—1976 conversation about feminism and vegetarianism
Ecofeminism identifies a series of dualisms: culture/nature; male/female; self/other; white/nonwhite; rationality/emotion. Some include humans/animals in this series. According to ecofeminist theory, nature has been dominated by culture; female has been dominated by male; people of color have been dominated by white people; emotion has been dominated by rationality; animals . . .
Where are animals in ecofeminist theory and practice?
I maintain that contemporary ecofeminist discourse, while potentially adequate to deal with the issue of animals, is now inadequate because it fails to give consistent conceptual place to the domination of animals as a significant aspect of the domination of nature.1 I will examine seven answers ecofeminists could give for not including animals explicitly in ecofeminist analyses and show how a persistent patriarchal ideology regarding animals as instruments has kept the experience of animals from being fully incorporated within ecofeminism. I will defend these claims by appealing, in part, to interviews I conducted in 1976 of more than seventy vegetarian members of the Cambridge-Boston women’s community.2 These interviews are intended to provide direct testimony to the fact that ecofeminism’s theoretical potential, as well as its history, is clearly on the side of animals. They also attest to the importance of first-person narrative in (eco)feminist theory building.
Animals are a part of nature. Ecofeminism posits that the domination of the rest of nature is linked to the domination of women and that both dominations must be eradicated. If animals are a part of nature, then why are they not intrinsically a part of ecofeminist analysis and their freedom from being instruments of humans an integral part of ecofeminist theory? Seven answers suggest themselves. I discuss each in turn.
1. Ecofeminism Explicitly Challenges the Domination of Animals
A strong case can be made for the fact that ecofeminism confronts the issue of animals’ exploitation and incorporates it into a larger critique of the maltreatment of the natural world. Consider the “Nature” issue of Woman of Power: A Magazine of Feminism, Spirituality, and Politics published in 1988. In it we find articles on animal defense; guidelines for raising children as vegetarians; a feminist critique of the notion of animal “rights” that argues that the best way to help animals is by adopting broad ecofeminist values; an interview with the coordinator of a grassroots animal defense organization; and Alice Walker’s moving description of what it means for a human animal to perceive the personhood of a nonhuman animal.3 In addition to these articles, a resource section lists companies to boycott because they test their products on animals, identifies cruelty-free products, and gives the names and addresses of organizations that are vegetarian, antifur, antivivisection, and multi–issue animal advocacy groups. The resource list implicitly announces that praxis is an important aspect of ecofeminism.
Or consider one of the earliest anthologies on ecofeminism and two of the latest. Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, published in 1983 contains essays that speak to some of the major forms of environmental degradation, such as women’s health, chemical plants, the nuclear age and public health, black ghetto ecology, greening the cities, and the Indian tree-hugging movement known as Chipko Andolan. The anthology also includes an essay on the exploitation of animals.4 A more recent anthology, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism published in 1990, contains an essay proposing that “ritual and religion themselves might have been brought to birth by the necessity of propitiation for the killing of animals,”5 as well as Marti Kheel’s essay that explores the way hunting uses animals as instruments of human male self-definition.6 This was followed in 1993 by an anthology that placed animals central to ecofeminist theory: Greta Gaard’s Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. 7
Still other signs of ecofeminism’s commitment to animals—as beings who ought not to be used as instruments—can be found. Greta Gaard identifies vegetarianism as one of the qualities of ecofeminist praxis, along with antimilitarism, sustainable agriculture, holistic health practices, and maintaining diversity.8 Ecofeminists carried a banner at the 1990 March for the Animals in Washington, DC. Ecofeminist caucuses within feminist organizations have begun to articulate the issue of animal defense as an essential aspect of their program. The Ecofeminist Task Force of the National Women’s Studies Association recommended at the 1990 NWSA meeting that the Coordinating Council adopt a policy that no animal products be served at any future conferences, citing ecological, health, and humane issues. Whether or not all ecofeminists should be vegans is considered one of the current controversies within ecofeminism.9
