Ecofeminism: Linking Environmental Sustainability with Gender Equality

The forests of Uttarakhand in the early 1970s witnessed an unusual form of protest. Village women wrapped their arms around tree trunks to stop contractors from felling them. This act of defiance, known as the Chipko movement, became a touchstone for a theoretical framework that would soon take shape across the world: ecofeminism. At its heart, ecofeminism argues that the destruction of forests, rivers, and soil is not a separate crisis from the subjugation of women. The two are products of the same mindset. Understanding this link helps us see why questions of climate, agriculture, and gender justice cannot be solved in isolation.

The core principles of ecofeminism 🔗

Ecofeminism emerged as a distinct school of thought in the 1970s when French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term in her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la Mort. She argued that the environmental crisis was inseparable from the oppression of women, both stemming from a patriarchal system that values control, profit, and domination. Since then, ecofeminist thinkers have refined this idea into a framework that examines how power structures simultaneously degrade nature and marginalise women.

The central claim is straightforward but powerful. Ecofeminists argue that hierarchical thinking grants power to men and enables the exploitation of both women and nature, particularly because the two have historically been associated with one another in cultural imagination. Nature is described as a “mother” to be tamed, while women are described as “natural” beings to be controlled. Both are treated as resources rather than agents.

Shared patterns of oppression 🔗

Three patterns illustrate this shared oppression. First, there is objectification, where both women and the natural world are reduced to objects valued for what they produce rather than for what they are. Second, there is the logic of domination, a way of thinking that ranks humans above nature and men above women, justifying control over those placed lower in the hierarchy. Third, there is invisibility, where the labour of women in caring for households and ecosystems is treated as unpaid, unimportant background work.

This framework helps explain a striking statistic: in climate-related disasters, women are far more likely to perish than men. The reason is not biological but structural. Women in many regions are tied to local resources like water, fuelwood, and food crops. When floods, droughts, or deforestation strike, they bear the brunt because their daily lives depend most directly on a healthy environment.

Cultural and radical strands 🔗

Within ecofeminism, scholars have developed different branches. Cultural ecofeminism celebrates qualities traditionally associated with women, such as care, nurturing, and cooperation, and treats them as ecological wisdom. Radical ecofeminism focuses on dismantling the patriarchal systems that exploit both women and the earth. Socialist and materialist ecofeminists, meanwhile, root the analysis in economic structures, arguing that capitalism turns both women’s labour and nature into resources to be extracted cheaply.

Vandana Shiva and the case for traditional knowledge 🔗

No discussion of ecofeminism is complete without Vandana Shiva, the physicist-turned-activist who has shaped the movement’s voice from the Global South. Born in Dehradun in 1952, Shiva trained as a physicist before turning her attention to the ecological costs of the Green Revolution and industrial agriculture. Shiva has argued that a more sustainable and productive approach to agriculture can be achieved by reinstating farming systems centred on engaging women, a position she has championed for decades.

Her landmark book, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India, published in 1988, made the case that women in subsistence economies hold knowledge essential to ecological survival. They know which seeds suit which soil, how to rotate crops to keep land fertile, how to manage water during dry months, and how to use forest produce without depleting it. This knowledge is not written down in textbooks. It is passed across generations through practice.

Seeds, biodiversity, and the Navdanya project 🔗

Shiva translated her ideas into action by founding Navdanya in 1991, a network dedicated to seed sovereignty, organic farming, and biodiversity conservation. The project responded to a crisis: monoculture-based agriculture yields enormous supplies of dominant crops but depletes soil nutrients and poses significant risks to biodiversity. By contrast, traditional women farmers cultivated a wide variety of crops together, mixing trees, vegetables, and livestock in ways that maintained ecological balance.

For Shiva, this is not nostalgia. It is a scientific argument. Women’s traditional methods, she contends, produce greater nutritional output per acre, conserve water, and protect against crop failure. When multinational corporations patent indigenous seeds, they appropriate the work of generations of women farmers and transfer control over food systems to distant boardrooms. Her critique extends to modern science as a western, patriarchal, and colonial project that treats women and nature as resources to be dominated.

