Gender, the Environment and Ecofeminism (original) (raw)

The world is facing what commentators, ranging from student activist Greta Thunberg to United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, are now calling an environmental emergency or climate crisis. The debates surrounding the environment in anthropology and beyond emphasise that any global processes necessarily emerge through locally embedded complex relationships and bring to the fore the tension at the heart of the anthropological project between the diversity of human experience and the question of alterity in a common world we all inhabit. In this entry I review how all these environmental processes are gendered. Further, the specific questions surrounding a critical rethinking of the nature/ culture divide resonate with crucial problematics in discussions of gender and essentialism, that therefore make joint questions about gender and the environment highly pertinent. Finally, the entry reviews past and current developments in ecofeminism, highlighting areas that are calling for further anthropological collaboration and research.