Minority Women and Environmental Writing
MINORITY WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING
Shubhangi Derhgawen
Hansraj College
As highlighted by Neeladri Bhatacharjee, there already exists a rift within narratives of
concerns between the agrarian historians and the environmental historians. He notes
that, with the development of colonized views of productivity, the agrarian history has
neglected the forests and pastures. This can be linked to the persisting stratification.
There needs to be an agency provided to the pastoralists and gathering women, who
are forced to be at the lowest level in this hierarchy of prioritization.
Gender needs to be understood as a social condition which is getting reproduced
through societal constructs. Therefore, this paper argues for an alternative source of
environmental writing which provides, not just agency to women, but integrate their
experiences and perspectives thereby reshaping their identity.
Ecofeminist arguments refer to the important connection between the domination and
oppression of women to the exploitation of nature. Carolyn Merchant explains how
nature is identified, especially the earth, with the nurturing mother, and also as culturally
restricted. The opposing image of nature is one of wild and uncontrollable, which could
render violence, storms, droughts, and general chaos. This image culturally sanctions
mastery and human dominance over nature. She elaborates on the Scientific revolution
and the rise of market oriented culture in Europe, the twin ideas of mechanism and
dominance over nature, support both, the denudation of nature and male dominance
over women.
Hence, the essence of patriarchal thought becomes women being identified as closer to
nature and men as being closer to culture. Nature is seen as inferior to culture; hence,
women are seen as inferior to men.
Vandana Shiva notes how third-world women are dependent on nature "for drawing
sustenance for themselves, their families, their societies." The destruction of nature thus
becomes the destruction of women's resources for ‘staying alive.’ Drawing upon her
experience of working with women activists in the Chipko movement (the environmental
movement for forest protection and regeneration in the Garhwal hills of northwest India)
Shiva argues that "Third World women'' have both a special dependence on nature and
a special knowledge of nature. This knowledge has been systematically marginalized under the impact of modern sciences. Therefore, the importance attached to such an
agency is imperative during a time where India is facing a severe environmental crisis.
Poor peasants and tribal women have been responsible for fetching fuel and fodder in
hill and tribal communities along with being cultivators. They are likely to be affected
adversely in quite specific ways by environmental degradation. During the course of
their everyday interactions with nature, they acquire a special knowledge of species
varieties and the processes of natural regeneration. They could thus be seen as both
victims of the destruction of nature and as repositories of knowledge about nature, in
ways distinct from the men of their class. The former aspect would provide the
gendered impulse for their resistance and response, to environmental destruction. The
latter would condition their perceptions and choices of what should be done. In this
conceptualization, therefore, the link between women and the environment can be seen
as structured by a given gender and class organization of production, reproduction, and
distribution giving birth to the feminist environmentalist perspective.
Such gaps amplify due to the way in which Country's natural resources are available to
the poor. These are two parallel, and yet interrelated trends. First, the growing
degradation of the provided resources, both in quantity and quality and second, their
increasing appropriation by the state and privatization by a dominant class of
individuals, with an associated decline in what was earlier communal. These two trends,
both independently and interactively, underlie many of the differential class-gender
effects of environmental degradation. Independently, the former trend is reducing
overall availability, while the latter is increasing inequalities within the distribution of
what is available. This has led to an erosion of community resource management
systems and control of these resources have been passed on to the state or to
individuals, thereby affecting the entire village economy. In turn, the shift from
community control and management of common property, to state or individual
ownership and control, has further increased this issue.
The gendered understanding of this comes from pre-existing division of labor. It is
women in poor peasant and tribal households who do much of the resource gathering
and fetching from rivers. In addition, women of such households are burdened with a
significant responsibility for family subsistence and they are often the primary, and in
many female-headed households the sole, economic providers. Along with that, there
are systematic gender differences in the distribution of subsistence resources including
food and health care, within rural households. The impacts of capitalism and moving of
the economic units away from the house has imposed the idea of women having fewer employment opportunities, less occupational mobility, lower levels of training, and lower
payments for same or similar work.
My field work in the area of Jahagirpuri and Samaypur Badli, highlighted these issues
immensely which can be understood under two contexts.
First, these areas consists of huge influx of labor to cities due to disruption of
livelihoods; either by the government and private entities, or because of environmental
degradation and drying up of rivers and wells. I observed that the work undertaken by
women in these localities got majorly reduced to domestic in nature. Moving out of a
safe space that had given them some sense of empowerment and mobility, lead them to
be further pushed into having limited political and social agency in the city as compared
to men.
