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Where Women Lead, Enviro
And Social Improvement Follow
by Nina Simons
One of the most promising trends in recent years has been the emergence around the
world of grassroots, women-led movements that are developing solutions to social
and environmental problems by reconnecting relationships -- not only between people
and groups, but human relationships to the land, to plants and animals and to traditional
foods.
Many of these initiatives create cascading positive effects and restore both economic
stability and ecological health. In Wendell Berry's words, they "solve for pattern."
A real solution looks at a problem in relationship to the larger web of patterns
within which it exists and tends to solve more than one problem, increasing the overall
health of a whole ecosystem or society.
Now that she has won the Nobel Peace Prize, the whole world has heard about Wangari
Maathai's work with the extraordinary women of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya who
planted 30 million trees and helped empower local communities, restore ecosystems
and contribute to removing an oppressive government, but these women are far from
alone.
All around the world, I see women cooking up these types of systemic solutions. They're
initiating bold actions, forging coalitions, catalyzing collaboration to effect profound,
long-term change. Recently in the oil-rich but deeply impoverished Niger Delta, for
example, hundreds of women blocked the gates of Chevron/Texaco facilities in protests
demanding that the company provide jobs, schools and hospitals and clean up the toxic
chemicals it had put in their water. Within 36 hours of beginning this action, as
word spread throughout the countryside, they were spontaneously joined by thousands
more women in their nonviolent occupation.
A turning point came when the women threatened to take off their clothes -- a powerful
traditional shaming gesture in this region. These peaceful, all-woman protests were
a major departure from past attempts at pressuring oil multinationals to change in
the delta, which have on occasion involved armed men using kidnapping and sabotage
to get the corporations to address social and environmental damage. The sieges paralyzed
Chevron/Texaco's operations, costing the company billions of dollars before a settlement
was reached. A spokeswoman for the protesters said: "History has been made.
Our culture is a patriarchal society. For women to come out like this and achieve
what we have is out of the ordinary."
India has been a hotbed of grassroots women's movements. Village women in Andhra
Pradesh have set up community grain and seed banks to gain control over their land,
food and lives. Rejuvenating marginalized lands, these women brought 2,500 acres
of fallow land under cultivation, and in the first year of their project generated
3 million meals for 30 villages, fodder for 6,000 cattle and wages for 2,500 people.
This program emphasizes reintroducing biodiversity and has radically boosted the
value of crops per acre and revived 50 traditional crop varieties.
The renowned physicist/activist Vandana Shiva launched the Navdanya movement to help
farmers retain control of their local food supply and resist the cooptation of their
native seeds and agriculture by multinational agribusiness corporations. She has
rallied millions to take a stand. And the brilliant novelist and social thinker Arundhati
Roy has helped mobilize popular resistance against the dam-building boondoggles of
the Indian government and the World Bank that displace millions of traditional villagers
and despoil riparian ecosystems.
One hallmark of these woman-led movements is that they frequently involve coalition
building, the bringing together of sometimes unexpected allies to achieve a common
goal. A growing collaboration between reproductive rights activists and environmentalists
is a good example. Endocrine disrupting chemicals, linked to sterility and deformed
genitalia in fish and birds, are a focus for many environmentalists. Similar compounds,
such as those found in DES, have been a concern of reproductive health activists
for many years. Since traces of endocrine disruptors are now commonly found in our
air, water and food supply and are believed to be negatively impacting human fertility
and women's reproductive health, they represent a critical nexus, illuminating the
inexorable connection between the health of the environment and that of humans.
After struggling for more than 30 years to preserve women's right to choose, reproductive
rights organizations have become known for their fierce independence, rarely aligning
with other issues or movements, yet both communities recognize the motivating force
of people's right to have healthy babies and related concerns about fertility, the
early onset of puberty in girls, and reproductive cancers in women. A serious collaboration
between these two groups could succeed in bringing this issue far greater public
attention -- and in putting a human face on this critical environmental health concern.
Consider the potential impact, then, if health-care providers, from doctors to nurses
to alternative practitioners, were to add their collective voice to such a movement.
The Healthcare Without Harm coalition, led by nurse Charlotte Brody, is building
precisely these types of broad alliances to address mercury and dioxin contamination
and has had a lot of success.
Forging coalitions that include groups that have rarely worked together will be a
key strategy for the time ahead, and women have in many instances shown the way.
Population and development experts all agree that what is good for women is good
for communities, countries and the planet. Where women's equality, literacy and power
have increased around the world, women have consistently chosen to have fewer children
and overall living standards have risen.
"As women come more and more into their own," notes the prescient social
analyst and pioneer of eco-psychology, Theodore Roszak, "the qualities that
we have long assumed were exclusively and stereotypically theirs will come to be
more widely acknowledged. Care-giving and compassion -- so long associated with mothers
and wives -- will permeate our social values. Institutions now grounded in harshly
competitive market values will give more and more place to care, cooperation and
mutual aid. In the century to come, we can expect our cultural style to be steadily
reshaped by the other half of the human race."
In emerging grassroots women-led movements here in the U.S. and around the world,
I believe we are seeing the seeds of Roszak's prediction, the profiles of the stands
we must make, the outlines of the coalitions we will need to cultivate, and the models
we can begin to draw upon to develop an Earth-honoring, life-affirming culture.
Nina Simons is co-executive director of Bioneers. Founded in 1990, Bioneers/ Collective
Heritage Institute is a non-profit educational organization that promotes practical
environmental solutions and innovative social strategies for restoring the Earth
and communities. Bioneers also cultivates and fosters networks and community. Programs
include the annual Bioneers Conference; satellite conferences across North America;
the Bioneers Youth Initiative; ecological food and farming; anthology books; media
outreach; and our award-winning radio series, Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart
of Nature. The Bioneers are impassioned individuals from all walks of life, cultures,
races and classes unified by a compelling vision of planetary renewal. Bioneers 2005
Conference is October 14-16 at Marin Center, San Rafael, Calif. Contact Bioneers
toll-free at 877-BIONEER or visit www.bioneers.org
Copyright © 2005 Nina Simons. All rights reserved. |
| June 2005 |
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