This is an Eco-feminism K that focuses on the dualistic hierarchy depicted by the affirmative which oppresses women through a representation of nature in abuse, exploitation, even ‘rape’. Please educate yourself in this topic by reading the first 2-3 pages of this largely unbiased and extremely helpful essay describing the essentials of ecofeminism: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/bron/PDF--
Christianity/Hobgood-Oster--Ecofeminism-International%20Evolution.pdf.
-Bill Zhang

, V. Spike **Peterson** and Anne Sisson **Runyan**, Prof Poly Sci.
University of Arizona and Prof Women’s Studies American University, Global Gender Issues, 1999 Page
147-149
At first glance, the issue of the use and abuse of the global environment and its natural resources seems to have nothing to do with gender. At one level, it can be argued that all human beings have an impact on the natural environment and that all human beings are affected by the degradation of the environment by
"man-made" pollution. At another level, we have come to think of natural resources as the property of states (and corporations), whose relative power in the international system depends upon the extent of the resources under their control and their ability to both exploit and preserve them for economic purposes.
Through these lenses, there is no room for seeing or thinking about what we call the gendered division of resources. However, if we look more closely at the way in which resources are divided within and between states, which resources are valued, how resources are used and by whom, and where pollution is most concentrated, we begin to see gendered patterns. Looking still deeper, we also begin to see that the very relationship that "man" has with nature in the late twentieth century throughout the world has been formed, in part, by a Western (neoliberal and capitalist) gender ideology that is becoming increasingly global and quite harmful to the earth and its inhabitants. The Indian physicist and ecofeminist Vandana
Shiva argued that before the rise of Western colonization and Western science, indigenous peoples throughout the world had close and relatively harmonious relationships with the natural world, viewing it as sacred and alive with spirituality. 124 Typically, natural forces were seen as feminine because they represented to these cultures the generative power of fertility and birth. Many of these pre- or non-
Christian cultures worshiped female deities who were embodied in all manner of natural objects, ranging from volcanoes and bodies of water to trees and animals. What Shiva called the feminine principle ensured that people used, but did not abuse, the natural environment. In fact, the "feminine principle" was itself a reflection of women's particular relationship with nature through the productive and reproductive work they performed in these cultures. Not only did women bring new life ito the world through childbirth, but they were also responsible for gathering and cultivating the staple foods consumed for the perpetuation of life. As we noted earlier, in many places the rise of Western colonization undermined communal land use and women's land rights. This disrupted carefully balanced and ecologically sound relationshipsbetween peoples and their lands. In addition, the rise of Western science transformed peoples' notions of nature, and a worldview that saw nature strictly as a resource for "man-made" projects replaced belief systems in which nature was revered as the manifestation of divinity. Early Western science, coupled with Christian ideology, turned the feminine principle upside down. Nature was still thought of as feminine; but rather than powerful and goddesslike, nature was seen as a passive resource from which men could take anything they needed or wanted without care for the effects of their interventions. This reversal in gender ideology and environmental thinking paved the way for rapacious land-use patterns and technologies, whichhave led to numerous ecological crises since the advent of the industrial revolution. 125 Western gender ideology construes nature as a passive resource to be controlled, used, and even abused. As this ideology has become increasingly widespread, environmental crises have followed, ranging from the problems of acid rain and global dumping to ozone depletion and

global warming. Gender ideology is by no means the sole cause of these problems, but if we look through the lens of the gendered division of resources, we see that gender ideology contributes to the growth and perpetuation of these problems. Although there are still cultures that retain some reverence for the feminine principle of nature, the increasingly global aspects of the gendered division of resources rest upon the following dualisms: culture-nature, active-passive, subject-object, users-resources, advancedprimitive, and exploitation-stewardship. These dualisms are manifested in the contemporary situation, where women have a great deal of responsibility for caring for the environment but little say in how it will be used and for what purposes. Gendered Resource Depletion Denying women any appreciable role in decision-making about use of the environment has led directly to what Gita Sen and Caren Grown call the food-fuel-water crises in the rural areas of the Third World. 126 These crises result from resource depletion that threatens the survival of people in subsistence economies. Women's displacement from the land by largescale agricultural development for export has contributed to high levels of famine, particularly in Africa. But there are additional consequences of this displacement, contributing not only to continued hunger but also to deforestation and desertification. Women are the main food producers and processors in most of the rural areas of the Third World, and they must have access to clean water and firewood for fuel. As their land is lost to corporate farms and as water sources are polluted by agricultural runoff from fertilizers and pesticides, rural women are forced to travel farther and farther in search of clean water, sometimes as far as twenty kilometers (about twelve and one-half miles) from their home.
Because the amount they can carry is limited, they may have to fetch water several times a day, adding more hours to their hard labor to sustain the meager diets of their families (see Figure 4.10 ). Similarly, as forests are cut down for large-scale agricultural enterprises, women must go farther afield to look for the firewood needed to cook and to boil water, making it safe to drink. When water and fuel sources are being depleted, not only does food become scarce, but also the basis for ecologically sound agricultural practices is eroded. First, female subsistence farmers are forced to cultivate small plots of land over and over again rather than engage in crop rotation. This depletes vital soil nutrients and can eventually even lead to small-scale desertification. Largescale desertification is the result of the overuse of crop lands by corporate farmers who do not rotate crops, and who overwater and salinate the soil and/or grow crops using methods that destroy fragile topsoil.
V. Spike **Peterson** and Anne Sisson **Runyan**, Prof Poly Sci.
University of Arizona and Prof Women’s Studies American University, Global Gender Issues, 1999 Page
1-13
Whenever we study a topic, we do so through a lens that necessarily focuses our attention in particular ways. By filtering or "ordering" what we look at, each lens enables us to see some things in greater detail or more accurately or in better relation to certain other things. But this is unavoid- ably at the expense of seeing other things that are rendered out of focus-- filtered out--by each particular lens. According to Paul
Viotti and Mark Kauppi, various theoretical perspectives, or "images," of international politics contain certain assumptions and lead us "to ask certain questions, seek certain types of answers, and use certain methodological tools." 1 For example, different images act as lenses and shape our assumptions about who the significant actors are (individuals? states? multinational corporations?), what their attributes are (rationality? self-interest? power?), how social processes are categorized (politics? cooperation? dependence?), and what outcomes are desirable (peace? national security? global equity?).The images or lenses we use have important consequences because they structure what we look for and are able to
"see." In Patrick Morgan's words, "Our conception of [IR acts as a] map for directing our attention and distributing our efforts, and using the wrong map can lead us into a swamp instead of taking us to higher ground." 2 What we look for depends a great deal on how we make sense of, or "order," our experience.
We learn our ordering systems in a variety of contexts. From infancy on, we are taught to make

distinctions enabling us to perform appropriately within a particular culture. As college students, we are taught the distinctions appropriate to particular disciplines(psychology, anthropology, political science) and particular schools of thought within them (realism, behavioralism, liberalism, structuralism). No matter in which context we learned them, the categories and ordering frameworks shape the lenses through which we look at, think about, and make sense of the world around us. At the same time, the lenses we adopt shape our experience of the world itself because they shape what we do and how and why we do it. For example, a political science lens focuses our attention on particular categories and events (the meaning of power, democracy, or elections) in ways that variously influence our behavior
(questioning authority, protesting abuse of power, or participating in electoral campaigns). By filtering our ways of thinking about and ordering experience, the categories and images we rely on shape how we behave and thus the world we live in: They have concrete consequences. We observe this readily in the These interacting phenomena--the position of women in world politics and the power of gender as a lens on the world--indicate that gender is important for contemporary understanding of world politics. It is no longer acceptable--and was never accurate--to treat gender as irrelevant to our knowledge of world politics. For these reasons, we offer in this text case of self-fulfilling prophecies: If we expect hostility, our own behavior (acting superior, displaying power) may elicit responses (defensive posturing, aggression) that we then interpret as "confirming" our expectations. It is in this sense that we refer to lenses and "realities" as interactive, interdependent, or mutually constituted. Lenses shape who we are, what we think, and what actions we take, thus shaping the world we live in. At the same time, the world we live in ("reality") shapes which lenses are available to us, what we see through them, and the likelihood of our using them in particular contexts. In general, as long as our lenses and images seem to
"work," we keep them and build on them. Lenses simplify our thinking. Like maps, they "frame" our choices and exploration, enabling us to take advantage of knowledge already gained and to move more effectively toward our objectives. The more useful they appear to be, the more we are inclined to take them for granted and to resist making major changes in them. We forget that our particular ordering or meaning system is a choice among many alternatives. Instead, we tend to believe we are seeing "reality" as it "is" rather than as our culture or discipline or image interprets or "maps" reality. It is difficult and sometimes uncomfortable to reflect critically on our assumptions, to question their accuracy or desirability, and to explore the implications of shifting our vantage point by adopting a different lens. Of course, the world we live in and therefore our experiences are constantly changing; we have to continuously modify our images, mental maps, and ordering systems as well. The required shift in lens may be minor: from liking one type of music to liking another, from being a high school student in a small town to being a college student in an urban environment. Or the shift may be more pronounced: from casual dating to parenting, from the freedom of student lifestyles to the assumption of full-time job responsibilities, from Newtonian to quantum physics, from East-West rivalry to post-Cold War complexities. Societal shifts are dramatic, as we experience and respond to systemic transformations such as economic restructuring, environmental degradation, or the effects of war. To function effectively as students and scholars of world politics, we must modify our thinking in line with historical developments. That is, as "reality" changes, our ways of understanding or ordering need to change as well. This is especially the case to the extent that outdated worldviews or lenses place us in danger, distort our understanding, or lead us away from our objectives. Indeed, as both early explorers and urban drivers know, outdated maps are inadequate, and potentially disastrous, guides.CONTINUES…
Today we know a great deal about gender, due to the growth of women's studies programs and gendersensitive research by scholars in all disciplines. Perhaps the most profound insight emerging from this scholarship is recognition of the pervasiveness of gender as a filtering category. (We elaborate on gender as a lens in the next chapter.) That is, gender-sensitive research does more than document the pattern of excluding or trivializing women and their experiences. It documents how gender-characterizations of masculinity and femininity--influence the very categories and frameworks within

which scholars work. In short, how we understand and value masculine and feminine characteristics profoundly shapes how we care about, perceive, understand, analyze, and critique the world in which we live. Gender thus influences not only who we are, how we live, and what we have, but also "how" we think, order reality, and claim to know what is true, and, hence, how we understand and explain the social world. As subsequent chapters illustrate, gender shapes our identification of global actors, characterization of state and nonstate actions, framing of global problems, and consideration of possible alternatives. a gender sensitive lens on global processes. Through this lens, not only the "what" of world politics but also "how" we view--and therefore understand--world politics is different. We see the extent and structure of gender inequality, the role of gender in structuring the experience of women and men worldwide, the significance of gender in shaping how we think about world politics, and the process by which gendered thought shapes world politics itself. A text on global gender issues affords more adequate and comprehensive understanding of world politics than do approaches that ignore the effect of world politics on gender relations and the effect of gender on world politics.
, Jill Steans, Senior Lecturer IR Theory, University of Birmingham, Gender and International
Relations, 1998 Pg 99-102
Those working from within the assumptions of the orthodoxy, do not make gender an explicit part of their analysis of war. However, it is clear that there is a crucial linkage between the construction ofmasculinity, femininity and the making of war. Chapter 3, in part, touched on the way in which struggles to carve out a place and identity for the imagined community of the ‘nation-state’ involve practices which demarcate the boundary between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, ‘citizens’ and foreigners’. War is central to the process of carving out political spaces and identities. War has been understood in social and political terms, resulting from social conflict and intimately connected to constructions of national identities and the pursuit of
‘national interests’. However, radical and psychoanalytic feminist thinkers have argued that this process of constructing identities and boundaries can be seen as but one manifestation of an underlying psychosexual drama in which masculinity is forged, affirmed and reaffirmed. In this view, therefore, if, as
Clausewitz maintained, war is the continuation of politics by other means, it has been constructed out of hostility towards the female ‘other’.CONTINUES… In this view, not only is war part of women’s daily existence, but war, violence and women’s oppression all grow from the same root. Military institutions and state are inseparable from patriarchy. War is not then, as realists and neo-realists would hold, rooted in the nature of ‘man’ or the anarchy of the international realm. However, the hegemony of a dominanceorientated masculinity sets the dynamics of the social relations in which all are forced to participate.
Some feminists argue thatpatriarchal societies have an inherent proclivity towards war because of the supreme value placed on control and the natural male tendency towards displays of physical force.
Though primarily concerned with the discourse of war, politics and citizenship, Hartsock argues that the association of power with masculinity and virility has very real consequences. She argues that ‘it gives rise to a view of community both in theory and in fact obsessed with the revenge and structured by conquest and domination’. Furthermore, according to Hartsock, the opposition of man to woman and perhaps even man to man is not simply a transitory opposition of arbitrary interests, but an opposition resting on a deep-going threat to existence. She argues that we re-encounter in the context of gender, as in class, the fact that the experience of the ruling group, or gender, cannot be simply dismissed as false. This raises the question of how we conceptualize and understand not only the ‘patriarchal state’, but also the relationship between the patriarchal nation-state requiring in the context of competitive struggle with other states militarism and internal hierarchy.

, Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies
Association and has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on
Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in
Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in International Relations:
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992
In previous chapters I have argued that traditional notions of national security are becoming dysfunctional. The heavy emphasis on militarily defined security, common to the foreign policy practices of contemporary states and to the historical traditions from which these practices draw their inspiration, does not ensure, and sometimes may even decrease, the security of individuals, as well as that of their natural environments. Many forms of insecurity in the contemporary world affect the lives of individuals, including ethnic conflict, poverty, family violence, and environmental degradation; all these types of insecurity can be linked to the international system, yet their elimination has not been part of the way in which states have traditionally defined their national security goals.Previous chapters have also called attention to the extent to which these various forms of military, economic, and ecological insecurity are connected with unequal gender relations. The relationship between protectors and protected depends on gender inequalities; a militarized version of security privileges masculine characteristics and elevates men to the status of first-class citizens by virtue of their role as providers of security. An analysis of economic insecurities suggests similar patterns of gender inequality in the world economy, patterns that result in a larger share of the world's wealth and the benefits of economic development accruing to men. The traditional association of women with nature, which places both in a subordinate position to men, reflects and provides support for the instrumental and exploitative attitude toward nature characteristic of the modern era, an attitude that contributes to current ecological insecurities.This analysis has also suggested that attempts to alleviate these military, economic, and ecological insecurities cannot be completely successful until the hierarchical social relations, including gender relations, intrinsic to each of these domains are recognized and substantially altered. In other words, the achievement of peace, economic justice, and ecological sustainability is inseparable from overcoming social relations of domination and subordination; genuine security requires not only the absence of war but also the elimination of unjust social relations, including unequal gender relations. 1

, Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, Ecofeminism: Toward global justice and planetary
health, Societ and Nature, 2 (1993), 1-35
The increase in biological manipulation in agriculture and the widespread growth of biotechnological industry are of concern to ecofeminist. These endeavors involve the objectification and domination of both women’s bodies and animals’ bodies as well as the further economic exploitation of working
class and Third World peoples. While technological intervention is often seen as a panacea- a means to progress and development, a way of increasing production and thus quality of life- it is becoming increasingly obvious that these technologies are creating more serious problems than those they
were meant to solve. As Vandana Shiva has suggested, to so-called advances of the ‘Green Revolution turned the seed into a commodity, which was owned and controlled by a few wealthy Western corporations who stripped the farmers and their products of integrity and power: “The social and political planning that went into the Green Revolution aimed at engineering not just seeds but social relations as well.” Biotechnological intervention in agriculture served to perpetuate the dependence relation between poorer nations and their inhabitants and the wealthy “innovators” of the superseed.

, Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, Ecofeminism: Toward global justice and planetary
health, Societ and Nature, 2 (1993), 1-35
The current system of global inequity, interpersonal and international violence, and environmental
degradation may seem beyond the scope of feminist analysis at first glance. However, if we can establish that a proposed activity or practice contributes to the subordination of women , then by
necessity it becomes a feminist concern. Certainly toxic waste, air pollution, contaminated
groundwater, increased militarization, and the like are not exclusively women’s issues; they are human issues which affect everybody. But, ecofeminists claim that environmental issues are feminist issues because it is women and children who are the first to suffer the consequences of injustice and environmental destruction.

