What if it really is as simple as changing our minds?
This is the central question of Nicole Schwab’s book, The Heart of the Labyrinth (Womancraft Publishing, 2014). This question paves the way for her eco-feminist approach to balancing the self and the environment. Schwab’s book is a parable as multilayered and complex as human nature, and it moves through the ages to probe the pure core of the self and the sustaining energy that connects all. Continue reading “The Heart of the Labyrinth: BOOK REVIEW by Mary Petiet”
Carol Adams in her article “Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals,” argues that ecofeminists should be vegetarians, since ecofeminism is, among other things, action-based and “one’s actions reveal one’s beliefs,” (129). According to ecofeminism, the patriarchal domination of animals and nature is linked to the oppression of women. For her and many ecofeminists, the survival of our planet rests on two foundations: first, fixing the conditions of women and other oppressed groups and, second, envisioning differently our relationship to the natural world. In other words, a better arrangement of human relationships requires better human relationships with the environment. Vegetarianism and veganism are two ways in which ecofeminists opt out of the patriarchal system of domination and exploitation and help create a better world.
But, does one really? Does adopting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle really have such an impact on the world? Yes and no. Yes, because it has been shown that raising animals to eat uses exorbitant amounts of fuel, water and land, not to mention, the larger environmental impact of farm run-off in the forms of disease-carrying manure, valuable topsoil and harmful pesticides. Yes, because animals are often inhumanely treated, housed in horrible conditions, genetically and/or hormonally-modified and cruelly killed. Continue reading “Do You Eat Animals? Ecofeminism and Our Food System by Ivy Helman”
I have spoken about the Social Responsibility of the Artist on numerous occasions. This blog approaches similar subject matter, but in relation to using art as a potent tool for change and as a platform for raising awareness of important environmental and ecological issues that all of humanity is currently faced with.
All forms of art have the potential to be tools for healing. I believe that through the creative process the relationship with self and the environment can be transformed. Why? Because when creative work is approached from a place of passion and purpose and art is brought to life with intention, great shifts can occur. Not only for the artist, but also for the viewer. I believe wholeheartedly that I can approach the canvas and paint intentionally to heal the earth and deepen my connection to it, and in doing so inspire others to deepen and honour a connection to the earth creatively.
There are many contemporary artists who are agents of environmental change and who are using their creative gifts and talents to build awareness and provoke thought through their work and process. Many artists, such as myself are working with transformative approaches and processes towards a new vision that is ecological and participates with the living cycles of nature. Many topics are approached such as oceans, climate change, water quality, recycling, water purification, natural disasters, de-forestation, endangered species and more.
Artists today are finding all sorts of inventive ways to call attention to the problems facing our environment, as corporate greed and profit impose destruction on our planet. While each artist works very differently and explores diverse territories, they share awareness about the critical loss of natural resources and a desire to save the planet from human destruction.
“Today the talk of the world is about an endangered Earth. One often wonders how much of the talk is backed with genuine concern and the will to take positive steps. But it should not surprise the world that artists are in the forefront of the discussion on the environment.”
Eco-feminist artist Ann T. Rosenthal and activist artist Steffi Domike have been collaborating on environmental installations for years. Their wall installation, Watermark: Wood, Coal, Oil, Gas (2011) consists of four panels that illustrate an evolutionary timeline of energy resources—wood, coal, oil and natural gas.
Dominique Mazeau is a poet and artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has made an exquisite journal of poems and drawings of cleaning up the Rio Grande River over many years. She has made sculptures from the trash and she teaches school children about the river with her poems and her art.
There are many more Eco-feminist and Environmentalist/Activist artists such as Charla Puryear and Helene Aylon using their art to raise awareness of ecological issues. These few examples alone demonstrate that art, in its myriad of forms, has the capacity to effect positive change on the earth and its environments.
Artists are catalysts for change, and this “change” takes place when we feel deeply for a precious cause. I feel deeply for the state of the earth and feel that it is largely humanity’s spiritual disconnection from the earth and from the earth as sentient that has contributed to the current state of not only the health of the earth body, but also the health of our bodies.
Coming up in October I will be presenting an exhibition ‘Voices for the Earth’ in Bundaberg, QLD Australia. This exhibition will feature the works of select regional artists who are using their art to speak for the earth. It is held in conjunction with RONA-16 an Earth Arts Festival as part of the The Rights of Nature Tribunal that is taking place the same month. Artists of all genres from around Australia are participating in creative activities to raise awareness of the urgency required to make the necessary changes so that ways can be found to make the health of our planet an absolute priority.
I know that more has to be done, and some might see ‘art’ as a hedonist, self absorbed way to attempt to bring about change – but the power of image should NEVER be underestimated.
I am Painting for the eARTh.
This Earth is my sister I love her daily grace Her silent daring And how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other All that we have lost All that we have found We are stunned by this beauty, And I do not forget What She is to me And what I am to Her.
