Spring 1997-- Global Human Ecology:
America, the Environment, and the Global Economy

Question for Discussion: How does the global environmental crisis affect women's lives? Is protecting the environment a women's issue?

Reading: Close to Home, pp. 1-9, 128-142

Video: CBS Eye on America: The Cloning Debate

Internet Sites and Documents:

WOMEN AND THE ENVIRONMENT -By Anita Roddick

Critical and Constructive Contributions of Ecofeminism

Love Canal is Everywhere: The Pervasive Threat of Dioxin

Our Environmental Health

A worldwide fight against biopiracy and patents on life

Shiva: The Seeds of Our Future

Doublespeak and the New Biological Colonialism

UN accused of industry bias on biotech

Vandana Shiva argues that our modern industrial culture is a patriarchal culture in which male-dominated perspectives and values dominate. She argues that our patriarchal culture divides the world into a series of dichotomies or divisions that shapes and reinforces our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the natural world. Below is a chart that examines the ways in which our modern industrial culture understands and divides up the world.

Dichotomies created and reinforced by Modern, Industrial Society

Shiva argues that these dichotomies between society and nature and between ourselves and the environment are one of the larger causes of the global environmental crisis. We tend to see ourselves separate and apart from nature and the environment. We tend to discount the role of the natural world in supporting our lives and our societies. We tend to discount the value of women's work in supporting and feeding our families and children. We tend to discount the role and rights of women, seeing them, like nature, as less rational and more primitive. We tend to value human control and domination of the environment. We tend to discount the vital human need for a healthy environment. We believe that when we pollute the environment, we aren't hurting ourselves because we are not part of our environments. Let's now look at a series of examples that Shiva gives to support her argument that by dividing ourselves from the world we are helping to create the larger global environmental crisis.

In the late 1980s, American society engaged in a debate over surrogate motherhood. Could a woman's body and the baby it produces be bought and sold like a commodity? In the case of the Baby M case, the surrogate mother, Mary Beth Whitehead was paid $10,000 to allow herself to be impregnated by the sperm of a man who was married to an infertile wife. The surrogate mother agreed to carry the baby to term and turn it over to the couple in return for the money. But when Ms. Whitehead began feeling the growing baby in her body she tried to back out of her agreement. Afterall, she was now carrying a baby, another human being, that she felt she was responsible to care and nurture. But the couple who contracted her to carry the baby refused to let her back out of her agreement; they insisted the Mary Beth Whitehead turn the baby over to them after it was born and give up custody to it.

Shiva would argue that in the Baby M case, our patriarchal culture was treating a women's body and a baby as property with no inherent rights or responsibilities. But Shiva would argue that a mother doesn't naturally see her baby or her body as property to be controlled and manipulated for profit. However, the judge ruled that the surrogate mother must turn the baby over to the couple who contracted her to carry the child because she must "honor the contract" she signed with the couple. But a higher court also granted Mary Beth Whitehead visitation rights to see her child. Clearly, the case of surrogate motherhood demonstrates the dangers involved in separating humans from nature, profit from responsibility, childbearing from motherhood, and culture from nature.

In the ongoing clean-air debate, concerned mothers and their children are demanding that the federal government force large industrial cities to dramatically reduce their pollution in order to reduce and prevent the growth of asthma and respiratory diseases among young children. There is a strong correlation between the growth of air pollution in our growing industrial cities and the rise of childhood asthma. However, American industry, cities, and economic interests are arguing that the costs to clean up the polluted air is simply too high. We can't be sure that the rise in childhood asthma is related to industrial pollution. But their real argument is that their continued profits and industrial operations would be hurt by these new clean-air regulations, and their profits are clearly more important than a few children with asthma.

In the case of industrial pollution, Shiva would argue that we can't separate profits and wealth from the larger health of our children, families, and communities. Because we don't recognize the human need for a healthy and clean environment, we discount impact of industrial pollution on the urban environment. If the men who dominate these industrial corporations and cities recognized the social trade-off between their individual profits and the larger health of their communities and families, then they wouldn't pollute the environment with these dangerous substances. If our society valued the health and well-being of women, families, and children, we wouldn't expose them to dangerous levels of pollutants.