Ann J. Tickner, Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California.
Gender in International Relarions: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, Pg.
A nascent market economy and its need for an ever-expanding resource base, together with a new vision of scientific progress, were important motivating forces as the early modern state system began to expand beyond its European boundaries. Europeans started venturing overseas in search of additional wealth and natural resources. Merchant describes an ecological crisis-- caused by Europe's shipbuilding industry, an industry that was one of the most critical for subsequent commercial expansion and national supremacy-- that occurred as early as the sixteenth century. Shipbuilding, which depended on mature oaks for masts and hulls, created a severe wood shortage in many parts of Europe, forcing the turn to mining coal as an alternate source of fuel. 18 As Europeans began to sail beyond their shores, the exploitation of natural resources in the name of human progress took on wider dimensions, beginning a process that has culminated in the twentieth century's highly interdependent global resource base with its strong potential for increasing international competition and conflict over scarce resources. As ecological crises have begun to take on global dimensions, humanity's vision of conquering nature has even extended beyond the earth into space. Schemes for mining the moon and using the material to create a "Pittsburgh in space" are being envisaged. In an international system consisting of autonomous sovereign political units, the notion of the world as a single resource base has led inevitably to political competition and conflict.European expansion and imperialism extended the seventeenth century's instrumental view of nature beyond the boundaries of Europe as scientific progress became in itself a justification for imperialist projects. The Enlightenment belief that the transformation of the environment was a measure of human progress was used as a justification for colonialism, because native populations were not deemed capable of effecting this transformation for themselves. 20 Thus the lower position assigned to women and nature in early modern Europe was extended to members of other cultures and races.Harriet
Ritvo argues that the growing dichotomy between domestic and wild animals in modern Europe was frequently compared to the dichotomy between civilized and savage human societies; she cites a report, to which Charles Darwin refers in his writings, of two Scottish collies who visited Siberia and "soon took the same superior standing" with regard to the native dogs "as the European claims for himself in relation to the savage." 21 The Regents Park Zoo, opened in London in 1828, was a celebration of England's imperial enterprise; wild animals from all over the world were displayed as evidence of England's ability to subdue exotic territories and convert their wild products into useful purposes. Ritvo cites a popular nineteenth-century zoology text that compares the ferocity of wild animals to the barbarity of native populations: when describing Africa, its author claims that "in all countries where men are most barbarous, the animals are most cruel and fierce." Carolyn Merchant asserts that by 1700 "nature, women, blacks and wage laborers were set on a path toward a new status as 'natural' and human resources for the modern world system." 23 "Empty" or "virgin" lands became sites for European conquest and settlement; according to Vandana Shiva, wastelands, a word loaded with the biases of colonial rule, were seen as spaces to be cultivated for the generation of revenue and resources for the "mother" country. 24 In reality, these spaces were not empty at all but occupied by people with very different relationships with their natural environment. The expansion of the European state system meant that the scientific revolution and its mechanistic attitude toward nature began to take on global dimensions with far-reaching implications for non-Western ecological traditions, most of which have been lost to the cultural imperialism of the

West. Merchant's account of changing attitudes toward nature in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
New England provides a case study of one such ecological revolution caused by European expansion. 25
Before European colonization, Native American populations, living in subsistence communities, regarded natural resources as gifts given by nature to take care of human needs; humans and animals lived in interlacing, cyclical time and space. As European settlers moved into these spaces they saw these new lands very differently, as "wastes" or wildernesses to be tamed and "improved," projects that required the expertise of a "superior" culture. The scientist Robert Boyle, who was also the governor of the New
England Company, declared his intention of ridding the "Indians" of their "ridiculous" notions about the workings of nature whom they misguidedly perceived "as a kind of goddess." 26 This taming process gradually set humans, European and native alike, apart from nature. Although Native Americans continued to be associated with animals in the minds of European settlers, and were thus placed below
Europeans in the social and political hierarchy, Native Americans began to see themselves as distanced from natural resources and apart from nature. Through their involvement in the fur trade Native
Americans began to objectify nature as it became associated with commercial transactions, and the killing of animals was undertaken for profit rather than survival. Merchant's account of the next phase of this ecological revolution in early New England parallels her earlier work on seventeenth-century Europe. As agricultural production was transformed from subsistence to market, farming gradually changed into a manufacturing industry. As this transformation took place, production and reproduction were split into separate spheres, and women became defined by their reproductive function within the private sphere.
Commercial farming, conducted mostly by men, required the management of nature as an abstract mechanical force; nature as mother retreated into the private sphere along with women, who were expected to be the upholders of moral values that had no place in a market economy. Merchant's conclusion is an ironic one when framed in a global perspective. She argues that since contemporary New
England depends on outside sources for most of its energy, food, and clothing some of its own environment has recovered, as evidenced by the regeneration of its natural forests. However, we should remember that today it is people in the Third World who are suffering the gravest consequences of resource depletion: with its colonial legacy as supplier of raw materials to the "civilized" world, the Third
World today suffers some of the harshest effects of environmental degradation. The demands upon the world's resources by the Eurocentric state system have imposed and continue to impose heavy burdens on the natural environment and its human inhabitants.

Ann J. Tickner, Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California.
Gender in International Relarions: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, Pg. 97- 98
Not until very recently ecological concerns have not been at the center of the agenda of international relations theory or practice. A global issue that defies national boundaries and calls for collective action,caring for the environment does not fit well with the power-seeking, instrumental behavior of states that I have described as in previous chapters. Barry Commoner’s definition of ecology as “the science of planetary housekeeping” is not the business of Realpolitik-.; such metaphors evoke images of the devalued private domain of women rather than the “important” public world of diplomacy and national security. Ecological bumper stickers with such messages as “Love Your Mother” are hardly designed to appeal to those engaged in the “serious“ business of statecraft and war. Therefore the inattention to environmental problems and the silencing of women in international relations may be more than coincidental. The term ecology, which means the study of life forms ”at home,” is based on the
Greek root for house; its modern meaning is the interrelationships between living organisms and their environment.2 These definitions evoke images of a domestic space traditionally populated by women, children, and servants.Ecology’s emphasis on holism and reproduction and metaphors such as global housekeeping connect it to women’s rather than men‘s life experiences.
Ann J. Tickner, Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California. Gender in International
Relarions: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, Pg 117-18
Traditional international relations theory, which describes the self-seeking, conflict-prone behavior of states and its detrimental effects on the natural environment, also offers a pessimistic view of the potential of the state as an environmental manager of the global commons. As Rousseau’s metaphor of the stag hunt suggests, collective action for the common good is hard to achieve in anarchical realms with no legally sanctioned method of enforcement. When public goods such as clean air and water can be consumed by all members of the system whether or not they pay for them, states tend to act selfishly, hoping that others will bear the costs. The Sprouts claim that when national governments look to spaces outside their own territory, their concerns reflect their own national values rather than the shared values of a global community.53 Paradoxically, the great powers, the traditional managers of the international system, pose the greatest threat to the environment by virtue of their disproportionate consumption of resources, their high level or pollution and their possession of large numbers of environmentally threatening weapons. Given the principle of state sovereignty, internal boundaries that contribute to environmental degradation are also hard to change when it is not in the interests of national political and economic elites to do so.
Ann J. Tickner, Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California.
Gender in International Relarions: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, Pg.110-11
Hobbes's Leviathan was a model for a society developed in the seventeenth century when the

perception of the universe shifted from organic to mechanistic. According to Merchant, one of the most significant achievements of mechanism as a world view was the reordering of reality around masculinist notion of order and power. In addition to their potential for dominating nature, machines brought certainty and control. In international relations, the search for control has also led theorists and practitioners to mechanistic models such as power balancing ~~ with its seeming promise of imposing order I on a disorderly international system. But power balancing and its resultant practice of self-help through military means if necessary do not offer solutions for the security of the natural environment. Paradoxically, the quest for national security, which involves the appropriation of natural resources through the domination of global space, is a historical process that has actually contributed to a decline in the security of the natural environment. Given the potential of modern weapons for mass destruction, military force, the last resort of states for security enhancement, has become the ultimate threat to the natural environment. This paradox has stimulated some international relations scholars to begin reconceptualizing security in ecological terms and to challenge the traditional formulations of geographical space.Such thinking attempts to move beyond a worldview whose boundaries are imposed by traditional formulations of geographical space. Such thinking attempts to move beyond a worldview whose boundaries are imposed by traditional national security concerns to ones that reconceptualizes geographical space in terms of the fragility of the natural environment and its human inhabitants
.
Ann J. Tickner, Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California.
Gender in International Relarions: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, Pg.103-04
Harding, and Evelyn Fox Keller, who have written about the origins of modern science, would agree with
Leiss’s argument that domination of nature was a central goal of modern science. Using a gendered perspective, however, they take his argument further: suggesting that the sexual imagery in seventeenth century science was intrinsic to its discourse, they claim that the domination of certain men over other human beings, other cultures, and nature cannot be fully understood unless this gendered language can be taken seriously. In her discussion of metaphors in science, Sandra Harding asks why certain metaphors, such as the rape of nature, have been dismissed by historians and philosophers as irrelevant to the real meaning of scientific concepts while others, such as the metaphor of nature as a machine, have been regarded as fruitful components of scientific explanation. Harding and Keller claim that these gender metaphors are crucial for understanding Western science as a masculine enterprise. The separation of mind from nature and the investigator from his or her subject of investigation have been important goals for modern science’s quest for objectivity. But as reason was separated from feeling and objectivity from subjectivity,science came to be defined in opposition to everything female. This kind of knowledge is consistent with a project that has involved the mastery, control, and domination of nature. These feminist therefore believe that such seventeenth century gendered metaphors were fundamental to developing attitudes towards nature and women, as well as racist attitudes toward non-Western peoples that I described; these attitudes have been consistent with the practices of an expansive and dominating international system.

, Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, Ecofeminism: Toward global justice and planetary
health, Societ and Nature, 2 (1993), 1-35
Those ecofeminists particularly concerned with the place of animals within ecofeminism emphasize
the woman-animal connection as both are seen as Other. They observe that the feminization,
naturalization, or animalization of an Other is often requisite to its ensuing subordination. They point to the metaphors of language which reveal its ideological underpinnings: phrases such as ‘the rape of nature’, ‘mother nature’, and ‘virgin forests’ all feminize nature and, thus, in a culture where women are seen as subordinate, authorize the subordination of nature. In turn, colloquialisms for women , such as
‘pussy’, ‘bitch’, ‘old hen’, ‘sow’, and the like, serve to animalize women and thereby reinforce
women’s inferior status by appealing to women’s animal (and thus non-human) nature.

(Judith, Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory,
“MERELY CULTURAL,” New Left Review I/227, January-February 1998, http://newleftreview.org/I/227/judith-butler-merely-cultural)--CRG
Thus, the result of parody is paradoxical: the gleeful sense of triumph indulged by the avatars of an ostensibly more serious Marxism about their moment in the cultural limelight exemplifies and
symptomatizes precisely the cultural object of critique they oppose ; the sense of triumph over this enemy, which cannot take place without in some eerie way taking the very place of the enemy, raises the question of whether the aims and goals of this more serious Marxism have not become hopelessly
displaced onto a cultural domain, producing a transient object of media attention in the place of a more systematic analysis of economic and social relations. This sense of triumph reinscribes a factionalization with-in the Left at the very moment in which welfare rights are being abolished in this country, class differentials are intensifying across the globe, and the right wing in this country has successfully
gained the ground of the ‘middle’ effectively making the Left itself invisible within the media. When does it appear on the front page of the New York Times, except on that rare occasion in which one part of the Left swipes at another, producing a spectacle of the Left for mainstream liberal and conservative press consumption which is all too happy to discount every and any faction of the Left within the political process, much less honour the Left of any kind as a strong force in the service of radical social change? Is the attempt to separate Marxism from the study of culture and to rescue critical knowledge from the shoals of cultural specificity simply a turf war between left cultural studies and
more orthodox forms of Marxism? How is this attempted separation related to the claim that new social movements have split the Left, deprived us of common ideals, factionalized the field of knowledge and political activism, reducing political activism to the mere assertion and affirmation of
cultural identity? The charge that new social movements are ‘merely cultural’, that a unified and progressive Marxism must return to a materialism based in an objective analysis of class, itself presumes that the distinction between material and cultural life is a stable one. And this recourse to an apparently stable distinction between material and cultural life is clearly the resurgence of a theoretical anachronism, one that discounts the contributions to Marxist theory since Althusser’s displacement of the base-superstructure model, as well as various forms of cultural materialism—for instance, Raymond
Williams, Stuart Hall and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Indeed, the untimely resurgence of that distinction is in the service of a tactic which seeks to identify new social movements with the merely cultural, and the cultural with the derivative and secondary, thus embracing an anachronistic materialism as the banner for a new orthodoxy. Orthodox Unity This resurgence of left orthodoxy calls for a ‘unity’ that
would, paradoxi-cally, redivide the Left in precisely the way that orthodoxy purports to lament.
Indeed, one way of producing this division becomes clear when we ask which movements, and for what reasons, get relegated to the sphere of the merely cultural, and how that very division between the material and the cultural becomes tactically invoked for the purposes of marginalizing certain forms of political activism? And how does the new orthodoxy on the Left work in tandem with a social and sexual conservativism that seeks to make questions of race and sexuality secondary to the ‘real’ business of politics, producing a new and eerie political formation of neo-conservative Marxisms.
On what principles of exclusion or subordination has this ostensible unity been erected? How quickly

we forget that new social movements based on democratic principles became articulated against a hegemonic Left as well as a complicitous liberal centre and a truly threatening right wing? Have the historical reasons for the development of semi-autonomous new social movements ever really been taken into account by those who now lament their emergence and credit them with narrow
identitarian interests? Is this situation not simply reproduced in the recent efforts to restore the universal through fiat, whether through the imaginary finesse of Habermasian rationality or notions of the common good that prioritize a racially cleansed notion of class? Is the point of the new rhetorics of unity not simply to ‘include’ through domestication and subordination precisely those movements that formed in part in opposition to such domestication and subordination, showing that the proponents of the ‘common good’ have failed to read the history that has made this conflict possible? What the resurgent orthodoxy may resent about new social movements is precisely the vitality that such movement are enjoying. Paradoxically, the very movements that continue to keep the Left alive are
credited with its paralysis. Although I would agree that a narrowly identitarian construal of such movements leads to a narrowing of the political field, there is no reason to assume that such social movements are reducible to their identitarian formations. The problem of unity or, more modestly, of solidarity cannot be resolved through the transcendence or obliteration of this field, and certainly not through the vain promise of retrieving a unity wrought through exclusions, one that reinstitutes
subordination as the condition of its own possibility. The only possible unity will not be the synthesis of a set of conflicts, but will be a mode of sustaining conflict in politically productive ways, practice of contestation that demands that these movements articulate their goals under the pressure of each other without therefore exactly becoming each other.

, United Nations Population Fund, State of the World’s Population report, 2009; Nikole
Brown, Gender Across Borders, Ecofeminism: Is the Movement Still Relevant? March 22, 2012
Women—particularly those in poor countries—will be affected differently than men. They are among
the most vulnerable to climate change , partly because in many countries they make up the larger share of the agricultural work force and partly because they tend to have access to fewer incomeearning opportunities. Women manage households and care for family members, which often limits
their mobility and increases their vulnerability to sudden weather-related natural disasters . Drought and erratic rainfall force women to work harder to secure food, water and energy for their homes. Girls drop out of school to help their mothers with these tasks. This cycle of deprivation, poverty and
inequality undermines the social capital needed to deal effectively with climate change .

Charlotte **Bretherton** is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and European
Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. “Movements, Networks, Hierarchies: A Gender Perspective on Global Environmental Governance,” Global Environmental Politics, 2003, project muse.
In common with ecofeminism, emancipatory arguments assign special insights, and by implication responsibilities, to women. In this latter case, however, women's special vantage point is provided, not by affinity with nature, but by their positions in social structures. Despite (limited) contemporary renegotiation of gender relations, particularly in Western societies, and considerable variations in patterns of gender relations between and within cultures, women generally remain politically and economically subordinate to men of their own class or ethnic group. Consequently men gain a "dividend" from patriarchy in terms of prestige, authority and material resources. This effectively undermines their ability to act collectively to subvert dominant structures: gender order where men dominate women cannot avoid constituting men as an interest group concerned with defense, and women as an interest group concerned with change. This is a structural fact, independent of whether men as individuals love or hate women, or believe in equality or abjection, and independent of whether women are currently pursuing change. 19 This formulation illuminates the masculinization of contemporary environmentalism. However, in denying an emancipatory role to men as a group, it does not (as ecofeminism might suggest) remove from individual men responsibility for opposing the dominant norms of capitalist patriarchy. It does, nevertheless, place women in a unique position of responsibility in challenging hegemonic structures and their constitutive norms. Women's movements have recognized this and responded accordingly. Peggy Antrobus, then coordinator of the Third World network Development
Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), addressed the 1991 Global Assembly of Women for a
Healthy Planet thus: We must clarify the links between environmental degradation and the structures of social, economic and political power...the links between the structure of our own subordination as women and the processes by which this subordination serves to perpetuate all other systems of oppression. 20

Ann J. Tickner, Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California.
Gender in International Relarions: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, Pg
The following three chapters will focus on three topics: national security, political economy, and the natural environment. Besides being central to the contemporary agenda of international relations scholarship, these topics constitute the framework within which an important redefinition of the meaning of security is currently taking place. The achievement of security has always been central to the normative concerns of international relations scholars. But dissatisfied with the traditional models of national security, which focus exclusively on military security, certain scholars of international relations have begun to use the term common security to envisage a type of security that is global and multidimensional with political, economic, and ecological facets that are as important as its military dimensions. The security of individuals and their natural environment are considered as well as the security of the state.
Certain peace researchers are beginning to define security in terms of the elimination of physical, structural, and ecological violence. 34 Moving the consideration of violence beyond its relation to physical violence allows us to move beyond simplistic dichotomies between war and peace to a consideration of the conditions necessary for a just peace, defined more broadly than simply the absence of war. Defining security in terms of the elimination of physical, structural, and ecological violence is quite compatible with feminist theories that have long been concerned with all these issues. 35 Thinking of security in multidimensional terms allows us to get away from prioritizing military issues, issues that have been central to the agenda of traditional international relations but that are the furthest removed from women's experiences. Many of the values promoted by supporters of common security are similar to the characteristics that, in our culture, are associated with femininity. Yet, none of this new thinking has considered security from a gendered perspective. Any feminist perspective would argue that a truly comprehensive security cannot be achieved until gender relations of domination and subordination are eliminated.

V. Spike Peterson, “Rereading Public and Private: The Dichotomy that is Not One” SAIS
Review 20.2 (2000) 11-29
Regarding security issues--a focal point of IR inquiry--feminists argue that gendered identities are key to manifestations of violence. Empirical evidence indicates that, worldwide, most acts of direct violence are committed by men. 20 Yet not all men are violent, and societies vary dramatically in exhibiting violence, which suggests that biologistic explanations are, at best, naïve. 21 Whatever else is entailed in accounting for systematic violence, it is absolutely [End Page 19] remarkable--one might even suggest irrational-that so little attention has been devoted to assessing the role of masculinity in this male-dominated arena.
Feminists insist that our investigations of violence--from war atrocities to schoolyard killings and domestic battering--take seriously how masculinity is constructed, internalized, enacted, reinforced, and glorified. In IR, such recognition requires that we seriously consider the question: Is militarism without masculinism possible? 22 An extensive literature confirms two key observations: first, thatcultures vary significantly in how they construct masculinity (hence, war-making and rape are not universal), and second, that more violent societies evidence more systematic cultivation of gender polarity, rigid heterosexism, male power in physical and symbolic forms, and ideologies of masculine superiority. **23** To ignore this correspondence is to impoverish our understanding of violence and the security questions it raises.