Jassy Watson, who lives on the sub-tropical coast of Queensland Australia, is a Mother of four, passionate organic gardener, Intuitive/Visionary & Community Artist, Teacher, Intentional Creativity Coach and a student of Ancient History and Religion at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is the Creatress of Earth Circle Studios; a school for the Sacred Creative Arts. Jassy teaches regular painting workshops in person, nationally and internationally, and online based around themes that explore myth, history and our connection to the earth.
My social media accounts have recently been ablaze with announcements of meetings, sessions, and receptions to attend for those of us who study or work in religion/theology in the U.S. Some 12,000-15,000 scholars and students will descend upon San Diego this weekend for the annual American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL) conference.
While as a theological and philosophical ethicist I attend this gathering every year regardless of venue or conference theme, I’m particularly excited about this year’s focus on climate change.
Beyond that, I’m especially excited about the number of sessions I see devoted to discussing ecofeminism–the scholarly and activist movement that takes seriously the interconnections between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature. Let me enumerate a few of these (n.b. the following is a non-exhaustive list):
– On Friday, 1:30-3:30pm (CC-14A), the Women’s Lounge Roundtable will entail a pre-conference luncheon on “Ecofeminism and Earth Healing” featuring emerging scholars from Claremont Graduate University.
– On Sunday, 9-11:30am (CC-3), the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Group will feature a panel of papers on “ecological, epistemological, and ethical habitations.”
– On Sunday, 1-2:30pm (CC-30A), the Feminist Theory & Religious Reflection Group will sponsor another session tied to the conference theme: “Strategic Negotiations with Feminism on the Borders: Rhetoric in American Homiletics, ‘On the Move’ Ethics in Ecofeminism.”
– On Sunday, 3-4:30pm (CC-26), the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group will convene a session entitled “Ecowomanism 101: A Roundtable Discussing Vital Themes and Trajectories.”
I’m looking forward to this conference and wish all AAR/SBL attendees an enriching and eventful time as well!
In my Ecofeminism class we have been discussing essentialism because some feminists have alleged that other feminists, particularly ecofeminists and Goddess feminists, are “essentialists.” They argue that essentialist views reinforce traditional stereotypes including those that designate men as rational and women as emotional. I too find essentialism problematic, but I do not agree that Goddess feminism and ecofeminism are intrinsically essentialist.
Goddess feminists and ecofeminists criticize classical dualism: the traditions of thinking that value reason over emotion and feeling, male over female, man over nature. We argued that the western rational tradition sowed the seeds of the environmental crisis when it separated “man” from “nature.”
Goddess feminists and ecofeminists affirm the connections between women and nature in an environmental worldview that acknowledges the interconnection of all beings in the web of life.
On Sunday May 18 the first round of Municipal and Regional Elections were held in Greece, and I ran for office again. A month or so before the 2010 Regional Elections were held in under a newly reorganized electoral system, my friend Michael Bakas sent me an email saying simply: “You are running with the Green Wind in the upcoming elections.” Michael asked me to run because we had worked together to save the wetlands in Lesbos and he had supported me as I wrote an official Complaint to the European Commission documenting the failures of national and local authorities to uphold European laws.
I did not know what I was supposed to do as a candidate on a Greek parliamentary-system list, but in the end I passed out flyers in my village and the adjoining one. My name was mentioned in a newspaper article because I was foreign-born. To everyone’s surprise, I came in 3rd of 18 candidates for the Green Wind in Lesbos, and we elected our first councilor in the regional government. After the election Michael told me that we were going together to Chios to meet with candidates to celebrate our victory. There I met an amazing group of green activists and despite being a “foreigner” was warmly received.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells, and pretty little maids all in a row.
From the beginning of horticulture about 8000 BCE or earlier to the present day, weeding has been women’s work. Women, who were the gatherers and preparers of food in traditional nomadic societies, no doubt were the first to discover that seeds dropped at a campsite one year sometimes sprung up as plants the next year. When this discovery was systematized, agriculture was invented, and human beings began to settle down in the first villages and towns.
In the early days of horticulture (the name for the earliest stage of agriculture before the plow was developed), the cycles of planting and harvest and all the stages in between were understood to have been given to mothers by the Great Mother, the Source of Life. The secrets of planting, seed collection, harvest, and food preparation and preservation were all perceived to be “mysteries” connected to the ongoing cycles of birth, death, and regeneration in the universe.
My grandmother Lena Marie Searing who was born on a farm in Michigan must have learned agricultural secrets from her mother, for she not only created a beautiful garden, she also farmed an orchard and preserved its fruits in glass jars that lined her pantry. It was she who taught me and my brothers and cousins to love nature. My mother learned to garden from her mother, but she did not harvest food crops. I think of both of them whenever I work in my garden.
The past few days I have been weeding my garden after heavy rains that left the soil clumpy and moist. I have weeded before, but I have never enjoyed it so much. My garden has matured over the past seven years, and now the weeds are more “under control.” There aren’t so many of them, and as I have now been weeding them out over the years, their roots are shallow.
