I have always cared about climate change and tried to advocate for it, but it’s been very difficult for me to become really invested in it. I’ve known for a while now that climate disasters disproportionately impact women, children, Indigenous, and other marginalized populations, but the technicality of understanding the science behind climate change has intimidated me and quite honestly kept me at a distance.
During my undergraduate degree, I remember getting into debates over whether human rights and gender equality were a bigger social priority than climate change. My argument was, what’s the point of living in a world that’s inherently violent and discriminatory towards so many people. And my friend’s argument was, if there’s no inhabitable planet to live on, how will progress towards a more just reality ever be made. Our debates were clearly oversimplified, and (surprise, surprise) promoting polarizing and binary thinking. It fed into the concept I’ve always grappled with, of feeling like I’ve had to prioritize the causes I cared about. With all the injustices in the world, I’ve tried to placate my discomfort with not being so invested in the fight against climate by telling myself if I had more time and energy, I’d be more passionate about it.
But this week’s readings really reframed the climate crisis and resource extraction for me in a way that’s made it more interesting and approachable. Dagget’s article on Petro-masculinity, and the examples she expanded on about Trump, “make America great again” and The Proud Boys, introduced me to thinking about the fossil fuel and energy industry as a hyper masculine and violent system, that reasserts white masculine power. It’s interesting that the ideas of hypermasculinity and combat against gender anxiety Dagget discusses seems to exist among varying socio-economic classes: the billionaire businessmen and politicians who benefit from resource extraction, the less economically fortunate men who work in the mines, and those who roll coal, all seem to be connected through the desire to enhance their masculine identity and become icon’s of masculinist empowerment.
Yoshida’s call to integrate the rights-of-nature approach into the women, peace, and seucrity agenda as a way promote sustainable and environmental peace really concretized how connected intersectional gender justice is to climate justice. The reading initially had me thinking about the differences in how national security is perceived in the context of climate threats as compared to more obviously militarized war and conflict situations. It’s evident that climate disasters disproprtionately affect marginalized populations, pushing communities into precarious situations that are not dissimilar from those of war. And it’s ironic, though unsurprising, that the men, who have stereotypically taken on the role of the “protectors” and “defenders” are the ones exacerbating the climate crisis for their own gain or masculine performance.
I also really enjoyed reading about the adaptive and climate resilient strategies the Indigenous Quecha women in Peru have been using to survive through glacial lake outburst floods. The study really demonstrated how imperative a feminist framework for adaptation planning in disaster zones is.
Question:
Given the reality of the patriarchal systems that govern us, how can we work to dismantle petro-masculinity?
This week, I spent a lot of time reflecting on how environmental destruction is intrinsically tied to patriarchal and capitalist frameworks of domination and profit. The Daggett (2018) reading gave insight into how fossil violence is a reactionary action against threats to traditional masculinities and a way of managing gender anxieties. I was reminded of ideas of ‘land rape’ in discussions around climate justice, acknowledging the entangled relationships between extractivist colonial frameworks, environmental degradation, and a blatant disregard for the inherent rights of all life forms, including those of women and gender minorities. I also found it interesting that Yoshida (2021) called for a movement to decolonise environmental law and question perceptions of nature that still centre around wealth and property rights. Revolution is therefore needed in how we perceive each other, ourselves, and our environments—one that resists anthropocentrism and instead revolves around care for all life.
Thinking with Yoshida (2021), we can extend our reimagining of peace to include healthier relationships with nature, including the application of a decolonized understanding of territories or borders that affirm the deep, embodied relationships that people— especially Indigenous communities—have with places and land. This has everything to do with the WPS agenda as women face disproportionate risks and burdens with climate change outcomes, and yet still largely remain excluded from decision-making spaces where policies that affect their everyday lives are created. It is essential to go beyond representation in climate policymaking spaces and instead encourage active participation, especially from Indigenous communities, women, and environmental rights defenders. Every week, my definition of peace swells and becomes more complete, now understanding that there can be no peace with lands and homes being destroyed and targeted for economic conquest or war intentions. Peace demands dismantling colonial and patriarchal beliefs, which inherently include environmental violence.
Despite the bleak reality of gendered violence in conflict and crisis, I think that the readings allowed for moments of levity and hope. Moulton & Carey (2022) restructured vulnerability frameworks within high-risk climate areas and challenged deficit models, contrastingly looking at how women actively create new futures for themselves and their communities every day. The issue with top-down approaches to climate adaptation is that they overlook the political aspects of everyday decision-making in changing environments. The notion of ‘poco a poco’ helped to shift my thinking around the climate crisis and social injustices as a whole. We often talk about how easy it is to feel hopeless and defeated, but as the authors question the inevitability of disaster, what happens if we envision futures where things go right? What if we allow ourselves to manifest a tomorrow where human needs are met through community networks and caring relationships? When we think about the future, maybe we can start with what we want our everyday moments to look like versus abstract and overwhelming goals. After Ojeda et al. (2022), it is entirely possible to adopt different ways of being and belonging to each other that affirm life instead of denying it.
Question:
In mainstream culture, what counts as knowledge, and where does it come from? How can lived experience inform these narratives to create feminist praxis?
Having grown up in Alberta, I am familiar with the manifestations of “petro-masculinity.” My dad moved to Edmonton from job-less Ontario immediately after graduating from high school in the 80s. Once in Alberta, dad put himself through school to get his red seal and become a mechanic. He now jointly owns his shop with my mom, where he is the only employee.
Dad takes a lot of pride in his work, in his ability to own and operate his own business, and on the way that this has supported his wife, two kids, and father, who also lived with us after my dad’s mom passed away. He also was an excellent example to me growing up of the ways in which you can do good for the world from wherever you stand. For example, dad was particularly attentive to explaining vehicle issues to women, understanding the reputation mechanics had for trying to deceive women because of their supposed lack of knowledge about vehicles. Many times, he fixed vehicles for families he knew couldn’t pay him back, but “how else are they supposed to get their kids around?”
I tell this story because, although a lot of points in the Daggett article rang true and I think they are important to bring to light, I also think the article’s criticism of petro-masculinity masks some of the more positive manifestations of masculinity that arise in petroleum economies and fails to address the class dynamics of choices men make around the oil industry.
Alberta’s oil-boom gave my dad, who came from a lower-middle class family with no access to post-secondary education, access to a stable income. This gave him the ability to, alongside my mom, (who he met while she was working part-time at a gas station to put herself through school) raise a family that had access to more privileges than he did. The oil industry gave my dad a positive masculine identity as a provider and he worked hard to be a more positive masculine figure in my life than his father, who had suffered more in the war than he was able to process in a healthy way, had been.
While I recognize that this lifestyle came at the expense of a lot of systems of oppression and exploitation (and believe me, as a teenager I incessantly criticized my father for this), I think sometimes we forget that men too are adapting to a limited set of opportunities available to them. And while white men have a great deal of power within our current context, which Daggett pointed out, I think the petro-masculinity article obscures some class considerations to Western masculinities and associated implications that stem from uneven access to education.
In reality, there weren’t a lot of stable income-earning career paths available to my dad given his access to education and more eco-friendly career paths were reserved for people in a higher class than him, who had money from their parents to pursue emerging green jobs and had a cushion to fall back on should those routes not work out.
Like Moulton and Carey point out in their article about futuremaking, despite the real hazards of climate change, people don’t think about the potential future destruction of their homes because they are preoccupied with “the environmental and social conditions that support a home and family on a daily basis.” (8)
For this week, I am thinking about futuremaking: who is included and who is left out in climate adaptation strategies (especially policy discussions)? If some parts of the population cannot see positive roles for themselves in an imagined future, where does that leave us?
While reading Feminist Ecologies, I learnt several new terms and concepts that were unfamiliar to me. I admire the author’s discussion on how territories are defined to reinforce masculinity, and how women can become trapped and treated as pawns, often without holding any real property rights. The author’s use of the phrase, “the use of space to control behavior,” effectively highlights the dynamics of masculinity in relation to power and space. The mention of Adivasi rights in the article reminded me of the struggles faced by Adivasi women in India. These women are often denied rights due to the complexities of polygamy, while those who do hold legal rights to land are frequently exploited by men who seek to benefit from their rights. Despite their legal claims to land, Adivasi women and children often become victims of masculine power structures that dominate the space and territory, leaving them vulnerable and powerless.
Yoshida’s recognition of the rights of nature resonated with me, particularly her mention of how intersectional theory can draw attention to multiple, overlapping forms of oppression that actually “bring women into view,” along with other social categories or statuses that reveal their lived experiences. This reminds me of an incident early in my career when another woman from a Scheduled Caste and I approached a women’s safety cell to file similar complaints about being harassed over the phone. Despite being in the same situation as women, I was treated differently because I belonged to a higher caste, while her complaint was not taken seriously. The person in authority belonged to a higher caste and practiced regressive untouchability, which influenced the response. Although my understanding of such dynamics was limited at the time, I now see how women can become invisible unless a strong “bring women into view” approach is implemented. This is especially critical in contexts like mining or rehabilitation, where the actual impact on women is often overlooked or underreported.
Upon reading Future making in a disaster zone, as they rightly pointed about water paradigm on Quecha women, I would like to share my experience of linking climate change with rehabilitation efforts. In 2017, I began working on a UNICEF project promoting WASH initiatives in Tribal Zones, areas specially classified as reserved forests. One Adivasi community preferred to stay in small hamlets deep within the forest. The forest department staff requested me to engage with the community, particularly the women, as they were the only ones who spoke the regional language, and convince them to relocate for rehabilitation since their habitat-building involved cutting trees. This deforestation was spotted by satellite, and India’s forest density is centrally monitored. And every tree is monitored on the name of climate change and I now believe are the lives of Adivasis who are the real humans is lesser than the importance that is given to trees. When I spoke with the women, they expressed two main concerns: their preference to give birth in nature due to their strong belief system and their practice of bathing in the river. While I explained the safety benefits of institutional deliveries for both mother and child, I also came to understand their deep connection to their way of life and their children’s upbringing. This was my first exposure to how the rigidly trained forest officials often resorted to abusive measures in enforcing forced rehabilitation, disregarding the choices and voices of the women in the community.
The questions that popped in mind:
1. Why masculinity always manifests toxicity? Is climate change being prioritized over the lives and well-being of women?