Cynthia Enloe, Prof Women’s Studies Clark University, The Curious Feminist, 2004 pg. 74
Thus we need to become more curious about the processes of trivialization. How exactly do regimes, opposition parties, judges, popular movements, and the press go about making any incident of violence against women appear trivial? The gendered violence can be explained as inevitable-that is, not worth the expenditure of political capital. Or it can be treated by the trivializers as numerically inconsequential, so rare that it would seem wasteful of scarce political will or state resources to try to prevent it.
Third, trivialization can be accomplished by engaging in comparisons: how can one spend limited political attention on, say, domestic violence or forced prostitution when there are market forces like global competition, structural adjustment, or nuclear testing to deal with -- as if, that is, none of those had any relationship to the incidence of violence against women? Finally, trivialization may take the form of undermining the credibility of the messenger. As early as the 1800s, trivializers already were labeling women who spoke out publicly against violence against women as "loose," "prudish," or "disappointed"
(it would be the trivializers' twentieth-century successors who would think to add "lesbian".

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies
Association and has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on
Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in
Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in International Relations:
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992
Having critiqued each model from the perspective of gender, I shall offer some feminist perspectives on international political economy. Just as women have been absent from the field of international relations, the few feminists who write about economics claim that their discipline has rendered women completely invisible. The field of economics has shown little interests in household production and accomplishments in a market economy. A growing literature on women and development has been marginalized from mainstream theories of political and economic development. Since very little literature on women and international political economy exists, once again I shall be drawing on feminist literature from other disciplines and approaches. Common themes in these various feminist approaches suggest that feminist perspectives on international political economy would start with assumptions about the individual, the state and class that are very different from those at the foundation of Gilpins three ideologies .

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies
Association and has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on
Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in
Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in International Relations:
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992
Like certain feminists, many ecologists are critical of modern society, given its dependence on an excessive appropriation of nature’s resources. They suggest that the values of modern society are based on an incomplete model of humanity that emphasizes instrumental rationality, production, and consumption at the expense of humaneness, creativity, and compassion. “Economic man” is a compulsive producer and consumer, with little thought for ecological constraints. Modernization, which has legitimized these destructive behaviors, has led to a loss of control over science and technology that is causing severe environmental stress today. Modernization, a product of the European Enlightenment, is now being reproduced in the Third World, where development projects often further strain limited environmental resources and reproduce inequality. Irene Dankelman and Joan Davidson claim that science’s manipulations of nature, manifested in projects such as the Green Revolution, threaten the natural environment and marginalize poor people. As modern techniques are used to increased crop yields, water supplies begin to suffer from contamination from fertilizers and pesticides, making them less available for drinking. Modernization of agriculture in the Third World has encouraged monoculture and cash cropping, which makes women’s tasks of feeding families more difficult. The authors point out that the ecological damage caused by modernization often falls most heavily on women in their role as family providers.

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies
Association and has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on
Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in
Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in International Relations:
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992
Each of these stories reinforces the belief, widely held in the United States and throughout the world by both men and women, that military and foreign policy are arenas of policy-making least appropriate for women. Strength, power, autonomy, independence, and rationality, all typically associated with men and masculinity, are characteristics we most value in those to whom we entrust the conduct of our foreign policy and the defense of our national interest. Those women in the peace movements, whom feminist critics of Donald Regan cited as evidence for women’s involvement in international affairs, are frequently branded as naïve, weak and even unpatriotic. When we think about the definition of a patriot, we generally think of a man, often a soldier who defends his homeland, most especially his women and children, from dangerous outsiders. (We sometimes even think of a missile or a football team.) The
Schroeder story suggests that even women who have experience in foreign policy issues are perceived as being too emotional and too weak for the tough life and death decisions required for the nation’s defense.
Weakness is always considered a danger when issues of national security are at stake: the president’s dual role as commander in chief reinforces our belief that qualities we associate with “manliness” are of utmost importance in the selection of our presidents.

John **Collins** and Ross **Glover**, Professor Sociology and Global Studies at St. Lawrence, Collateral Language, Pg 6-7 2002
The Real Effects of Language. As any university student knows, theories about the “social construction” and social effects of language have become a common feature of academic scholarship. Conservative critics often argue that those who use these theories of language (e.g., deconstruction) are “just” talking about language, as opposed to talking about the “real world.” The essays in this book, by contrast, begin from the premise that language matters in the most concrete, immediate way possible: its use, by political and military leaders, leads directly to violence in the form of war, mass murder (including genocide), the physical destruction of human communities, and the devastation of the natural environment. Indeed, if the world ever witnesses a nuclear war (holocaust,) it will probably be because leaders in more than one country have succeeded in convincing their people, through the use of political language, that the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, the destruction of the earth itself, is justifiable. From our perspective, then,every act of political violence—from the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans to the murder of political dissidents in the Soviet Union to the destruction of the World Trade Center, and now the bombing of Afghanistan—is intimately linked with the use of language.Partly what we are talking about here, of course, are the processes of
“manufacturing consent” and shaping people’s perception of the world around them; people are more likely to support acts of violence committed in their name if the recipients of the violence have been defined as “terrorists,” or if the violence is presented as a defense of “freedom.” Media analysts such as
Noam Chomsky have written eloquently about the corrosive effects that this kind of process has on the political culture of supposedly democratic societies. At the risk of stating the obvious, however, the most fundamental effects of violence are those that are visited upon the objects of violence; the language that shapes public opinion is the same language that burns villages, besieges entire populations, kills and maims human bodies, and leaves the ground scarred with bomb craters and littered with land mines. As George Orwell so famously illustrated in his work, acts of violence can easily be made more palatable through the use of euphemisms such as “pacification” or, to use an example discussed in this book, “targets.” It is important to point out, however, that the need for such language derives from the simple fact that the violence itself is abhorrent. Were it not for the abstract language of “vital interests” and “surgical strikes” and the flattering language of “civilization” and ‘just” wars, we would be less likely to avert our mental gaze from the physical effects of violence.
Chloe Wall, Metamorphosis: Research and Creative Activity at Public Liberal Arts Colleges, The Nature of
Knowledge: Toward an Ecofeminist Epistomology, University of Alberta, 2012
Lakoff and Johnson’s thesis, however, does have some somewhat unnerving implications. If the body is
where the mind takes root, then those who have better bodies also have better minds. Furthermore, if reason is what makes us human, then those with better minds, who are more rational, are more human.
So, if better bodies mean better minds, and better minds mean better humans, then those with
better bodies are more human . This notion is, obviously, quite the affront to our post-Enlightenment sensibilities, and has dangerous ramifications if pursued in practice. (One extreme scenario might involve the systematic enslavement or extermination of all people who do not meet the necessary
“humanness” criteria, whatever that criteria might be.) What we would see is the dehumanization of

all those who are not human enough, reducing them into the position we currently assign animals.
Lakoff and Johnson, however, undercut this notion. Reason is, to them, evolutionary, and understanding that “ utterly changes our relation to other animals and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places
us on a continuum with them.” 6 (I shall return to this point later, but for now I would like to continue to discuss the rest of Lakoff and Johnson’s concept of reason.)

Jan Jin Pettman, Professor of Women’s Studies Australia National University, Worlding
Women: A Feminist International Politics, 1996 Pg. 90
War involves sustained, large-scale and politically directed violence, often between states, though frequently involving anti-state forces from within the borders. Political violence is broader; it includes state terror enacted by state agents or by vigilante gangs with state complicity, for example, directed against all or parts of the state’s own population. This terror is designed to disable opposition or resistance, to so intimidate a population as to forcibly ‘depoliticise’ it, and to break down the very fabric of everyday life and social relationships. This terror is usually gender specific, and international. It is still largely ignored in IR war literature—yet another legacy of the inside/outside dichotomy and the privileging of relations, especially war relations, between states. Also ignored in mainstream IR are other and wider definitions of violence with rather different implications for thinking about war and peace.
Johan Galtung’s notion of structural violence (1975) brought to peace research attention the causes of death and suffering that do not result directly from war, though they are often defended by force and militarization, directly or indirectly. A contemporary estimate suggests that while on average one million people die from war killings a year, somenineteen million die from immediately preventable causes associated with poverty and the grossly unequal distribution of goods and services, which the current international system props up (Nordstrom, 1994a). In this circumstances, the opposite of war may not be peace, but justice. Third-world women especially argue the interconnections of poverty, environmental degradation, gross social inequality, exploitation, militarization and violence (Sen and
Grown, 1987; Mies and Shiva, 1993). Widening definitions of violence also deepen our definitions of peace, so peace becomes more than negative peace, more than simply not-war (though that itself is important enough, often); it becomes positive peace, where people’s own security is built collectively in their everyday lives (Brock-Utne, 1989).

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992
Reexamining the Anarchy/Order DistinctionThe pervasiveness of internal conflict within states in the latter part of the twentieth century and the threats that militarized states pose to their own populations have called into question the realist assumption about the anarchy/order distinction. Critics of realism have also questioned the unitary actor assumption that renders the domestic affairs of states unproblematic when talking about their international behavior. Claiming that militarism, sexism, and racism are interconnected, most feminists would agree that the behavior of individuals and the domestic policies of states cannot be separated from states' behavior in the international system. 70 Feminists call attention to the particular vulnerabilities of women within states, vulnerabilities that grow out of hierarchical gender relations that are also interrelated with international politics. Calling into question the notion of the "protected," the National Organization for Women in their "Resolution on Women in Combat" of September 16, 1990, estimated that 80-90 percent of casualties due to conflict since World War II have been civilians, the majority of whom have been women and children. In militarized societies women are particularly vulnerable to rape, and evidence suggests that domestic violence is higher in military families or in families that include men with prior military service. Even though most public violence is committed by men against other men, it is more often women who feel threatened in public places. Jill Radford suggests that when women feel it is unsafe to go out alone, their equal access to job opportunities is limited. Studies also show that violence against women increases during hard economic times; when states prioritize military spending or find themselves in debt, shrinking resources are often accompanied by violence against women. Feminist theories draw our attention to another anarchy/order distinction-- the boundary between a public domestic space protected, at least theoretically, by the rule of law and the private space of the family where, in many cases, no such legal protection exists. In most states domestic violence is not considered a concern of the state, and even when it is, law enforcement officials are often unwilling to get involved.
Domestic assaults on women, often seen as "victim precipitated," are not taken as seriously as criminal assaults. Maria Mies argues that the modernization process in the Third World, besides sharpening class conflict, has led to an increase in violence against women in the home as traditional social values are broken down. While poor women probably suffer the most from family violence, a growing women's movement in India points to an increase in violence against educated middle-class women also, the most extreme form of which is dowry murder when young brides are found dead in suspicious circumstances. Eager to marry off their daughters, families make promises for dowries that exceed their means and that they are subsequently unable to pay. In 1982 there were 332 cases of "accidental burning" of women in New Delhi; many more cases of "dowry deaths" go unreported. Recent studies of family violence in the United States and Western Europe have brought to light similar problems. When the family is violence-prone, it is frequently beyond the reach of the law; citing a 1978 report of the
California Commission on the Status of Women, Pauline Gee documents that in 1978 one-quarter of the murders in the United States occurred within the family, one-half of these being husband-wife killings.
Much of this family violence takes place outside the sanction of the legal system; it has been estimated that only 2 percent of men who beat their wives or female living partners are ever prosecuted. Maria

Mies argues that this line, whichdemarcates public and private, separates state-regulated violence, the rule of right for which there are legally sanctioned punishments, and male violence, the rule of might for which, in many societies, no such legal sanctions exist. The rule of might and the rule of right are descriptions that have also been used in international relations discourse to distinguish the international and domestic spheres. By drawing our attention to the frequently forgotten realm of family violence that is often beyond the reach of the law, these feminists point to the interrelationship of violence and oppression across all levels of analysis. Feminist perspectives on security would assume that violence, whether it be in the international, national, or family realm, is interconnected. Family violence must be seen in the context of wider power relations; it occurs within a gendered society in which male power dominates at all levels. If men are traditionally seen as protectors, an important aspect of this role is protecting women against certain men. Any feminist definition of security must therefore include the elimination of all types of violence, including violence produced by gender relations of domination and subordination. The achievement of this comprehensive vision of security requires a rethinking of the way in which citizenship has traditionally been defined, as well as alternative models for describing the behavior of states in the international system. Citizenship Redefined Building on the notion of hegemonic masculinity, the notion of the citizen-warrior depends on a devalued femininity for its construction. In international relations, this devalued femininity is bound up with myths about women as victims in need of protection; the protector/protected myth contributes to the legitimation of a militarized version of citizenship that results in unequal gender relations that can precipitate violence against women. Certain feminists have called for the construction of an enriched version of citizenship that would depend less on military values and more on an equal recognition of women's contributions to society. Such a notion of citizenship cannot come about, however, until myths that perpetuate views of women as victims rather than agents are eliminated. CONTINUES… In previous chapters I have argued that traditional notions of national security are becoming dysfunctional. The heavy emphasis on militarily defined security, common to the foreign policy practices of contemporary states and to the historical traditions from which these practices draw their inspiration, does not ensure, and sometimes may even decrease, the security of individuals, as well as that of their natural environments. Many forms of insecurity in the contemporary world affect the lives of individuals, including ethnic conflict, poverty, family violence, and environmental degradation; all these types of insecurity can be linked to the international system, yet their elimination has not been part of the way in which states have traditionally defined their national security goals. Previous chapters have also called attention to the extent to which these various forms of military, economic, and ecological insecurity are connected with unequal gender relations. The relationship between protectors and protected depends on gender inequalities; a militarized version of security privileges masculine characteristics and elevates men to the status of first-class citizens by virtue of their role as providers of security. An analysis of economic insecurities suggests similar patterns of gender inequality in the world economy, patterns that result in a larger share of the world's wealth and the benefits of economic development accruing to men. The traditional association of women with nature, which places both in a subordinate position to men, reflects and provides support for the instrumental and exploitative attitude toward nature characteristic of the modern era, an attitude that contributes to current ecological insecurities. This analysis has also suggested that attempts to alleviate these military, economic, and ecological insecurities cannot be completely successful until the hierarchical social relations, including gender relations,intrinsic to each of these domains are recognized and substantially altered. In other words, the achievement of peace, economic justice, and ecological sustainability is inseparable from overcoming social relations of domination and subordination; genuine security requires not only the absence of war but also the elimination of unjust social relations, including unequal gender relations. The individual, the state, and the international system, the levels of analysis favored by realists for explaining international conflict, are not merely discrete levels of analysis around

which artificial boundaries can be drawn; they are mutually reinforcing constructs, each based on behaviors associated with hegemonic masculinity. While various approaches to international relations critical of realist thinking have questioned the adequacy of these assumptions and explanations of contemporary realities, they have not done so on the basis of gender. Marxist analyses of the world economy are also constructed out of the historical experiences of men in the public world of production.
Revealing the masculinist underpinnings of both these types of discourse suggests that realism, as well as the approaches of many of its critics, has constructed worldviews based on the behavior of only half of humanity.

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992
In the discourse of international politics, however, our national identities as citizens have been tied to the heroic deeds of warrior-patriots and our various states' successful participation in international wars. This militarized version of national identity has also depended on a devaluation of the identities of those outside the boundaries of the state. Additionally, it has all but eliminated the experiences of women from our collective national memories. A less militarized version of national identity, which would serve us better in the contemporary world where advances in technology are making wars as dangerous for winners as for losers, must be constructed out of the equally valued experiences of both women and men. To foster a more peaceful world, this identity must also rest on a better understanding and appreciation of the histories of other cultures and societies.The multidimensional nature of contemporary insecurities also highlights the importance of placing greater public value on reproduction and maintenance. In a world where nuclear war could destroy the earth and most of its inhabitants, we can no longer afford to celebrate the potential death of hundreds of thousands of our enemies; the preservation of life, not its destruction, must be valued. The elimination of structural violence demands a restructuring of the global economy so that individuals' basic material needs take priority over the desire for profit. An endangered natural environment points to the need to think in terms of the reproduction rather than the exploitation of nature. This ethic of caring for the planet and its inhabitants has been devalued by linking it to the private realm associated with the activities of women; yet caring and responsibility are necessary aspects of all dimensions of life, public and private.
They will be valued in the public realm only when men participate equally in the private realm in tasks associated with maintenance and responsibility for child rearing. If we are to move toward a more secure future, what we value in the public realm, including the realm of international politics, should not be so rigidly separated from the values we espouse in the home.

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992
Since, as I have suggested, the world of international politics is a masculine domain, how could feminist perspectives contribute anything new to its academic discourses? Many male scholars have already noted that, given our current technologies of destruction and the high degree of economic inequality and environmental degradation that now exists, we are desperately in need of changes in the way world politics is conducted; many of them are attempting to prescribe such changes. For the most part, however, these critics have ignored the extent to which the values and assumptions that drive our contemporary international system are intrinsically related to concepts of masculinity; privileging these values constrains the options available to states and their policymakers. All knowledge is partial and is a function of the knower's lived experience in the world. Since knowledge about the behavior of states in the international system depends on assumptions that come out of men's experiences, it ignores a large body of human experience that has the potential for increasing the range of options and opening up new ways of thinking about interstate practices. Theoretical perspectives that depend on a broader range of human experience are important for women and men alike, as we seek new ways of thinking about our contemporary dilemmas.
Conventional international relations theory has concentrated on the activities of the great powers at the center of the system. Feminist theories, which speak out of the various experiences of women-- who are usually on the margins of society and interstate politics-- can offer us some new insights on the behavior of states and the needs of individuals, particularly those on the peripheries of the international system. Feminist perspectives, constructed out of the experiences of women, can add a new dimension to our understanding of the world economy; since women are frequently the first casualties in times of economic hardship, we might also gain some new insight into the relationship between militarism and structural violence.