Such ecofeminist attention to praxis involving the well-being of animals ought not to be surprising. Ecofeminism’s roots in this country can be traced to feminist-vegetarian communities. Charlene Spretnak identifies three ways the radical feminist communities of the mid-1970s came to ecofeminism: through study of political theory and history, through exposure to nature-based religion, especially Goddess religion, and from environmentalism.10 A good example of these communities is the Cambridge-Boston women’s com munity. One of the initial ecofeminist texts—Francoise d’Eaubonne’s 1974 book Le féminisme ou la mort—was introduced that year to scores of feminists who took Mary Daly’s feminist ethics class at Boston College. That same year, Sheila Collin’s A Different Heaven and Earth appeared and was discussed with interest in this community. Collins saw “racism, sexism, class exploitation, and ecological destruction” as “interlocking pillars upon which the structure of patriarchy rests.”11 In 1975, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s New Woman/New Earth was also greeted with excitement. Ruether linked the ecological crisis with the status of women, arguing that the demands of the women’s movement must be united with the ecological movement. The genesis of the two book-length ecofeminist texts that link women and animals can be traced to this community during those years and its association with Daly.12
Interviews with members of the Cambridge-Boston women’s community reveal a prototypical ecofeminism that locates animals within its analysis. As one feminist said: “Animals and the earth and women have all been objectified and treated in the same way.” Another explained she was “beginning to bond with the earth as a sister and with animals as subjects not to be objectified.”
At a conceptual level, this feminist-vegetarian connection can be seen as arising within an ecofeminist framework. To apprehend this, consider Karen J. Warren’s four minimal conditions of ecofeminism.13 Appeal to them indicates a vegetarian application articulated by these activist ecofeminists in 1976 and still viable in the 1990s.
Ecofeminism argues that important connections exist between the domination of women and the domination of nature. The women I interviewed perceived animals to be a part of that dominated nature and saw a similarity in the status of women and animals as subject to the authority or control of another, i.e., as subordinate:
Look at the way women have been treated. We’ve been completely controlled, raped, not given any credibility, not taken seriously. It’s the same thing with animals. We’ve completely mutilated them, domesticated them. Their cycles, their entire beings are conformed to humans’ needs. That’s what men have done to women and the earth.
Since ecofeminism is distinguished by whether it arises from socialist feminism, radical feminism, or spiritual feminism, many of the ecofeminists of 1976 identified themselves within these classifications as they extended them to include animals. Socialist feminists linked corpse eating with capitalist forms of production and the classist nature of corpse consumption; spiritual feminists emphasized the association of goddess worship, a belief in a matriarchy, harmony with the environment, and gentleness toward animals; radical feminists associated women’s oppression and animals’ oppression, and some held the position of nature feminists who valorize women’s nature and see women as naturally more sensitive to animals.
The second of Warren’s conditions of ecofeminism is that we m
ust understand the connections between the oppression of women and the oppression of nature. To do so we must critique “the sort of thinking which sanctions the oppression,”14 what Warren identifies as patriarchal thinking allegedly justified by a logic of domination according to which “superiority justifies subordination.”15 The women I interviewed rejected a logic of domination that justifies killing animals: “A truly gynocentric way of being is being in harmony with the earth, and in harmony with your body, and obviously it doesn’t include killing animals.”
The testimonies of the women I interviewed offer an opportunity to develop a radical feminist epistemology by which the intuitive and experiential provide an important source of information or knowledge that serves to challenge the distortions of patriarchal ideology. Many women discussed trusting their body and learning from their body. They saw vegetarianism as “another extension of looking in and finding out who I really am and what I like.” From this a process of identification with animals arose. Identification means that relationships with animals are redefined; they are no longer instruments, means to our ends, but persons who deserve to continue living and toward whom we act respectfully if not out of friendship.16
Feminists realize what it’s like to be exploited. Women as sex objects, animals as food. Women turned into patriarchal mothers, cows turned to milk machines. It’s the same thing. I think that innately women aren’t cannibals. I don’t eat flesh for the same reason that I don’t eat steel. It’s not in my consciousness anymore that it could be eaten. For the same reason that when I’m hungry I don’t start chomping on my own hand.