2. Despite frameworks like Women, Peace, and Security that emphasize the need for an intersectional lens, why does history keep repeating itself, forcing women to endure and navigate the same challenges? When will we break this cycle? Is it possible?
The readings for this week sparked reminders of a movie I watched over the summer called “Stolen”, by Elle Márjá Eira (https://nordicwatchlist.com/2024/04/13/stolen-on-netflix/). The story is centered around a young girl in the Sámi community, an Indigenous group who speak the Sami language and live in northern Norway, Finland, and Sweden, in addition to northwestern Russia. The young girl (Elsa) chooses a reindeer to care for during herding season and watches it get murdered by a man outside of the Sámi community. Years later, when reindeer are being regularly murdered once again, Elsa recalls her reindeer’s murderer and acts upon her desire to protect the animals and her culture that is being attacked upon. The murderer is a Swedish man who is hateful towards the Sámi peoples and resents their governmentally-appointed use of land for reindeer herding. In the background of the murders, there are town halls held to discuss turning the herding land into a mine. The mine development is favourable to the local Swedish workers, but incredibly damaging to the Sámi community, who is already beginning to see the number of reindeer herders diminish in younger generations. The tradition of reindeer herding itself is shown to be a predominantly male-driven one, as is the decision making and media presence of the Sámi in local news.
In “Stolen”, Elsa is doubly transgressing upon authoritarian rule, firstly as a Sámi person who is trying to conserve the land, animals, and culture that she has been raised to respect. In Daggett’s petro-masculinity reading, focus is drawn to zoning plans that are placed in poor/POC neighbourhoods to keep terracide out of the consciousness of more privileged populations (Daggett 31). The same can apply to the zoning of Indigenous Sámi land for mine construction in northern Sweden. Elsa tries building a case to present to the Swedish police, which are largely unhelpful throughout the majority of the murders. From a feminist view, Elsa is also transgressing upon authoritarian rule as a Sámi woman, going against the patriarchy not only in participation as a reindeer herder, but also in refusing wishes of older, male Sámi members who try to quiet her protests against the mine construction and reindeer deaths.
Elsa’s sense of multispecies or multibeing justice, as discussed in the Feminist Ecologies reading, is certainly strong and the “plurality of territories and challenging singularity of knowledge systems” is a key aspect of her resistance (Ojeda et al. 159). Particularly for nomadic beings, the understanding of territories outside of the militaristic, rigid, hypermasculine sense seems especially essential. My questions for this week is: in feminist political ecology, can individuals define a territory, or do we construct a definition collectively? How many people/who has to agree on the definition of a territory until it is accepted (if this even exists)?
The readings this week introduced several interesting ideas, that I felt built on our discussion last week of the transformative potential of feminist approaches to security. I found that key to this approach across all of the readings was decolonization, and the prioritization of bottom-up, community and care-based approaches to climate justice.
I was particularly struck by the concept of “future-making” in disaster zones, especially the emphasis on focusing on the ‘everyday’ rather than some distant ‘someday.’ This shift in perspective on adaptation reminded me of our discussions on how war is lived in the everyday. Much of the Western approach to “saving the planet” relies on high-level economic projections like Environmental Kuznets Curve, which assumes that increased GDP will eventually address environmental issues. However, this overlooks how, in practice, these problems are often merely offshored along with production. The idea of ‘poco a poco’ and making the future through daily observation and understanding centres the experiences and capabilities of marginalized people who are living the daily reality of the climate crisis.
Similarly, I’ve noticed that Western-led approaches to the climate crisis often prioritize technical solutions, ignoring historical inequalities and political context. This is evident in Moulton and Carey’s work; while recognizing the importance of large-scale technical solutions, their work illustrates how everyday adaptations at the local level can work to solve not only technical problems, but restore Indigenous agency and combat narratives of decline. As discussed by both Ojeda and Dagget, systems like patriarchy and capitalism are entrenched in our system, and seemingly incompatible with true climate justice. Put succinctly by Ojeda, “We are convinced of capitalism’s incompatibility with life and community sustenance and condemn its close relation with patriarchy in the domination of the environment.” As such, climate solutions cannot be simply technical; they require political understanding and solutions.
This kind of ‘transformative adaptation’ is also discussed by Ojeda’s work. It reminded me a lot of our discussion last week, and the idea of making war ‘unthinkable’ by removing the underlying structures that allow war to take place. Similarly, in understanding the transformative potential of feminist ecologies, we don’t have to settle for technical solutions to current environmental issues, we can make the idea of environmental destruction unthinkable. These transformative solutions have remarkable potential; for instance, Yoshida’s discussion of the rights of nature. Expanding legal personhood to include nature could recalibrate our collective normative understanding of nature’s value and would have enormous implications for how we approach discussions of environmental protection. As an example, companies in the US can have legal personhood, which says a lot about how policies and legal battles play out.
Questions:
1. In what ways does focusing on the ‘everyday’ and ‘poco a poco’ approach challenge dominant, Western-led technical solutions to climate change? How can this perspective shift contribute to transformative adaptation and environmental justice, especially for marginalized communities?
2. What are the implications of expanding legal personhood to nature in reshaping our normative understanding of environmental protection and climate justice?
This class and the weekly readings really have me going from being slightly optimistic to extremely pessimistic to the very extreme of sometimes thinking that we’d be better off if a meteor hit Earth right now. And then back up to slightly optimistic. Talking about the planetary crisis has me like a pendulum going from these stances at basically every other sentence I read for this week. We literally just saw the effects of petro-masculinites with hurricane Milton and Governor Ron DeSantis insisting that climate change has nothing to do with the increase of hurricane intensity in the past few years. Project 2025 aims to dismantle several government agencies whose purpose is to help curb the effects of climate change, including the National Weather Service.
Daggett’s article on petro-masculinities within the US context, really had me thinking and recognizing the patterns the US government has taken in order to become the global power it is, at the expense of not only their own population but also people all over the world. Flint, Michigan; Hawai’i; Guatemala; Dominican Republic; these are just some place in which capitalism, ecological destruction, and the wish to extend the power the US exercises beyond its borders can clearly be seen. The Flint water crisis started because the state government wanted to reduce the costs of transporting clean water to Flint. Flint has a majority black population, which shows the intersection between race, capitalist exploitative actions and the lengths at which the government is willing to sacrifice its own people. Ever since Hawai’i was invaded by the US, which was led my owners of pineapple plantations, native Hawai’ian populations have suffered from the consequences of excessive agricultural practices and neglect in the face of a booming tourist economy which only helps to exacerbate these issues. There is a reason why Hawai’ians have asked repeatedly to please stop going to the islands. The US invasions in Guatemala, Dominican Republic and other Central American and Caribbean countries are more examples of the way capitalism, expansionism and colonialism are intertwined with environment-related crises.
Obviously, these notions of petro-masculinities are not just a characteristic of the Global North countries, though there is definitely a lot to say in terms of their role in settler-colonialism and the resulting ecological crises. For example, AMLO in Mexico had promised for several years to become a greener government, in accordance with its staunch position against neoliberalism. Yet, he opened a new oil refinery which every single activist group agreed hurt the environment and it would not deliver the supposed economic boost to the region, which was the reason why AMLO pushed for this project (officially). Just a few years ago, two ecological activists that had spent their lives on protecting and increasing public awareness of the endangerment of the monarch butterfly habitat in Mexico were murdered due to their complaints over illegal logging. As Antonia Recinos’ comment says about mining being irreversible death, and to which Yoshida expands further, environmental rights defenders are targeted and killed because of this.
It is difficult to remain optimistic in the face of so much destruction and, in reference to last week’s reading, it would seem it is even more difficult to imagine feminist futures. Yet, some instances like the way the American bison or the jaguar across what is Latin American were successfully reintroduced to its native territory, ask me to imagine a greener future (such a cliché phrase, I am so sorry). The fact that the way Indigenous people, all over the world, managed for centuries to maintain a balance between their use of natural resources and their own ways of lives, is finally being recognized may be a testament that there is a way to do something about the planetary crisis.
I guess my questions for this week are exactly that, how do we imagine feminist futures in the face of so much destruction? Is there a way to make the responsibility for environmental protections more even across the board? How do our current understanding of race, gender, class, and geographical contexts underlie the current planetary crisis?
The GP2 I was assigned this year requires my team and I to address the barriers female smallholder farmers face in Kenya’s coffee industry, particularly regarding land ownership. Through this, we’ve learned that while women produce nearly half of the world’s agricultural output, they continue to face a disproportionate amount of challenges related to land access and ownership. Women hold an immense amount of knowledge and experience regarding the environment and the way they show up in those spaces in relation to men. Their knowledge would inform the success and sustainability of the agricultural industries they occupy – contributing perspectives to address the barriers they face and methods to appropriately interact with the land.
The intersection between gender rights and environmental rights continues to pop up when speaking about climate and environmental justice, a concept that has been advocated for years now. Colombian and Ecuadorian activists have been calling attention to how environmental destruction and the marginalization of women are inextricably linked. The Quechua women, like peace and environmental activists, embody the intersection of gender and ecological justice, recognizing how they influence and shape each other. Menton and LeBillon, Yoshida, and many others show us how women can be tied so deeply to the land, not just for their livelihoods but also in a cultural and spiritual sense. Despite this widespread understanding addressed by national and international organizations, the struggles they face continue to be amplified by a global system that prioritizes profit and extraction over the rights of the most vulnerable.
The critiques on the WPS agenda focus on the lack of seriousness toward women’s involvement in peace and security discussions. Regardless of the conversations surrounding women’s participation, we know that commitment and action are lacking. Intentional misinformation, weaponized incompetence, and general ignorance continue to target and harm these communities, compounding their struggles. These readings encourage us to explore that environmental harm, in this sense, is not only an ecological issue but also a human rights violation that most affects women and children, exacerbating social inequities and conflicts.
With that understanding, I find it particularly unsettling (and frankly evil) how environmental and biological destruction is used as a tool of oppression. Whether it’s targeting and extracting resources to fund warfare or destroying land to displace populations, it just continues to harm the vulnerable. We see this with the destruction of Palestine to the point that it is no longer habitable. We see how it severs the cultural and spiritual ties people have to their environment, violating their human rights twice over – both as citizens and as stewards of their land. We’ve also seen how the effects of climate change have affected women and children so drastically in Latin America, forcing these climate refugees to flee environmental disasters or flee from displacement through the treacherous and deadly Darien Gap.
