding the courage and imagination to map out new ways of connecting with one another and our living planet. Because millions of women are currently figuring out in their own ways what they can bring to the work ahead to challenge these threats; millions are determined to save what they can from these fires, and we can learn from the energy and determination that are rising around us.
Natasha Walter is a writer, feminist campaigner, the founder of Women for Refugee Women, and a member of Writers Rebel. Her latest book is Feminism for a World on Fire.