Both make life possible for one thing. For another, there are the attitudes and behaviors that devalue, exploit and abuse them both. Trees as posts to hang bags of garbage or forests cut down for profit; women sold for sex or stripped naked in advertising to sell products. Such common links are manifestations of a “dominator culture” that claims the right to control and exercise power over nature and over women. That culture’s language often fuses women and nature, in romanticizing terms like “mother earth” which we’ll hear a lot again on June 5, World Environment Day, but also in describing the common violence they endure as in “the rape of the land.”
Why this happens is understood with the analyses of ecofeminism that show the historical and ideological dualisms underpinning the western patriarchal value system: mind valued over body, spirit over matter, maleness over femaleness, reason over emotion, culture over nature. Much as we would like to believe that today we have adopted a more “wholistic” and integrated view of life, it is simply not true; it is everywhere evident what lower regard there is for women and for the environment, while patriarchal values are extolled as having overriding worth.
The whole reproductive health debate demonstrates the low regard for women. There’s even a new chapter in what is a war on women : bills to “protect the life of the unborn.” This has echoes of a right-wing proposal by a fanatic fringe in the US for a law to declare a status of personhood for a fertilized egg! What does this make of a woman who may carry a fertilized egg in her fallopian tubes, uterus, or even outside them in the case of an ectopic pregnancy — a mere container? Does this then mean that there will be two persons in one body – a human being with a personal history, a self-reflective consciousness and personality, along with a biological potential for a human being in a gestation process? Will they have equal rights that may be pitted against each other in certain circumstances? Science tells us that up to 50% of fertilized eggs do not prosper, are those then persons who have died? Such arguments would be merely ludicrous if their real and sinister intent were not so transparent: to ensure control over what happens to women’s bodies and to deny women decision-making over their lives.
There’s also a sub-text in conservative religious arguments that manifest a deep fear of and discomfort with women’s sexuality and sexuality as a whole : Jesus’ mother having to be a virgin, in exalting “virginity” itself, in the celibacy of priests, in the Catholic adamant refusal to allow women to be priests — “ a sin against the sacraments” said Pope Benedict, while former priest and author of “Practicing Catholic
Control and abuse, because thousands of women die because of the lack of contraception. Control and abuse of nature, of animals, the land and the sea, regarded as mere economic resources to exploit, sometimes to extinction. But minds are trapped in what Abraham Lincoln called “the dogmas of the quiet past (that) are inadequate to the stormy present.” So much the worse for us all.