The strategies for addressing these crises seem relatively simple, but they all require some form of giving up power, authority, money, etc., from those who benefit most from this environmental degradation. The idea of “future-making” highlighted by Moulton and Carey was interesting, shifting the focus of the framework from a singular outcome to a process-oriented approach prioritizing intergenerational well-being, everyday resilience and communal care. Ultimately, just as in the Columbian Constitutions, our international organizations and states need to move beyond viewing nature as a resource to be commodified but as something that has rights to be protected and conserved. We also need to do more than just consult with Indigenous communities that have deep connections with the land.
I wonder, what will it take to actually succeed in having a universal view of nature as something that has a right to be protected? What would this look like? i’m thinking a utopian future type of movie.
The readings this week call for a reimagining of human-nature relations, where feminist ecological perspectives offer pathways toward a more just and sustainable future. It has become clear to me that patriarchy is not just a social or political issue but a structural framework that shapes societal norms, values, and power dynamics, influencing every aspect of life.
An example of this is Daggett’s concept of petro-masculinity, which highlights how fossil fuel dependency serves not only as an economic concern but also as a tool for maintaining patriarchal power. As Daggett explains, fossil fuels create identities tied to control and dominance, particularly among conservative white men who feel their status is threatened by climate change. Thus, defending fossil fuels becomes a way to preserve these traditional power structures. This realization makes me see that climate action is not just about reducing emissions but must also address the cultural and gendered dimensions of fossil fuel economies.
Similarly, the issue of extractivism is deeply linked to both capitalism and patriarchy. Ojeda et al. argue that extractive activities prioritize economic gain at the expense of environmental sustainability, exploiting both nature and marginalized communities. Women, especially those in rural and Indigenous communities, are disproportionately affected by these activities. This reflection led me to recognize how capitalist systems, sustained by patriarchal values, treat nature and women as resources to be exploited rather than as integral to the health of ecosystems. The connection between gender and environmental exploitation is striking, and it is evident that addressing one requires addressing the other.
Yoshida’s argument for environmental peace offers another important perspective. She links environmental justice to peacebuilding, showing that sustainable peace is impossible without addressing environmental degradation. Her call to integrate the rights of nature into frameworks like the WPS agenda underscores how protecting ecosystems and recognizing the agency of non-human entities are key not only to environmental justice but also to preventing conflict.
Moulton and Carey’s concept of futuremaking brought a new dimension to my thinking about climate adaptation. Rather than seeing Quechua women in the Peruvian Andes as passive victims of climate change, they emphasize their agency in shaping their futures through everyday actions. They make it through what is called ‘poco a poco’ (or little by little), a process that is often overlooked by top-down policies. The concept of futuremaking made me realize the power of grassroots, community-based approaches to climate adaptation and how essential they are for creating resilient, sustainable futures. It also prompted me to reconsider how we view “effective” solutions, understanding that large-scale interventions are not always the answer; sometimes, it is the everyday, lived experiences that hold the key to lasting change.
Question:
How can we integrate the everyday lived experiences of women (such as Quechua women) into the development of solutions to the environmental crisis?
In this class I find we often look at small victories in the face of huge structural and institutional issues and disasters. In the face of a climate and environmental crisis, we can look to an ecofeminist or decolonial environmental future. I don’t think that this necessarily dictates how we should feel about crises (optimistic, pessimistic, apathetic, etc) but I do think that the way victory is represented in the academy is reflective of something within our society. What that reflection is, I’m not so sure. Today, my reflection is on the language we use when discussing social issues in academia. In this weeks readings, we see a lot of hyper specific terminology and fields of study: climate fascism, emancipatory ecology, multispecies justice, feminist political ecology, etc. These terms conjure up different histories, communities, understandings of our world. But they are also complex academic jargon which requires extensive background knowledge and a specific understanding of language. In order for these terms to be useful, a western understanding of education is required.
Petromasculinity is such an interesting concept and term in this context, overtly linking power and environmental dominance to conceptions of patriarchy and colonialism. I think that the use of this term is being presented to us as itself a small victory, the naming of something which could not previously be connected. And I agree! I am happy to see these connects clearly drawn out and explained in writing. Here I am reminded of the term intersectionality, now widely used, but originally coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. This term has become more and more known, and what it describes is now a key tenet of equity and critical studies. This term draws attention to, for example, a crucial element missing from second wave feminism. But sometimes, a term like intersectionality becomes coopted, for example by corporate EDI departments, diversity committees run by all men. I guess what I am getting at here is these terms, this research, they are both useful and useless. I do believe that it is important to call things for what they are, that identifying fascism, misogyny, etc, as such is an important part of preventing harm. But at the same time I question the limits of words. I am reminded by a phrase I read in a University of Toronto student newspaper, “The campus police harasses students using their preferred pronouns”. Words can be empowering, affirming, powerful. But at the same time I ask, what good are new words and inclusive language without action? Is creating these words a type of action, and if so, who does it help?
Questions
What is the difference between language and action, and where do the two intersect?
How does naming a concept or idea change that concept?
Does creating language enact or spark change?
When International Relations feels like the mess that it is, I often go outside, look at a tree, take a sigh of relief as I say the word “tree”. As if I was a child discovering the world for the first time. The trees inspire me, they remind me what it means to be resillient—that one needs roots, sun, community.
This week’s readings demand an interrogation not just of resilience and adaptation but of the layered meanings, cultural resonances, and semantic contradictions embedded in these terms. As a graduate student engagement coordinator last year for the Disaster Resilience Research Network, we spoke of resilience as a state’s ability to endure crisis.
However resilience is refracted through gendered, environmental, and political lenses that reveal deeper questions: Resilience for whom? Resilience for what? This week invited us to examine how power, identity, and resources shape environmental interactions, thus compelling me towards a more nuanced understanding of resilience as both a societal expectation and a personal, localized practice.
I thought as I often do) of Libya and its increasing reliance on extractive industries to sustain itself economically. A country in which oil is cheaper than water, a fact that is often celebrated but is in fact so incredibly sad.
Petromasculinity embodies a duality, where fossil fuels symbolize not only economic sustenance but a gendered assertion of control. In Libya, this manifests as a near-sacred reliance on oil, rendering petroleum more than a fuel; it becomes a totem of state power and masculine resilience. Here, “petro-masculinity” unfolds as a mode of governance that enforces a paradoxical resilience: a society bound to the same fuel that accelerates its ecological demise. But what does this masculine reliance on fossil fuels obscure? The semantics of “feminist ecologies,” as explored by Ojeda et al., shift our gaze to the interdependence between people and ecosystems, a sharp divergence from state-led resilience narratives that see nature as subordinate. Feminist ecologies question resilience not as a heroic ability to withstand hardship but as a relational and adaptive process, one that challenges the binaries of strength and vulnerability.
I did some more reading and I found this book chapter on extractive masculinities in the Western genre. In the chapter it writes how Westerns portray a unique relationship between male heroes and the landscape, which complicates the typical trope of a feminized environment. Instead of depicting the land as something to be conquered or subdued, Westerns often present male heroes as intrinsically connected to and shaped by the harshness of their surroundings. Tompkins argues that in the Western, “to be a man…is to seem to grow out of the environment”—where toughness, hardness, and unforgiving attitudes mirror the harsh landscape itself. This identification reflects a masculinity that draws strength from the land, rather than seeing it purely as a passive, feminized entity.
While the Western hero’s identity is formed in connection with the land, true masculinity in this narrative is defined by resisting and enduring the environment’s threats rather than submitting to them, constructing a masculinity tied to dominance and survival. Rooted in a settler-colonial ideology that valorizes Anglo-European men as conquerors of a hostile, “inimical” wilderness. The landscape in these narratives becomes an entity that challenges, tests, and ultimately reinforces the hero’s strength and resilience. Though the land in these Westerns is not explicitly feminized, it still serves as a proving ground for masculinity—one that supports an imperialist framework by portraying man’s control over the natural world as both necessary and valorous. I found that this dynamic both aligned with and diverged from ecofeminist critiques, revealing how masculine identity in the Western genre is tied to a dominative resilience, where true success is found not in coexistence with the land but in mastering its threats.
So now I must say I experienced this week’s readings as uncomfortable forms of self constructed imagery. That masculinity would grow out of the Earth similar to the trees I turn to day to day for inspiration. That manhood would be a byproduct of its terrain, like a phallic metaphor finding life in what it pulled from the Earth. That it would find a way to sustain itself—like the entrenched systems do.
Instead going to imagine me, a feminist tree being relational, reciprocal and interdependent.
Sigh.
This was the book chapter:
Goldberg, Sylvan. 2022. “Extractive Masculinity: The Western’s Precarious Male Bodies in the Anthropocene.” In The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West. 1st ed. Vol. 1, 197-209: Routledge.
This week’s readings made me curious as to how far our world must further damage the planet it completely depends on before it realizes just how crucial it is to protect it as it is literally our home. It should not be a ‘feminist’ perspective to advocate to protect the environment all of us depend on to survive, yet it sadly is. Cara Dagget’s article which discussed in detail about how the West has embraced a toxic masculine combination of climate denial, misogyny, and racism (2018, p. 25) made immediate sense once the author explained how her explanation of ‘petro-masculinity’ was evident in the success and embrace of Trump’s MAGA slogan during and after the 2016 election. In a way, the author’s explanation made complete sense to me and easy to understand the main points the author was making throughout the article.
It is further shocking that the UN’s WPS framework does not include climate change as a threat to international peace and security (Yoshida, 2021, p. 166). I would imagine that it would be one of the first things I would add into a framework about international peace and security.
On a positive note, reading about how Quechua women adapted to everyday climate change left me with weird optimism. All these readings reminded me of contemporary natural disasters occurring in Florida as I found connections from each reading to everyday climate change events and people in the States that are pro-Trump and his abhorrent beliefs and policies. Interestingly, reading a footnote about how white women voters have backed Republican presidential candidates more than Democratic candidates reminded me about reading certain conspiracy theories that have emerged in the States which correlate the climate emergencies to the upcoming election, somehow. Not sure why that footnote made me draw that exact connection, however. I hope that women (and all individuals) are and will adapt in the areas affected by these hurricanes as well as the Quechua women in this week’s readings.
