I grew up knowing my country was drowning. My childhood memories are full of flashing images of annual monsoon rains making rivers out of our roads, lakes out of our rice paddy fields, washing away farmers' harvests, pushing the rural population into our already overpopulated capital city. Of course the yearly floods alternated with even greater natural disasters- cyclones, tornadoes, you name it growing up I saw it. The rumor in the playground was that in twenty years Bangladesh would be completely underwater.
Today that statement is no longer a rumor, but very much a reality. According to the UK 's Guardian publication, Bangladesh makes up not even 10% of the land mass of South Asia , but over 90% of the region's water passes through it. Experts state that Bangladesh 's shifting and intensifying weather patterns are making a bad situation worse. The case of Bangladesh shows us that climate change is real, and is already impacting populations and ecosystems around the world.
But the case of Bangladesh shows us something more: That it's the world's poor who will feel the impact of this change the hardest. And who exactly are the poor? Women, who make up approximately 65% of the world's poorest populations.
Because of the traditional domestic responsibilities which fall on women and girls, experts state that climate change is having a disproportionate affect them. Women are the primary caretakers of families, primary managers of everything from food production to water management in their households. As UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) puts it, women are the ones who cook, clean, and farm for their families, in addition to providing health care and hygiene. Women are not only on the "frontlines" of climate change, but their work and relationship with the environment is so intimate that their experience with it changing is often just as personal.
Let's look at the issue of water for example, a natural resource especially sensitive to climate change, and one that traditionally women are the managers of in their households. According to UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women), women and girls on average travel 10-15 kilometers, spending up to 8 hours a day gathering water for their families. Droughts caused by climate change are shrinking up and eliminating existing water supplies, making the distance to walk even longer. Because of the distances women and girls have to walk to fetch water for their families, millions of girls around the world are unable to go to school. Imagine that. The average person would never make the connection between accessing water and girls' education. Yet it exists.
As the gendered impact of climate change becomes increasingly palpable, my question is- where are the feminist voices? Why are more women's rights advocates and activists not picking up and rallying around this issue vigorously? Everyday you see articles in the news, but where is the real action? More importantly, where is the outrage? Just yesterday I read an article in the LA Times talking about how the newest kind of refugee is not from war, but from of climate change. They are called "climate refugees" and the LA Times states that almost 10million people around the world have been forced to leave their homes for "reasons ranging from rising (or falling) sea levels, lack of rain, and desertification."
Back home in Bangladesh , the list of innovative ideas to combat and more importantly, adapt to climate change is endless. International aid organizations are working with local NGOs to build "floating villages," clinics on boats, and help women educate their communities about securing flood and cyclone shelters.
But there has to be more. Women may be in the frontlines of climate change, but they are not only its victims. Their personal and intimate experience of the harsh impacts of climate change means that within them lies very real solutions to combat it. If the voices from the women's rights movement don't pick up this issue, loudly, clearly and unanimously, climate change will not only drown out countries, but the agents of change, women, with it. And that is simply not an option.
It is the responsibility of the women's movement, both here in the US and abroad, to make the issue of our altering environment, our issue, otherwise everybody loses. Climate change is a human rights issue, but its very obvious gendered impacts make it a women's rights issue.
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This is a great article, thanks for posting! I think its also worth mentioning that global warming will likely exacerbate political instability , which will have a myriad of consequences for women.
If I have one complaint about mainstream feminism, it's that science (and, by extension, much of the research on environmental issues) seems to have become a dirty word. I realize that science (just like pretty much every discipline ever) has a history of marginalizing women, but I wish feminists weren't so quick to dismiss or ignore valid research.
I think there is a risk to broadening feminism to the point that it is just another word for a female progressive. Feminists do not necessarily need to toe the line on every progressive cause. I think climate change and environmental issues is one area where feminists can disagree. Belief in the equality of women does not necessarily lead to belief in human-caused climate change.
Personally, I am not sure I buy into global warming as a result of carbon emissions. The climate is an infinitely complex system. It is difficult enough to determine whether we are actually warming -- it is virtually impossible to scientifically explain away environmental occurrences such as climate change with simple explanations like carbon emissions.
This is not to say that there aren't serious environmental occurences, or even to say that the climate isn't changing. I just don't think that there are simple explanations as to WHY the climate is changing.
kbz
I think the distinction you made in your post about feminism not being another way of saying 'female progressive' is important - there is diversity of opinion within feminism that makes it dynamic. That said, I think the central issue in regards to global warming and its impact on women was alluded to when you referred to the "belief in the equality of women" that feminism upholds. Whether or not you believe in global warming, or humans as the cause of global warming, it remains true that women bear the brunt of the difficulties related to increasingly erratic weather and climate patterns because of ingrained beliefs that the role of a woman is to take care of a man and any children (without the luxury of choice).
This relates to the "belief in the equality of women" as men are not (statistically) as effected by the same changes.
kbz because you sound like a thoughtful poster, I beg you to do more digging into climate science. There is no meaningful debate about the correlation between CO2 emissions, positive feedback loops, and dramatic climate change. If you want just one study, check out "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" by Naomi Oreskes. In it she does a comprehensive survey of abstracts of hundreds of climate studies and demonstrates unanimous consensus on some basic tenets of climate science. That was in 2004. Now, with polar melting proceeding faster than every model predicted, it's clear that if we're off about anything- it is because we are underestimating the effects.
Climate science is absolutely complex, but the scale of study that has been pursued is massive. The national academies of every country on earth is in agreement- this isn't a facile hypothesis, it is on the level approaching theory-hood. Evolution is complex- we're re-evaluating core elements of the theory all the time. That doesn't make the universal consensus less real, the implications for our understanding of life processes less valuable.