Another described the process of identification this way:
The objectifying of women, the metaphors of women as pieces of meat, here’s this object to be exploited in a way. I resent that. I identify it with ways that especially beef and chickens also are really exploited. The way they stuff them and ruin their bodies all so that they can sell them on the capitalist market. That is disturbing to me in the same way that I feel that I am exploited.
From this process of identification with animals’ experiences as instruments arises an ecofeminist argument on behalf of animals: it is not simply that we participate in a value hierarchy in which we place humans over animals and that we must now accede rights to animals, but that we have failed to understand what it means to be a person—the insight that propelled Alice Walker some years later to describe her recognition of an other-than-human animal’s personhood. Becoming a vegetarian after recognizing and identifying with the personhood of animals is a common occurrence described by Walker in her essays and by this woman in 1976: “When I thought that this was an animal who lived and walked and met the day, and had water come into his eyes, and could make attachments and had affections and had dislikes, it disgusted me to think of slaughtering that animal and cooking it and eating it.” As women described animals, they recognized them as ends in themselves rather than simply as means to others’ ends.
The third ecofeminist claim Karen Warren identifies is that feminist theory and practice must include an ecological perspective. Ecofeminism reflects a praxis-based ethics: one’s actions reveal one’s beliefs. If you believe women are subordinated you will work for our liberation; if you recognize that the rest of nature is dominated you will judge personal behavior according to its potential exploitation of nature. In this regard, Frances Moore Lappé’s powerful book Diet for a Small Planet had had a profound effect on numerous feminists I interviewed because it provided an understanding of the environmental costs of eating animals. One stated: “When I was doing my paper on ecology and feminism, the idea of women as earth, that men have exploited the earth just like they’ve exploited women and by eating meat you are exploiting earth and to be a feminist means not to accept the ethics of exploitation.” What she recognizes is that ecofeminists must address the fact that this flesh-advocating culture has successfully separated the consequences of eating animals from the experience of eating animals.17
2. The Environmental Consequences of Eating Animals
One of ecofeminism’s attributes is its concern with the consequences of the domination of the earth. It recognizes that the patriarchal philosophy that links women and nature has measurable, negative effects that must be identified and addressed. When we consider the consequences of corpse production—and the way by which each corpse eater is implicated in these consequences—ecofeminism faces the necessity of taking sides: will it choose the ecocide and environmental disaster associated with eating animals or the environmental wisdom of vegetarianism?18
The Costs to the Environment of a Flesh Diet
The relationship between corpse eating and environmental disaster is measurable.19 In fact, advocates for a vegetarian diet have created images that translate the environmental profligacy of corpse production to the level of the individual consumer: the average amount of water required daily to feed a person following a vegan diet is 300 gallons;20 the average amount of water required daily to feed a person following an ovo-lacto-vegetarian diet is 1,200 gallons; but the average amount of water required daily to feed a person following the standard US corpse-based diet is 4,200 gallons. The same land that can be used to produce flesh for 250 days would provide sustenance for 2,200 days if cultivated with soybeans. Half of all water consumed in the United States is used in the crops fed to livestock, “and increasingly that water is drawn from underground lakes, some of which are not significantly renewed by rainfall.”21
Animal agriculture is the major industrial polluter in the U.S. Feedlots and slaughterhouses are responsible for more of the country’s water pollution than all other industries and households combined. More than 50 percent of water pollution can be linked to wastes from the livestock industry (including manure, eroded soil, and synthetic pesticides and fertilizers). A pound of animal flesh means that one hundred pounds of livestock manure had to be disposed of, often in our waterways. Slaughterhouse waste—fat, carcass waste, fecal matter—is several hundred times more concentrated than raw waste, yet it is dumped into our rivers at the rate of more than two tons an hour. It is estimated that 125 tons of waste are produced every second by animals raised for human consumption; more than half of this waste is not recycled. “American livestock contribute five times more harmful organic waste to water pollution than do people, and twice that of industry.”22 Agricultural crops—more than half of which are harvested to produce livestock feed—are the source of most of the pollutants such as pesticides, nutrients, leachates, and sediment that plague our water resources.