Importantly though, my question for this week from our readings are: What would the point be of international diplomacy and collaboration if none of us can agree on the urgency of solving our climate crisis to ensure our survival? Is the only reason why people want to cooperate internationally for the sake of making money and not to prevent and solve global issues that directly threaten all of us?
Today I once again have many thoughts, without much coherence. I want to talk about the Ojeda article- this reading provided me with so much vocabulary that I didn’t know existed and I didn’t know I needed, and it sparked a lot of reflection about anthropocentrism for me. For my reflection this week, I want to explore two personal connections that it helped me make sense of. The examples I want to talk about are:
1. It feels almost too colloquial or “silly” to bring up in a reflection for class, and I’m almost worried that it will seem like I don’t take this topic seriously when I of course do, but I immediately thought of this scene from How I Met Your Mother where Marshall refers to squirrels getting married, and his partner Lily says “Squirrels don’t get married” to which Marshall responds, “Like you could possibly know that”. This whole line was delivered as Marshall being the butt of the joke because he was “obviously” being silly. However, this scene has stuck with me because I remember even the first time I watched it thinking, is it so ridiculous to imagine that animals have their own worlds? Maybe this was just a joke made in passing in a sitcom and it’s not this deep, but I think this scene does provide some commentary on the ways that we have less tolerance for adults who retain imagination and wonder about animals’ worlds.
2. I have this memory of my mom from when I was a kid- we were moving out of our old house, which was in a County that was probably about 30 minutes outside of Downtown Edmonton, and my Mom was home alone cleaning out the house while me and my brother were at our Dad’s place for the week. While she was cleaning late at night, my mom found this little mouse on the stairs to our basement which had been injured and seemed to have some kind of hole in his neck. My Mom was always an animal lover, and she caught and packed up this little mouse in a box and drove him all the way Downtown to the emergency vet clinic that was open 24/7. This got a lot of eye rolls from our family members (and I wonder if maybe even from the vets), and a lot of the reactions were along the lines of “Oh, that’s Nancy for you,” in a way that suggested that her decision to try and rescue this little mouse was perhaps something to be humoured, but that it was ultimately a bit excessive, ridiculous, naive, idealistic, silly, or even childish.
Ojeda writes that “Feminist ecological thought has also pointed to how the value of nonhuman animals is often considered only in terms of their usefulness to humans within current regimes of extraction”, and of course this brought up my mom’s mouse ordeal for me. Even at the time, I remember being so touched and proud that she was my Mom, and that she would care so much about such a tiny life that she would go out of her way to do something so seemingly excessive and possibly futile just because she could possibly make a little animal’s life better. And I do think that this fundamentally shaped how I view the world, because if my Mom would drive 40 minutes in the middle of the night to find a vet for an animal that is considered a pest, then how can I possibly accept any theory that places humans in a hierarchically higher position than any animal, big or small, or the ecosystems (plants, forests, water, etc) that they call home? How can I possibly dismiss “non-human life” (as Ojeda phrases it) as any less sacred than my own? I wish that 19 year old me had the vocabulary to understand anthropocentrism and defend my mom to critical family members, and explain why I didn’t think my mom was ridiculous for taking a mouse to the emergency vet, because 24 year old me is reading Ojeda et. al’s paper and is thinking, wow- Nancy was practicing ecological feminism and I am so fortunate to have been in the presence of such a great woman who was not afraid to look “silly”.
I also found the section of Ojeda’s paper where they quote from Alexis Pauline Gumbs meaningful- “[h]ow can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm? This is where we start our trans-species communion, opening a space to uplift the practice of listening even more than the practices of showing and proving and speaking up. Listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in”. I was moved by the concept of listening across life forms, quieting down and tuning in, especially in contrast to the concept of “proving”. I don’t know if I’m misunderstanding the concept of proving here, but what it conjured up for me was the relentless positivist push to prove, explain, categorize, rather than embracing the degree of uncertainty inherent to life (mentioned in a previous reading but I can’t remember which). This brought me back to Marshall and the squirrels- I was reflecting about why this scene continues to stick with me, and I’ve concluded for now that it’s because I actually don’t care about whether or not we can prove that squirrels get married! (also, why are we projecting norms of the nuclear family on to squirrels) I don’t need to know whether there’s definitive “proof” that squirrels experience partnership, community, and love, because regardless of whether or not I can prove it (I don’t care), it matters to me that that’s how I look at non-human life that I encounter. Maybe this is what we were talking about in our last session about imagining better futures, and maybe a huge part of that is returning to the art of storytelling about our lands and the creatures that live with us on them.
I want to be the kind of person who looks at squirrels’ lives as having dimension and beauty and value, and I want to be the kind of person who will box up a mouse to take it to the vet- I also want to live in a world where reverence for the sanctity of life is the norm, and so I the decision to box up a mouse is arguably significant to how we practice our politics and my values. As Ojeda writes, “the emergence of alternative framings of territory are often rooted in the resurgence of ancient and continuing relational values and practices, their reinstatement, or the reinvention of relations and understandings under new conditions. They are being inscribed into living worlds through daily practice, from Indigenous lands to urban gardens and intentional communities of farmworkers-to-farmers.” I extrapolate from this that alternative framings of life and subjectivity are undergoing similar processes, and that they are also being re-inscribed when I look at squirrels with fondness and imagination and slow down for them on the roads, or when my mom carefully cradles a mouse in a box while she drives it to the vet. This put a different spin on the “everyday” for me, and brings into focus the ways that slowing down and considering “encounter” can offer opportunities to disrupt narratives of devaluation, commodification, and dismissal.
Now, I also think that there’s nuance here- I think that sometimes there’s very valid critiques of this kind of take, because it can be very rightly pointed out that sometimes people value the lives of animals more than human beings- people will, for instance, spend money putting cosmetic braces on their dog but vote against wellfare programs, or will donate to the SPCA but not relief for Palestinian children. This is a legitimate critique and it totally makes why people would find the case for a mouse’s life tired and possibly even insulting when we consider the scale of violence enacted against people in marginalized communities. As I understand it, however, the core issue we would take issue with here is the dehumanisation of people and the unwillingness to recognize human suffering- people are being treated as less than animals in this case. This is not the same critique as a case to disregard the value of non-human life. These critiques are helpful, accurate, and valid, in my view, and are not in tension with the rejection of anthropocentrism- I think, as discussed in these readings, we are hoping to build a world where human and non-human life is sacred- violence and commodification of animals, environment, and human beings is unimaginable.
This was too long! My questions are:
1. Ojeda et. al argue that alternative framings of territory are being inscribed into living worlds through daily practice. How can we connect this to our previous discussions of the everyday?
Ok I really really enjoyed this week’s readings and have a lot of thoughts I will try my best to connect and explain them all.
Darrgett (2018) writes, “the parallels between rape and extractivism have been well documented” (pg. 39). This immediately made me think of missing and murdered Indigenous women. I’ve previously read articles about how violence against Indigenous women increases when there is a pipeline being developed on or near their land. Labourers (mostly men) move into construction camps while the pipeline is being built. These construction camps are often near Indigenous communities and are associated with increased violence against Indigenous women. Here the connection between violence to the land and violence to women’s bodies is clear.
I found the connection between patriarchy, masculinity and fossil fuel dependence really interesting. Darrgett (2018) writes about fossil fuels but I also thought about meat consumption. The beef industry in particular, causes a lot of environmental harm. Meat has become so entangled with masculinity. To eat a lot of meat is to be manly and vegetarian diet is seen as feminine. I do think that a sustainable future involves a less meat-heavy diet. There is so much resistance to this, especially from men and after reading this article I now understand this to be in part gender anxiety. This is frustrating to think about. Is the world so resistant to change because men need to protect their idea of masculinity?
Darrgett (2018) gives examples of mostly right-wing hypermasculine type men. However, these ideas of masculinity are internalized by everyone, which is what makes it so hard to combat. I think about my brother and dad and how they need meat at every meal. I don’t eat meat and my mom doesn’t eat much so when I am home we cook mostly vegetarian. My brother and dad often cook their own chicken or other source of meat to add to the meal. They are not hyper-masculine men, but they still have this internalized idea that men eat meat.
The concept of petro-masculinity made me think a lot about the cultural feminist perspective that understands women’s oppression as not because of the roles they have in society, but the undervaluing of these roles. Feminine roles, for example, a caregiver, are powerful and necessary for society to function. Liberation does not mean women have to break away from historically feminine roles (although absolutely they can), but also involves a restructuring of what is valued in society. This perspective has links to environmentalism as it places women not only as caregivers of the home but also of the environment.
One thought I had while reading this week is how removed we in the western world from the natural world (especially those living in cities). We don’t know what it means to live with and in nature, we live separate from it or even against it. This has shaped the way we view and value nature. Moulton and Carey (2023) explore how Quechua Women experience and adapt to a changing climate in their everyday lives. The article speaks about how much of the climate migration work and discourse is mainly concerned with major disaster mitigating. Life in western cities does not depend largely on small scale changes to the climate. We buy our food from the grocery store that has been shipped in from far away farms, our water comes out of piped from the treatment plant. We live disconnected from the earth. Even when there is, for example, a large-scale drought affecting crops, our access to food is not dramatically altered. Grocery stores remain stocked. Maybe one item is harder to find or more expensive, but our everyday lives are relatively unaffected. I thought of this while reading Moulton and Carey (2023). I think the western idea of the climate crisis is largely based around a Domesday-like sicario because of this disconnect. To those of us living in cities largely protected from natural elements, that is the biggest threat. When that is the only lived experience included in the decision making, it ignores how many people’s ways of life are much more sensitive to the changing climate.
I really loved the concept of multispecies/multi-being justice brought up by Ojeda for thinking about all of this and connecting all my thoughts for me. The patriarchal system is one of dominance. Men dominate over all of earth’s species, animal and plant alike. Dismantling this system would mean revaluing everything. Thinking of the world in a holistic way, Connecting back to nature, Valuing the lived experience and diverse perspectives of people, and understanding conservation as not just for the value of humans, but for the value of all life on earth.
I am not really sure what my question is this week. Maybe, how would the world be different if we valued “feminine” traits?