In the case of the Green Revolution, First World countries are providing hybrid seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides to Third World countries. The development experts teaching these countries how to take advantage of this Green Revolution technology assume that Third World farmers and Third World land isn't productive without this technology. Because before the Green Revolution, most small farmers grew food to feed and their families and a little surplus to sell, development experts argued that these farmers and their land was not productive. Land and resources are only productive if they are seen to make a profit and create wealth. But clearly Third World farmers using the land to feed their families and villages is a productive and natural use of the land.

Shiva would argue that the Green Revolution is a perfect example of the dangers created by the dichotomies created by modern, industrial culture. With the use of Green Revolution technology to produce huge crop surpluses to sell, local farmers and villages experience increasing water and air pollution. The pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers threaten their wives, children, and communities health. Women experience higher rates of miscarriages, children suffer birth defects and learning disorders, and people begin to suffer and die from cancer. But despite all this, development experts argue that the Green Revolution is good because it creates wealth and profit. However, the wealth and profit comes at the expense of the environment, people's health, and the community's well-being. Why then do we still see the Green Revolution as such an important breakthrough? Because we don't value the health of the environment and our families and the well-being of our communities. If we did, we would not expose them to such risks for individual profit.

Finally, let's look at Shiva major example of our patriarchal culture: biotechnology. Since the mid-1980s, when the Courts ruled that companies could patent seeds and parts of a plant, global corporations have been searching throughout the world for diverse natural varieties of major crop plants such corn, wheat, rice, and sorghum. These companies send scientists out to collect sample of wild strains from Third World countries and Third World farmers. After collecting these wild varieties, company scientists take these seeds back to their lab and using biotechnology create new and improved "hybrid seeds." Having created these hybrid seeds, the global seed companies now want to patent them and force Third World farmers to pay to grow and plant their seeds. But why should Third World farmers pay to use many of the plant seeds and varieties that they have been growing and developing locally for hundreds of years? Shouldn't these seed companies pay Third World farmers a royalty on the plant varieties and seeds they originally took from Third World countries?

But global companies argue that the plant varieties and seeds had no value until their scientists manipulated them in the lab using biotechnology. The Third World farmer's and nature's contribution to the development of these seeds is completely discounted. But it goes further than this. Global companies are now patenting diverse characteristics of different plants, claiming that any one who grows one of these plants that has these characteristics must pay the global seed company royalties on their patents. What these companies are actually demanding the right to do is patent various genes in the major grain crops and use these patents to force farmers throughout the world to pay them royalties. Should farmers be forced to pay to grow plants that they have been growing naturally for hundreds of years. Can we really allow these companies to patent seeds and even genetic traits for plants?

Shiva argues that biotechnology and patenting seeds and genes is another example of First World colonialism. First World companies are trying to reap the rewards created by nature and farmers by claiming that only as a result of their "scientific" creation through biotechnology do these seeds have any value? This is another example of the refusal to recognize that the environment and the ability of the natural world to reproduce and support life has inherent value that we can't discount. Our refusal to recognize the value of the natural evolution of plants in a natural environment that selects traits on the basis of natural selection over long periods of times is another example of our ignorance about our place in the natural world.

Because women create live and bear children, because they are increasingly providing the food and resources for the families to survive as their husbands in developing Third World countries enter the labor market and work for wages, and because women are thus closer to the environment and the needs of their families, women better understand the true reality of human existence. Shiva concludes that we are a part of our environment, what we do to nature can and does affect us, that profit often comes at the expense of people's health and social well-being, and women and nature play a vital role in our societies. Third World women's increasing recognition of the contradictions created by our modern, industrial culture is causing them to create and join environmental and social movements aimed at improving the lives of their families and communities. Throughout the rest of her edited book, Close to Home, Vandana Shiva is going to highlight case-studies of women trying to improve their lives by protecting the environment and the welfare and well-being of their children and communities. She believes it is in movement like these that we will begin to address and solve the growing environmental problems facing the Third World.

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