Ecofeminism: Connecting Environmental Justice with Gender Equality

What does the destruction of a forest in the Himalayas have to do with the oppression of women in the Global South? What connects industrial pollution to gender inequality? For decades, a body of thought called ecofeminism has been answering precisely these questions – and its answers are more relevant today than ever. Ecofeminism argues that the domination of nature and the domination of women are not separate problems. They share the same ideological roots, and they cannot be solved independently of each other.

What is ecofeminism? 🔗

Ecofeminism is a branch of feminist theory and political philosophy that examines the connections between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of the natural world. It holds that both forms of domination arise from the same source: a patriarchal worldview that assigns value to some lives and dismisses others, treating women and nature alike as resources to be controlled, used, and discarded.

The term itself was born in France. In 1974, the French feminist author and activist Françoise d’Eaubonne published Le Féminisme ou la Mort – translated as Feminism or Death – in which she coined the word éco-féminisme. D’Eaubonne argued that the same forces oppressing women also caused ecological destruction, and that dismantling patriarchy was not just a feminist imperative but an ecological one. Her framing was stark: without a fundamental restructuring of gender relations and our relationship with the planet, both would perish.

D’Eaubonne’s intellectual background was shaped by socialist politics, anti-colonial thought, and a growing alarm about environmental destruction. She drew on the early environmental warnings of her era – nuclear power expansion, pollution, deforestation – and saw in all of them the same “male society” logic: accumulate, dominate, extract. She determined that an interlinked subordination of women and the earth, developing throughout history, lay at the root of both the environmental crisis and women’s systemic oppression worldwide.

How the movement grew 🔗

D’Eaubonne’s ideas gained traction slowly in France but found fertile ground in the United States by the 1980s. The modern ecofeminist movement developed out of a series of conferences held by academic and professional women in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where they explored how feminism and environmentalism could be combined to challenge the shared roots of gender and ecological oppression. Key theological voices like Rosemary Radford Ruether argued that women’s liberation was inseparable from the liberation of the natural world. Feminist theorist Ynestra King helped popularize the term further in 1987 through a landmark article in The Nation titled “What Is Ecofeminism?” – challenging Americans to examine how their belief systems allowed for the exploitation of both the earth and women.

Influential texts from this period – including Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980), Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature (1978), and later Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988) – helped build a canon of ecofeminist scholarship that spanned philosophy, history, and activist practice. As a critical subfield within feminist theory and environmental theory, ecofeminism rose to prominence through the interconnected analysis of gender, race, class, nationhood, and ecology.

The link between women and nature 🔗

At the heart of ecofeminism is a recognition of how patriarchal societies have historically linked women with nature – and then used that association to justify the subjugation of both. The parallel is not accidental. Women and nature were often depicted as chaotic, irrational, and in need of control, while men were characterized as rational and capable of directing the development of both. This framing created a hierarchical structure that granted power to men and legitimized the exploitation of everything identified as “feminine” – the body, the land, the ecosystem.

Ecofeminists point to a deeply embedded series of binary oppositions that reinforce this hierarchy: male/female, culture/nature, mind/body, reason/emotion, human/animal. In each pairing, the first term is elevated, and the second is devalued. These binaries are used in social judgements of value and non-value, coding women and the natural world as inferior and controllable. From this logic flows everything from the exploitation of female labor to the clearance of old-growth forests.

The material reality: who bears the burden 🔗

The connection between gender and environmental degradation is not only symbolic – it is material and immediate. Women in rural areas, Indigenous communities, and the Global South are disproportionately affected when ecosystems collapse. In many parts of the world, women are the primary gatherers of water, firewood, and food. When rivers dry up or forests are felled, the burden falls first and hardest on them. Women are 14 times more likely to die from a climate-related disaster than men, and research consistently shows they suffer more acutely from resource depletion and the consequent poverty it produces.

The India-based Chipko movement offers one of the most cited illustrations of this reality. In 1973, a group of women from Mandal village in the Himalayas literally embraced trees to prevent loggers from felling them, led by activist Gaura Devi. The women’s dependence on the forest for their daily lives and livelihoods made them acutely aware of what its destruction would mean. Their action was not abstract environmental activism – it was a fight for survival. Vandana Shiva, who has documented the movement extensively, sees in Chipko a powerful example of how women’s material relationship with nature positions them as both the most vulnerable to environmental destruction and the most motivated to resist it.