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992
Having examined the connection between realism and masculinity, I shall examine some feminist perspectives on national security. Using feminist theories, which draw on the experiences of women, I shall ask how it would affect the way in which we think about national security if we were to develop an alternative set of assumptions about the individual, the state, and the international system not based exclusively on the behavior of men.
Realist assumptions about states as unitary actors render unproblematic the boundaries between anarchy and order and legitimate and illegitimate violence. If we were to include the experiences of women, how would it affect the way in which we understand the meaning of violence? While women had been less directly involved in international violence as soldiers, their lives have been affected by domestic violence in households, another unprotected space, and by the consequences of war and the policy priorities of militarized societies.
Certain feminists have suggested that, because of what they see as a connection between sexism and militarism; violence at all levels of society is interrelated, a claim that calls into question the realist assumption of the anarchy/order distinction. Most important, these feminists claim that all types of violence are embedded in the gender hierarchies of dominance and subordination that I described in chapter 1. Hence they would argue that until these and other hierarchies associated with class and race are dismantled and until women have control over their own security a truly comprehensive system of security cannot be devised.

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, pg. 142
When women have been politically effective, it has generally been at the local level. Increasingly, women around the world are taking leadership roles in small scale development projects, such as cooperation production and projects designed to save the environment. Women are also playing important roles in social movements associated with peace and the environment. While these decentralized democratic projects are vital for women to achieve a sense of empowerment and are important building blocks for a more secure future, they will remain marginal as long as they are seen as women's projects and occur far from centers of power. Hence it is vitality important that women be equally represented, not just in social movements and in local politics but at all levels of policymaking. If foreign policy-making within' states has been a difficult area for women to enter, leadership positions in international organizations have been equally inaccessible. While women must have access to what have traditionally been seen centers of power where men predominate, it is equally important for women and men to work together at the local level. Victories in local struggles are important for the achievement of the kind of multidimensional, multilevel security I have proposed. The feminist perspectives presented in this book suggest that issues such as global security are interconnected with and partly constituted by local issues, therefore the achievement comprehensive security depends on the action by women and men at all levels of society. Such action is only possible when rigid gender hierarchies are challenged.
Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992,
Rather than discussing strategies for bringing more women into the international relations discipline as it is conventionally defined, I shall seek answers to my questions by bringing to light what I believe to be the masculinist underpinnings of the field. I shall also examine what the discipline might look like if the central realities of women’s day to day lives were included in its subject matter. Making women’s experiences visible allows us to see how gender relations have contributed to the way in which the field of international relations is conventionally constructed and to reexamine the traditional boundaries of the field. Drawing attention to gender hierarchies that privilege men's knowledge and men's experiences permits us to see that-it is these experiences that have formed the basis of most of our knowledge about international politics. It is doubtful whether we can achieve a more peaceful and just world, a goal of many scholars both women and men who are seeking a more inclusive approach to the way we think about international politics, while these gender hierarchies remain in place. Although this book is an attempt to make the discipline of international relations more relevant to women's lives, I am not writing it only for women; I hope that its audience will include both women and men who are

seeking a more inclusive approach to the way we think about international politics. Women have spoken and written on the margins of international relations because it is to the margins that their experiences have been relegated. Not until international politics is an arena that values the lived experience of us all can we truly envisage a more comprehensive and egalitarian approach that, it is to be hoped, could lead to a more peaceful world. Because gender hierarchies have contributed to the perpetuation of global insecurities, all those concerned with international affairs – men and women alike – should also be concerned with understanding and overcoming their effects.

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, pg.
While it has paid little direct attention to environmental issues, the conventional discipline of international relations has relied to a great extent on modernity’s mechanistic view of nature in framing its assumptions about the behavior of states n the international system. Feminist perspectives on ecology reveal not only the hierarchical relationship between humans and nature that has grown our out this worldview but also the extent to which this unequal relationship interacts with other forms of domination and subordination, including gender relations. The hierarchical dualisms discussed in this chapter, such as culture/nature, civilized/wild, North/South, rich/poor, public/private, and international/local, have been characteristic of the way in which we describe world politics and the interaction of states with their natural environment. A feminist perspective would argue that not until the boundaries of inequality and domination these dualisms represent are transcended can true ecological security be achieved. Only through the emergence of a system of values that simultaneously respect nature, women, and a diversity of cultures – norms that have been missing from the historical practice of international statecraft –can models that promise an ecologically secure future be devised.
Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, pg.
Many of these new thinkers submit that the international system, composed of states that have sought to ensure and enhance their own security at the expense of the natural environment and its individual inhabitants, requires a fundamental restructuring if it is to overcome our environmental dilemmas. Yet few of these scholars make similar inferences about the need to restructure the relationship between humans and nature that has evolved simultaneously with the globalization of the state system.
Ecologists and eco-feminists offer this more radical challenge: only by changing our relationship with nature can real security, for both our natural environment and its human inhabitants be achieved.

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, pg.
Given the generally masculine nature of international politics, how could such a change in values be effected? Underscoring the masculinist orientation in the discipline of international relations does nothing to change the masculinist underpinnings of state behavior in the international system. In the world of statecraft, no fundamental change in the hierarchy of the sexes is likely to take place until women occupy half, or nearly half, the positions at all levels of foreign and military policy making. No change in the hierarchy of gender will occur until mediators and care-givers are valued as presidents as citizen-warriors currently are. This will not come about until we live in a world in which gender hierarchies no longer contribute to women’s oppression. To the very limited extent they have visible in the world of international politics, women have generally been perceived as victims or problems; only when women’s problems or victimization are seen as being the result of unequal, unjust, or exploitative gender relations can women participate equally with men as agents in the provisions of global security.
Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, pg.
The following three chapters will focus on three topics: national security, political economy and the natural environment. Besides being central to the contemporary agenda of international relations scholarship, these topics constitute the framework within which an important redefinition of the meaning of security is currently taking place. The achievement of security has always been central to the normative concerns of international relations scholars. But dissatisfied with the traditional models of national security, which focus exclusively on military security, certain scholars of international relations have begun to the term common security to envisage a type of security that is global and multidimensional with political, economic, and ecological facets that as important as its military dimensions. The security of individuals and their natural environment are considered as well as the security of the state. Certain peace researchers are beginning to define security in terms of the elimination of consideration of violence beyond its relation to physical violence allows us to move beyond simplistic dichotomies between war and peace to a consideration of the conditions necessary for a just peace, defined more broadly than simply than absence of war. Defining security in terms of the elimination of physical, structural, and ecological violence is quite compatible with feminist theories that have long been concerned with all these issues. Thinking of security in multidimensional terms allows us to get away from prioritizing military issues, issues that have been central to the agenda of traditional international relations but that are the furthest removed from women’s experiences. Many of the values promoted by supporters of common security are similar to the characteristics’ that, in our culture, are associated with femininity. Yet, none of this new thinking has considered security from a gendered

perspective. Any feminist perspective would argue that a truly comprehensive security cannot be achieved until gender relations of domination and subordination are eliminated.

Ann J. Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches
International Relations. She is 1993-94 Vice President of the International Studies Association and has been a Visiting Research
Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She is the author of Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics:
American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States, also published by Columbia University Press, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 1992, pg.
When we consider security from the perspective of the individual we find that new thinking is beginning to provide us with definitions of security that are less state centered and less militaristic. But little attention has been paid either to gender issues or to women’s particular needs with respect to security or to their contributions toward its achievement. Feminist reformulations of the meaning of security are needed to draw attention to the extent to which gender hierarchies themselves are a source of domination and thus an obstacle to a truly comprehensive definition of security. I shall now turn to the issue of how women might define national security and to an analysis of security from a feminist perspective

, Greta Gaard, Vegetarian Ecofeminism: A Review Essay, Frontiers: A Journal of Women
Studies 23.3 (2002) Frontiers Editorial Collective
Marti Kheel's concept of the truncated narrative urges ecofeminists to look for the whole story behind what appear to be mutually exclusive ethical choices: choices between human survival and animal welfare, for example, as in the arguments for animal experimentation. Kheel suggests that we must understand the worldview that produced the ethical dilemma and thereby discover a way that such a crisis could be prevented. "Our moral conduct cannot be understood apart from the context (or moral soil) in which it grows," contends Kheel. Kheel also critiques both the tendency of deep ecologists to value the ecological "whole" over the specific part or individual and the tendency of animal liberationists to value the individual over the whole. Emphasizing the ecological concept of interconnectedness, Kheel argues that ethical decisions must consider both the interests of the individual and the community as interrelated. She reminds us that while a preference for the "whole" may seem more rational, our emotional relations and concerns are usually built on the strength of individual ties, and that both reason and emotion must be considered in making ethical decisions. In each of these arguments, Kheel rejects the "heroic" ethics of patriarchy and recommends a more holistic ethics that is ecofeminism.

, Marti Kheel, vegan ecofeminist activist scholar credited with founding Feminists for Animal
Rights, "Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference." InReweaving the
World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, 128–137. San
Francisco: Sierra Club Publishers, 1990
IT IS A SAD IRONY that the destruction of the natural world appears to be proceeding apace with the
construction of moral theories for how we should behave in light of this fact. Unable to trust or draw upon a felt sense of connection, most environmental theorists endorse reason as the sole guide in our dealings with the natural world. The vast majority of theories that constitute the field of environmental ethics are thus axiological or value theories whose primary purpose is the rational allotment of value to the appropriate aspects of the natural world. Both ecofeminism and deep ecology share in common an opposition to these value theories with their attendant notions of obligations and rights. The emphasis of both philosophies is not on an abstract or "rational" calculation of value but rather on the development of a new consciousness for all of life. Both ecofeminism and deep ecology may therefore be viewed as "deep" philosophies in the sense that they call for an inward transformation in order to attain an outward change. Deep ecologists employ the notion of self-realization to describe this inward transformation. As environmental philosophers Bill Devall and
George Sessions explain, this process:¶ begins when we cease to understand or see ourselves as isolated and narrow competing egos and begin to identify with other humans from our family and friends to, eventually, our species. But the deep ecology sense of Self requires a further maturity and growth, an identification which goes beyond humanity to include the nonhuman world.¶ There is a significant distinction between ecofeminism and deep ecology, however, in
their understanding of the root cause of our environmental malaise. For deep ecologists, it is the
anthropocentric world-view that is foremost to blame. The two norms of deep ecology self-realization and biospherical egalitarianism-are thus designed to redress this self-centered world-view. Ecofeminists,
on the other hand, argue that it is the androcentric world-view that deserves primary blame .2 For ecofeminists, it is not just "humans" but men and the masculinist world-view that must be dismantled from their privileged place.

, Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, Ecofeminism: Toward global justice and planetary
health, Societ and Nature, 2 (1993), 1-35
Some ecofeminists, such as Carolyn Merchant, see the separation of culture from nature as a product
of the scientific revolution . Where nature was previously seen as alive, with the scientific revolution, and most notably the works of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, nature was increasingly viewed as a
machine which could be analyzed, experimented with, and understood through reason. This sheory located animals in nature and authorized unlimited animal experimentation without anesthesia.
Animals, thought to be particularly well-fashioned machines, could be tortured at will because the animals’ cries of pain were not real but rather like the striking of a well-timed clock. According to this mind-set, nature was dead, inert, and mechanistic. Thus the domination or oppression of nature was not considered to be unethical, but rather a judicious use of resources .

(Mark, masters degree in philosophy of science at university of Maryland and researcher working at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and John, Director, Space Policy Institute
The George Washington University, Washington, “DO WE NEED A COSMOCENTRIC ETHIC?” http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.25.7502)
Steve Gillett has suggested a hybrid view combining homocentrism as applied to terrestrial activity combined with biocentrism towards worlds with indigenous life
.32 Invoking such a patchwork of theories to help deal with different domains and circumstances could be considered acceptable and perhaps even desirable especially when dealing with something as varied and complex as ethics. Indeed, it has a certain common sense appeal. However, instead of digging deeply into what is certainly a legitimate epistemological issue,
let us consider the words of J. Baird Callicott: “
But there is both a rational philosophical demand and a human psychological need for a self-consistent and all-embracing moral theory. We are neither good philosophers nor whole persons if for one purpose we adopt utilitarianism, another deontology, a third animal liberation, a fourth the land ethic, and so on. Such ethical eclecticism is not only rationally intolerable, it is morally suspect as it invites the suspicion of ad hoc rationalizations for merely expedient or self-serving actions.
”33

, The Green Fuse, Ecofeminism Critique, http://www.thegreenfuse.org/ecofemcrit.htm#root
Ecofeminism appears to have no problem with the classification of humans into two distinct groups with definite qualities. It is the way that patriarchy uses dualism that is at issue . Ecofeminist seems to
propose an alternative dualism that values both 'Natural' and 'Cultural' aspects.
¶
But is this ecofeminist dualism too analytical and reductionist? Is is legitimate to classify all the diversity of human life into two distinct groups?
¶
Some feminists and ecofeminists use the persecution of Medieval witches as an example of patriarchal oppression:¶ "The reaction against the disorder of nature symbolized by women was directed...at lower class witches."¶
Carolyn Merchant, 'The Death of Nature'¶ But at least 20% of those witches were men, and it seems as likely that their persecution was because they were a marginal group who did not fit into the cultural duality of the time. If this is so, then an ecofeminist dualism could have been equally oppressive.¶ Queer theory probably offers the strongest critique of
ecofeminist dualism, and may paradoxically offer enormous insights to progress the broader project of social transformation.

, Greta Gaard, Vegetarian Ecofeminism: A Review Essay, Frontiers: A Journal of Women
Studies 23.3 (2002) Frontiers Editorial Collective
Broadly speaking, ecofeminist theory has developed its analyses from initial insights linking various
objects of oppression to an analysis of the structure and functioning of oppression itself. Yet structural analyses of oppression have been present from the start of both feminist and ecofeminist theories. In the development of theory, there is not merely a linear progression but more specifically a
dialectical relationship between these two analytical approaches. The process of recognizing the
various objects of oppression (women, people of color, workers, queers, nonhuman animals, nature, the Third World or the South), the systems of oppression (sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, speciesism, anthropocentrism or naturism, colonialism), and the way those systems are interlinked is a
process that describes the history and development of most feminisms and ecofeminisms.

— Stan Rowe, Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, 1996 (“From Shallow To
Deep Ecological Philosophy,” Trumpeter, Volume 13, Number 1, Available Online at http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/278/413, Accessed 07-26-2011)
Organisms can be “alive” one moment and “dead” the next with no quantitative difference. The recently deceased organism has lost none of its physical parts yet it lacks “life”—an unknown quality of organization
(perhaps that mystery called “energy?”) but not the organization itself
. A still stronger reason exists for not equating “life” and “ organisms
.” The latter only exhibit “aliveness” in the context of life-supporting systems
, though curiously the vitality of the latter has mostly been denied. By analogy, it is as if all agreed that only a tree trunk’s cambial layer is “alive” while its support system
—the tree’s bole and roots of bark and wood that envelops and supports the cambium— is “dead.” Instead we perceive the whole tree as “alive.” The separation of “living” organisms from their supportive but “dead” environments is a reductionist convention that ecology disproves.
Both organic and inorganic are functional parts of enveloping ecosystems
, of which the largest one accessible to direct experience is the global ecosphere.
To attribute the organizing principle “life” to Earth
—to the ecosphere and its sectoral aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems— makes more sense than attempting to locate it in organisms per se
, divorced from their requisite milieus. The aquatic ecologist Lindeman (1942) who pioneered examination of lakes as energetic systems adopted the ecosystem concept because of the blurred distinction between “living” and “dead” in the components of the Minnesota lakes he studied.
The Biological Fallacy, equating organisms with life, is the result of a faulty inside-the-system view
(Rowe 1991).
Pictures of the blue-and-white planet Earth taken from the outside are intuitively recognized as images of a living “cell.”
Inside that “cell,” cheated by sight, people perceive a particulate world separable into important and unimportant parts: the “organic” and the “inorganic,” “biotic” and “abiotic,” “animate” and “inanimate,” “living” and “dead.”
Religions, philosophies and sciences have been constructed around these ignorant taxonomies, perpetuating the departmentalization of a global ecosystem whose “aliveness” is as much expressed in its improbable atmosphere, crustal rocks, seas, soils and sediments as in organisms. When did life begin? When did any kind of creative organization begin? Perhaps when the ecosphere came into existence. Perhaps earlier at time zero and the Big Bang.
Important human attitudes hinge on the idea of life and where it resides. If only organisms are imbued with life, then things like us are important and all else is relatively unimportant. The biocentric preoccupation with organisms subtly supports anthropocentrism
, for are we not first in neural complexity among all organisms? Earth has traditionally been thought to consist of consequential entities—organisms, living beings—and their relatively inconsequential dead environments. What should be attended to, cared for, worried about? The usual answer today is “life” in its limited sense of “organisms,” of biodiversity. Meanwhile sea, land and air—classified as dead environment—can be freely exploited. In the reigning ideology as long as large organisms are safeguarded, anything goes.
We demean Earth by equating
“life” and “organisms,” then proving by text-book definition that Earth is dead because not-anorganism. In this way mental doors are barred against the idea of liveliness everywhere
. Certainly Earth is not an organism, nor is it a super organism as Lovelock has proposed, any more than organisms are Earth or mini-Earth.
The planetary ecosphere and its sectoral volumetric ecosystems are SUPRA-organismic, higher levels of integration than mere organisms. Essential to the ecocentric idea is assignment of highest value to the ecosphere and to the ecosystems that it comprises
. Note the use of “ecosphere” rather than “biosphere,” the latter usually defined as a
“life-filled” (read “organism-filled”) thin shell at Earth’s surface. The meaning of “ecosphere” goes deeper; it is Earth to the core, comprising the totality of gravity and electro-magnetic fields, the molten radioactive magma that shifts the crustal plates, vulcanism and earthquakes and mountain building that renew nutrients at the surface, the whole dynamic evolving “stage” where organisms play out their many roles under the guidance of the larger whole, shaped at least in part by the “morphic fields” of the living Gaia (Sheldrake 1991:162). In different times and places the source of life has been attributed to the air, to soil, to water, to fire, as well as to organisms. As with the blind men touching the elephant, each separate part has been the imagined essential component of the whole Earth. Now that the planet has been conceptualized as one integrated entity, can we not logically attribute the creative synthesizing quintessence called “life” to it, rather than to any one class of its various parts?
When life is conceived as a function of the ecosphere and its sectoral ecosystem the subject matter of Biology is cast in a bright new light. The pejorative concept of “environment” vanishes. The

focus of vital interest broadens to encompass the world. Anthropocentrism and biocentrism receive the jolting shock they deserve. The answer as to where our preservation emphasis should center is answered: Earth spaces
( and all that is in them
) first, Earth species second. This priority guarantees no loss of vital parts
.
The implication s of
locating animation where it belongs, of denying the naive “Life = Organisms” equation
, are many. Perhaps most important is a broadening of
the Schweizerian
“reverence for life” to embrace the whole Earth. Reverence for life means reverence for ecosystems. We should feel the same pain when the atmosphere and the seas are poisoned as when people are poisoned. We should feel more pain at the destruction of wild ecosystems
, such as the temperate rain forest of the West Coast, than at the demise of any organism, no matter how sad the latter occasion, because the destruction of ecosystems severs the very roots of evolutionary creativity
.