I have always cared about climate change and tried to advocate for it, but it’s been very difficult for me to become really invested in it. I’ve known for a while now that climate disasters disproportionately impact women, children, Indigenous, and other marginalized populations, but the technicality of understanding the science behind climate change has intimidated me and quite honestly kept me at a distance.
During my undergraduate degree, I remember getting into debates over whether human rights and gender equality were a bigger social priority than climate change. My argument was, what’s the point of living in a world that’s inherently violent and discriminatory towards so many people. And my friend’s argument was, if there’s no inhabitable planet to live on, how will progress towards a more just reality ever be made. Our debates were clearly oversimplified, and (surprise, surprise) promoting polarizing and binary thinking. It fed into the concept I’ve always grappled with, of feeling like I’ve had to prioritize the causes I cared about. With all the injustices in the world, I’ve tried to placate my discomfort with not being so invested in the fight against climate by telling myself if I had more time and energy, I’d be more passionate about it.
But this week’s readings really reframed the climate crisis and resource extraction for me in a way that’s made it more interesting and approachable. Dagget’s article on Petro-masculinity, and the examples she expanded on about Trump, “make America great again” and The Proud Boys, introduced me to thinking about the fossil fuel and energy industry as a hyper masculine and violent system, that reasserts white masculine power. It’s interesting that the ideas of hypermasculinity and combat against gender anxiety Dagget discusses seems to exist among varying socio-economic classes: the billionaire businessmen and politicians who benefit from resource extraction, the less economically fortunate men who work in the mines, and those who roll coal, all seem to be connected through the desire to enhance their masculine identity and become icon’s of masculinist empowerment.
Yoshida’s call to integrate the rights-of-nature approach into the women, peace, and seucrity agenda as a way promote sustainable and environmental peace really concretized how connected intersectional gender justice is to climate justice. The reading initially had me thinking about the differences in how national security is perceived in the context of climate threats as compared to more obviously militarized war and conflict situations. It’s evident that climate disasters disproprtionately affect marginalized populations, pushing communities into precarious situations that are not dissimilar from those of war. And it’s ironic, though unsurprising, that the men, who have stereotypically taken on the role of the “protectors” and “defenders” are the ones exacerbating the climate crisis for their own gain or masculine performance.
I also really enjoyed reading about the adaptive and climate resilient strategies the Indigenous Quecha women in Peru have been using to survive through glacial lake outburst floods. The study really demonstrated how imperative a feminist framework for adaptation planning in disaster zones is.
Question:
Given the reality of the patriarchal systems that govern us, how can we work to dismantle petro-masculinity?
This week, I spent a lot of time reflecting on how environmental destruction is intrinsically tied to patriarchal and capitalist frameworks of domination and profit. The Daggett (2018) reading gave insight into how fossil violence is a reactionary action against threats to traditional masculinities and a way of managing gender anxieties. I was reminded of ideas of ‘land rape’ in discussions around climate justice, acknowledging the entangled relationships between extractivist colonial frameworks, environmental degradation, and a blatant disregard for the inherent rights of all life forms, including those of women and gender minorities. I also found it interesting that Yoshida (2021) called for a movement to decolonise environmental law and question perceptions of nature that still centre around wealth and property rights. Revolution is therefore needed in how we perceive each other, ourselves, and our environments—one that resists anthropocentrism and instead revolves around care for all life.
Thinking with Yoshida (2021), we can extend our reimagining of peace to include healthier relationships with nature, including the application of a decolonized understanding of territories or borders that affirm the deep, embodied relationships that people— especially Indigenous communities—have with places and land. This has everything to do with the WPS agenda as women face disproportionate risks and burdens with climate change outcomes, and yet still largely remain excluded from decision-making spaces where policies that affect their everyday lives are created. It is essential to go beyond representation in climate policymaking spaces and instead encourage active participation, especially from Indigenous communities, women, and environmental rights defenders. Every week, my definition of peace swells and becomes more complete, now understanding that there can be no peace with lands and homes being destroyed and targeted for economic conquest or war intentions. Peace demands dismantling colonial and patriarchal beliefs, which inherently include environmental violence.
Despite the bleak reality of gendered violence in conflict and crisis, I think that the readings allowed for moments of levity and hope. Moulton & Carey (2022) restructured vulnerability frameworks within high-risk climate areas and challenged deficit models, contrastingly looking at how women actively create new futures for themselves and their communities every day. The issue with top-down approaches to climate adaptation is that they overlook the political aspects of everyday decision-making in changing environments. The notion of ‘poco a poco’ helped to shift my thinking around the climate crisis and social injustices as a whole. We often talk about how easy it is to feel hopeless and defeated, but as the authors question the inevitability of disaster, what happens if we envision futures where things go right? What if we allow ourselves to manifest a tomorrow where human needs are met through community networks and caring relationships? When we think about the future, maybe we can start with what we want our everyday moments to look like versus abstract and overwhelming goals. After Ojeda et al. (2022), it is entirely possible to adopt different ways of being and belonging to each other that affirm life instead of denying it.
Question:
In mainstream culture, what counts as knowledge, and where does it come from? How can lived experience inform these narratives to create feminist praxis?
Having grown up in Alberta, I am familiar with the manifestations of “petro-masculinity.” My dad moved to Edmonton from job-less Ontario immediately after graduating from high school in the 80s. Once in Alberta, dad put himself through school to get his red seal and become a mechanic. He now jointly owns his shop with my mom, where he is the only employee.
Dad takes a lot of pride in his work, in his ability to own and operate his own business, and on the way that this has supported his wife, two kids, and father, who also lived with us after my dad’s mom passed away. He also was an excellent example to me growing up of the ways in which you can do good for the world from wherever you stand. For example, dad was particularly attentive to explaining vehicle issues to women, understanding the reputation mechanics had for trying to deceive women because of their supposed lack of knowledge about vehicles. Many times, he fixed vehicles for families he knew couldn’t pay him back, but “how else are they supposed to get their kids around?”
I tell this story because, although a lot of points in the Daggett article rang true and I think they are important to bring to light, I also think the article’s criticism of petro-masculinity masks some of the more positive manifestations of masculinity that arise in petroleum economies and fails to address the class dynamics of choices men make around the oil industry.
Alberta’s oil-boom gave my dad, who came from a lower-middle class family with no access to post-secondary education, access to a stable income. This gave him the ability to, alongside my mom, (who he met while she was working part-time at a gas station to put herself through school) raise a family that had access to more privileges than he did. The oil industry gave my dad a positive masculine identity as a provider and he worked hard to be a more positive masculine figure in my life than his father, who had suffered more in the war than he was able to process in a healthy way, had been.
While I recognize that this lifestyle came at the expense of a lot of systems of oppression and exploitation (and believe me, as a teenager I incessantly criticized my father for this), I think sometimes we forget that men too are adapting to a limited set of opportunities available to them. And while white men have a great deal of power within our current context, which Daggett pointed out, I think the petro-masculinity article obscures some class considerations to Western masculinities and associated implications that stem from uneven access to education.
In reality, there weren’t a lot of stable income-earning career paths available to my dad given his access to education and more eco-friendly career paths were reserved for people in a higher class than him, who had money from their parents to pursue emerging green jobs and had a cushion to fall back on should those routes not work out.
Like Moulton and Carey point out in their article about futuremaking, despite the real hazards of climate change, people don’t think about the potential future destruction of their homes because they are preoccupied with “the environmental and social conditions that support a home and family on a daily basis.” (8)
For this week, I am thinking about futuremaking: who is included and who is left out in climate adaptation strategies (especially policy discussions)? If some parts of the population cannot see positive roles for themselves in an imagined future, where does that leave us?
While reading Feminist Ecologies, I learnt several new terms and concepts that were unfamiliar to me. I admire the author’s discussion on how territories are defined to reinforce masculinity, and how women can become trapped and treated as pawns, often without holding any real property rights. The author’s use of the phrase, “the use of space to control behavior,” effectively highlights the dynamics of masculinity in relation to power and space. The mention of Adivasi rights in the article reminded me of the struggles faced by Adivasi women in India. These women are often denied rights due to the complexities of polygamy, while those who do hold legal rights to land are frequently exploited by men who seek to benefit from their rights. Despite their legal claims to land, Adivasi women and children often become victims of masculine power structures that dominate the space and territory, leaving them vulnerable and powerless.
Yoshida’s recognition of the rights of nature resonated with me, particularly her mention of how intersectional theory can draw attention to multiple, overlapping forms of oppression that actually “bring women into view,” along with other social categories or statuses that reveal their lived experiences. This reminds me of an incident early in my career when another woman from a Scheduled Caste and I approached a women’s safety cell to file similar complaints about being harassed over the phone. Despite being in the same situation as women, I was treated differently because I belonged to a higher caste, while her complaint was not taken seriously. The person in authority belonged to a higher caste and practiced regressive untouchability, which influenced the response. Although my understanding of such dynamics was limited at the time, I now see how women can become invisible unless a strong “bring women into view” approach is implemented. This is especially critical in contexts like mining or rehabilitation, where the actual impact on women is often overlooked or underreported.
Upon reading Future making in a disaster zone, as they rightly pointed about water paradigm on Quecha women, I would like to share my experience of linking climate change with rehabilitation efforts. In 2017, I began working on a UNICEF project promoting WASH initiatives in Tribal Zones, areas specially classified as reserved forests. One Adivasi community preferred to stay in small hamlets deep within the forest. The forest department staff requested me to engage with the community, particularly the women, as they were the only ones who spoke the regional language, and convince them to relocate for rehabilitation since their habitat-building involved cutting trees. This deforestation was spotted by satellite, and India’s forest density is centrally monitored. And every tree is monitored on the name of climate change and I now believe are the lives of Adivasis who are the real humans is lesser than the importance that is given to trees. When I spoke with the women, they expressed two main concerns: their preference to give birth in nature due to their strong belief system and their practice of bathing in the river. While I explained the safety benefits of institutional deliveries for both mother and child, I also came to understand their deep connection to their way of life and their children’s upbringing. This was my first exposure to how the rigidly trained forest officials often resorted to abusive measures in enforcing forced rehabilitation, disregarding the choices and voices of the women in the community.
The questions that popped in mind:
1. Why masculinity always manifests toxicity? Is climate change being prioritized over the lives and well-being of women?