When I was in conversation with a Santhal tribe woman, Helena Hembrum, I observed
that management of local practices and cultures; Giving control of forests and
management of land resources by the government has made a huge difference in
shaping the identity of a woman who was working in the city as a caretaker for just a
few months to pay off some loans. She commanded an agency which was self sufficient
and not dependent on the employer or on the male counterparts. As I observed, this
was because of the assurance of making ends meet even at the off chance of her
leaving the job, because the access to forest commons and the presence of 50-60
different trees within the land held by her family gave her ample amount of resources to
sustain her livelihood.
Therefore, irrespective of having property rights or not, the village commons have been
extremely essential. They have always provided rural women and children (especially
those of tribal, landless, or marginal peasant households) a source of subsistence, while
being unmediated by dependency relationships on adult males.
For instance, access to village commons is usually linked to basic membership in the
village community and therefore women are not excluded in the way they may be in a
system of individualized private land rights. This acquires additional importance in
regions with strong norms of female seclusion (as in northwest India) where women's
access to the cash economy, to markets, and to the marketplace itself is constrained
and dependent on the mediation of male relatives.
Now because women are the main gatherers of fuel, fodder, and water, it is primarily
their working day (already averaging ten to twelve hours) that is lengthened with the
depletion of and reduced access to forests, waters, and soils. Firewood, for instance, is the single most important source of domestic energy in India providing more than 65
percent of domestic energy in the hills and deserts of the north. Much of this is gathered
and not purchased, especially by the poor.
The shortage of drinking water has exacerbated the burden of time and energy on
women and young girls. Where low-caste women often have access to only one well, its
drying up could mean an endless wait for their vessels to be filled by upper-caste
women, as was noted to have happened in Odisha.
Even though the government comes out with schemes to deal with environmental
degradation, far from benefiting the poor, these schemes have taken away even
existing rights and resources, leading to widespread local resistance. Also, women
either do not feature at all in such schemes or, at best, tend to be allotted the role of
caretakers in tree nurseries, with little say in the choice of species or in any other aspect
of the project.
This establishes the need to confront gender and class issues in a number of small but
significant ways. For instance, gender relations are called into question in their taking
oppositional stands to the village men on several occasions, in asking to be members of
village councils, and in resisting male alcoholism and domestic violence. Similarly, there
is clearly a case of class confrontation involved in their resistance even when together
with the men of their community against the contractors holding licenses for mining and
felling in the area.
This is why ecological movements such as Chipko have been contextualized by Bina
Aggarwal. Although localized resistance to the processes of natural resource
appropriation and degradation in India has taken many different forms, and arisen in
diverse regional contexts, resistances in which entire communities and villages have
participated to constitute a movement, have emerged primarily in hill or tribal
communities. This may be attributable particularly to two factors: the immediateness of
the threat from these processes to people's survival, and these communities being
marked by relatively low levels of the class and social differentiation that usually splinter
village communities in south Asia.
They therefore have a greater potential for wider community participation than is
possible in more economically and socially stratified contexts. Further, in these
communities, women's role in agricultural production has always been visibly substantial
and often primarily an aspect more conducive to their public participation than in many
other communities of northern India practicing female seclusion.
Therefore, an alternative approach, suggested by feminist environmentalists, needs to
be transformational rather than welfarist where development, redistribution, and ecology
link in mutually regenerative ways. This would necessitate complex and interrelated
changes such as in the composition of what is produced, the technologies used to
produce it, the processes by which decisions on products and technologies are arrived
at, the knowledge systems on which such choices are based, and the class and gender
distribution of products and tasks.
For eg, in the context of forestry programs, a different composition may imply a shift
from the currently favored mono-cultural and commercial tree species being grown to
growing mixed species critical for local subsistence.
Even though Ramchandra Guha argues how arguments of Shiva and analysis of
movements such as Chipko, can be alternatively interpreted not as feminist but as a
peasant movement, it needs to be understood how this perspective is needed as it
offers on the feminist front a need to challenge and transform notions and also the
actual division of work and resources between the genders.
Further while being in the middle of an environmental crisis, the denial of agency to
women for navigating environmental policies just increases the gap between the legal
and public contexts of the conservation tactics. This perspective is important to
implement sustainable policies meeting the minimum requirement of being truly equal in
nature.
