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doing the heteronomous work involved in reproducing life itself:
Ecologism and other ideologies 185
The hallmark of modern capitalist patriarchy is its autonomy in
biological and ecological terms . . . Western man is young, fit,
ambitious, mobile and unencumbered by obligations. This is not
the world that most women know. Their world is circumscribed by
obligated labour performed on the basis of duty, love, violence or
fear of loss of economic support.
(Mellor, 1997, p. 189)
This evidently bears upon the green movement s general aspiration to
have us living more lightly on the Earth. As we saw in Chapter 2, deep
ecologists argue for a change of consciousness with respect to our deal-
ings with the non-human natural world. Warwick Fox wants a shift in
priorities such that those who interfere with the environment should
have to justify doing so, rather than having the onus of justification rest
on the environment s defenders. A precondition for this, he argues, is an
awareness of the soft boundaries between ourselves and the non-
human natural world. I pointed out at the time that in this connection
deep ecologists are presented with a formidable problem of persuasion
most people simply do not think like that, and it is hard to see how
they ever will.
Some ecofeminists, though, suggest that there are already millions of
people thinking like that, or at least potentially on the brink of doing
so women themselves. On this reading, women s closeness to nature
puts them in the green political vanguard, in touch with a world that
Judith Plant describes and that many members of the green movement
would like to see resurrected a world in which rituals were carried out
by miners: offerings to the gods of the soil and the subterranean world,
ceremonial sacrifices, sexual abstinence and fasting were conducted and
observed before violating what was considered to be the sacred earth
(n.d., p. 3).
One problem ecofeminism needs to confront in the context of the
wider aims of the green movement is the reconciliation of the demand
for positive evaluation of the activity of childbirth and the need to
reduce population levels. Of course, there is no need for such an evalu-
ation to imply a large number of actual births, but a culture that held
childbirth in high esteem may find it hard to legitimize population con-
trol policies. But again, in the properly functioning sustainable society,
people would learn to reach and maintain sustainable reproductive
rates, much as members of a number of communities (particularly in
Africa and Latin America) already do.
Difference ecofeminism, in particular, has not been without its
critics and Janet Biehl, for one, believes that the linking of women with
186 Green Political Thought
nature and the subsequent subordination of both is precisely the reason
why it is dangerous to try to use the link for emancipatory purposes:
[W]hen ecofeminists root women s personality traits in repro-
ductive and sexual biology, they tend to give acceptance to those
malecreated images that define women as primarily biological
beings . . . [this] is to deliver women over to the male stereotypes
that root women s character structure entirely in their biological
being.
(Biehl, 1993, p. 55)
Plumwood, too, makes it absolutely clear why this sort of ecofemi-
nism is seen in some quarters of the feminist movement as reactionary:
The concept of nature . . . has been and remains a major tool in the
armoury of conservatives intent on keeping women in their place , and:
Given this background, it is not surprising that many feminists
regard with some suspicion a recent view, expressed by a grow-
ing number of writers in the ecofeminist camp, that there may be
something to be said in favour of feminine connectedness with
nature.
(Plumwood, 1988, p. 16; see also 1993, p. 20)
In similar vein, Mary Mellor makes the useful distinction between
feminism and feminine values: Even where male green thinkers claim
that a commitment to feminism is at the centre of their politics, this
often slides into a discussion of feminine values (Mellor, 1992b, p. 245;
emphasis in original), and while it ought to be pointed out that the
evidence in this chapter suggests that there are plenty of female writers
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