2. Despite frameworks like Women, Peace, and Security that emphasize the need for an intersectional lens, why does history keep repeating itself, forcing women to endure and navigate the same challenges? When will we break this cycle? Is it possible?
The readings for this week sparked reminders of a movie I watched over the summer called “Stolen”, by Elle Márjá Eira (https://nordicwatchlist.com/2024/04/13/stolen-on-netflix/). The story is centered around a young girl in the Sámi community, an Indigenous group who speak the Sami language and live in northern Norway, Finland, and Sweden, in addition to northwestern Russia. The young girl (Elsa) chooses a reindeer to care for during herding season and watches it get murdered by a man outside of the Sámi community. Years later, when reindeer are being regularly murdered once again, Elsa recalls her reindeer’s murderer and acts upon her desire to protect the animals and her culture that is being attacked upon. The murderer is a Swedish man who is hateful towards the Sámi peoples and resents their governmentally-appointed use of land for reindeer herding. In the background of the murders, there are town halls held to discuss turning the herding land into a mine. The mine development is favourable to the local Swedish workers, but incredibly damaging to the Sámi community, who is already beginning to see the number of reindeer herders diminish in younger generations. The tradition of reindeer herding itself is shown to be a predominantly male-driven one, as is the decision making and media presence of the Sámi in local news.
In “Stolen”, Elsa is doubly transgressing upon authoritarian rule, firstly as a Sámi person who is trying to conserve the land, animals, and culture that she has been raised to respect. In Daggett’s petro-masculinity reading, focus is drawn to zoning plans that are placed in poor/POC neighbourhoods to keep terracide out of the consciousness of more privileged populations (Daggett 31). The same can apply to the zoning of Indigenous Sámi land for mine construction in northern Sweden. Elsa tries building a case to present to the Swedish police, which are largely unhelpful throughout the majority of the murders. From a feminist view, Elsa is also transgressing upon authoritarian rule as a Sámi woman, going against the patriarchy not only in participation as a reindeer herder, but also in refusing wishes of older, male Sámi members who try to quiet her protests against the mine construction and reindeer deaths.
Elsa’s sense of multispecies or multibeing justice, as discussed in the Feminist Ecologies reading, is certainly strong and the “plurality of territories and challenging singularity of knowledge systems” is a key aspect of her resistance (Ojeda et al. 159). Particularly for nomadic beings, the understanding of territories outside of the militaristic, rigid, hypermasculine sense seems especially essential. My questions for this week is: in feminist political ecology, can individuals define a territory, or do we construct a definition collectively? How many people/who has to agree on the definition of a territory until it is accepted (if this even exists)?
The readings this week introduced several interesting ideas, that I felt built on our discussion last week of the transformative potential of feminist approaches to security. I found that key to this approach across all of the readings was decolonization, and the prioritization of bottom-up, community and care-based approaches to climate justice.
I was particularly struck by the concept of “future-making” in disaster zones, especially the emphasis on focusing on the ‘everyday’ rather than some distant ‘someday.’ This shift in perspective on adaptation reminded me of our discussions on how war is lived in the everyday. Much of the Western approach to “saving the planet” relies on high-level economic projections like Environmental Kuznets Curve, which assumes that increased GDP will eventually address environmental issues. However, this overlooks how, in practice, these problems are often merely offshored along with production. The idea of ‘poco a poco’ and making the future through daily observation and understanding centres the experiences and capabilities of marginalized people who are living the daily reality of the climate crisis.
Similarly, I’ve noticed that Western-led approaches to the climate crisis often prioritize technical solutions, ignoring historical inequalities and political context. This is evident in Moulton and Carey’s work; while recognizing the importance of large-scale technical solutions, their work illustrates how everyday adaptations at the local level can work to solve not only technical problems, but restore Indigenous agency and combat narratives of decline. As discussed by both Ojeda and Dagget, systems like patriarchy and capitalism are entrenched in our system, and seemingly incompatible with true climate justice. Put succinctly by Ojeda, “We are convinced of capitalism’s incompatibility with life and community sustenance and condemn its close relation with patriarchy in the domination of the environment.” As such, climate solutions cannot be simply technical; they require political understanding and solutions.
This kind of ‘transformative adaptation’ is also discussed by Ojeda’s work. It reminded me a lot of our discussion last week, and the idea of making war ‘unthinkable’ by removing the underlying structures that allow war to take place. Similarly, in understanding the transformative potential of feminist ecologies, we don’t have to settle for technical solutions to current environmental issues, we can make the idea of environmental destruction unthinkable. These transformative solutions have remarkable potential; for instance, Yoshida’s discussion of the rights of nature. Expanding legal personhood to include nature could recalibrate our collective normative understanding of nature’s value and would have enormous implications for how we approach discussions of environmental protection. As an example, companies in the US can have legal personhood, which says a lot about how policies and legal battles play out.
Questions:
1. In what ways does focusing on the ‘everyday’ and ‘poco a poco’ approach challenge dominant, Western-led technical solutions to climate change? How can this perspective shift contribute to transformative adaptation and environmental justice, especially for marginalized communities?
2. What are the implications of expanding legal personhood to nature in reshaping our normative understanding of environmental protection and climate justice?
This class and the weekly readings really have me going from being slightly optimistic to extremely pessimistic to the very extreme of sometimes thinking that we’d be better off if a meteor hit Earth right now. And then back up to slightly optimistic. Talking about the planetary crisis has me like a pendulum going from these stances at basically every other sentence I read for this week. We literally just saw the effects of petro-masculinites with hurricane Milton and Governor Ron DeSantis insisting that climate change has nothing to do with the increase of hurricane intensity in the past few years. Project 2025 aims to dismantle several government agencies whose purpose is to help curb the effects of climate change, including the National Weather Service.
Daggett’s article on petro-masculinities within the US context, really had me thinking and recognizing the patterns the US government has taken in order to become the global power it is, at the expense of not only their own population but also people all over the world. Flint, Michigan; Hawai’i; Guatemala; Dominican Republic; these are just some place in which capitalism, ecological destruction, and the wish to extend the power the US exercises beyond its borders can clearly be seen. The Flint water crisis started because the state government wanted to reduce the costs of transporting clean water to Flint. Flint has a majority black population, which shows the intersection between race, capitalist exploitative actions and the lengths at which the government is willing to sacrifice its own people. Ever since Hawai’i was invaded by the US, which was led my owners of pineapple plantations, native Hawai’ian populations have suffered from the consequences of excessive agricultural practices and neglect in the face of a booming tourist economy which only helps to exacerbate these issues. There is a reason why Hawai’ians have asked repeatedly to please stop going to the islands. The US invasions in Guatemala, Dominican Republic and other Central American and Caribbean countries are more examples of the way capitalism, expansionism and colonialism are intertwined with environment-related crises.
Obviously, these notions of petro-masculinities are not just a characteristic of the Global North countries, though there is definitely a lot to say in terms of their role in settler-colonialism and the resulting ecological crises. For example, AMLO in Mexico had promised for several years to become a greener government, in accordance with its staunch position against neoliberalism. Yet, he opened a new oil refinery which every single activist group agreed hurt the environment and it would not deliver the supposed economic boost to the region, which was the reason why AMLO pushed for this project (officially). Just a few years ago, two ecological activists that had spent their lives on protecting and increasing public awareness of the endangerment of the monarch butterfly habitat in Mexico were murdered due to their complaints over illegal logging. As Antonia Recinos’ comment says about mining being irreversible death, and to which Yoshida expands further, environmental rights defenders are targeted and killed because of this.
It is difficult to remain optimistic in the face of so much destruction and, in reference to last week’s reading, it would seem it is even more difficult to imagine feminist futures. Yet, some instances like the way the American bison or the jaguar across what is Latin American were successfully reintroduced to its native territory, ask me to imagine a greener future (such a cliché phrase, I am so sorry). The fact that the way Indigenous people, all over the world, managed for centuries to maintain a balance between their use of natural resources and their own ways of lives, is finally being recognized may be a testament that there is a way to do something about the planetary crisis.
I guess my questions for this week are exactly that, how do we imagine feminist futures in the face of so much destruction? Is there a way to make the responsibility for environmental protections more even across the board? How do our current understanding of race, gender, class, and geographical contexts underlie the current planetary crisis?
The GP2 I was assigned this year requires my team and I to address the barriers female smallholder farmers face in Kenya’s coffee industry, particularly regarding land ownership. Through this, we’ve learned that while women produce nearly half of the world’s agricultural output, they continue to face a disproportionate amount of challenges related to land access and ownership. Women hold an immense amount of knowledge and experience regarding the environment and the way they show up in those spaces in relation to men. Their knowledge would inform the success and sustainability of the agricultural industries they occupy – contributing perspectives to address the barriers they face and methods to appropriately interact with the land.
The intersection between gender rights and environmental rights continues to pop up when speaking about climate and environmental justice, a concept that has been advocated for years now. Colombian and Ecuadorian activists have been calling attention to how environmental destruction and the marginalization of women are inextricably linked. The Quechua women, like peace and environmental activists, embody the intersection of gender and ecological justice, recognizing how they influence and shape each other. Menton and LeBillon, Yoshida, and many others show us how women can be tied so deeply to the land, not just for their livelihoods but also in a cultural and spiritual sense. Despite this widespread understanding addressed by national and international organizations, the struggles they face continue to be amplified by a global system that prioritizes profit and extraction over the rights of the most vulnerable.
The critiques on the WPS agenda focus on the lack of seriousness toward women’s involvement in peace and security discussions. Regardless of the conversations surrounding women’s participation, we know that commitment and action are lacking. Intentional misinformation, weaponized incompetence, and general ignorance continue to target and harm these communities, compounding their struggles. These readings encourage us to explore that environmental harm, in this sense, is not only an ecological issue but also a human rights violation that most affects women and children, exacerbating social inequities and conflicts.
With that understanding, I find it particularly unsettling (and frankly evil) how environmental and biological destruction is used as a tool of oppression. Whether it’s targeting and extracting resources to fund warfare or destroying land to displace populations, it just continues to harm the vulnerable. We see this with the destruction of Palestine to the point that it is no longer habitable. We see how it severs the cultural and spiritual ties people have to their environment, violating their human rights twice over – both as citizens and as stewards of their land. We’ve also seen how the effects of climate change have affected women and children so drastically in Latin America, forcing these climate refugees to flee environmental disasters or flee from displacement through the treacherous and deadly Darien Gap.