The Chipko inspiration 🔗

Shiva’s thinking was deeply shaped by the Chipko movement. The protests that began in Mandal village in 1973 saw rural women confront loggers by hugging trees they depended on for fuel, fodder, fruit, and water retention. The movement was not just about saving forests. It was about defending livelihoods that the state’s commercial forestry policy had ignored. Chipko, the Green Belt movement in Kenya, and similar grassroots actions collectively shaped the central philosophy of ecofeminism, that the protection of nature and the recognition of women’s agency must go together.

Criticisms of ecofeminism 🔗

Despite its insights, ecofeminism has faced sharp criticism from within feminist scholarship. The most influential objection is that it risks essentialism, the idea that women have an innate or biological connection with nature. The biggest criticism of ecofeminism comes back to the idea of essentialism, the belief that women and nature share set characteristics that bind them together.

The essentialism problem 🔗

If women are described as naturally nurturing, intuitive, and closer to the earth, the argument goes, this echoes the very stereotypes patriarchy has used to confine them. Saying that women are uniquely suited to environmental care can quietly imply that men are not, which lets men off the hook for ecological responsibility. It can also reinforce the idea that caregiving is women’s work, justifying unpaid labour in homes and farms while men move into paid public roles.

Janet Biehl, Chris Cuomo, and Melissa Leach have all argued that romanticising the woman-nature link is politically dangerous. Leach went further, suggesting that this framing has been used in international development programmes to extract cheap conservation labour from women under the assumption that they will care for the environment out of natural inclination.

Bina Agarwal’s feminist environmentalism 🔗

One of the most rigorous critiques comes from Indian economist Bina Agarwal. She does not deny the link between women and the environment in countries like India, but she insists it is socially constructed, not biological. Agarwal points out that ecofeminism tends to homogenise women’s experiences and fails to account for the complex intersection of gender with class, caste, and race.

In her framework, called feminist environmentalism, women’s closer connection to nature in rural areas is a result of gendered divisions of labour. They are the ones tasked with fetching water, gathering firewood, and managing kitchen gardens. When forests shrink or rivers dry up, their work expands. Their knowledge of the environment is real, but it comes from necessity and assigned roles, not from any mystical bond. To frame it otherwise risks freezing them in those roles.

Caste and class blind spots 🔗

Critics have also pointed out that early ecofeminist writing, especially Shiva’s, did not adequately engage with caste. The experience of a Dalit woman farm labourer is structured differently from that of a landowning upper-caste woman, even if both are described as “women in nature”. Treating all women as a single category obscures these power differences. A more honest analysis would ask not just how patriarchy and capitalism damage women and nature together, but how caste, class, religion, and indigenous identity shape who suffers most and who has the resources to resist.

Why ecofeminism still matters 🔗

None of these criticisms cancel ecofeminism. They refine it. The core insight remains valid: environmental policy that ignores gender will miss most of the people doing the work of feeding, watering, and warming households. Patriarchal attitudes are the common root behind both environmental destruction and the exploitation of women, and addressing one without the other tends to fail.

Contemporary ecofeminists, particularly those in the Global South, have moved beyond the early essentialist framing. They focus instead on questions of land rights, seed sovereignty, climate justice, and the recognition of indigenous knowledge. They ask why women still own only a small fraction of agricultural land despite doing most of the farm work, why climate adaptation funds rarely reach rural women, and why traditional ecological knowledge is dismissed as folklore until a corporation finds a way to patent it.

Ecofeminism, in its sharper contemporary form, is less about claiming that women are closer to nature and more about exposing how systems of power decide whose knowledge counts, whose labour is paid, and whose lives can be sacrificed for somebody else’s development.

What do you think? Do you see the connection between gender inequality and environmental degradation in your own surroundings, perhaps in how household water or cooking fuel is managed? And how can we honour women’s environmental knowledge without trapping them in the role of permanent caretakers?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ecofeminism
2. https://theleaflet.org/home-1/ecofeminist-framework
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva
4. https://impakter.com/what-is-ecofeminism-3-key-takeaways-from-vandana-shivas-activism/
5. https://www.creativeflight.in/2025/05/ecofeminist-perspective-struggle-to.html
6. https://feminisminindia.com/2019/10/29/is-ecofeminism-relevant-today/
7. https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/ecofeminism-history-and-principles
8. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/beyond-essentialism-redefining-the-gender-environment-nexus
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12381554/