The Dictionary of Human Geography

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ecofeminism An umbrella term for a wide
variety of environmental concerns and ap-
proaches that integrate diverse feminist and
environmentalist perspectives. Ecofeminism is
boththeoryand praxis, building on the intel-
lectual foundations of ecological and feminist
political movements where these intersect
as, for example, in popular mobilizations in
the name of peace and nuclear disarmament
(Seagar, 1993), animal welfare (Gaard,
1993) or environmental justice (Shiva,
1988). There are different accounts of the ori-
gin of the term itself, but it is most frequently
attributed to the 1980 work of the French
author Franc ̧ois D’Eaubonne.
The thematic connection linking diverse eco-
feminist currents is the notion that women are
closer tonature. This putative connection is
woven into themainstream intellectual, religious
and social fabric of many cultures, and has been
animportantfocusoffeministcritique(seefemi-
nism). For several decades, feminists sought
to distance the analysis of women’s position in
society from any bodily or biological referent,
labelling any such reference ‘essentialist’and,
thereby, unspeakable (see Fuss, 1989). As a
consequence, ecofeminist concerns and argu-
ments were cold-shouldered by the feminist
academy for some years when they found
their most powerful expression in works of the
imagination as, for example, in the science fic-
tion writing of Ursula le Guin or Marge Piercy.
While ecofeminism’s conservative tenden-
cies to reduce the heterogeneity of women’s
experience to the singular figure of Woman
and the mutability of nature to an unchanging
primordial Nature remain, since the late 1980s
ecofeminist work has found new consonance
with developments in feminist philosophy
and social theory (see, e.g., Plumwood,
1993). These developments centre on con-
cerns with (i) thematerialismof social life
and its connectedness beyond the human
(see alsobiophilosophy) and (ii) the situated-
ness of knowledge production associated with
the rise of feministscience studies. As Donna
Haraway, one of the leading proponents of
this latter project, has argued, ‘Ecofeminists
have perhaps been the most insistent on
some version of the world (nature/body) as
active subjects, not asresourcesto be mapped

or appropriated in bourgeois, marxist or

masculinistprojects’ (1991, p. 199). sw

Suggested reading

Fuss (1989); Gaard (1993); Haraway (1991c);

Plumwood (1993); Seagar (1993); Shiva (1988).

ecological fallacy Aproblemthatmayarise

when inferring characteristics of individuals

fromaggregatedatareferringtoapopulationof

which they are part. It was first highlighted

by Robinson (1950), who foundcorrelations

of 0.773 in aregressionof the percentage of

African-Americans in a state’s population agai-

nst its percentage illiterate, but only 0.203 when

using data on individuals from the same source.

The fact that African-Americans were concen-

trated in states with high illiteracy rates did not

necessarily mean that African-Americans had

high illiteracy rates (hence the necessity not to

confuse correlation with causality).

Alker (1969) identified six related fallacies:

. the ecological fallacy– assuming that rela-
tionships identified using aggregate data
apply to the individuals concerned;
. the individualistic fallacy– assuming that
the whole is no more than the sum of its
parts (the inverse of the ecological fallacy);
. the cross-level fallacy– assuming that a rela-
tionship identified in one aggregation of a
population applies to other aggregations
(cf.modifiable areal unit problem);
. the universal fallacy–assumingthatrela-
tionships identified among some individuals
applies to all members of the population
from which they have been selected, but
not as a randomsample;
. the selective fallacy– in which data from
carefully chosen cases are used to ‘prove’
a general point; and
. the cross-sectional fallacy–assumingthat
what is observed at one data applies to
others as well.
All are problems ofecological inference,asis
themorerecentlyidentifiedcross-time fallacy,
whereby relationships that hold at one time are
fallaciously assumed to hold at others as well.rj

ecological imperialism In his seminal

account of ‘the biological expansion of

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