Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On this episode, author and social entrepreneur Nina Simons reminds us that in a fact driven culture, sometimes it’s important to return to the emotional, physical, and even spiritual in order to balance the conversation.
While capitalism has taught us to identify the first with money-making and the second with life-making – a necessary but nevertheless subordinated, dependent and qualitatively inferior activity – climate justice movements are claiming the progressive, i.e. egalitarian, emancipatory, and wealth-producing agency of reproductive forces.
In this piece, we argue how ecofeminist theory can help understand nuances and draw insights on the Paris Agreement’s dominant narratives.
The feminist approach to climate justice therefore demands that governments, civil society, private sector, environmentalists should address the causes and effects of climate change, not as a single issue, but in recognition of the full spectrum of the numerous challenges that communities face
The Covid-19 pandemic has made all the more evident what feminists have long argued, namely that care work – especially direct care work which involves a relation between a caregiver and a care receiver – is the foundation of our economy and society.
Let’s start with what’s fairly clear: There is no hope that a population of eight billion people with the current level of aggregate consumption today can continue indefinitely.
In Western society and culture, which is now dominant or prevalent globally, women are treated as inferior to men, ‘nature’ is treated as inferior to ‘culture’, and humans are understood as being separate from, and often superior to, the natural environment. Dualism’s logical structure of otherism and negation lies at the root of propelling and exacerbating the problem.
Can this crisis provide a window of opportunity to re-organize and shift power to build radical democratic systems that genuinely care for the environment and our collective well-being?
When unpacking the systems of harm around climate change, we reveal violation upon violation upon violation, like layers around an onion—and a feminist, anti-racist intersectional lens is necessary to understand these interconnected systems of harm.
From my point of view –which comes from systems dynamics and environmentalism rather than from feminism– one of the tools that can best help feminist economics articulate a coherent discourse is the pattern of collapse.