As I slide a trowel into the earth the weeds lift up and with my fingers I gently pull the plants with their roots from the soil. The weeds are familiar, though I don’t know all of their names. The “sticky weed” has many tough roots, the clover has many fine ones—both are hard to eradicate. Other weeds are easy to pull up and do not reappear again until the next year.
wild chamomile blooming among “weeds”
I am discovering that weeding is a delicate process. Sometimes the roots of plants I want in the garden are entangled with those of the weeds. I work carefully choosing the ones to save and the ones to discard.** I leave poppies, chamomile, yellow daisies, and marigolds where I find them, as I consider them to be wildflowers that will provide beauty in my garden when they bloom in spring. I also take care to “keep the soil in good heart” by not discarding too much of it along with the weeds.
As I weed, I think of the women in my village who harvest greens from the fields, feeling certain that some of the weeds I discard are edible. I marvel at all of the knowledge women have shared and passed down over the past 10,000 years and more, as I realize how little of it I know. My suspicion that some of my weeds could be food is validated when a friend and I order boiled “greens from the mountains” for lunch at a local taverna and are served one of the plants I had thrown into the garbage can.
As I weed, I am reminded of an essay called “Keeping the Soil in Good Heart: Women Weeders, the Environment, and Ecofeminism” by Candice Bradley which was published in Karen J. Warren’s Ecofeminism. Bradley writes that weeding is women’s work in almost all cultures. As I work, I understand that this is so because weeding is delicate work that requires concentration and patience and that must be repeated. Bradley says that in many cultures men disparage weeding as they disparage housework—not considering either to be “real” work.
Horticulture is the most environmentally friendly form of farming, according to Bradley, because it does the least harm to the soil, and because the weeds that are not eaten are burned or composted and turned back into the earth to replenish it.
While weeding by hand has been considered work for women and children, men have generally controlled the plow and its recent successor, the tractor. However, as Bradly states, the plow and the tractor do not eliminate the need for hand-weeding. In many cases they encourage the weeds to regenerate. Women and children still weed.
The chemical gardening and farming industry (“round it up”) is based on the premise that weeds can and must be eradicated. Rachel Carson warned us of the danger this approach to agriculture presents to human and all other forms of life. A by-product of chemical agriculture is that the careful work of women weeders is further discounted.
I do not use chemicals or pesticides in my garden, and I will be out there weeding on a regular basis in the next months. As I put my hands in the earth, I will think of all the women before me who have weeded and planted, weeded and harvested, and weeded again. Blessed be.
*The title of this essay is an homage to Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years which discusses and celebrates women and weaving.
**I am aware that no plant was born a “weed” and that the designation of some plants as weeds is a by-product of human digestive systems, human taste, agriculture, and the creation of gardens for the celebration of beauty.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is one of the most brilliant theologians of our time and her newly released autobiography, My Quest for Hope and Meaning, is a gift to those of us who have been so touched by her work. In this intimate and beautiful piece, Ruether shares her personal journey in feminist scholarship and activism. The autobiography opens with a profound forward by Renny Golden (that is also shared here on Feminism and Religion) and continues with an introduction and six chapters where Ruether guides us through an exploration of the influence of the matriarchs in her life, her interactions with Catholicism, her continued exploration of interfaith relations, her family’s struggle with mental illness, and her commitment to ecofeminist responses to the ecological crisis.
Ruether states that “Humans are hope and meaning creators” (xii), and her autobiography details her own quests for hope and meaning. She reflects on the incredible impact made by the female-centered patterns in family and community in her life. According to Ruether, these “matricentric enclaves” grounded and shaped her interest in feminist theory and women’s history. She also describes the spiritually and intellectually serious Catholicism that she received from her mother and articulates her continued frustration with Vatican leadership that has undermined the efforts of Vatican II. For Ruether, her ongoing affiliation with feminist theological circles is crucial as she continues to work toward shaping an ecumenical and interfaith Catholicism.
September 25, 2013 is the second anniversary of the death of environmental, peace, justice, and democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Wangari Muta Maathai.
Wangari Muta was born in 1940 in a round hut in rural tribal Kenya. Wangari’s tribe considered the fig tree to be holy, and she was taught that one is never to cut a fig tree down or to use its branches for firewood. Wangari spent many happy childhood hours in the shade of a fig tree that grew by a nearby stream. Fig trees play an important role in the ecological system of the Rift Valley of Kenya. Their roots penetrate the hard rock surface of the mountains to find underground water, thus opening channels where the water flows upward to fill streams and rivers.
As an adult Maathai learned that the fig tree she played under had been cut down by a settler with the result that the river had dried up. This was happening all over Kenya on a massive scale to make room for cash crop plantations. Rivers were silting up and widespread erosion threatened to turn the fertile Rift Valley into a desert. Crops were failing, animals were starving, there was no wood for cooking fires, and rural people were suffering.
“I hope that readers will rethink their consumer choices, monies that have long been offered at the expense of nonhuman animals–overwhelmingly female and exploited because of their female biology. We choose where our money goes, and in the process, we choose whether to boycott cruelty and support change, or melt ambiguously back into the masses.”
What if it really is as simple as changing our minds?
Feminism and Religion 