Climate change is not a feminist issue

Western eco-feminism that blames men for environmental destruction and women for overpopulation is misguided

Elizabeth Kirkwood
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 November 2009 15.00 GMT
It's tempting to suggest that climate change, and in particular the question of population control, is a feminist issue. For starters it allows us to put a clear culprit in the dock: find the right stats and hey presto: "Men are all bastards and their irresponsible actions are destroying the planet."
Mary Fitzgerald recently argued that population control is at heart a feminist issue because, if women across the globe (and particularly those in "developing" nations) are given the right to control their bodies via universal birth control, this will halt the potentially disastrous upward curve of the birth rate. Alex Renton has also urged that "population reduction is best achieved by ensuring women's equality and improving their education, while providing cheap and effective birth control."
All this talk of "female education" in the name of feminism pinging round the blogosphere in the run-up to Copenhagen is making me twitchy. I've no qualm with the two threads of Renton's argument when contended independently, but there is an intrinsic risk in compounding them under an "eco-feminist umbrella". Why, when it comes to birth control, is the onus still exclusively placed on female education, and not male education?
One obvious danger lies in making the burden of tackling population control – and by implication climate change – the accepted and sole responsibility of the world's female population. Have all these "uneducated" women been single-handedly overpopulating the world via a process of amoeba-like fission of which I am unaware?
There is a self-defeating logic in simultaneously pointing the finger at men and yet trying to exclude them from further discussion about women's rights and birth control. Writing on the Reality Check website, Edwin Okongo rightly criticised the gender bias in aid given to "developing" nations in the name of feminism: "We can spend 10 times the billions of dollars proposed to empower all the women of the world, but those efforts will be in vain if we don't empower men."
Okongo's reasoning highlights why branding climate change an issue of feminism is at best inadequate, and at worst divisive, by pre-emptively splitting men's interests from those of women's. Furthermore, it provides male "deniers" a cushy little get-out clause to smugly wheel out at parties: "Ain't my problem anyway – it's down to you gals now." Let us not pour more fuel on that crazy fire. When it comes to climate change, men have equal responsibility – whether they live in sub-Saharan African or SW1.
Equally, to suggest, as Jess McCabe has, that women are more "likely to bear the brunt of climate change as 70% of the world's poor are women", thereby placing women "on the frontline of climate change," is slack thinking, and says as much about the skewed state of feminism in western society today as it does about the limited choices of women in non-western ones. Even if 70% of the world's poor are women, this doesn't make the threat of climate change a feminist issue - it makes it a humanitarian one. Interestingly, the Women's Manifesto on Climate Change, which supplies this stat, justifies its posture by declaring that "women are far more concerned about environmental issues than men." Little wonder, if you box it up as a women's group interest only.
And let us not forget, offering birth control doesn't automatically mean that women are treated as equal to men. The notion of "reproductive justice" is more complex, if not elusive. Women in western societies are still held primarily responsible for the provision of birth control, but was this really the zenith of feminist ideals? It may have allowed women to sleep with who they want, but it hardly encourages, how shall I say, "sustainable activity" on the part of men. Instead, it arguably perpetuates the still acceptable myth that men can sow their seed where they like and "liberated" women can pick up the pieces.
When it comes to gender equality and climate change, we are all on the "frontline", regardless of gender or geography. We don't need well-wrung stats to accuse one gender over another – hop down to Oxford Street, if you dare, and you'll encounter just as many women as men buying into mass consumerism, which contributes to environmental destruction.
Eco-feminism tends to divide rather than unite, and risks packaging environmental responsibility as "emasculating", reinforcing rigid notions of masculinity – a hazard which similarly applies to recycling, taking your own shopping bag, and not eating meat. We need to stop thinking about the environment as "mother nature" being abused by men, which in turn will be saved by women exclusively.