(Eric, Director of Science, Technology, and Society Program at the New Jersey Institute of
Technology, “Nature as Subject” 1997)
One approach
within this conception of environmental philosophy would be to seek
these "
'environmentally appropriate" ethical principles in the direct application of traditional ethical theories--such as utilitarianism
, Kantianism, rights theory, or contractarianism--to the newly emerging problems of the environmental crisis. From this perspective, environmental philosophy would be a version of a basic applied ethics. Its subject matter--the justification of environmental policies--would be new, but the philosophical principles and ethical ideals used to analyze and solve these new problems would be the familiar positions and ideas of Western philosophy.
A rather different approach to environmental philosophy would eschew the traditional versions of ethical theory and offer a radical reinterpretation or critique of the dominant philosophical ideas
of the modern age. From this critical perspective, traditional ethical systems must be modified
, expanded, or transcended
in order to deal with the fundamental philosophical issues raised by the existence of the contemporary environmental crisis.
The crucial change would be an expansion of ethical thought beyond the limits of the human community to include the direct moral consideration of the natural world
. In these essays I have chosen this second path. My basic critical idea is that human-centered
(or "anthropocentric") ethical systems fail
to account for a moral justification for the central policies of environmentalism. From this negative account of anthropocentrism I derive my fundamental position in environmental ethics: the direct moral consideration and respect for the evolutionary processes of nature. I believe that it is a basic ethical principle that we must respect Nature as an ongoing subject of a history, a life-process, a developmental system
. The natural world--natural entities and natural ecological systems--deserves our moral consideration as part of the interdependent community of life on Earth. Hence the title of this collection. I consider
Nature
as analogous to a human subject, entitled to
moral respect and subject to traditional ethical categories. I do not anthropomorphize Nature; I do not ascribe human feelings and intentions to the operations of natural processes. I do not consider natural processes to be sentient or alive. I merely place
Nature within the realm of ethical activity. The basis of a moral justification of environmental policy is that we have ethical obligations to the natural world
, just as we have ethical obligations to our fellow human beings. In these essays I explain and analyze this nonanthropocentric perspective in environmental philosophy. Mass extinction is key to evolution.

(Steven, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas El Paso, “Revolutionary
Environmentalism: An Emerging New Struggle for Total Liberation” 2006)
George W. Bush’s feel-good talk of progress and democracy, given an endless and uncritical airing by mainstream corporate media
, masks the fact that we live in an unprecedented era of social and ecological crisis
. Predatory transnational corporations
such as ExxonMobil and Maxxam are pillaging the planet
, destroying ecosystems, pushing species into extinction, and annihilating indigenous peoples and traditional ways of life. War, globalization, and destruction of peoples, species, and ecosystems march in lockstep: militarization supports the worldwide imposition of the "free market" system
, and its growth and profit imperatives thrive though the exploitation
of humans, animals, and the earth (see
Kovel 2002; Tokar 1997; Bannon and Collier 2003).
Against the mindless optimism of technophiles, the denials of skeptics, and complacency of the general public, we depart from the premise that there is a global environmental crisis which is the most urgent issue facing us today. If humanity does not address ecological problems immediately and with radical measures
that target causes not symptoms, severe, worldaltering consequences will play out over a long-term period and will plague future generations
. Signs of major stress of the world’s eco-systems are everywhere, from shrinking forests and depleted fisheries to vanishing wilderness and global climate change. Ours is an era of global warming, rainforest destruction, species extinction, and chronic resource shortages that provoke wars and conflicts such as in Iraq. While five great extinction crises have already transpired on this planet, the last one occurring 65 million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs, we are now living amidst the sixth extinction crisis, this time caused by human not natural causes. Human populations have always devastated their environment and thereby their societies, but they have never intervened in the planet’s ecosystem to the extent they have altered climate. We now confront the “end of nature” where no natural force, no breeze or ripple of water, has not been affected by the human presence (McKribben 2006). This is especially true with nanotechnology and biotechnology. Rather than confronting this crisis and scaling back human presence and aggravating actions, humans are making it worse. Human population rates continue to swell, as awakening giants such as India and China move toward western consumer lifestyles, exchanging rice bowls for burgers and bicycles for SUVs.
The human presence on this planet is like a meteor plummeting to the earth, but it has already struck and the reverberations are rippling everywhere. Despite the proliferating amount of solid, internationally assembled scientific data supporting the reality of global climate change and ecological crisis, there are still so-called environmental “skeptics,” “realists,” and “optimists” who deny the problems, often compiling or citing data paid for by ExxonMobil. Senator James
Inhofe has declared global warming to be a “myth”
that is damaging to the US economy.
He and others revile environmentalists as “alarmists,” “extremists,” and “eco-terrorists” who threaten the American way of life
. There is a direct and profound relationship between global capitalism and ecological destruction. The capitalist economy lives or dies on constant growth, accumulation, and consumption of resources.
The environmental crisis is inseparable from the social crisis, whereby centuries ago a market economy disengaged from society and ruled over it with its alien and destructive imperatives.
The crisis in ecology is ultimately a crisis in democracy, as transnational corporations arise and thrive through the destruction of popular sovereignty. The western environment movement has advanced its cause for over three decades now
, but we are nonetheless losing ground in the battle to preserve species, ecosystems, and wilderness
(Dowie 1995; Speth 2004). Increasingly, calls for moderation, compromise, and the slow march through institutions can be seen as treacherous and grotesquely inadequate. In the midst of predatory global capitalism and biological meltdown, “reasonableness” and
“moderation” seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as “extreme” and “radical” actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate.
As eco-primitivist Derrick Jensen observes, “
We must eliminate false hopes, which blind us to real possibilities
.”
The current
world system is inherently destructive
and unsustainable; if it cannot be reformed, it must be transcended through revolution at all levels
—economic, political, legal, cultural, technological, and, most fundamentally, conceptual.
The struggles and changes must be as deep, varied, and far-reaching as the root of the problems.
(Steven, professor of philosophy at Texas El Paso, “From Earth Day to Ecological Society” http://www.drstevebest.org/Essays/FromEarthDay.htm, date accessed: 7/27/11

If humanity is to survive and flourish in its precarious journey into the future, it needs a new moral compass because anthropocentrism has failed us dramatically.
Albert Schweitzer observed that “ the problem with ethics so far is that they have been limited to a human-to-human consideration
.” In place of the alienated and predatory sensibility of Western life,
Schweitzer proposed a new code – an “ethic of reverence for life.” This entails a universal ethic of compassion and respect that includes all humanity, embraces non-human species, and extends to the entire earth.
We need a “Declaration of Interdependence” to replace our outmoded “Declaration of Independence.”
The demand to cease exploiting animals and the earth is one and the same; we cannot change in one area without changing in the othe r. Animal rights and environmental ethics are the logical next stages in human moral evolution and the next necessary steps in the human journey to enlightenment and wholeness.
Sadly, on Earth Day, as on every other day, the human species continues to invade and damage the planet. As I write, I receive a report from Traffic, a British-based wildlife monitoring group, saying that because of deforestation and trading in its body parts, the Sumatran tiger, Indonesia's last tiger sub-species, is on the brink of extinction. In addition, I read that the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service removed two tropical birds, the Mariana mallard and the Guam broadbill, from its endangered species list – not because they are safe but because they became extinct. In some way we cannot possibly grasp, the entire earth is trying to adjust to their inalterable absence. According to the cliché, “Every day is Earth Day.” Truth be told, every day is Human Growth Day. On April 22, the media might turn away from Michael Jackson or Bush’s terror war for a thirty second fluff piece on the state of the planet, and some individuals might pause for a moment to think about their environment.
Like the evil-doer who sins all week and then atones on
Sunday, human beings plunder the planet all year long and stop for a moment of guilt and expiation.
We congratulate ourselves for honoring Earth Day, when in fact the very concept would be incoherent in an ecological society. In honor of
Earth Day it is appropriate to ask: what does it mean to be an environmentalist?
Where industries, the state, and toxic nihilists of ever stripe want those who care about the environment to bear stigmas such as “kook,” wacko,” “un-American,” and even “terrorist,” being an environmentalist must become a badge of honor.
To be an environmentalist is to realize that one is not only a citizen of human society, one also is a citizen of the earth, an eco-citizen.
Our community includes not only our society with other human beings on a national and international scale, but also our relations to the entire living earth, to the biocommunity
.
We need to act like we are citizens and not conquering invaders. We have not only a negative duty to avoid doing harm to the earth as much as possible, but also a positive duty to help nature regenerate.

Note: This is a nice neg-block analytic that every neg should use, because if the aff drops this, you automatically win on presumption.

[Jayan, Fall, School of Law, University of Warwick Transnational Law & Contemporary
Problems “Orders of Inhumanity”]
Located within a site of privilege, and charged to reflect upon the grand questions of world-order and the human condition as the third Christian Millennium dawns, we are tempted to turn the mind to the task of abstract imaginings of "what could be" of our "world," and "how should we organize" our
"humanity." Perhaps such contemplations are a necessary antidote to cynicism and skepticism regarding any possibility of human betterment, a necessary revitalization of critical and creative
energies to check the complacencies of the state of things as they are. n1 However, imagining [*601] possibilities of abstractions--"world-order," "international society," "the global village," "the family of humankind," etc.--does carry with it a risk. The "total" view that is the take-off point for discourses on preferred "world-order" futures risks deflection as the abstracted projections it provokes might entail
little consequence for the faces and the names of the humanity on whose behalf we might speak .
[Gordon R., Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh, “PEDAGOGICAL POSSIBILITIES
FOR ARGUMENTATIVE AGENCY IN ACADEMIC DEBATE” Argumentation & Advocacy, Vol. 35 Issue 2, p41-
60]
While an isolated academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected environment has significant pedagogical value (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), the notion of the

academic debate tournament as a sterile laboratory carries with it some disturbing implications, when the metaphor is extended to its limit. To the extent that the academic space begins to take on characteristics of a laboratory, the barriers demarcating such a space from other spheres of deliberation beyond the school grow taller and less permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students practicing critical thinking and advocacy skills in strictly hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may research and track public argument as it unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach, students witness argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse to directly participate or alter the course of events (see
Mitchell 1995; 1998).
The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune. Instead of focusing on the visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and misery, debaters overcome with the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to concentrate on the meanings that such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate arguments. For example, news reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case" (in the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality as one of the most politically debilitating failures of contemporary education:
"Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide the kind of civic forums we need.
In fact, one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools is to deprive successor generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of political life" (1991, p. 8).
Credits to: Ihsdebate from www.cross-x.com

, Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, Ecofeminism: Toward global justice and planetary
health, Societ and Nature, 2 (1993), 1-35
Other ecofeminists cite patriarchal religion as the origin of this separation. They date the origin of the oppression of nature back to 4500 BC, well before the scientific revolution , when the shift from
goddess-worshipping cultures to male deities began. In the goddess religions, both the earth and women’s fertility were seen as sacred. There was no gender hierarchy, and divinity was seen as immanent. With the advent of patriarchal religions, people worshipped a sky god, and nature was
seen as his creation. The role of the male in reproduction was elevated above the roles of the female: women were compared to fields which would gestate and bear the male seed . Certainly this shift from goddess-centered cultures to male deities didn’t happen overnight, and many men and women resisted, but by the time of the
Jews and the Greeks, the change had been largely effected. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, a great chain of being was established with god at the top, appointing Adam to be in charge of his entire creation. Woman was created from
Adam’s rib and placed below him, and below the divinely appointed heterosexuals were the animals
and the rest of nature, all to serve man. The patriarchal domination of both nature and women was
divinely commanded .

, Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, Ecofeminism: Toward global justice and planetary
health, Societ and Nature, 2 (1993), 1-35
Others have suggested that patriarchal domination is the result of human evolutionary development .
According to one very popular anthropological story, an evolutionary shift occurred as the result of the
emergence of hunting behavior in male hominids. The hunter’s destructive, competitive, and violent activity directed toward his prey is what originally distinguished man from nature. According to this theory of human social evolution, woman’s body, which is smaller, weaker, and reproductive, prevents
her from full participation in the hunt and thus relegates her to the realm of non-culture. Her reproductive capacity and life-bearing activities stood in sharp contrast to the death-oriented activities that underlie culture. Thus, women, animals, and nature are considered inferior to the cultural activities of men and can be thought of as separate from them.

[Linda. "Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots" Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical
Explorations by Carol J. Adams & Josephine Donovan. Pg. 173]
Another popular theory that tells a story about animals is "the land ethic," a characteristically holistic approach that encourages humans to stop imagining ourselves as superior beings morally entitled to
dominate nature, and instead to see ourselves as simple citizens of a biotic community, no more or less privileged than a frog, a tree, or a river. The important unit of moral consideration is "the land," the entire community of beings and processes. Aldo Leopold, whose work has formed the basis of much subsequent holistic theorizing, believed that all action could be judged according to a single moral principle: "A thing is good when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" ( 224). Generally stated, then, the land ethic takes no
notice of individuals except insofar as their presence or absence affects the community. Although it avoids the crude "good animal/bad animal" fantasy of anthropocentric positions, the land ethic
continues to distinguish between classes of animals. For domestic animals, the outcome of the story is predetermined: they will be meat. For wild animals, a degree of chance is possible: although, as land ethic proponent Baird Callicott observes, "the most fundamental fact of life in the biotic community is eating...and being eaten" ( 57 ), wild animals may exercise their own cunning, luck, and strength to effectively coauthor their life stories. Most significantly, however, the land ethic does not allow for the consideration of particularly situated individuals: everything exists as a specimen, a representative of a type, and is judged as such. An individual life has no value -- unless, of course, that individual is among the last of its kind. And while conflicts between individuals may arise, they are irrelevant
unless their resolution will affect "the land."

[Carol J: teacher at Perkins School of Theology, Dallas. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Pg. 57-
58]
Animals’ fate in butchering is exploited in the oppression of women, and it is exploited by feminists concerned with stopping women’s oppression. While animals are the absent objects, their fate is
continually summoned through the metaphor of butchering. Butchering is that which creates or causes one’s existence as meat; metaphorical “butchering” silently invokes the violent act of animal slaughter
while reinforcing raped women’s sense of themselves as “pieces of meat.” Andrea Dworkin observes that “the favorite conceit of male culture is that experience can be fractured, literally its bones split, and that one can examine the splinters as if they were not part of the bone, or the bone as if it were not part of the body.” We dwell on the T-bone steak or the drumstick as if it were not part of a body.) Dworkin’s dissection of the body of culture resounds with meaning when we consider the concept of animals’ status as absent referent: “Everything is split apart: intellect from feeling and/or imagination; act from consequence; symbol from reality; mind from body. Some part substitutes for the whole and the
whole is sacrificed to the part.”64 Dworkin’s metaphorical description of patriarchal culture depends on the reader’s knowledge that animals are butchered in this way. Images of butchering suffuse
patriarchal culture. A steakhouse in New Jersey was called “Adam’s Rib.” Who do they think they were eating? The Hustler, prior to its incarnation as a pornographic magazine, was a Cleveland restaurant whose menu presented a woman’s buttocks on the cover and proclaimed, “We serve the best meat in town!” Who? A woman is shown being ground up in a meat grinder as Hustler magazine proclaims: “Last
All Meat Issue.” Women’s buttocks are stamped as “Choice Cuts” on an album cover entitled “Choice
Cuts (Pure Food and Drug Act).” When asked about their sexual fantasies, many men describe
“pornographic scenes of disembodies, faceless, impersonal body parts: breasts, legs, vaginas, buttocks.”65 Meat for the average consumer has been reduced to exactly that: faceless body parts, breasts, legs, udders, buttocks. Frank Perdue plays with images of sexual butchering in a poster encouraging chicken consumption: “Are you a breast man or a leg man?”