The strategies for addressing these crises seem relatively simple, but they all require some form of giving up power, authority, money, etc., from those who benefit most from this environmental degradation. The idea of “future-making” highlighted by Moulton and Carey was interesting, shifting the focus of the framework from a singular outcome to a process-oriented approach prioritizing intergenerational well-being, everyday resilience and communal care. Ultimately, just as in the Columbian Constitutions, our international organizations and states need to move beyond viewing nature as a resource to be commodified but as something that has rights to be protected and conserved. We also need to do more than just consult with Indigenous communities that have deep connections with the land.
I wonder, what will it take to actually succeed in having a universal view of nature as something that has a right to be protected? What would this look like? i’m thinking a utopian future type of movie.
The readings this week call for a reimagining of human-nature relations, where feminist ecological perspectives offer pathways toward a more just and sustainable future. It has become clear to me that patriarchy is not just a social or political issue but a structural framework that shapes societal norms, values, and power dynamics, influencing every aspect of life.
An example of this is Daggett’s concept of petro-masculinity, which highlights how fossil fuel dependency serves not only as an economic concern but also as a tool for maintaining patriarchal power. As Daggett explains, fossil fuels create identities tied to control and dominance, particularly among conservative white men who feel their status is threatened by climate change. Thus, defending fossil fuels becomes a way to preserve these traditional power structures. This realization makes me see that climate action is not just about reducing emissions but must also address the cultural and gendered dimensions of fossil fuel economies.
Similarly, the issue of extractivism is deeply linked to both capitalism and patriarchy. Ojeda et al. argue that extractive activities prioritize economic gain at the expense of environmental sustainability, exploiting both nature and marginalized communities. Women, especially those in rural and Indigenous communities, are disproportionately affected by these activities. This reflection led me to recognize how capitalist systems, sustained by patriarchal values, treat nature and women as resources to be exploited rather than as integral to the health of ecosystems. The connection between gender and environmental exploitation is striking, and it is evident that addressing one requires addressing the other.
Yoshida’s argument for environmental peace offers another important perspective. She links environmental justice to peacebuilding, showing that sustainable peace is impossible without addressing environmental degradation. Her call to integrate the rights of nature into frameworks like the WPS agenda underscores how protecting ecosystems and recognizing the agency of non-human entities are key not only to environmental justice but also to preventing conflict.
Moulton and Carey’s concept of futuremaking brought a new dimension to my thinking about climate adaptation. Rather than seeing Quechua women in the Peruvian Andes as passive victims of climate change, they emphasize their agency in shaping their futures through everyday actions. They make it through what is called ‘poco a poco’ (or little by little), a process that is often overlooked by top-down policies. The concept of futuremaking made me realize the power of grassroots, community-based approaches to climate adaptation and how essential they are for creating resilient, sustainable futures. It also prompted me to reconsider how we view “effective” solutions, understanding that large-scale interventions are not always the answer; sometimes, it is the everyday, lived experiences that hold the key to lasting change.
Question:
How can we integrate the everyday lived experiences of women (such as Quechua women) into the development of solutions to the environmental crisis?
In this class I find we often look at small victories in the face of huge structural and institutional issues and disasters. In the face of a climate and environmental crisis, we can look to an ecofeminist or decolonial environmental future. I don’t think that this necessarily dictates how we should feel about crises (optimistic, pessimistic, apathetic, etc) but I do think that the way victory is represented in the academy is reflective of something within our society. What that reflection is, I’m not so sure. Today, my reflection is on the language we use when discussing social issues in academia. In this weeks readings, we see a lot of hyper specific terminology and fields of study: climate fascism, emancipatory ecology, multispecies justice, feminist political ecology, etc. These terms conjure up different histories, communities, understandings of our world. But they are also complex academic jargon which requires extensive background knowledge and a specific understanding of language. In order for these terms to be useful, a western understanding of education is required.
Petromasculinity is such an interesting concept and term in this context, overtly linking power and environmental dominance to conceptions of patriarchy and colonialism. I think that the use of this term is being presented to us as itself a small victory, the naming of something which could not previously be connected. And I agree! I am happy to see these connects clearly drawn out and explained in writing. Here I am reminded of the term intersectionality, now widely used, but originally coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. This term has become more and more known, and what it describes is now a key tenet of equity and critical studies. This term draws attention to, for example, a crucial element missing from second wave feminism. But sometimes, a term like intersectionality becomes coopted, for example by corporate EDI departments, diversity committees run by all men. I guess what I am getting at here is these terms, this research, they are both useful and useless. I do believe that it is important to call things for what they are, that identifying fascism, misogyny, etc, as such is an important part of preventing harm. But at the same time I question the limits of words. I am reminded by a phrase I read in a University of Toronto student newspaper, “The campus police harasses students using their preferred pronouns”. Words can be empowering, affirming, powerful. But at the same time I ask, what good are new words and inclusive language without action? Is creating these words a type of action, and if so, who does it help?
Questions
What is the difference between language and action, and where do the two intersect?
How does naming a concept or idea change that concept?
Does creating language enact or spark change?
When International Relations feels like the mess that it is, I often go outside, look at a tree, take a sigh of relief as I say the word “tree”. As if I was a child discovering the world for the first time. The trees inspire me, they remind me what it means to be resillient—that one needs roots, sun, community.
This week’s readings demand an interrogation not just of resilience and adaptation but of the layered meanings, cultural resonances, and semantic contradictions embedded in these terms. As a graduate student engagement coordinator last year for the Disaster Resilience Research Network, we spoke of resilience as a state’s ability to endure crisis.
However resilience is refracted through gendered, environmental, and political lenses that reveal deeper questions: Resilience for whom? Resilience for what? This week invited us to examine how power, identity, and resources shape environmental interactions, thus compelling me towards a more nuanced understanding of resilience as both a societal expectation and a personal, localized practice.
I thought as I often do) of Libya and its increasing reliance on extractive industries to sustain itself economically. A country in which oil is cheaper than water, a fact that is often celebrated but is in fact so incredibly sad.
Petromasculinity embodies a duality, where fossil fuels symbolize not only economic sustenance but a gendered assertion of control. In Libya, this manifests as a near-sacred reliance on oil, rendering petroleum more than a fuel; it becomes a totem of state power and masculine resilience. Here, “petro-masculinity” unfolds as a mode of governance that enforces a paradoxical resilience: a society bound to the same fuel that accelerates its ecological demise. But what does this masculine reliance on fossil fuels obscure? The semantics of “feminist ecologies,” as explored by Ojeda et al., shift our gaze to the interdependence between people and ecosystems, a sharp divergence from state-led resilience narratives that see nature as subordinate. Feminist ecologies question resilience not as a heroic ability to withstand hardship but as a relational and adaptive process, one that challenges the binaries of strength and vulnerability.
I did some more reading and I found this book chapter on extractive masculinities in the Western genre. In the chapter it writes how Westerns portray a unique relationship between male heroes and the landscape, which complicates the typical trope of a feminized environment. Instead of depicting the land as something to be conquered or subdued, Westerns often present male heroes as intrinsically connected to and shaped by the harshness of their surroundings. Tompkins argues that in the Western, “to be a man…is to seem to grow out of the environment”—where toughness, hardness, and unforgiving attitudes mirror the harsh landscape itself. This identification reflects a masculinity that draws strength from the land, rather than seeing it purely as a passive, feminized entity.
While the Western hero’s identity is formed in connection with the land, true masculinity in this narrative is defined by resisting and enduring the environment’s threats rather than submitting to them, constructing a masculinity tied to dominance and survival. Rooted in a settler-colonial ideology that valorizes Anglo-European men as conquerors of a hostile, “inimical” wilderness. The landscape in these narratives becomes an entity that challenges, tests, and ultimately reinforces the hero’s strength and resilience. Though the land in these Westerns is not explicitly feminized, it still serves as a proving ground for masculinity—one that supports an imperialist framework by portraying man’s control over the natural world as both necessary and valorous. I found that this dynamic both aligned with and diverged from ecofeminist critiques, revealing how masculine identity in the Western genre is tied to a dominative resilience, where true success is found not in coexistence with the land but in mastering its threats.
So now I must say I experienced this week’s readings as uncomfortable forms of self constructed imagery. That masculinity would grow out of the Earth similar to the trees I turn to day to day for inspiration. That manhood would be a byproduct of its terrain, like a phallic metaphor finding life in what it pulled from the Earth. That it would find a way to sustain itself—like the entrenched systems do.
Instead going to imagine me, a feminist tree being relational, reciprocal and interdependent.
Sigh.
This was the book chapter:
Goldberg, Sylvan. 2022. “Extractive Masculinity: The Western’s Precarious Male Bodies in the Anthropocene.” In The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West. 1st ed. Vol. 1, 197-209: Routledge.
This week’s readings made me curious as to how far our world must further damage the planet it completely depends on before it realizes just how crucial it is to protect it as it is literally our home. It should not be a ‘feminist’ perspective to advocate to protect the environment all of us depend on to survive, yet it sadly is. Cara Dagget’s article which discussed in detail about how the West has embraced a toxic masculine combination of climate denial, misogyny, and racism (2018, p. 25) made immediate sense once the author explained how her explanation of ‘petro-masculinity’ was evident in the success and embrace of Trump’s MAGA slogan during and after the 2016 election. In a way, the author’s explanation made complete sense to me and easy to understand the main points the author was making throughout the article.
It is further shocking that the UN’s WPS framework does not include climate change as a threat to international peace and security (Yoshida, 2021, p. 166). I would imagine that it would be one of the first things I would add into a framework about international peace and security.
On a positive note, reading about how Quechua women adapted to everyday climate change left me with weird optimism. All these readings reminded me of contemporary natural disasters occurring in Florida as I found connections from each reading to everyday climate change events and people in the States that are pro-Trump and his abhorrent beliefs and policies. Interestingly, reading a footnote about how white women voters have backed Republican presidential candidates more than Democratic candidates reminded me about reading certain conspiracy theories that have emerged in the States which correlate the climate emergencies to the upcoming election, somehow. Not sure why that footnote made me draw that exact connection, however. I hope that women (and all individuals) are and will adapt in the areas affected by these hurricanes as well as the Quechua women in this week’s readings.