Shubhangi Derhgawen
Hansraj College
As highlighted by Neeladri Bhatacharjee, there already exists a rift within narratives of
concerns between the agrarian historians and the environmental historians. He notes
that, with the development of colonized views of productivity, the agrarian history has
neglected the forests and pastures. This can be linked to the persisting stratification.
There needs to be an agency provided to the pastoralists and gathering women, who
are forced to be at the lowest level in this hierarchy of prioritization.
Gender needs to be understood as a social condition which is getting reproduced
through societal constructs. Therefore, this paper argues for an alternative source of
environmental writing which provides, not just agency to women, but integrate their
experiences and perspectives thereby reshaping their identity.
Ecofeminist arguments refer to the important connection between the domination and
oppression of women to the exploitation of nature. Carolyn Merchant explains how
nature is identified, especially the earth, with the nurturing mother, and also as culturally
restricted. The opposing image of nature is one of wild and uncontrollable, which could
render violence, storms, droughts, and general chaos. This image culturally sanctions
mastery and human dominance over nature. She elaborates on the Scientific revolution
and the rise of market oriented culture in Europe, the twin ideas of mechanism and
dominance over nature, support both, the denudation of nature and male dominance
over women.
Hence, the essence of patriarchal thought becomes women being identified as closer to
nature and men as being closer to culture. Nature is seen as inferior to culture; hence,
women are seen as inferior to men.
Vandana Shiva notes how third-world women are dependent on nature "for drawing
sustenance for themselves, their families, their societies." The destruction of nature thus
becomes the destruction of women's resources for ‘staying alive.’ Drawing upon her
experience of working with women activists in the Chipko movement (the environmental
movement for forest protection and regeneration in the Garhwal hills of northwest India)
Shiva argues that "Third World women'' have both a special dependence on nature and
a special knowledge of nature. This knowledge has been systematically marginalized under the impact of modern sciences. Therefore, the importance attached to such an
agency is imperative during a time where India is facing a severe environmental crisis.
Poor peasants and tribal women have been responsible for fetching fuel and fodder in
hill and tribal communities along with being cultivators. They are likely to be affected
adversely in quite specific ways by environmental degradation. During the course of
their everyday interactions with nature, they acquire a special knowledge of species
varieties and the processes of natural regeneration. They could thus be seen as both
victims of the destruction of nature and as repositories of knowledge about nature, in
ways distinct from the men of their class. The former aspect would provide the
gendered impulse for their resistance and response, to environmental destruction. The
latter would condition their perceptions and choices of what should be done. In this
conceptualization, therefore, the link between women and the environment can be seen
as structured by a given gender and class organization of production, reproduction, and
distribution giving birth to the feminist environmentalist perspective.
Such gaps amplify due to the way in which Country's natural resources are available to
the poor. These are two parallel, and yet interrelated trends. First, the growing
degradation of the provided resources, both in quantity and quality and second, their
increasing appropriation by the state and privatization by a dominant class of
individuals, with an associated decline in what was earlier communal. These two trends,
both independently and interactively, underlie many of the differential class-gender
effects of environmental degradation. Independently, the former trend is reducing
overall availability, while the latter is increasing inequalities within the distribution of
what is available. This has led to an erosion of community resource management
systems and control of these resources have been passed on to the state or to
individuals, thereby affecting the entire village economy. In turn, the shift from
community control and management of common property, to state or individual
ownership and control, has further increased this issue.
The gendered understanding of this comes from pre-existing division of labor. It is
women in poor peasant and tribal households who do much of the resource gathering
and fetching from rivers. In addition, women of such households are burdened with a
significant responsibility for family subsistence and they are often the primary, and in
many female-headed households the sole, economic providers. Along with that, there
are systematic gender differences in the distribution of subsistence resources including
food and health care, within rural households. The impacts of capitalism and moving of
the economic units away from the house has imposed the idea of women having fewer employment opportunities, less occupational mobility, lower levels of training, and lower
payments for same or similar work.
My field work in the area of Jahagirpuri and Samaypur Badli, highlighted these issues
immensely which can be understood under two contexts.
First, these areas consists of huge influx of labor to cities due to disruption of
livelihoods; either by the government and private entities, or because of environmental
degradation and drying up of rivers and wells. I observed that the work undertaken by
women in these localities got majorly reduced to domestic in nature. Moving out of a
safe space that had given them some sense of empowerment and mobility, lead them to
be further pushed into having limited political and social agency in the city as compared
to men.