[Carol J: teacher at Perkins School of Theology, Dallas. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Pg. 60-
61]
In constructing stories about violence against women, feminists have drawn on the same set of cultural images as their oppressors. Feminist critics perceive the violence inherent in representations
that collapse sexuality and consumption and have titled this nexus “carnivorous arrogance” (Simone De
Beauvoir), “gynocidal gluttony” (Mary Daly), “sexual cannibalism” (Kate Miller), “psychic cannibalism”
(Andrea Dworkin), “metaphysical cannibalism” (Ti-Grace Atkinson); racism as it intersects with sexism has been defined by bell hooks in distinctions based on meat eating: “The truth is—in sexist America, where women are objectified extensions of male ego, black women have been labeled hamburger and white women prime rib.”72 These feminist theorists take us to the intersection of the oppression of women and the oppression of animals and then do an immediate about-face, seizing the function of the absent referent to forward women’s issues and so imitating and complementing a patriarchal structure. Dealing in symbols and similes that express humiliation, objectification, and violation is an
understandable attempt to impose order on a violently fragmented female sexual reality. When we use meat and butchering as metaphors for women’s oppression, we express our own hog-squeal of the universe while silencing the primal hog-squeal of Ursula Hamdress herself. When radical feminist talk as if cultural exchanges with animals are literally true in relationship to women, they exploit and co-opt what is actually done to animals. It could be argued that the use of these metaphors is as exploitative
as the posing of Ursula Hamdress: an anonymous pig somewhere was dressed, posed, and photographed. Was she sedated to keep that pose or was she, perhaps, dead? Radical feminist theory participates linguistically in exploiting and denying the absent referent by not including in their vision
Ursula Hamdress’s fate. They butcher the animal/woman cultural exchanges represented in the operation of the absent referent and then address themselves solely to women, thus capitulating to
the absent referent, part of the same construct they wish to change.73 What is absent rom much feminist theory that relies on metaphors of animals’ oppression for illuminating women’s experience
is the reality behind the metaphor. When Mary Daly suggests raiding the Playboy’s playground to let out “the bunnies, the bitches, the beavers, the squirrels, the chicks, the pussycats, the cows, the nags, the foxy ladies, the old bats and biddies, so that they can at last begin naming themselves” we, her readers know that she is talking about women and not about actual bunnies, bitches, beavers, and so on.74 Butr, I argue, she should be. Otherwise, feminist theorists’ use of language describes, reflects, and perpetuates oppression by denying the extent to which these oppressions are culturally
analogous.

[Joan. "Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots" Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical
Explorations by Carol J. Adams & Josephine Donovan. Pg. 11]
Through massive and sustained exploitation, humans inflict enormous suffering on other animals.
Humans generally justify their exploitation of other species by categorizing "animals" as inferior and therefore rightfully subjugated while categorizing humans as superior and naturally entitled to
dominate. So inveterate and universal is the false dichotomy of animal vs. human-arid so powerfully evocative-that symbolically associating women with "animal" assists in their oppression. Applying images of denigrated nonhuman species to women labels women inferior and available for abuse; attaching images of the aggrandized human species to men designates them superior and entitled to
exploit. Language is a powerful agent in assigning the imagery of animal vs. human. Feminists have long objected to "animal" pejoratives for women and the pseudogenerics man and mankind. These linguistic habits are rooted in speciesism, the assumption that other animals are inferior to humans and do not
warrant equal consideration and respect. 1"
[Herta: Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. “The Feminist
Critique of Reason Revisited,” Hypatia, 14.1, 1999.]
The thesis that human beings dominate Nature can just as well be formulated without allusion to
gender relations. If it turns out that this thesis itself is in need of critical discussion—for instance in reference to today's environmental crisis—then we are dealing with a specific problem. We cannot condemn the human domination of Nature simply by underscoring that women's subordination is unacceptable.
In other words, the demand for women's liberation does not make it necessary , by the same token , to give up structures of subordination presumed to be found in any other area of reality.
Though Keller's claim to discern explicitly patriarchal thoughts in Bacon's work is doubtlessly justified, her critique loses plausibility as she considers the detected patriarchal traits a sufficient reason for charging Bacon's entire conception of science to be marked by a masculine bias.
That Keller fails to take issue, in detail, with Bacon's use of gendered comparisons adds an, no doubt, unintended element to her thought: the wholesale objection she raises presupposes that she, instead of articulating a repudiation, tacitly adopts this very alignment of scientific rationality with maleness.

(Herta: Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. “The Feminist
Critique of Reason Revisited,” Hypatia, 14.1, 1999.)
Keller's understanding of science is burdened with this problem, as can be seen in the way she seeks to prove the masculine character of modern science's concept of rationality. As illustrated by the previous quotes, she argues that Nature is oppressed in two ways: on the one hand, insofar as it is the object of knowledge and, on the other, insofar as it is dominated. Supposing this description of Nature's oppression is correct, the decisive question still remains unanswered: Why should this statement be taken to imply necessarily that modern science is based upon a subordination of woman? Evidence for a male claim to supremacy can only be found here on the condition that "woman" has already been
identified with Nature. Yet this equation is by no means compelling. On the contrary, it must be
challenged, especially from a feminist perspective. The reason this problematic implication of Keller's argument has hardly been addressed until now may be that some of the motives behind her critique of science as such are legitimate. It is, in fact, necessary to reject an epistemology that hinges on a naive
confrontation between subject and object. Likewise, the scientism of modern research is in need of critical investigation from the point of view that it introduces into the realm of the humanities a way
of looking at people that supports sociotechnological kinds of action. But what is problematic here is not that science has connotations of masculinity; rather, the problems are with the specific concepts
of subject/object relationship and of scientism that call for a more sophisticated theory. Further, we must consider that both these issues have already led to very complex debates that are in the center of the contemporary theory of science and the humanities. Keller's work, however, tends to oversimplify. A couple of examples must suffice here. Where Keller denounces domination in general, a wide range of
distinctions is necessary—say, between the justifiably criticized disenfranchisement of human beings on the one hand and, on the other hand, a use of natural resources that is necessary for human survival. Also, considering the world's current ecological crisis, a wholesale dismissal of thoughts
about human control over Nature is not advisable. Rather, in this case, it is necessary to distinguish between irreversible destruction of natural resources and the kind of use that leaves intact the
resources' regenerative potential.

(Herta: Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. “The Feminist
Critique of Reason Revisited,” Hypatia, 14.1, 1999.)
Keller's premises also do not give her the means to address the differences between the natural and the social sciences. Based on her subsumption of woman to Nature, she claims that the scientist's
attitude should be inspired by the model of empathy—of love, in fact—between subjects. Thus, she endorses [End Page 55] June Goodfield's point of view: "If you really want to understand about a tumour, you've got to be a tumour" (1981, 63). Goodfield also stands for the view that, in the practice of scientific research, "the best analogy is always love" (1981, 213), a view Keller endorses, too. 7 Now it appears dubious whether the concept of love is appropriate at all as a category in theory of science, but it could still be interpreted in terms of the hermeneutic understanding of the social sciences. However, the vague use of the concept when applied to science in general makes Keller's suggestions for a
renewal of the natural sciences sound almost animistic. The topic of "animism" is addressed also by Val
Plumwood, but in a twofold manner. While she is criticizing "an anthropomorphic 'respiritualisation' of nature," Plumwood endows the term "animism" with some positive connotations (1993, 136). Her general aim is certainly plausible: rejecting a merely mechanistic model of nature, she pleads for a more complex conception. Yet the way she seeks to achieve this goal is problematic. Plumwood suggests to reintroduce the concept of "intentionality," which, she hopes, will allow us to discover that "mindlike qualities are spread throughout nature" (1993, 134), and to understand human difference "against an overall background of kinship, forming a web of continuity and difference" (1993, 134). It is in this context that she notes: "There are many ways to readmit intentionality . . ., and some forms of animism are ways of stressing continuity" (1993, 134). But what, exactly, does she have in mind? Plumwood explains: "We already have much of the vocabulary of natural agency: 'That stone doesn't want to come,' says the mason of one that is indeed a being thoroughly embedded in the context and mysterious history of its place" (1993, 136). There are two ways to interpret this statement, both of which lead to difficulties. The first confronts us with a self-contradiction: by attributing agency to a stone, Plumwood seems to advocate precisely the "anthropomorphic 'respiritualisation' of nature"
that she sets out to discard. In other words, interpreted in this manner, her considerations do not provide a way out of the problem just diagnosed with reference to Keller's use of the term "love." The second option is to understand the mason's way of expressing himself as metaphorical. In this case, however, because he would not actually attribute agency to the stone in question, the thesis of continuity, so crucial for Plumwood's argument, would no longer be evidenced by his words. At this point, I would like to note a further instance of self-contradiction: formulating her claim of continuity,
Plumwood addresses readers to whom she attributes the specific competence of theorizing about this continuity. She fails to discuss the faculties that make it possible that "we can distinguish, without ordering as a hierarchy, items within a complex differentiated field in which mind is expressed in a
family of related intentional concepts" (1993, 135; emphasis added). 8

[Stacy. “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism.
Feminist Studies,20.1, 1994.]
The social organization, communicative actions, and "personality" of animals makes blurring boundaries between people and animals much easier than crossing the broader human-nature divide.23 How should an ecologically conscious feminism engage nature? Ecofeminism, as Carolyn Merchant explains, valorizes both women and nature: "The radical form of ecofeminism is a response to the perception that women and nature have been mutually associated and devalued in western culture and that both
can be elevated and liberated through direct political action."24 Parallel to the way Luce Irigaray reverses the values of traditional femalemale oppositions, ecofeminism recognizes that women and nature have long been linked in Western systems of thought, and instead of trying to break the ties that many would argue keep women oppressed, ecofeminists reaffirm them in order to fight for both
women and nature. They accept the ideological terrain, complete with its Victorian throwbacks of woman as nurturer. Even when ecofeminists strive toward a nonessentialist connection between
women and nature, they still describe women primarily as mothers and homemakers: "Women who are responsible for their children's well-being are often more mindful of the long-term costs of quickfix solutions. Through the social experience of caretaking and nurturing, women become attentive to
the signs of distress in their communities that might threaten their households."25 Despite its shortcomings from a poststructuralist feminist perspective, ecofeminism would seem a productive oppositional discourse for contemporary U.S. culture. In Ynestra King's words (paraphrased by Judith
Plant), it is a "strand of feminist thought that, indeed, was not interested in an equal share of the same old carcinogenic pie."26 Ecofeminism's conception of ordinary "female" activities and experiences as the basis of planet saving could attract women who feel left behind by what they perceive as a feminist movement that is only concerned with women achieving "successful careers." The potential for ecofeminism to attract women who define themselves in traditional roles could benefit both the environmental and feminist movements.
, Marti Kheel, vegan ecofeminist activist scholar credited with founding Feminists for Animal
Rights, "Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference." InReweaving the
World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, 128–137. San
Francisco: Sierra Club Publishers, 1990
Contemporary feminism is an extraordinarily complex movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Western feminists saw the problem as women being systematically denied the educational and economic opportunities necessary for them to compete on an equal footing with men. Feminism meant fighting for equal rights in the political and economic arenas. Gradually, however, feminists began to see that it might be unwise for women to emulate roles that had been defined and structured by and for men. Feminist theorists began to emphasize the differences between men and women. Still later, some feminists began to conclude that not only are women different from men, they are better than men. Whereas earlier feminists had insisted that differences between men and women were cultural in origin, some feminists now began taking an
"essentialist" position, according to which patriarchal culture distorts or conceals the essential

feminine that is the birthright of every woman.
¶
Other feminists have been quick to point out the problems with this position. First, it seems to confirm the misogynist's viewpoint that women are essentially or naturally or biologically different. The misogynist concludes that such "natural" differences make women "inferior," while the feminist concludes that they make women "superior."
And any talk of female "superiority" reinstalls the very hierarchy that feminists found and fought
against in patriarchy. Some ecofeminists even speak as if men are so flawed that only women can solve the environmental crisis because women are more attuned to the cycles of nature and to their
own feelings than are men. But women are also distorted by patriarchy, and some men are deeply appreciative of their relationship to the natural world. Most ecofeminists acknowledge that what is needed is the transformation of women and men. Ecofeminists, however, may be able to make a contribution that many men cannot because the marginal place of women in the history of patriarchy may have protected them from some of the crippling effects that it has had on so many men.

(Bradley A., PhD. At the Department of Social Science at Baylor University, “Bringing in
Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism, and International Politics”, International Security, Volume 25,
Issue 2, Autumn
Contemporary evolutionary theorists offer excellent arguments for explaining some of the human behavior expected by realism.
Particularly interesting are those in the subdiscipline of evolutionary theory known as sociobiology, the study of human behavior from the perspective of evolutionary theory.31 Thus far, however, realists have not used evolutionary theory to place realism on a stronger foundation.32 After briefly reviewing the evolutionary process, I dis- cuss how it can explain the origins of egoism and domination and why it is a better ultimate cause of realist behavior than those put forth by Niebuhr and Morgenthau.33
THE PROCESS OF EVOLUTION In evolutionary theory, Homo sapiens, or the anatomically modern human, is an animal, and like all animals behaves as he does as a result of evolution by natu- ral selection .34 The essence of evolution by natural selection is that most behav- ioral characteristics of a species evolve because they help the species survive and reproduce.
35 According to philosopher of biology Elliott Sober, there are 31. Formally, sociobiology is a subdiscipline of evolutionary theory that applies the theory to the social behavior of animals, including Homo sapiens, in order to study how social behavior is shaped by natural selection. The locus classicus is Edward 0. Wilson, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).
Wilson defines it as "the systematic study of the bi- ological basis of all social behavior." Ibid., p. 4. Sober offers a broader definition: "a research program that seeks to use evolutionary theory to account for significant social, psychological, and behavioral characteristics in various species." Sober, Philosophy of Biology, p. 184. 32. In a broader context, the intellectual intercourse between social sciences and biology should be increased.
Notable for their work at the nexus of biology and social science, in addition to the au- thors noted elsewhere, are Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Hu- man Diasporas: The History of Diversity and
Evolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995); Peter A. Corning, "The Biological Bases of Behavior and Some Implications for Political
Science," World Politics, Vol. 23, No. 3 (April 1971), pp. 321-370; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1997); and Thomas C. Wiegele, ed., Biology and the Social Sciences: An Emerging Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview,
1982). 33. While evolutionary theory can explain this behavior, the egoism or drive to dominate of any individual may result from other causes as well
. 34. More precisely, human behavior is the result of the environment and genotype. The perspec- tive begins with Charles Darwin's description of natural selection , the mechanism of evolution in Darwin, On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1964[1859]). 35. "Those whose genes promote characteristics that are advantageous in the struggle to survive three constituents of this process.36 First, there must be genetic variation in the species.
If all individuals are the same, then there is no basis for change. Gene frequencies, however, alter regularly through genetic drift, migration, muta- tion, and natural selection.37 Thus for sexually reproducing species, only iden- tical twins (or other monozygotic multiple births) are truly identical; all others possess differences. Second, genetic variation must improve what biologists term "fitness" : A member of a species is fit if it is better able to survive and re- produce-hence the term "survival of the fittest."38 These individuals will be better represented in the next generation than those less fit. Finally, there must be heritable variation in fitness: The characteristic must be passed from parent to offspring.39 According to evolutionary theory, human behavioral traits (the genetic causes of human behavior) evolve and genes that increase fitness spread though the population. By displaying these traits, an individual stands a better chance of surviving long enough to reproduce and of having her genes repre- sented in the next generation. This is the essence of the basic model of evolu- tionary theory upon which realism may build .40
(Bradley A., PhD. At the Department of Social Science at Baylor University, “Bringing in
Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism, and International Politics”, International Security, Volume 25,
Issue 2, Autumn
Evolutionary theory provides a stronger foundation for realism because it is based on science, not on theology or metaphysics. I use the theory to explain two human traits: egoism and domination. I submit that the egoistic and domi- nating

behavior of individuals, which is commonly described as "realist," is a product of the evolutionary process .5 I focus on these two traits because they are critical components of any realist argument in explaining international politics .6 I also argue that evolutionary theory may be applied not only to realism, but also to some of the central issues in international politics including the origins of war and ethnic conflict . An evolutionary perspective allows scholars of in- ternational politics to understand that war is not unique to humans, but is characteristic of other species in the animal kingdom as well. It also helps ex- plain the role that war has played in human evolution, and why xenophobia and ethnocentrism are contributing causes of ethnic conflict. These arguments are significant for two reasons.
First, evolutionary theory offers a firm intellectual foundation for the realist argument that egoistic and dominating behavior is the result of human evolution.
Realist scholars can use evolutionary theory to construct verifiable scientific explanations and thus ex- pand realism's explanatory range,7 which may help to reinvigorate realist scholarship.8 Scholars who are attracted to realism but are not persuaded to ground their arguments based on animus dominandi or anarchy will find a sound scientific substructure in evolutionary theory.

[Elizabeth A.: Religion department at Bowdoin College. “The Way Out West: Development and the Rhetoric of Mobility in Postmodern Feminist Theory,” Hypatia , 15.3, 2000.]
When postmodern feminists deploy metaphors of mobility and displacement and repudiate the closure or fixity of patriarchy and/or modernity, they unwittingly betray the legacy of this
Enlightenment logic of development. Postmodern feminist critiques of the Enlightenment have largely focused on disclosing the gender, race, and class biases of the supposedly "universal subject" of the
Enlightenment. In so doing, these feminists have revealed the exclusive location of the vaunted "view
from nowhere." This insight into the locatedness of the Enlightenment subject is, however, a perennial hobby of Enlightenment, that is, smoking out the parochialism of pretenders to the boundarylessness of the universal. Indeed, Enlightenment thinkers and postmodern feminists share a common language: the description of what they oppose or have left behind as static and closed and their siding with that which represents mobility and openness. For both, progress or development consists in a more extensive reach, a more dynamic and mobile subjectivity.

