Feminism and Environmental Ethics: A Materialist Perspective 223form the basis of ecofeminism, but a material analysis of the way in which male
domination is created and sustained. As Mies et al (1988) have argued, women are
one of the ‘colonies’ of capitalist patriarchy. They are ‘paying the price’ (Dalla
Costa and Dalla Costa, 1995). Women’s identification with the ‘natural’ is not
evidence of some timeless unchanging essence, but of the material exploitation of
women’s work, often without reward (Waring, 1989). It is not even always just the
work that women do, but their availability. Someone has got to live in biological
time, to be available for the crisis, the unexpected as well as the routine. Although
materialist ecofeminism points to the particular dynamic represented in the sex/
gender dualism, this is only one pattern of mediation. I see materialist ecofemi-
nism as contributing to a wider debate about the material relations into which
humans enter when confronting their embodiment and embeddedness. Marx’s
historical materialism addressed the social relations of class in this context. Later
analyses have seen racism and imperialism/colonialism as equally, if not more,
important. These dimensions are not in a hierarchy of oppressions, but rather a
matrix that cut across each other (Collins, 1990).
Mediation involves both exploitation and exclusion. Mediation is making
time, space or resources for someone else. Even so, the world is not clearly divided
into mediators and the mediated. Many people stand in complex networks of
mediation. Mediation is not only carried out by women, in fact, many women are
themselves the beneficiaries of mediation. White Western women may mediate
biological time for their family, but exploit the labour of others, the resources of
the South, and the sustainability of the Earth. Many people live in complex net-
works of mediation on the basis of ‘race’, class, gender or ethnicity. The most
destructive, however, are the industrialized societies of capitalist patriarchy that
rest on a huge network of mediation through exploitation and exclusion: of women,
of workers exploited or excluded on the basis of class, ‘race’ or gender, through the
expropriation of colonized lands and the exclusion of colonized peoples. Environ-
mental justice is about the social and ecological consequences of that ‘freedom’
exercised by the minority at the expense of the many (Hofrichter, 1993). The
insight of ecofeminism that is common to both affinity and social constructionist
ecofeminism is that the needs of human embodiment are shared by all hu(man)ity
but are disproportionately borne in the bodies and lives of women.
Ecofeminism, in bringing together the domination of women with the domi-
nation of nature, brought into sharp focus the central dilemma of feminism: how
could women’s association with nature be asserted without falling into an essential-
ist and naturalist trap? The answer lies in not seeing women’s oppression as repre-
senting their ‘natural’ affiliation with the natural world, but the connectedness of
all hu(man)ity with nature. Women do have particular bodies which do particular
things, but what matters is how society takes account of sexual differences and the
whole question of the materiality of human existence. That is why I have linked
the concepts sex/gender, to represent the interconnections of the biological and
the social. Women are not closer to nature because of some elemental physiolog-
ical or spiritual affinity, but because of the social circumstances in which they