7/6/25: 'Ecofeminism' by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva on Radical Feminist Perspectives, with Lierre Keith

some people in the United States of America celebrate the 4th of July by barbecuing dead animals and terrifying live ones with explosives, and some people spend the holiday weekend preparing notes on the patriarchal, masculinist roots of ecocidal derangement. this Sunday, i was glad to place myself in the latter category alongside Lierre Keith as we discussed Maria Mies’ and Vandana Shiva’s Ecofeminism (1993) for WDI’s Radical Feminist Perspectives series. Ecofeminism is a wide-ranging and accessible introduction to ecofeminist thought, in the form of a sampler of essays on topics like destructive “development,” patriarchal science, colonialism, global capitalism’s immiseration of women, men’s exploitative romanticization of nature and women, reproductive technologies, biopiracy, and consumerism; as well as women and non-industrialized communities’ grassroots movements for earthbound survival, in resistance to the manmade death machine of industrial civilization.

as Lierre points out, both authors have a tendency to focus on the contemporary iteration of male dominion favored for critique the complex Imperial Capitalist Patriarchy, to the effect that the history of male rule, its origins and phases go largely unexamined. but unlike most Marxist or socialist feminists – or wannabe-feminist leftists – Mies and Shiva do not succumb to the error of ahistorically ranking capitalism over male dominion as the primary system of oppression afflicting humanity; they do not try to convince readers that an end to capitalism would by default deliver us unto universal emancipation and utopian egalitarianism. rarely is anyone willing to go far enough in their questioning of manmade society, manmade culture, masculinist ideology, male violence—for it is an excruciating process to rip oneself loose of everything one has known, like tearing a band-aid off the sore skinless flesh of a broken heart, still raw. we all have blinders on, corners we’d rather not peer into, behaviors and activities we’re too invested in to have done with yet, ideas we cling to because they’re comfort us, loyalties we haven’t weaned ourselves from, choices we defend because we can’t imagine living any other way, conformities we cede to because it is frightening to be alone, fights we do not fight because constant conflict exhausts us. still, though they do not go all the way, writers like Mies and Shiva take us further than most. it is up to each of us not to idle where they leave us. the work now is to keep moving.