Key issues in ecofeminism: critiques of industrialization and technology 🔗

Ecofeminism does not limit itself to describing oppression. It offers a systematic critique of the systems that produce it – most centrally, patriarchal capitalism, industrialization, and Western models of technological progress.

Industrialization and the double burden 🔗

Ecofeminists view patriarchy as responsible for systems of production and consumption that treat nature as a commodity to be used and discarded. Industrial capitalism is understood not as a neutral economic system but as an expression of patriarchal logic: it prioritizes extraction, accumulation, and growth while externalizing the costs onto the bodies and communities least able to resist. Women – particularly in the Global South – routinely bear a double burden in this system. They occupy the lowest-paid and most hazardous positions in industrial sectors like garment manufacturing, agriculture, and mining, while also living with the environmental damage these industries produce in their communities.

Indian physicist and ecofeminist scholar Vandana Shiva is among the most prominent voices making this argument on a global scale. Shiva argued that Third World development projects promoting industrialization on the Western model enriched their Western sponsors while doing little to alleviate local poverty – and worse, replaced indigenous ecological practices with large-scale environmental degradation. In her analysis, development is not progress but a continuation of colonial domination by other means.

Technology, reproduction, and control 🔗

Ecofeminists extend their critique of industrialization to the domain of technology, including reproductive technology. Language and conceptual frameworks play a key role in shaping how women, animals, and nature are understood – and technology is another arena in which patriarchal frameworks impose control. Shiva and German sociologist Maria Mies, co-authors of the foundational 1993 text Ecofeminism, argued that biotechnology and reproductive engineering further the same logic of domination: reducing living organisms – including women’s bodies – to raw material for industrial and commercial purposes.

Their critique of seed patents and GMO agriculture makes the same point at the level of agriculture. Shiva argued that purchased seeds displace women from decision-making and custodianship, transforming them into unskilled labor in agricultural systems that once centered their knowledge and agency. The privatization of seed – treating biodiversity itself as corporate property – is, in the ecofeminist reading, both an ecological and a gendered act of violence.

The patriarchal dualisms behind science and progress 🔗

Ecofeminism also critiques the philosophical foundations of modern Western science, which developed alongside a worldview that positioned nature as an object to be mastered. The patriarchal-capitalist structure combines binary and hierarchical thinking – man/woman, human/nature – with the capitalist logic of wealth accumulation at the lowest possible cost. In this framework, anything coded as “other” – women, nature, Indigenous communities, the poor – becomes exploitable. Ecofeminism challenges this framework not by inverting the hierarchy but by rejecting hierarchical logic altogether.

The role of ecofeminism in contemporary movements 🔗

Ecofeminism has evolved considerably since d’Eaubonne coined the term fifty years ago. Today, it informs and intersects with a wide range of movements – climate justice, Indigenous rights, food sovereignty, and intersectional feminism – even when those movements do not always use the ecofeminist label explicitly.

Climate justice and gendered impacts 🔗

The climate justice movement has increasingly adopted the insight that environmental harms are not distributed equally – they fall along the same lines of gender, race, and class that structure all other forms of inequality. Studies show that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women, and across the Global South, it is women who absorb the shocks of drought, flooding, and food insecurity most directly. This is not biological inevitability; it is the result of structural inequality – gender norms that restrict women’s mobility, limit their access to resources, and exclude them from the decision-making processes that shape climate policy.

Activists like Dominique Palmer, who organizes with Fridays for Future and the UN Women Feminist Coalition for Climate Justice, describe ecofeminism as “both political activism and an intellectual critique” that links feminist struggle to the fight against climate breakdown. For Palmer, the patriarchal, extractive system that prioritizes profits over the planet is the same system that marginalizes women and communities of color. Dismantling one requires dismantling the other.

Indigenous women and environmental defense 🔗

Across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Indigenous women are at the forefront of environmental defense – not as an ideological choice, but because their lives and cultures depend directly on the health of local ecosystems. Their struggles against extractive industries, land dispossession, and deforestation have become central to global environmental justice campaigns. Educating and empowering women has a quantifiable effect on reducing a country’s emissions, and actively involving women in climate policy discussions leads to more impactful outcomes. Research shows that when women are included in environmental governance, the results are better – both for ecosystems and for communities.