The consequences for women, working poor, people of color, and indigenous people- consequences that are already being felt- are too catastrophic to dismiss lightly. We are talking hundreds of millions of refugees, huge areas rendered inhospitable to traditional forms of agriculture, an unbelievable decline in ecosystem services. This is the ultimate in environmental injustice, and I thank the original poster for bringing up this element of it- those of us who consider ourselves climate activists need to do a better job of reaching out to other communities and figuring out our common interests.
The evidence for anthropocentric climate change is overwhelming. What's also overwhelming is the amount of corporate dollars that have gone into convincing you that it isn't happening.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/07/the-real-climate-scandal/
Thank you for this post! It's really interesting and enlightening.
Climate change is an important issue for everyone, including feminists. I'm not going to get into a debate over what is causing global warming even though I think the science is pretty clear and has been clear on the issue for a while, but whether or not you agree with the science practicing sustainability and influencing our communities to reduce our carbon footprint is only going to benefit us.
great article. thanks for writing about an important issue. i think environmentalism has always been a feminist issue and it has always been a women's movement, starting with the "chipko" movement in northern india.
it's unfortunate that sometimes in order to deal with certain issues, other important ones get pushed to the back burner.
another pet peeve of mine is the "overpopulation" argument. focusing on just human overpopulation wrongly places the emphasis on the overpopulated developing countries, when in fact they use far, far, less energy per capita and produce far, far, less toxic waste per capita than the people of rich industrialized countries like america. both overpopulation and underpopulation arguments also inevitably impose a control on women's bodies (and to a lesser extent, men's), one that many women don't support. it's not the overpopulation of people that is the main problem, its the overpopulation of hummers and fast food chains.
it's really disappointing to see a feminist commenter say that she's not sure of global warming or carbon emissions. that's just burying your head in the sand when faced with overwhelming scientific evidence. scientists have been warning about the environmental effects of pollution since 1940s. the health risks are well documented too. it's nothing less than stupid and absurd to still this "it's not as simple."
sure, the world is not going to end tomorrow, no scientist said it would. but pretty soon, certain countries are going to suffer, bangladesh being the scapegoat of all the world's pollution. if a feminist doesn't care about carbon emissions and pollution it means s/he doesn't care about people dying because of injustice.
to the OP, if you're interested, I'd like to have you as a contributor to a blog i've set up as means to write as a south asian feminist. it's called desifeminists.wordpress.com
keep writing!
@ desifeminist Thank you for your comment and I would love to write on your blog! Email me at ahossain@feminist.org
I'm going to get a little off topic but this is it. I promise.
Also it's just a plain myth that we don't have enough food or resources to feed the entire population of Earth. The problem is that very little of the world's population owns the land - so the rest of us are at the whim of their decisions about land use.
Capitalism through competition in the market place has induced grocery stores to throw away good food competing to be the freshest. Because the cost of production is disconnected from the price the stores can afford to do this - it's so cheap to make the food that as long as they sell enough fresher food they can chase their losses. And why is it cheap? It's cheap because of Free Trade agreements, which also hurt women. We don't pay the social or environmental costs of that extra fresh cherry turnover at the store - women and children forced off their ancestral lands and into factories by Neoliberalism do. Sure, some grocers do donate food. Some donate a lot of food. But an overwhelming amount of food is wasted before it ever gets to the consumer.
And besides that, Capitalism has also made it profitable to grow corn for corn syrup instead of corn or other crops for real food. Or corn for animal feed which is turned into animal meat and our high amounts of meat consumption are responsible for lots of waste of land.
Capitalism and it's necessary abolition are at the heart of environmentalist, feminist, and animal-rights causes.
One last thing - I feel like Global Warming is an elaborate conspiracy of misdirection by people who have the most potential to profit from combating it using market solutions to it. What are they shewing us away from? Pollution. Pollution is here now, not 20 years from now, it has been here since the industrial revolution at least and it has been getting worse. There are few if any profitable solutions to pollution and the industrial economy does not want to own up to the damage it is causing to all of us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_organic_pollutant
Watch the Story of Stuff for free by going to it's website. (Guess the address...)
While your first point is true, your conclusion is backwards. The problem is that very little of the world's population owns anything, and unowned and unmanaged resources lead to disastrous tragedies of the commons. And it's more correct to describe this as one of many problems, since the cause is not as simplistic as you've made it sound.
And besides that, Capitalism has also made it profitable to grow corn for corn syrup instead of corn or other crops for real food. Or corn for animal feed which is turned into animal meat and our high amounts of meat consumption are responsible for lots of waste of land.You're confusing several different issues here. The main reason for the rise of high-fructose corn syrup has been government corn subsidies and tariffs against imported sugar —? i.e. exactly the sort of market interference that you seem to be advocating in your confused post.
Capitalism and it's necessary abolition are at the heart of environmentalist, feminist, and animal-rights causes.Capitalism, in the dictionary definition of the term, is orthogonal to all these things. In practice, markets function within a broader social and cultural context, just like anything else. Change that underlying context and you change people's valuation of things, which changes demand, which changes supply, and so on. That's why feminism's focus should be on changing that context, rather than promoting one economic system or another in the hope that it will somehow eliminate patriarchy as a side effect.
Having said that, it's worth noting that non-market economies are, if anything, more susceptible to environmental degradation (just look at the USSR), and that economic liberalization tends to erode the rigid social hierarchies that enable systemic oppression of women.
One last thing ??– I'll never understand is how a self-described anarchist can seemingly oppose exchanges between willing participants (i.e. markets).
Thank you all so much for commenting on my post! Check out my blog that I just launched this week! http://anushayspoint.wordpress.com/