Importantly though, my question for this week from our readings are: What would the point be of international diplomacy and collaboration if none of us can agree on the urgency of solving our climate crisis to ensure our survival? Is the only reason why people want to cooperate internationally for the sake of making money and not to prevent and solve global issues that directly threaten all of us?
Today I once again have many thoughts, without much coherence. I want to talk about the Ojeda article- this reading provided me with so much vocabulary that I didn’t know existed and I didn’t know I needed, and it sparked a lot of reflection about anthropocentrism for me. For my reflection this week, I want to explore two personal connections that it helped me make sense of. The examples I want to talk about are:
1. It feels almost too colloquial or “silly” to bring up in a reflection for class, and I’m almost worried that it will seem like I don’t take this topic seriously when I of course do, but I immediately thought of this scene from How I Met Your Mother where Marshall refers to squirrels getting married, and his partner Lily says “Squirrels don’t get married” to which Marshall responds, “Like you could possibly know that”. This whole line was delivered as Marshall being the butt of the joke because he was “obviously” being silly. However, this scene has stuck with me because I remember even the first time I watched it thinking, is it so ridiculous to imagine that animals have their own worlds? Maybe this was just a joke made in passing in a sitcom and it’s not this deep, but I think this scene does provide some commentary on the ways that we have less tolerance for adults who retain imagination and wonder about animals’ worlds.
2. I have this memory of my mom from when I was a kid- we were moving out of our old house, which was in a County that was probably about 30 minutes outside of Downtown Edmonton, and my Mom was home alone cleaning out the house while me and my brother were at our Dad’s place for the week. While she was cleaning late at night, my mom found this little mouse on the stairs to our basement which had been injured and seemed to have some kind of hole in his neck. My Mom was always an animal lover, and she caught and packed up this little mouse in a box and drove him all the way Downtown to the emergency vet clinic that was open 24/7. This got a lot of eye rolls from our family members (and I wonder if maybe even from the vets), and a lot of the reactions were along the lines of “Oh, that’s Nancy for you,” in a way that suggested that her decision to try and rescue this little mouse was perhaps something to be humoured, but that it was ultimately a bit excessive, ridiculous, naive, idealistic, silly, or even childish.
Ojeda writes that “Feminist ecological thought has also pointed to how the value of nonhuman animals is often considered only in terms of their usefulness to humans within current regimes of extraction”, and of course this brought up my mom’s mouse ordeal for me. Even at the time, I remember being so touched and proud that she was my Mom, and that she would care so much about such a tiny life that she would go out of her way to do something so seemingly excessive and possibly futile just because she could possibly make a little animal’s life better. And I do think that this fundamentally shaped how I view the world, because if my Mom would drive 40 minutes in the middle of the night to find a vet for an animal that is considered a pest, then how can I possibly accept any theory that places humans in a hierarchically higher position than any animal, big or small, or the ecosystems (plants, forests, water, etc) that they call home? How can I possibly dismiss “non-human life” (as Ojeda phrases it) as any less sacred than my own? I wish that 19 year old me had the vocabulary to understand anthropocentrism and defend my mom to critical family members, and explain why I didn’t think my mom was ridiculous for taking a mouse to the emergency vet, because 24 year old me is reading Ojeda et. al’s paper and is thinking, wow- Nancy was practicing ecological feminism and I am so fortunate to have been in the presence of such a great woman who was not afraid to look “silly”.
I also found the section of Ojeda’s paper where they quote from Alexis Pauline Gumbs meaningful- “[h]ow can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm? This is where we start our trans-species communion, opening a space to uplift the practice of listening even more than the practices of showing and proving and speaking up. Listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in”. I was moved by the concept of listening across life forms, quieting down and tuning in, especially in contrast to the concept of “proving”. I don’t know if I’m misunderstanding the concept of proving here, but what it conjured up for me was the relentless positivist push to prove, explain, categorize, rather than embracing the degree of uncertainty inherent to life (mentioned in a previous reading but I can’t remember which). This brought me back to Marshall and the squirrels- I was reflecting about why this scene continues to stick with me, and I’ve concluded for now that it’s because I actually don’t care about whether or not we can prove that squirrels get married! (also, why are we projecting norms of the nuclear family on to squirrels) I don’t need to know whether there’s definitive “proof” that squirrels experience partnership, community, and love, because regardless of whether or not I can prove it (I don’t care), it matters to me that that’s how I look at non-human life that I encounter. Maybe this is what we were talking about in our last session about imagining better futures, and maybe a huge part of that is returning to the art of storytelling about our lands and the creatures that live with us on them.
I want to be the kind of person who looks at squirrels’ lives as having dimension and beauty and value, and I want to be the kind of person who will box up a mouse to take it to the vet- I also want to live in a world where reverence for the sanctity of life is the norm, and so I the decision to box up a mouse is arguably significant to how we practice our politics and my values. As Ojeda writes, “the emergence of alternative framings of territory are often rooted in the resurgence of ancient and continuing relational values and practices, their reinstatement, or the reinvention of relations and understandings under new conditions. They are being inscribed into living worlds through daily practice, from Indigenous lands to urban gardens and intentional communities of farmworkers-to-farmers.” I extrapolate from this that alternative framings of life and subjectivity are undergoing similar processes, and that they are also being re-inscribed when I look at squirrels with fondness and imagination and slow down for them on the roads, or when my mom carefully cradles a mouse in a box while she drives it to the vet. This put a different spin on the “everyday” for me, and brings into focus the ways that slowing down and considering “encounter” can offer opportunities to disrupt narratives of devaluation, commodification, and dismissal.
Now, I also think that there’s nuance here- I think that sometimes there’s very valid critiques of this kind of take, because it can be very rightly pointed out that sometimes people value the lives of animals more than human beings- people will, for instance, spend money putting cosmetic braces on their dog but vote against wellfare programs, or will donate to the SPCA but not relief for Palestinian children. This is a legitimate critique and it totally makes why people would find the case for a mouse’s life tired and possibly even insulting when we consider the scale of violence enacted against people in marginalized communities. As I understand it, however, the core issue we would take issue with here is the dehumanisation of people and the unwillingness to recognize human suffering- people are being treated as less than animals in this case. This is not the same critique as a case to disregard the value of non-human life. These critiques are helpful, accurate, and valid, in my view, and are not in tension with the rejection of anthropocentrism- I think, as discussed in these readings, we are hoping to build a world where human and non-human life is sacred- violence and commodification of animals, environment, and human beings is unimaginable.
This was too long! My questions are:
1. Ojeda et. al argue that alternative framings of territory are being inscribed into living worlds through daily practice. How can we connect this to our previous discussions of the everyday?
2. How can we listen across harm?
Ok I really really enjoyed this week’s readings and have a lot of thoughts I will try my best to connect and explain them all.
Darrgett (2018) writes, “the parallels between rape and extractivism have been well documented” (pg. 39). This immediately made me think of missing and murdered Indigenous women. I’ve previously read articles about how violence against Indigenous women increases when there is a pipeline being developed on or near their land. Labourers (mostly men) move into construction camps while the pipeline is being built. These construction camps are often near Indigenous communities and are associated with increased violence against Indigenous women. Here the connection between violence to the land and violence to women’s bodies is clear.
I found the connection between patriarchy, masculinity and fossil fuel dependence really interesting. Darrgett (2018) writes about fossil fuels but I also thought about meat consumption. The beef industry in particular, causes a lot of environmental harm. Meat has become so entangled with masculinity. To eat a lot of meat is to be manly and vegetarian diet is seen as feminine. I do think that a sustainable future involves a less meat-heavy diet. There is so much resistance to this, especially from men and after reading this article I now understand this to be in part gender anxiety. This is frustrating to think about. Is the world so resistant to change because men need to protect their idea of masculinity?
Darrgett (2018) gives examples of mostly right-wing hypermasculine type men. However, these ideas of masculinity are internalized by everyone, which is what makes it so hard to combat. I think about my brother and dad and how they need meat at every meal. I don’t eat meat and my mom doesn’t eat much so when I am home we cook mostly vegetarian. My brother and dad often cook their own chicken or other source of meat to add to the meal. They are not hyper-masculine men, but they still have this internalized idea that men eat meat.
The concept of petro-masculinity made me think a lot about the cultural feminist perspective that understands women’s oppression as not because of the roles they have in society, but the undervaluing of these roles. Feminine roles, for example, a caregiver, are powerful and necessary for society to function. Liberation does not mean women have to break away from historically feminine roles (although absolutely they can), but also involves a restructuring of what is valued in society. This perspective has links to environmentalism as it places women not only as caregivers of the home but also of the environment.
One thought I had while reading this week is how removed we in the western world from the natural world (especially those living in cities). We don’t know what it means to live with and in nature, we live separate from it or even against it. This has shaped the way we view and value nature. Moulton and Carey (2023) explore how Quechua Women experience and adapt to a changing climate in their everyday lives. The article speaks about how much of the climate migration work and discourse is mainly concerned with major disaster mitigating. Life in western cities does not depend largely on small scale changes to the climate. We buy our food from the grocery store that has been shipped in from far away farms, our water comes out of piped from the treatment plant. We live disconnected from the earth. Even when there is, for example, a large-scale drought affecting crops, our access to food is not dramatically altered. Grocery stores remain stocked. Maybe one item is harder to find or more expensive, but our everyday lives are relatively unaffected. I thought of this while reading Moulton and Carey (2023). I think the western idea of the climate crisis is largely based around a Domesday-like sicario because of this disconnect. To those of us living in cities largely protected from natural elements, that is the biggest threat. When that is the only lived experience included in the decision making, it ignores how many people’s ways of life are much more sensitive to the changing climate.
I really loved the concept of multispecies/multi-being justice brought up by Ojeda for thinking about all of this and connecting all my thoughts for me. The patriarchal system is one of dominance. Men dominate over all of earth’s species, animal and plant alike. Dismantling this system would mean revaluing everything. Thinking of the world in a holistic way, Connecting back to nature, Valuing the lived experience and diverse perspectives of people, and understanding conservation as not just for the value of humans, but for the value of all life on earth.
I am not really sure what my question is this week. Maybe, how would the world be different if we valued “feminine” traits?