(
VioletTHE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word ; THE
ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
THE political bestiality of our age is abetted by our willingness to tolerate the deconstructing of humanist values. The process begins with the cynical manipulation of language. It often ends in stupefying murderousness before which the world stands silent, frozen in impotent "attentism"--a wait-and-see stance as unsuited to the human plight as a paci-fier is to stopping up the hunger of a starving child.
In the Germany of the 1930s, a demonic idea was born in a demented brain; the word went forth; orders were giv-en, repeated, widely broadcast; and men, women, and children were herded into death camps. Their offshore signals, cries for help, did not summon us to rescue.
We had become inured to the reality of human suffering. We could no longer hear what the words meant or did not credit them or not enough of us joined the chorus. Shrieking victims per-ished in the cold blankness of inhumane silence.
We were deaf to the apocalyptic urgency
in Solzhenitsyn's declaration from the Gulag that we must check the disas-trous course of history.
We were heedless of the lesson
of his experience that only the unbending strength of the human spirit, fully taking its stand on the shifting frontier of encroaching vio-lence and declaring "not one step further," though death may be the end of it--only this unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace for the individual, of genuine peace for mankind at large.
n2
In past human crises, writers and thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep alive the memory of the unimaginable, to keep the human conscience from forgetting. In the current context, however, intellectuals seem more devoted to abstract assaults on values than to thoughtful probing of the moral dimensions of human experience.
"Heirs of the ancient possessions of higher knowledge and literacy skills,"
n3 we seem to have lost our nerve
, and not only because of Holocaust history and its tragic aftermath.
We feel insecure before the empirical absolutes of hard science. We are intimidated by the "high modernist rage against mimesis and content,"
n4 monstrous progeny of the union between Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity, and no disinterested knowledge.
n5
Less certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the
[*47] humanist soul,"
n6 to frame a credo to live by or criteria to judge by, we are vulnerable even to the discredited
Paul de Man's indecent hint that
"wars and revo-lutions are not empirical events . . . but 'texts' masquerading as facts."
n7
Truth and reality seem more elusive than they ever were in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are embarrassed by virtue.
T ruth and reality seem more elusive than they ever
were in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are embarrassed by virtue.
Words collide and crack under these new skeptical strains
, dissolving into banalities the colossal enormity of what must be expressed lest we forget. Remembering for the future has become doubly dispiriting by our having to remember for the present, too, our having to register and confront what is wrong here and now.
The reality to be fixed in memory shifts as we seek words for it; the memory we set down is flawed by our subjec-tivities. It is selective, deceptive, partial, unreliable, and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented. It stops up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face. n8
Lodged in our brains, such axioms, certified by science and statistics, tempt us to concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to get on with our lives. Besides, memories reconstructed in words, even when they are documented by evidence, have not often changed the world or fended off the powerful seductions to silence, forgetting, or denying.
Especially denying
, which, in the case of the Holocaust, has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our sense of the past.
It is said that the Holocaust never happened.
Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in words; something in words must be set against it.
Yet what? How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition of cryogenic dubiety?
Not only before but also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic manipulation and deliberately reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity across the planet.
"The cancer that has eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [has] Kosovo for its locus," but not merely as a piece of land. The country's rogue adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvoke as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated by Turks in 1389! n9 Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, de-mands the bloody revenge of new massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic, the bard of Serb nationalism, writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle--by widening the Kosovo charnel-house, by adding wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo. . . . Ko-sovo is the Serbianized [*48] history of the
Flood--the Serbian New Testament." n10
A cover of Suddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee women from Bosnia in an eeri-ly perverse afterbirth of violence revisited. n11
We stand benumbed before multiplying horrors.
As Vaclav Havel warned more than a decade ago, regimes that generate them "are the avant garde of a global crisis in civilization." The depersonalization of power in "system, ideolo-gy and apparat
," pathological suspicions about human motives and meanings, the loosening of individual

responsibility, the swiftness by which disastrous events follow one upon another "have deprived us of our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity." n12
Nothing less than the transformation of human con-sciousness is likely to rescue us.

[Carol J: teacher at Perkins School of Theology, Dallas. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Pg. 54-
55]
Rape, too, is implemental violence in which the penis is the implement, of violation. You are held down by a male body as the fork holds a piece of meat so that the knife may cut into it. In addition, just as the slaughterhouse treats animals and its workers as inert, unthinking, unfeeling objects, so too in rape are women treated as inert objects, with no attention paid to feelings or needs. Consequently they feel
like pieces of meat. Correspondingly, we learn of “rape racks” that enable the insemination of animals against their will. 48 To feel like a piece of meat is to be treated like an inert object when one is (or was) in fact a living, feeling being. The meat metaphors rape victims choose to describe their experience and the use of the “rape rack” suggest that rape is parallel and related to consumption, consumption both
of images of women and of literal animal flesh. Rape victims’ repeated use of the word “hamburger” to describe the result of penetration, violation, being prepared for market, implies not only how unpleasurable being a piece of meat is, but also that animals can be victims of rape. They have been penetrated, violated, prepared for market against their will. Yet, overlapping cultural metaphors
structure these experiences as though they were willed by women and animals. To Justify meat eating, we refer to animals’ wanting to die, desiring to become meat. In Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, meat is forbidden unless it comes from animals who died “a natural death.” Resultingly, “it was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances…It was astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher’s knife if there was one within a mile of them, and run right up against it if the butcher did not get it out of their way in time.”49
One of the mythologies of a rapist culture is that women not only ask for rape, they also enjoy it; that they are continually seeking out the butcher’s knife. Similarly, advertisements and popular culture tell us that animals like Charlie the Tuna and Al Capp’s Shmoo wish to be eaten. The implication is that women
and animals willingly participate in the process that renders them absent.

[Stacy. “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism.
Feminist Studies,20.1, 1994.]
"Love Your Mother" demands a bumper sticker bearing the image of the planet. Mother Earth, the single most popular image of feminized nature, has been promoted by ecofeminism, male-dominated
environmentalism,11 and capitalist patriarchy. In 1980 , Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature:
Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, an ecofeminist analysis of the scientific revolution, warned about the Earth Mother image. It is not the purpose of this analysis to reinstate nature as the mother of humankind nor to advocate that women reassume the role of nurturer dictated by that historical identity. Both need to be liberated from the anthropomorphic and stereotypic labels that
degrade the serious underlying issues. The weather forecaster who tells us what Mother Nature has in store for us this weekend and legal systems that treat a woman's sexuality as her husband's property are equally guilty of perpetuating a system repressive to both women and nature.12 This warning has gone largely unheeded by the environmental movements that have reclaimed this image. Although the ecofeminist celebration of Mother Earth attempts to recover the image in support of a feminist environmentalism, portraying the earth as a mother strengthens a patriarchal, capitalist discourse
harmful not only to women but also to the environment.13

[Stacy, “Feminist Studies, Vol. 20”,]
It is not the purpose of this analysis to reinstate nature as the mother of humankind nor to advocate that women reassume the role of nurturer dictated by that historical identity. Both [women and nature] need to be liberated from the anthropomorphic and stereotypic labels that degrade the serious underlying issues. The weather forecaster who tells us what Mother Nature has in store for us this weekend and legal systems that treat a woman's sexuality as her husband's property are equally
guilty of perpetuating a system repressive to both women and nature.12 This warning has gone largely unheeded by the environmental movements that have reclaimed this image. Although the ecofeminist celebration of Mother Earth attempts to recover the image in support of a feminist environmentalism, portraying the earth as a mother strengthens a patriarchal, capitalist discourse harmful not only to
women but also to the environment.13 For example, the way Mother Earth was used in the 1990 television Earth Day Special14 undermines both the environmental and feminist movements. Mother
Nature, played by floral-crowned Bette Midler, stars in this program. The basic plot of the media fest is this: poor Mother Earth is sick, victimized by humanity. This perfectly selfless mother doesn't really
mind that she herself is dying but worries about the people who need her. She is placed in the town hospital and doctored by male physicians. Yet what saves Mother Earth is not medical science but, lo and behold, capitalist consumers and good housekeepers. The old association between women and the earth is deployed here in a contradictory way. Mother Earth is a near-dead victim, to be saved by commercial capitalism (buying the right products); this echoes Merchant's account of how during the
Scientific Revolution "living animate nature died, while dead inanimate money was endowed with life."15 The way that the show manages to articulate environmentalism with capitalism supports Hall's explanation of why the Right has been more successful than the Left in connecting with popular trends:
"Their strategy has been to align the positive aspirations of people with the market and the restoration of the capitalist ethic, and to present this as a natural alliance."16 The Earth Day Special not only supports a capitalist ethic but also a patriarchal one, because it portrays the planet as a victimized
female and suggests that everyday environmental problem solving is "women's work." Even though the program displays both men and women suggesting environmental solutions, the message of the program (and, it seems the whole mainstream Earth Day mentality)--"what you can do at home to save the earth"-places the blame and responsibility on women, who do the majority of the shopping and housecleaning. Domestic imagery makes earth saving just another domestic chore. For example, the
Bundys' bad housekeeper is admonished: "Imagine that your house was the earth. If you just dusted your house once in a while, imagine what the earth could be like." And, as the Cosbys inform us, if we just wouldn't open the lids on stovetop pots, we'll save energy and save the earth. Domestic dust and escaping steam cloud our view of more threatening substances such as nuclear waste or incinerator smoke. Furthermore, these pat solutions to systemic problems cast environmentalism as women's work, thus tightening women's domestic ties while letting corporate and governmental polluters off the hook.
Ironically, the program opens with Robin Williams as a smarmy Everyman boasting of Man's great exploits, technologies, and environmental dominations. Williams's many phallic allusions to missiles and power worship show an ironic awareness of feminist critiques of phallotechnology. The program quickly transforms systemic shortcomings into mere personal failings, however, as Everyman and the industrial polluter who confess their misdeeds are both represented as bad boys who have disappointed their mother nature. The industrial polluter says the government controls and the system are fine and don't need to be changed-he just has to start behaving. Mother Earth ideology here codes the earth and by

feminine association, women, into passive victims at the same time that it depicts polluters as mere naughty boys, thus making the problem personal and familial instead of political and systemic. It shifts the focus from patriarchal capitalism to the home and places the blame and responsibility, not on corporate polluters, scandalous lack of government controls, or waste-oriented capitalism but ultimately on homemakers, who had better use cloth diapers and keep those pots fully covered. Just as patriarchal capitalism can pocket Mother Earth, a conservative environmentalism can embrace the "nurturing" discourse of ecofeminism. In The Conservator, the magazine of the Nature Conservancy, the title of the
1990 article, "Stewardship: Empowering the Land," juxtaposes the conservative Christian idea that God appointed Man as the Steward of nature with the leftist language of empowerment that places the land in the position of oppressed groups, leaving us with a weird amalgamation of an oppressed-but-soon-tobe-empowered land with an old-timey land that needs to be managed. This article about volunteers borrows the language of ecofeminism: "Linda Wark may have articulated the leadership role of stewards best when she said, 'stewardship is not only the care and nurturing of natural areas, it's the care and nurturing of volunteers.'"17 Why does the Nature Conservancy, an organization seemingly untouched by feminism, here employ its "care and nurturing" language? The feminized language supports The
Conservator's conservative politics: by alluding to the motherly realms of care and nurturing it places
the ecological volunteer work into the sphere of the domestic, fencing it off from the public sphere of business, economics, and politics--issues that this organization, partly funded by big business, does not disturb. Deane Curtin warns that an "ethic of care provides a very important beginning for an ecofeminist ethic, but it runs the risk of having its own aims turned against it unless it is regarded as part of a distinctively feminist political agenda that consciously attempts to expand the circle of caring for."18 Limiting the realm of caring to the private world leaves government and corporate polluters undisturbed. Of course, the what-I-cando-at-home-to-save-the-earth movement has increased recycling and consumer awareness of environmental problems. People can have an effect as consumers; and women, who constitute the majority of household shoppers, may be empowered by our potential to promote ecological causes even while shopping. Yet, as beneficial as these gains may be, they are achieved with the risk that the environmental movement will get sidetracked into a depoliticized, indeed, procapitalist, privatized mode-and the potential for ecologically conscious consumerism to save the planet is limited. Thus, the ecofeminist exultations of Mother Earth and the exhortations to mother the earth are congruent with a patriarchal, capitalist politics that casts the earth as a feminized victim and throws the blame on to housekeeping, nurturing women--leaving capitalist
America free to mind its own business.

, Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and the University of Virginia, Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford, Achieving our country, 1998, p. 98-99
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government
of our nation-state will be
, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be told that, since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for such governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they are likely to prevail . Bill Readings was right to say that “ the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism,” but it remains the entity which makes decisions about social benefits, and thus about social justice .
The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx’s philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent rightwing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semi- conscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for "the system " and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.
If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about
Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland —as a country of simulacra— and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action . Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms . The existence of such a list— endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets—might revitalize leftist politics.
, Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and the University of Virginia, Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Stanford 1982,Consequences of Pragmatism Pg Pg. xiv
Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word "true" or
"good," supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of "number." They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven't. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call "philosophy" -a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness.
This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that "there is no such thing" as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a "relativistic" or "subjectivist" theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject.
They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it.
Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using.
Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language . For they face a dilemma if their

language is too unphilosophical, too "literary," they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach.

Phyllis D. Coontz, PhD Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of Pittsburgh, et al,
JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY HEALTH NURSING, 2001, 18(4), 235-246 – J-Stor
In the 1950s, psychiatrist and theorist Viktor Frankl (1963) described an existential theory of purpose and meaning in life. Frankl, a long-time prisoner in a concentration camp, re- lated several instances of transcendent states that he experienced in the midst of that terri- ble suffering using his own experiences and observations. He believed that these experi- ences allowed him and others to maintain their sense of dignity and self-worth. Frankl (1969) claimed that transcendence occurs by giving to others, being open to others and the environment, and coming to accept the reality that some situations are un- changeable. He hypothesized that life always has meaning for the individual; a person can always decide how to face adversity. Therefore, self-transcendence provides mean- ing and enables the discovery of meaning for a person (Frankl, 1963). Expanding Frankl's work, Reed (1991b) linked selftranscendence with mental health. Through a developmental process individuals gain an increasing understanding of who they are and are able to move out beyond themselves despite the fact that they are ex- periencing physical and mental pain. This expansion beyond the self occurs through in- trospection, concern about others and their well-being, and integration of the past and fu- ture to strengthen one's present life (Reed, 1991b).
Steven Lee is the H.L.A. Hart Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Philosophy of Law and University
College for Michaelmas, as well as Visiting Research Fellow at the Changing Character of War Programme. He is a Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Reviewed work(s): Nuclear Deterrence,
Morality and Realism. by John Finnis ; Joseph M. Boyle, Jr. ;¶ Germain Grisez ; Jefferson McMahan Source: Philosophy and
Public Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 93-106 Published by: Blackwell Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265364
The claim that nuclear devastation and Soviet domination cannot be compared in consequentialist terms rests largely on the claim that the kinds of harm or evil involved in these outcomes are incommensurable. For, "the values of life, liberty, fairness, and so on, are diverse. How many people's lives are equivalent to the liberty of how many-whether the same or other-persons? No one can say" (p.
241). When one con- siders the two outcomes, "[e]ach seems the more repugnant while one is focusing upon it" (p. 240). But this incommensurability claim is not plausible. Life and political liberty are diverse goods, but having liberty is only part of what makes life worth living. Certainly most people would prefer loss of liberty to loss of life, and even if consequential value is not a function solely of preferences, the preferences in this case reflect a real difference in value. Even where liberty is lacking, a life has much
poten- tial for value. Of course, it is unlikely that everyone would die in a nu- clear war, but it is likely that many of the living would envy the dead. As the authors point out, however, we do not know how destructive the nu- clear war might be, nor how repressive the Soviet domination. A very limited nuclear war might be preferable to a very repressive Soviet-im- posed regime. But these are unlikely extremes.
In terms of expected util- ities, domination is preferable to war. In this sense, Red is better than dead, and the consequentialist comparison can be made.

, Marysia Zalewski, Reader in the Centre for Women’s Studies, and Jane Parpart, professor of Gender Studies at University of Dalhousie, 98 [The 'Man' Question in International Relations,
Westview Press, Boulder, p76]
Central though this binary conception of gender is to much of Western thought, it presents an illusory dichotomous opposition between genders that obscures important distinctions within masculinity and femininity. Interestingly enough, once the idea of fractures within Western conceptions of masculinity and femininity is accepted, the division between what is masculine and what is feminine tends to be less clear.
Fractures within masculinity have played a crucial part in defining the relationships between
the two orthodox
paradigms in
IR
: namely realism and liberal internationalism
.
The division
of orthodox IR into two different masculine camps has led to a competition between two aspiring hegemonic masculinities over which is more masculine
(real and objective) and which should be regarded as inferior
and feminine (subjective and normative)

[Chandra Talpade: Professor and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies
Sociology, Cultural Foundations of Education, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, 2008 Honorary
Doctor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University. Feminism Without Borders, 2003. Pg. 6]
In my own context I would identify three particular problematic directions within U.S.-based
feminisms. First, the increasing, predominantly classbased gap between a vital women's movement
and feminist theorizing in the U.S. academy has led in part to a kind of careerist academic feminism whereby the boundaries of the academy stand in for the entire world and feminism becomes a way to advance academic careers rather than a call for fundamental and collective social and economic
transformation. This gap between an individualized and narrowly professional understanding of feminism and a collective, theoretical feminist vision that focuses on the radical transformation of the everyday lives of women and men is one I actively work to address. Second, the increasing corporatization of U.S. culture and naturalization of capitalist values has had its own profound
influence in engendering a neoliberal, consumerist (protocapitalist) feminism concerned with
"women's advancement" up the corporate and nation-state ladder. This is a feminism that focuses on financial "equality" between men and women and is grounded in the capitalist values of profit,
competition, and accumulation.10 A protocapitalist or "free-market" feminism is symptomatic of the
"Americanization" of definitions of feminism —the unstated assumption that U.S. corporate culture is
the norm and ideal that feminists around the world strive for. Another characteristic of protocapitalist feminism is its unstated and profoundly individualist character. Finally, the critique of essentialist identity politics and the hegemony of postmodernist skepticism about identity has led to a narrowing of feminist politics and theory whereby either exclusionary and self-serving understandings of identity
rule the day or identity (racial, class, sexual, national, etc.) is seen as unstable and thus merely
"strategic." Thus, identity is seen as either naive or irrelevant, rather than as a source of knowledge
and a basis for progressive mobilization.11 Colonizing, U.S.- and Eurocentric privileged feminisms, then, constitute some of the limits of feminist thinking that I believe need to be addressed at this
time. And some of these problems, in conjunction with the feminist possibilities and vision discussed earlier, form the immediate backdrop to my own thinking in the chapters that follow.