When I was in conversation with a Santhal tribe woman, Helena Hembrum, I observed
that management of local practices and cultures; Giving control of forests and
management of land resources by the government has made a huge difference in
shaping the identity of a woman who was working in the city as a caretaker for just a
few months to pay off some loans. She commanded an agency which was self sufficient
and not dependent on the employer or on the male counterparts. As I observed, this
was because of the assurance of making ends meet even at the off chance of her
leaving the job, because the access to forest commons and the presence of 50-60
different trees within the land held by her family gave her ample amount of resources to
sustain her livelihood.
Therefore, irrespective of having property rights or not, the village commons have been
extremely essential. They have always provided rural women and children (especially
those of tribal, landless, or marginal peasant households) a source of subsistence, while
being unmediated by dependency relationships on adult males.
For instance, access to village commons is usually linked to basic membership in the
village community and therefore women are not excluded in the way they may be in a
system of individualized private land rights. This acquires additional importance in
regions with strong norms of female seclusion (as in northwest India) where women's
access to the cash economy, to markets, and to the marketplace itself is constrained
and dependent on the mediation of male relatives.
Now because women are the main gatherers of fuel, fodder, and water, it is primarily
their working day (already averaging ten to twelve hours) that is lengthened with the
depletion of and reduced access to forests, waters, and soils. Firewood, for instance, is the single most important source of domestic energy in India providing more than 65
percent of domestic energy in the hills and deserts of the north. Much of this is gathered
and not purchased, especially by the poor.
The shortage of drinking water has exacerbated the burden of time and energy on
women and young girls. Where low-caste women often have access to only one well, its
drying up could mean an endless wait for their vessels to be filled by upper-caste
women, as was noted to have happened in Odisha.
Even though the government comes out with schemes to deal with environmental
degradation, far from benefiting the poor, these schemes have taken away even
existing rights and resources, leading to widespread local resistance. Also, women
either do not feature at all in such schemes or, at best, tend to be allotted the role of
caretakers in tree nurseries, with little say in the choice of species or in any other aspect
of the project.
This establishes the need to confront gender and class issues in a number of small but
significant ways. For instance, gender relations are called into question in their taking
oppositional stands to the village men on several occasions, in asking to be members of
village councils, and in resisting male alcoholism and domestic violence. Similarly, there
is clearly a case of class confrontation involved in their resistance even when together
with the men of their community against the contractors holding licenses for mining and
felling in the area.
This is why ecological movements such as Chipko have been contextualized by Bina
Aggarwal. Although localized resistance to the processes of natural resource
appropriation and degradation in India has taken many different forms, and arisen in
diverse regional contexts, resistances in which entire communities and villages have
participated to constitute a movement, have emerged primarily in hill or tribal
communities. This may be attributable particularly to two factors: the immediateness of
the threat from these processes to people's survival, and these communities being
marked by relatively low levels of the class and social differentiation that usually splinter
village communities in south Asia.
They therefore have a greater potential for wider community participation than is
possible in more economically and socially stratified contexts. Further, in these
communities, women's role in agricultural production has always been visibly substantial
and often primarily an aspect more conducive to their public participation than in many
other communities of northern India practicing female seclusion.
Therefore, an alternative approach, suggested by feminist environmentalists, needs to
be transformational rather than welfarist where development, redistribution, and ecology
link in mutually regenerative ways. This would necessitate complex and interrelated
changes such as in the composition of what is produced, the technologies used to
produce it, the processes by which decisions on products and technologies are arrived
at, the knowledge systems on which such choices are based, and the class and gender
distribution of products and tasks.
For eg, in the context of forestry programs, a different composition may imply a shift
from the currently favored mono-cultural and commercial tree species being grown to
growing mixed species critical for local subsistence.
Even though Ramchandra Guha argues how arguments of Shiva and analysis of
movements such as Chipko, can be alternatively interpreted not as feminist but as a
peasant movement, it needs to be understood how this perspective is needed as it
offers on the feminist front a need to challenge and transform notions and also the
actual division of work and resources between the genders.
Further while being in the middle of an environmental crisis, the denial of agency to
women for navigating environmental policies just increases the gap between the legal
and public contexts of the conservation tactics. This perspective is important to
implement sustainable policies meeting the minimum requirement of being truly equal in
nature.
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