Gender and environmental degradation

By Narendra Pai

This article is my reflections on Bina Agarwal’s The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India (Agarwal, 1992).

“What is women’s relationship with environment?”, opens the article, throwing up an essential question for the reader on the proximity of women and environment; and indeed, the distinct experience of environment. The author argues against the framework of an ecofeminism as broadly applied to non-generalizable third-world contexts by its western proponents. Ecofeminism, here, must be thought of as having four major features: (1) Important connections between domination and oppression of women and the domination and exploitation of nature. (2) Patriarchal thought regards nature to be inferior to culture and the close association of women and men to the two respectively. (3) Women have more stakes (therefore the onus) in ending the subjugation of nature (and subjugation of women, more primarily). (4) both the movements stand for an egalitarian, non-hierarchical systems. However, the author’s central critique rests on the constructs of ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘male’, ‘female’ and so on.

I particularly agree with this critical framing because to begin with, ecofeminism assumes a gender binary, privileges heteronormative narrative of social structures, marginalizing gender identities beyond the spectrum. This has an impact on scholarship, because as the author also argues, with respect to her alternate formulation, ‘feminist environmentalism’, privileging one gender over other (and in my opinion, considering a gender binary) in placing an unequal onus. In other words, this broad-brush views on gender and environment to non-generalizable contexts has led to a lack of knowledge on, say how Jogathis and Jogappas (transwoman devadasis of North Karnataka), interact with environment and degradation. Both frameworks of ecofeminism and indeed even feminist environmentalism lack in (but that battle for another time).

Premise of feminist environmentalism then becomes rooted in complex network of material realities of gender, caste, class, race and so on. For instance, tribal women have a higher degree of spatial knowledge of nature like species varieties, processes of natural regeneration, extent of non-damaging extraction of resources, patterns of shifting areas of nomadic cultivation etc., not because notions of likeness of femininity and nature, but because fuel and fodder fetching are the work of women. By extension, the same women also become repositories of these knowledge. The force of the argument is that, if a policy process fails to factor in these women, in say a context of an intervention framing, then not only would there be an overlap of external knowledge systems on preventing environment degradation that could be deterrent to the system, but also can cut off the access to livelihoods of these women.

What environmental degradation causes for an already skewed gender-power (and class/caste) dynamics is phenomenal. The indiscriminate use of water for during the period of Green Revolution, has led to consistent depleting levels of ground-water. The women are hit the worst by this (staying on with the gender-binary bias). Reports of “water-wives” of Maharashtra, suggest this perpetuation of inequitable system. The drinking water crisis in these areas have led men to have more than one wives just for the purpose of bringing water (Reuters, 2015). The author elaborates impacts of environment degradation on gender and class. The above example is consistent with the narrative of impact on personal time (and leisure, a capability Nusbaum considers central to human life (Nussbaum, 2011)). This has a cascading effect on the household income, nutrition, health (medicines being the biggest financial burden on a household expenditure (“How India spends on health,” 2017). All these factors have a policy imperative to structure schemes in such a way that they (a) do not impact women and environment adversely, (b) consider the specific relationships of men and women with their environment and factor for those in the interventions and (c)frame interventions in a transformational manner rather than welfares, that is, development, redistribution and ecology interact in mutually regenerative modes.

References

Agarwal, B. (1992). The gender and environment debate: lessons from India. Feminist Studies, 18(1), 119–158.

How India spends on health. (2017, December 11). Retrieved October 1, 2018, from https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-india-spends-on-health/story-CPyiZZ4jcI4imSKJq03jBM.html

Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities. Harvard University Press.

Reuters. (2015). Drought-hit Maharashtra village looks to “water wives” to quench thirst. Retrieved October 1, 2018, from https://www.reuters.com/article/india-waterwives-maharashtra/drought-hit-maharashtra-village-looks-to-water-wives-to-quench-thirst-idUSKBN0OK1CI20150604