Carol P. Christ

“Calling All Women” to Save the Earth, signed and shared by Carol P. Christ

I contend therefore that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advanced investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. Wangari Maathai

I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. Greta Thunberg

We are calling all women and our allies to come together to save the earth that sustains us all. Is it any wonder that from Rachel Carson to Wangari Maathai to the emerging young leader Greta Thunberg, women have been in the forefront of environmental movements for a century? As daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, we have long cared and advocated for the most vulnerable among us, the very young, the very old, the disabled, those who are the first to suffer the consequences of climate catastrophe and the many kinds of pollution that are poisoning the earth we share.

As cooks, gardeners, and small farmers providing sustenance for our families throughout the world, we speak for the soil and the water, the air and the crops that feed us. As Congresswomen, diplomats, lawyers, doctors, CEOs, artists and scientists we are calling for fair and equitable public policies that address the crises we are facing together. As those who create homes and maintain households, we are speaking out for our first and only home, the planet earth we share.

Today as never before we are witnessing the destruction of the intricate and delicate balance, the miraculous conditions on earth on which all life depends. At this moment as a drastically changing climate and a deluge of poisonous substances, from plastic to coal to pesticides threaten the habitats of living creatures world wide, we are confronted by unprecedented loss of species, what some are calling “the sixth extinction,” a tragic loss reflected in the epidemic of disease in our families and communities.

Like indigenous communities and people of color, because women are so often marginalized, as outsiders we have a crucial perspective including valuable insights into what has caused the frightening and destructive events we are witnessing. We see a world too often governed by ruthless attempts to dominate and win, placing profit above every other value, framed by a world view that describes nature as inferior, lacking in intelligence or the inviolable integrity that all living beings possess. In response we call for an ethic of peaceful cooperation with nature and between nations.

Faced with the consequences of heedless, ignorant and ultimately violent policies that threaten our lives and all we love, wild fires burning our forests and homes, floods and mudslides destroying our towns, fierce storms battering our coastline, lakes and rivers becoming too toxic to drink, as our oceans and the fish that swim in them are choked with plastic, as our air becomes heavy with particles that threaten human health, we are calling for women to unite in an effort to recognize and respond to the failures of political, economic and moral vision behind these crises.

As nurses, teachers, waitresses, secretaries, wives, partners, those who respect and nurture life, we understand we are all dependent on each other and every other living being on earth. And we know too that together we have the creative vision to stop the advance of climate change and the sixth extinction, to put an end to the poisoning of our earth, to build societies that, taking inspiration from indigenous cultures, respect nature’s rights and learn from nature’s wisdom. In this light we urge you now to speak out, organize, rally, protest and step up in every way you can to protect the future of life on earth.

Susan Griffin, Vandana Shiva, Alice Walker, Alice Waters, Vijaya Nagarajan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Deirdre English, Ayelet Waldman, Jane Hirshfield, Arlie Hochschild, Joanna Macy, Jodie Evans, Medea Benjamin, Claire Greensfelder, Belvie Rooks, Jennifer Berezan, Ruth Rosen, Elizabeth Rosner, Joyce Jenkins, Nancy Shelby, Anita Barrows, Rebecca Foust, Joan Miura, Carol P. Christ

Here are some actions you can take and organizations you can join and support:

Learn about the environmental issues in your own neighborhood. Educate your community and organize to while demanding an end to pollution and the emission of CO2 in every form. Work to empower our communities to allow us to make decisions that protect the environment and our families and all lives Ask your senators and representatives to support The Green New Deal. Call for and support public transportation. Ask the businesses in your communities and chains such as Trader Joe’s to adopt practices that support the environment and cease those that are destructive, such as the use of plastic. Take action to ban poisons such as Glyphosate found in Monsanto’s Round Up from our communities. Boycott Monsanto and companies that fail to adopt green policies. Ask your governments to stop exporting environmental destruction, in every form including dumping waste, mining, drilling for oil, selling pesticides, altering and patenting seeds, internationally. Oppose war and investments in warfare. As the largest source of pollution on the planet, armed conflict and the manufacture and storage of weapons cause irreparable and vast damage all over the earth.

Below is a list just a few of the organizations working to save our planet that can support your efforts and which you can join and support.

350.org, Bioneers, Black Belt Citizens, Greenpeace, Mothers out Front, Rain Forest Action, Seed Sovereignty, The Nature Conservancy, The Southern Environmental Law Center, Women Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), Women’s Environmental Network (WEN), Women’s Environmental Action, Women’s Voices for the Earth, Collaborative on Health and the Environment, CODEPINK.

Call: written by Susan Griffin with Vandana Shiva

Painting: Mother Earth by Jennifer Cortez-Perlmutter

Note from Carol P. Christ: “Women’s knowledge” that we are part of the earth stems from women’s work: caring for the weak and the vulnerable in all cultures and caring for plants and trees in horticultural and forest-cultural societies. This knowledge is available to men as well but only if they are willing to challenge long-standing cultural assumptions about “manhood” based in the separation of men from women and nature.