In Kenya, the work of the late Wangari Maathai – founder of the Green Belt Movement, which mobilized rural women to plant millions of trees – became a landmark example of what ecofeminist practice looks like on the ground. Maathai understood that deforestation and women’s disempowerment were entangled problems that required a single integrated response. Her work earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Ecofeminism, intersectionality, and evolving debates 🔗

Contemporary ecofeminism has also grappled with significant internal critiques. Early versions of the theory were criticized for being too focused on the experiences of white, Western women and for sometimes suggesting an essentialist view – that women are inherently closer to nature. Critics like social ecologist Janet Biehl argued this risked reinforcing the very stereotypes ecofeminism sought to dismantle. By the 1990s, environmental justice emerged as a complementary framework – one that addressed race and class more explicitly and brought in voices from communities most directly affected by environmental harm.

Today, many ecofeminist thinkers work explicitly within an intersectional framework – one that recognizes how gender, race, class, colonialism, and sexuality all shape who is harmed by environmental destruction and who holds power over it. A growing number of ecofeminists approach gender as a social construct, rejecting the idea that women are inherently closer to nature – since that framing is itself part of the patriarchal logic that subjects both women and nature to exploitation. What ecofeminism offers, at its best, is not a fixed ideology but a critical lens: a way of seeing how systems of domination connect, and why they must be challenged together.

Ecofeminism and policy 🔗

The ecofeminist framework also has direct policy implications. When women are represented in environmental governance and decision-making, outcomes improve – both in terms of biodiversity protection and community resilience. Studies show that elevating women in legislative fields yields better outcomes in environmental policymaking and more coherent efforts in international environmental cooperation. Despite this, women remain underrepresented in global climate negotiations. COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, where world leaders gathered to advance the Paris Agreement commitments, was male-dominated and failed to accurately represent those doing the most to fight climate change on the ground.

For ecofeminists, this is not merely a symbolic problem. It is structural: the same systems that exclude women from power also produce the environmental crises they then must absorb. Real progress on both fronts – gender equality and environmental sustainability – requires changing who makes decisions, not just what decisions are made.

Why ecofeminism still matters 🔗

Ecofeminism began as an academic framework but it has always been grounded in material reality – in the lives of women who carry water for miles because industrial projects contaminated their wells, in forest communities that lost their land to export agriculture, in workers poisoned by the industries that also impoverish them. D’Eaubonne’s synthesis – that the exploitation of nature by man and the exploitation of woman by man share a common foundation – remains a first milestone of ecofeminist theory, and one that later thinkers have expanded, complicated, and deepened.

What the framework offers is a refusal of fragmentation. It insists that we cannot solve the climate crisis without addressing gender inequality, and that we cannot achieve gender justice in a world whose ecology is collapsing. The two struggles are not parallel – they are the same struggle, fought on different terrains. As ecofeminist author Rosemary Radford Ruether has argued, only by coordinating these efforts will we be able to eradicate gender inequality and encounter a real solution to the ecological crisis. In a moment of intensifying climate breakdown, that insight is not just intellectually compelling – it is urgently practical.

What do you think? If the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature truly share the same roots, does solving one necessarily require solving the other – or can meaningful progress happen on either front independently? And given that women disproportionately bear the costs of environmental destruction, how should that reality shape who is included in climate policymaking at the global level?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ecofeminism
2. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/deaubonne-coins-term-ecofeminism
3. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/5288-what-ecofeminist-francoise-d-eaubonne-can-teach-us-in-the-face-of-the-climate-emergency
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/ecofeminism
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofeminism
6. https://earth.org/ecofeminism/
7. https://www.tni.org/en/podcast/ecofeminism-1-a-powerful-vision
8. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-environmental/
9. https://www.scripted.com/writing-samples/examing-ecofeminism-why-vandana-shiva-links-women-and-earth
10. https://www.dejusticia.org/en/column/two-fights-in-one-feminism-and-environmentalism/
11. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/ecofeminist-issues-activists-examples/
12. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/5289-meet-the-french-feminist-behind-the-theory-of-ecofeminism