Besides depleting water supplies, corpse production places demands on energy sources: the five hundred calories of food energy from one pound of steak requires twenty thousand calories of fossil fuel. Between forty to sixty percent of the United States’ imported oil requirements would be cut if the U. S. population switched to a vegetarian diet.23
Millions of acres are deforested to convert land to grazing and croplands to feed farm animals. Then overgrazing or intensive cultivation causes these lands to become desert. Cattle are responsible for 85 percent of topsoil erosion—the loss of the organic soil layer that provides plants with nutrients and moisture. Because of conversion of land to feed animals, wildlife are losing their habitats and are often crushed or wounded during the clearing operations. Beef consumption accounts for about 5 to 10 percent of the human contribution to the greenhouse effect. Among the reasons that water, soil, and air are damaged by corpse production are the hidden aspects of raising animals for food. Before we can eat animals, they must eat and live and drink water and defecate (and even burp).24 Producing the crops to feed animals taxes the natural world. Frances Moore Lappé reports that “the value of raw material consumed to produce food from livestock is greater than the value of all oil, gas, and coal consumed in this country. . . . One-third of the value of all raw materials consumed for all purposes in the United States is consumed in livestock foods.”25 Eighty-seven percent of US agricultural land is used for livestock
production (including pasture, rangeland, and cropland).
Uniting Consumption, Maintenance, and Production
Not only is the analysis of consequences an important aspect of ecofeminist thought, but for ecofeminists a failure to consider consequences is one of the results of the dualisms that characterize patriarchal culture: consumption is experienced separately from production, and production is valued over maintenance. By this I mean that as a result of the fetishization of commodities associated with capitalist production, we see consumption as an end in itself, and we do not consider what have been the means to that end: eating (a dead) chicken at a fast-food restaurant is disassociated from the experience of the black women “lung gunners”26 and the experience of the slaughtered chickens; both groups instead are means to the end of consumption, but because consumption has been disembodied, their oppressions as worker and consumable body are invisible. This disembodied production of a tangible product is viewed as a positive indication of the economy, but maintenance—those actions necessary to sustain the environment—is neither measured no r valued. Currently, maintenance of domestic space or environmental space is not calculated in economic terms—housework is not calculated in the gross national product in the United States, nor are the environmental resources we value.27 We do not measure the negative environmental effects of raising animals to be our food, such as the costs to topsoil and groundwater. Maintenance of resources is sacrificed to corpse production.
An ethic that links maintenance with production, that refuses to disembody the commodity produced from the costs of such production, would identify the loss of topsoil, water, and the demands on fossil fuels that corpse production requires and factor the costs of maintaining these aspects of the natural world into the end product, the corpse. It would not enforce a split between maintenance and production. The cheapness of a diet based on grain-fed terminal animals exists because it does not include the cost of depleting the environment. Not only does the cost of flesh not include the loss of topsoil, the pollution of water, and other environmental effects, but price supports of the dairy and flesh industries mean that the US government actively prevents the price of eating animals from being reflected in the commodity of flesh. My tax money regrettably subsidizes war, but it also regrettably subsidizes the eating of animals. For instance, the estimated costs of subsidizing the flesh industry with water in California alone is $26 billion annually.28 If water used by the flesh industry were not subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, “hamburger” would cost thirty-five dollars per pound and “beefsteak” would be eighty-nine dollars.
Neither Man nor Beast Page 13