Carol P. Christ is an internationally known feminist writer, activist, and educator living in Lasithi, Crete. Carol’s recent book written with Judith Plaskow, Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology, is on Amazon. A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess is on sale for $9.99 on Amazon. Carol has been leading Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete for over twenty years: join her in Crete. Carol’s photo by Michael Honneger.

Listen to Carol’s a-mazing interview with Mary Hynes on CBC’s Tapestry recorded in conjunction with her keynote address to the Parliament of World’s Religions.

His Terror by Carol P. Christ

The first two parts of Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature, “MATTER” and “SEPARATION,” are written in the authoritative voice of western philosophy and science that declares matter to be dead and the body an impediment to thought, and proceeds to separate the mind from the body. All of this, Griffin suggests, is based in the fear of death.

As Griffin notes, in this equation woman is identified with the body and her voice is silenced. Re-reading these parts of Woman and Nature for the umpteenth time for a class I am teaching felt even more painful than it had before. I was reliving parts of my own story. Continue reading “His Terror by Carol P. Christ”

A Matter of Life and Death: The Military or the Green New Deal? by Carol P. Christ

“I have set before you life and death . . . Choose life.” (Deut. 30:19)

Scientists tell us that an environmental catastrophe which has already begun threatens every aspect of life as we know it on planet earth. The choice could not be clearer. Will we choose life? Or will we choose death?

On March 6, 2019, William Barber and Phyllis Bennis published an opinion piece titled: “If America can find $716 bn for the military, it can fund the Green New Deal.” In it, they note that politicians in both parties are rushing to dismiss the Green New Deal as an unrealistic pipe dream, stating that there simply is no money to fund it. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s response is characteristic of the Democratic Party’s so-called moderate and pro-military wing. As Barber and Bennis report:

When young organizers from the Sunrise Movement recently challenged Senator Dianne Feinstein to support a Green New Deal, she told them “there’s no money to pay for it”. She probably didn’t expect those eight- and 10- and 11-year-old kids to respond immediately: “Yes, there is, there’s tons of money going to the military.”

Feinstein responded condescendingly that the military does “important things” with that money.

Continue reading “A Matter of Life and Death: The Military or the Green New Deal? by Carol P. Christ”

Tree-Hugging Is About Trees and So Much More Than Trees by Carol P. Christ

Not too long ago I heard someone deride members of a seminar who were building labyrinths in the olive groves of Greece as “a bunch of tree-huggers.” I bristled! I probably first heard of the Chipko tree-hugging movement which is led by women in the 1970s and 1980s. Because I love nature, I naturally assumed hugging trees is a good thing. Originally, I had no idea that the tree-hugging movement was about much more than saving trees from being felled in the interests of short-term profit.

I did not know that the deeper purpose of the movement is to save a way of life based on forest-culture that is being threatened by the imposition of western ideas and practices promoted by colonialism and its successor, the green revolution. Nor did I know that the traditional forest-culture of India is the provenance of women: more than 4000 years of observing and experimenting created a “women’s knowledge” passed down from mother to daughter. Continue reading “Tree-Hugging Is About Trees and So Much More Than Trees by Carol P. Christ”

Meeting the Windigo by Carol P. Christ

Towards the end of Braiding Sweetgrass, mother, biologist, and member of the Citizen Potawami Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer sets out at the end of winter to visit a forest area near her home that she considers hers not in name but in virtue of her love and care for it. On arriving, she discovers that the forest is no more, having been clear-cut by the owner. The wildflowers and the plants she has harvested over the years have sprouted up, but Kimmerer knows that without the forest cover they will be burned by the sun and their places taken by brambles. Continue reading “Meeting the Windigo by Carol P. Christ”

Time to Dismantle the Myth of the Nation State? by Carol P. Christ

I am a citizen of two countries currently being torn apart by popular nationalism. In Greece, the cry is “Macedonia is only Greek,” while in the United States a nation of immigrants is being told that it must fear being invaded by immigrants. The truth is that the idea of a nation state is a fiction created in the nineteenth century. It is high time to dismantle it.

Here is the Greek case. Phillip of Macedon invaded from the north and created a federation of Greek states in 338 BCE. His son Alexander the (so-called) Great conquered territories extending as far as India before his death in 323 BCE, establishing the seat of his empire in the newly founded city of Alexandria in Egypt. Phillip and Alexander are claimed as Greek, but in fact Phillip forced independent Greek-speaking city states into union under his rule.

