women histories, incest sexual abuse. institutionalized. But what if ...

GENESIS II: ,, ,
An Ecoieminist neclama
by Lynn Wenzel
Afew years ago, the New York Times reported that 100
million women are "missing" worldwide: victims of
infanticide, starvation, murder, lack of health care,
or simple disinterest. Recently, I read that the Clinton
Administration had approved oil drilling on the site of
Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah, established
last year as a "protected" wilderness. The future of this
pristine area now involves roads and pipelines, ballfieldsize
drilling pads, and concoctions of toxic drilling mud
overflowing into plant and animal habitats. Do we merely
read this over morning coffee and go about our own
business? Do we wait to act until our children
spend their summers indoors because of
smog alerts? Do we wait until we discover
that the houses we live in were built
over toxic dumping sites? Do we wait
until nuclear waste is spilled during
its transportation, contaminating thousands of square
miles? Or is this the morning we finally say we've had
enough?
Ecofeminists say "no more waiting." We are in a
state of emergency and must do something about it now.
Many threads of thought make up the ecofeminist quilt.
Cathleen and Colleen McGuire, founding members of the
early-1990s grassroots group Ecofeminist Visions
Emerging (EVE), call today's ecofeminism a "meta-feminism,"
that includes analysis of prepatriarchal history, an
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embracing of spirituality that validates female divinity,
and a commitment to challenging all forms of oppression
born of patriarchy. Ecofeminists see the current system, in
existence for four to five thousand years—less than two
percent of the time humans have existed on the earth—as
an aberration rather than a normal state of affairs. Monica
Sjoo and Barbara Mor, authors of The Great Cosmic
Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, call it
"just a brief forgetting." Now, ecofeminists are
remembering, and drawing on those memories
as they seek to recreate a sense of a world where
nature and humans are symbiotic, our fates
inseparable, as indeed they are.
Nature on the Rack
Modern scientific and technological revolutions
split a unified world into dualities. This
world view split mind from body, spirit from matter (from
the Latin mater, for mother), male from female, humans
from nature (from the Latin nasci, meaning "to be born"). A
hierarchy of value was arranged in the following order:
God-Men-Women-Children-Animals-Plants-Nature. This
ideology was also used to justify the inferiority of black
races (more animal) as well as the enslavement of "childlike"
cultures. All of us who have been raised in this tradition,
says feminist theologian and environmentalist
Elizabeth Dodson Gray, have been socialized into this way