[Chandra Talpade: Professor and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies
Sociology, Cultural Foundations of Education, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, 2008 Honorary
Doctor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University. Feminism Without Borders, 2003. Pg. 39-40]
What happens when this assumption of “women as an oppressed group" is situated in the context of
Western feminist writing about Third World women? It is here that I locate the colonialist move. By
contrasting the representation of women in the Third World with what I referred to earlier as Western
feminisms' self-presentation in the same context, we see how Western feminists alone become the true
"subjects" of this counterhistory. Third World women, in contrast, never rise above the debilitating generality of their “object” status. While radical and liberal feminist assumptions of women as a sex
class might elucidate (however inadequately) the autonomy of particular women's struggles in the
West, the application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the Third
World colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks; in doing so it ultimately robs them of their historical
and political agency. Similarly, many Zed Press authors who ground themselves in the basic analytic strategies of traditional Marxism also implicitly create a "unity" of women by substituting "women's
activity" for "Labor" as the primary theoretical determinant of women's situation. Here again, women are constituted as a coherent group not on the basis of "natural" qualities or needs but on the basis of
the sociological "unity" of their role in domestic production and wage labor (see Haraway 1985, esp.
76). In other words, Western feminist discourse, by assuming women as a coherent, already constituted group that is placed in kinship, legal, and other structures, defines Third World women as subjects outside social relations, instead of looking at the way women are constituted through these
very structures.

( Jason Gaverick Matheny, He previously worked for the Future of Humanity
Institute at Oxford University, where his work focused on existential risks, He holds a PhD in Applied
Economics from Johns Hopkins University, an MPH from Johns Hopkins, an MBA from Duke University, and a BA from the University of Chicago. http://jgmatheny.org/extinctionethics.htm, “Ought we worry about human extinction?”
Moral philosophers have not written much about human extinction. This may be because they underestimate the potential benefits of human survival and/or the risks of human extinction.
If we survive the next few centuries, humanity could allow Earth-originating life to survive a trillion years or more. If we do not survive, Earthoriginating life will probably perish within a billion years. If prolonging the survival of Earth-originating life is morally important, then there may be nothing more important than reducing the near-term risks of human extinction. Keywords: extinction, population ethics, intergenerational justice, catastrophic risk, existential risk, risk analysis, animal welfare, environmental ethics Word count: 3,400 Introduction It was only in the last century, with the invention of nuclear weapons, that the probability of human extinction could be appreciably affected by human action
. Ever since, human extinction has generally been considered a terrible possibility.
It’s surprising
, then, that a search of JSTOR and the Philosopher’s Index suggests contemporary philosophers have written little about the ethics of human extinction. In fact, they seem to have written more about the extinction of other animals.
Maybe this is because they consider human extinction impossible or inevitable; or maybe human extinction seems inconsequential compared to other moral issues
. In this paper
I argue that the possibility of human extinction deserves more attention. While extinction events may be very improbable
, their consequences are grave
.
Human extinction would not only condemn to non-existence all future human generations, it would also cut short the existence of all animal life, as natural events will eventually make Earth uninhabitable
. The value of future lives Leslie (1996) suggests philosophers’ nonchalance toward human extinction is due in large part to disagreements in population ethics. Some people suppose it does not matter if the number of lives lived in the future is small -- at its limit, zero.[2] In contrast, I assume here that moral value is a function of both the quality and number of lives in a history.[3] This view is consistent with most people’s intuition about extinction (that it’s bad) and with moral theories under which life is considered a benefit to those who have it, or under which life is a necessary condition for producing things of value (Broome, 2004; Hare, 1993;
Holtug 2001, Ng, 1989; Parfit 1984; Sikora, 1978). For instance, some moral theories value things like experiences, satisfied preferences, achievements, friendships, or virtuous acts, which take place only in lives. On this view, an early death is bad (at least in part) because it cuts short the number of these valuable things. Similarly
, on this view, an early extinction is bad
(at least in part) because it cuts short the number of these valuable things. I think this view is plausible and think our best reasons for believing an early death is bad are our best reasons for believing an early extinction is bad. But such a view is controversial and I will not settle the controversy here. I start from the premise that we ought to increase moral value by increasing both the quality and number of lives throughout history. I also take it, following Singer (2002), this maxim applies to all sentient beings capable of positive subjective feelings. Life’s prospects The human population is now 6 billion (6 x 109). There are perhaps another trillion (1012) sentient animals on Earth, maybe a few orders more, depending on where sentience begins and ends in the animal kingdom (Gaston, Blackburn, and Goldewijk, 2003; Gaston and Evans, 2004).
Animal life has existed on Earth for around 500 million years. Barring a dramatic intervention, all animal life on Earth will die in the next several billion years
. Earth is located in a field of thousands of asteroids and comets
. 65 million years ago, an asteroid 10 kilometers in size hit the Yucatan , creating clouds of dust and smoke that blocked sunlight for months, probably causing the extinction of 90% of animals, including dinosaurs. A 100 km impact, capable of extinguishing all animal life on Earth, is probable within a billion years (Morrison et al.,
2002). If an asteroid does not extinguish all animal life, the Sun will. In one billion years, the Sun will begin its Red Giant stage, increasing in size and temperature. Within six billion years, the Sun will have evaporated all of Earth’s water, and terrestrial temperatures will reach 1000 degrees -- much too hot for amino acid-based life to persist.
If, somehow, life were to survive these changes, it will die in 7 billion years when the
Sun forms a planetary nebula that irradiates Earth (Sackmann, Boothroyd, Kraemer, 1993; Ward and Brownlee, 2002). Earth is a dangerous place and animal life here has dim prospects. If there are 1012 sentient animals on Earth, only 1021 life-years remain.
The only hope for terrestrial sentience surviving well beyond this limit is that some force will deflect large asteroids

before they collide with Earth, giving sentients another billion or more years of life (Gritzner and
Kahle, 2004); and/or terrestrial sentients will colonize other solar systems, giving sentients up to another 100 trillion years of life until all stars begin to stop shining (Adams and Laughlin, 1997). Life might survive even longer if it exploits non-stellar energy sources
. But it is hard to imagine how life could survive beyond the decay of nuclear matter expected in 1032 to 1041 years (Adams and Laughlin, 1997). This may be the upper limit on the future of sentience.[4] Deflecting asteroids and colonizing space could delay the extinction of Earth-originating sentience from 109 to 1041 years.
Assuming an average population of one trillion sentients is maintained (which is a conservative assumption under colonization[5]), these interventions would create between 1021 and 1053 life-years. At present on Earth, only a human civilization would be remotely capable of carrying out such projects. If humanity survives the next few centuries, it’s likely we will develop technologies needed for at least one of these projects. We may already possess the technologies needed to deflect asteroids (Gritzner and Kahle, 2004; Urias et al., 1996). And in the next few centuries, we’re likely to develop technologies that allow colonization. We will be strongly motivated by self-interest to colonize space, as asteroids and planets have valuable resources to mine, and as our survival ultimately requires relocating to another solar system (Kargel, 1994;
Lewis, 1996). Extinction risks
Being capable of preserving sentient life for another 1041 years makes human survival important. There may be nothing more important. If the human species is extinguished, all known sentience and certainly all Earth-originating sentience will be extinguished within a few billion years. We ought then pay more attention to what Bostrom (2002) has called “existential risks” -- risks
“where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potentia l.” Such risks include: an asteroid or comet strikes Earth, creating enough debris to shut down photosynthesis for months; a supervolcano erupts, creating enough debris to shut down photosynthesis; a nearby supernova unleashes deadly radiation that reaches Earth; greenhouse gasses cause a radical change in climate; a nuclear holocaust creates enough debris to cause a
“nuclear winter,” shutting down photosynthesis; a genetically engineered microbe is unleashed, by accident or design, killing most or all of humanity; or a high-energy physics experiment goes awry, creating a “true” vacuum or strangelets, destroying the Earth (Bostrom 2002;
Bostrom and Cirkovic 2006; Leslie 1996, Posner 2004, Rees 2003). To me, most of these risks seem very unlikely. But dishearteningly, in their catalogs of these risks, Britain ’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees (2003), gives humanity 50-50 odds of surviving the next few centuries, and philosophers John Leslie (1996) and Nick Bostrom (2002) put our chances at 70% and 75%, respectively. Estimating the probabilities of unprecedented events is subjective, so we should treat these numbers skeptically. Still, even if the probabilities are orders lower, because the stakes are high, it could be justified to invest in extinction countermeasures. Matheny (2007) found that, even with traditional social discounting, investing in asteroid detection and mitigation is justified under standard cost-effectiveness analysis. Ought humanity be saved?
Even accepting that future lives have value and that extinction risks can be cost-effectively reduced, there could still be reasons not to worry about human extinction. For instance, human lives might have negative moral value, in which case human extinction could be a good thing. This might have been Bertrand Russell’s sentiment when he wrote, “Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation.”[6] In the 20th century, more people, in absolute numbers, died of war, famine, and pestilence than ever before. But in the same century, more people did not die of war, famine, and pestilence than ever before. So even if we're especially pessimistic about average human welfare during the last century compared to others, it would be hard to argue that total welfare decreased. As long as average welfare was greater than zero – that is, the average life was preferable to suicide
– then the century was a success for humanity. We will be capable of even greater moral nightmares in this century than in the last, but we will also be capable of securing greater welfare for a larger fraction of humanity. I suspect in this century, the average life will again be worth living, assuming we survive the century to judge. We should be more pessimistic when we review how nonhuman animals have fared in the last century. At present around 50 billion animals are raised and killed each year to feed humanity. (Many million animals are used for clothing, product testing, research, and entertainment, but their numbers are insignificant by comparison.) Since World War 2, with the invention of
"factory farming," farm animals’ welfare has significantly deteriorated, as they now live in conditions that frustrate their most basic instincts
(Singer, 2002, chapter 3).
At the same time, we’re probably the only animal on Earth that routinely demonstrates compassion for other species
. Such compassion is nearly universal in developed countries but we usually know too little, too late, for deeply ingrained habits, such as diets, to change.
If improvements in other public morals were possible without any significant biological change in human nature, then the same should be true for our treatment of nonhuman animals
, though it will take some time. Even without any change in public morals, it seems unlikely we will continue to use animals for very long – at least, nowhere near 50 billion per year. Our most brutal use of animals results not from sadism but from old appetites now satisfied with inefficient technologies that have not fundamentally changed in 10,000 years.
Ours is the first century where newer technologies -- plant or in vitro meats, or meat from brainless animals -- could satisfy human appetites for meat more efficiently and safely
(Edelman et al, 2005). As these technologies mature and become cheaper, they will likely replace conventional meat. If the use of sentient animals survives much beyond this century, we should be very surprised.
This thought is a cure for misanthropy.
As long as most humans in the future don't use sentient animals, the vast number of good lives we can create would outweigh any sins humanity has committed or is likely to commit.
Even if it takes a century for animal farming to be replaced by vegetarianism (or in vitro meats or brainless farm animals), the century of factory farming would represent around 1012 miserable life-years. That is one-billionth of the 1021 animal life-years humanity could save by protecting Earth from asteroids for a billion years. The century of industrialized animal use would thus be the equivalent of a terrible pain that lasts one second in an otherwise happy 100-year life
.

To accept human extinction now would be like committing suicide to end an unpleasant itch
. If human life is extinguished, all known animal life will be extinguished when the Sun enters its Red Giant phase, if not earlier
. Despite its current mistreatment of other animals, humanity is the animal kingdom’s best long-term hope for survival.

[Stacy. “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism.
Feminist Studies,20.1, 1994.]
As environmental destruction increases, interest in ecofeminism grows. The new Ms. includes ecofeminism as a regular feature, and Hypatia6 recently devoted an entire issue to it. Yet critics charge that recent ecofeminist writings neglect politics. For example, Ariel Salleh critiques the latest ecofeminist anthologies: "Both Plant Healing the Wounds ( 1989 ) and Diamond and Orenstein
Reweaving the World ( 1990 ) are, with the exception of one or two essays, largely preoccupied with ethics, life-style, selfrealization, cultural ritual and art--this, while 465 million people starve today, and
one more species will have died out by midnight."7 Similarly, Stephanie Lahar contends that the
"reference to political praxis has decreased relative to earlier discussions" and asks: "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?"8 These critiques may signal a move back to the politically engaged ecofeminism exemplified by the 1983 anthology Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, edited by Leonie Caldecotte and
Stephanie Leland. Although the above critiques still share the basic values and goals of ecofeminism,
Janet Biehl Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics rejects ecofeminism in favor of Murray Bookchin's social ecology. Much of Biehl's dismissal stems from her repudiation not just of women/nature metaphors but of all metaphors. "Insofar as the ecofeminist bases for ethics--interconnectedness, aliveness, 'women's caring'--are mediated by the metaphors of 'woman=nature,' they avoid the problem of objectivity in the real world. Thus, if an ethic is to be based strictly on metaphors, it becomes wholly tenuous." She later explains that metaphors should not found political movements because "one of the functions of a political movement, let alone a radical one, is to explain the world, not to obscure it."9Biehl critiques ecofeminism from an epistemologically simplistic ground where "reality" and "metaphor," "reason" and
"myth" stand as pure polarities. But any ethics or politics-- indeed, any way of thinking--is shaped via metaphors and ideologies. Instead of castigating ecofeminism's use of metaphors, it would be more productive to analyze the specific effects of those metaphors within their context.
[Stacy. “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism.
Feminist Studies,20.1, 1994.]
Just as patriarchal capitalism can pocket Mother Earth, a conservative environmentalism can embrace the "nurturing" discourse of ecofeminism. In The Conservator, the magazine of the Nature Conservancy, the title of the 1990 article, "Stewardship: Empowering the Land," juxtaposes the conservative Christian idea that God appointed Man as the Steward of nature with the leftist language of empowerment that places the land in the position of oppressed groups, leaving us with a weird amalgamation of an oppressed-but-soon-to-be-empowered land with an old-timey land that needs to be managed. This article about volunteers borrows the language of ecofeminism: "Linda Wark may have articulated the leadership role of stewards best when she said, 'stewardship is not only the care and nurturing of

natural areas, it's the care and nurturing of volunteers.'"17 Why does the Nature Conservancy, an organization seemingly untouched by feminism, here employ its "care and nurturing" language? The feminized language supports The Conservator's conservative politics: by alluding to the motherly realms of care and nurturing it places the ecological volunteer work into the sphere of the domestic, fencing it off from the public sphere of business, economics, and politics--issues that this organization, partly funded by big business, does not disturb. Deane Curtin warns that an "ethic of care provides a very important beginning for an ecofeminist ethic, but it runs the risk of having its own aims turned against it unless it is regarded as part of a distinctively feminist political agenda that consciously attempts to
expand the circle of caring for."18 Limiting the realm of caring to the private world leaves government
and corporate polluters undisturbed. Of course, the what-I-cando-at-home-to-save-the-earth movement has increased recycling and consumer awareness of environmental problems. People can have an effect as consumers; and women, who constitute the majority of household shoppers, may be empowered by our potential to promote ecological causes even while shopping. Yet, as beneficial as these gains may be, they are achieved with the risk that the environmental movement will get
sidetracked into a depoliticized, indeed, procapitalist, privatized mode-and the potential for
ecologically conscious consumerism to save the planet is limited. Thus, the ecofeminist exultations of
Mother Earth and the exhortations to mother the earth are congruent with a patriarchal, capitalist politics that casts the earth as a feminized victim and throws the blame on to housekeeping, nurturing
women--leaving capitalist America free to mind its own business.

[Natalie, Julia T., “The Personal Is Still Political: Embodied dPolitics in Third
Wave Feminism.,” Women's Studies in Communication, Vol. 28, 2005]
Consistent with third wavers' insights is Heckman's (2000) argument that feminism must "move from identity politics to a politics of identification.... in which political actors identify with particular
political causes and mobilize to achieve particular political goals" (p. 304). This kind of identification leads third wavers to become "true compatriots and allies because of our dreams and perceptions, which match much more closely than our skin and hair" (Bondoc, 1995, p. 179). Third wave feminists' allegiance to inclusive solidarity and politics also seems to embody Laclau's belief that to engage only the struggles of one's own specific group is to be politically ineffective. In an interview, Laclau (Worsham
& Olson, 1999) stated that, "if only the particularity of the struggle is recognized without entering into relations of solidarity with other groups and engaging in wider struggles at the level of society, then the group will be totally enclosed in its particularized demands and its actions will have no hegemonic
consequences at the wider level" (p. 149). In this way, third wave politics reflect a commitment to building coalitions and a kind of solidarity that fully recognizes and attempts to work with both interlocking facets of identity and the interlocking nature of oppressions.

[Sankaran, Dept. of Polit. Sci., Alternatives, 1993]
The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to “nostalgic”, essential unities that have become obsolete and have been the grounds for all our oppressions. In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by Chaloupka in his equally dismissive critique of the more mainstream nuclear oppression, the Nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s, that according to him, was operating along obsolete lines emphasizing “facts” and “realities” while a “postmodern”
President Reagan easily outflanked them through an illusory Star Wars program. (See KN: chapter
4)Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign truths
(which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism) and the more partial (and issuebased) criticism of what he calls “nuclear opposition” or “antinuclearists” at the very outset of his book. (KN: xvi) Once again, the unhappy choice forced upon the reader is to join Chaloupka in his total critique of sovereign truths or be trapped in obsolete essentialisms.This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common (and need to unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both Chaloupka and Der Derian thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups that should, in any analysis, be regarded as the closest to them in terms of an oppositional politics and their desired futures. Instead of finding ways to live with these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce against the New Right, this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a political activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups that have very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it fails to consider the possibility that there may have been other, more compelling reasons for the “failure” of the Nuclear Freedom movement or anti-Gulf War movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that need not be a totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives.The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and
Chaloupka, between total critique and “ineffective” partial critique, ought to be transparent. Among other things, it effectively militates against the construction of provisional or strategic essentialisms in our attempts to create space for an activist politics. In the next section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical international theory and its impact on such an activist politics