Although the Greek language became the lingua franca of the Alexandrian Empire, the people who spoke forms of Greek did not become an ethnically pure free Greek nation under Alexander. Rather they became subjects in an empire ruled by a king that united people of different cultural traditions under a newly imposed Greek language. It is probable that Phillip and Alexander originally spoke a form of Greek, but even this is debated by experts. Continue reading “Time to Dismantle the Myth of the Nation State? by Carol P. Christ”

Making a New Home: It’s Not So Easy by Carol P. Christ

I am sitting in my studio apartment with my computer on my lap on a cold, windy, and rainy day in Voutes, Heraklion, Crete. My little dog is curled up asleep, seeing no reason to awake on a day like this.

I made the decision to leave my beautiful home in Molivos, Lesbos last winter, renting a small Air BNB house in Heraklion the winter and a small house in Pachia Ammos for the summer. Then back to Lesbos for 2 weeks, on to the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete for 2 weeks, back to Lesbos for 2 weeks, on to America for a speaking tour, back to Lesbos for a few more weeks with an interval in Thessaloniki, and on to Crete for the New Year holidays.

Things went pretty much as planned up until my return to Crete. There were a few glitches, but I enjoyed being in Heraklion and then in by the sea in Pachia Ammos, and I was beginning to make new friends. I enjoyed my time in Lesbos and my trips to the US and Canada. I was looking forward to my return to Crete. Continue reading “Making a New Home: It’s Not So Easy by Carol P. Christ”

Just When We Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse, It Did by Carol P. Christ

Like many of you I have been following discussions of the revelation that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam dressed in blackface or as a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he was a medical student. It was reported that Northam was earlier known as “coonman,” an epithet which suggests that he had blackened his face more than once. His later admission that he put only a little bit of black shoe polish on his face because it is hard to get off, when he dressed up as Michael Jackson, seems to confirm that blackface was something he had tried before. There was also the fact that students had been asked by the yearbook committee to submit photographs for their pages: Northam did not say if he submitted the photographs on his page.

Some commented that Northam’s was not a (possibly forgivable) youthful offense, but one committed by a twenty-six year-old adult. Others said that Northam’s failure to take full responsibility for his apparently repeated behavior and the hurt and harm his actions and actions like them had caused was the more serious offense. Perhaps he could still have governed if he had apologized fully, told the story of how he came to understand race relations on a deeper level, and immediately offered to meet with black leaders and restorative justice experts to discuss what he could to earn back the trust of the people who elected him.

Everyone seemed relieved that Northam would be replaced by a young progressive black man. It seemed like a happy ending to a very sad story.

And then the other shoe dropped. Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax was accused of forcible sexual assault by a black woman named Dr. Vanessa Tyson who had absolutely nothing to gain by telling her story. Continue reading “Just When We Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse, It Did by Carol P. Christ”

Receiving, Giving, Reciprocating vs. Nonintervention: Two Different Models for Environmental Ethics by Carol P. Christ

“Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, to reciprocate.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer

The notion of a gift economy is at the heart of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer shares a different way of being in the world: one that recognizes the gifts that have been given to us and the necessity to reciprocate. In the modern world we have been taught that nature’s resources are ours for the taking. We have not been taught that nature’s resources are not infinite, that they exist in a web of interdependent relationships in which minerals, plants, animals, and human beings all participate. Everything we do has consequences for other living things.

For many environmentalists, the goal is to leave “wild” nature alone. In this model, the destruction human beings have done to nature is recognized. But what is not understood is that human beings are part of nature too. For hundreds of thousands of years, we and our ancestors have interacted with nature. The model of setting aside spaces for wild nature does not recognize that human beings can interact in positive ways with nature and that we have done so for millennia. Continue reading “Receiving, Giving, Reciprocating vs. Nonintervention: Two Different Models for Environmental Ethics by Carol P. Christ”

Iroquoian Women: Power Held and Shared by Carol P. Christ

According to Barbara Alice Mann, author of Iroquoian Women, women were at the center of a matrilineal Iroquoian society that could be called (though she does not call it that) an “egalitarian matriarchy.” As in other egalitarian matriarchies, including those of the Mosuo and the Minangkabau, women both hold power and share it with men. According to Peggy Reeves Sanday who studied many societies in the anthropological records, female power does not mean female domination.

In attempting to reconstruct the role of women in Iroquois society, Mann first had to engage in a painstaking deconstruction of the scholarly consensus that men ruled among the Iroquois. Believing that male dominance is universal, scholars ignored or explained away a great deal of evidence that Iroquoian women were and are at the center of Iroquoian society. Those who believe that academic scholarship is objective or relatively objective may have to revise their opinions after reading the masses of evidence of witting and unwitting distortion of Iroquois society that Mann uncovers. In order to reconstruct the role of women in Iroquoian society, Mann also had to deal with the fact that the American government destroyed much of Iroquoian oral tradition through policies of forced assimilation that removed children to government schools and forbade the speaking of native languages. Continue reading “Iroquoian Women: Power Held and Shared by Carol P. Christ”