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Women and their environment VOL. IX ISSUE XII DECEMBER 2002

The truth about eco-feminism by Pankaj H Gupta

Other articles in this issue

Tilted scalesSumi Krishna

Women in the fieldsVirendar S Khatana & J Jangal

Engendering development organisations

Malnourished women inMaharashtraSeema Kulkarni

Seeing through the damSucheta Dalal

The women of IdukkiShwetha E George

Education: rights and wrongsKathyayini Chamaraj

Across the borderlineRukmini Datta

The plight of Dalits

Refractive IndexHuman Index

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Editorial Humanscape Features

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of Myths and Movements by Haripriya Ranganoffers an interesting insight into how the ecology-women link has been turned into bankable rhetoricWomen in the villages of ‘underdeveloped’ economies like India are the primary managers of the natural resources available to them. They do most of the work on the farm and in taking care of the livestock. This “living environment” of soil, water, forests and energy form the patterns of their daily lives from sun up to sun down. In addition, women also participate in buying andselling of agricultural produce. The raw materials they use in their crafts and tool making also come from nature and are vulnerable to environmental degradation. As farmers and traders, women experience environmental problems directly undermining the basis of their lives.

This link between environment and women is obvious, but rarely acknowledged. It has been of little scholarly interest, and other than an occasional conference paper here and there, it has been undeservedly ignored.

,by Haripriya Rangan is not about this

subject either – it is primarily a brilliant account of the journey of the Chipko movement from fact to myth, but it offers an interesting insight into how the ecology-women link has been turned into a bankable rhetoric.

of Myths and Movements rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History

The book has a vast sweep as it unravels the fascinating ecological history of Garhwal, linking the Chipko movement to pre-British history and the Uttarakhand agitation, and describing the rolesplayed by some of the now most famous names in India’s environmental pantheon, like Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Sunderlal Bahuguna, et al. The author is herself “amazed by how Chipko has found a niche in the imaginations and memories of numerous scholars” in the West and “appears, without fail, in conversations that centre on sustainability, the Himalayas, deforestation in India, or social movements in poor regions of the

of Myths and Movements,by

Haripriya Rangan (Verso, 272 pages, $20)

rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History

9/25/07 9:18 AMHumanscape Features Dec 2002-A valuable book for those trying to understand the science and politics of our degrading environment

of 3http://www.humanscapeindia.net/humanscape/new/dec02/thetruthof.htm

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world.” Chipko is, in fact, almost a metaphor for this country’s environment on the world stage.

Even in India, the idea of Chipko has been clung to as tenaciously as supposedly did the original tree-huggers, by many activists, scholars, journalists and academicians. One of these players who brought the story to world audiences was Vandana Shiva, who gave Chipko her own twist of eco-feminism.

Of Shiva, Rangan says, “It would be fairly accurate to say that her recognition as the spokesperson of Third World women and theirrelationship to nature derives, in large part, from her repeated and widespread narration of the Chipko story to environmental audiences in the English-speaking world. Shiva’s narratives ofChipko centre on women. She draws the village women of Garhwal into her narratives by binding them to the Himalayan forests and nature…Nature is feminine; the Earth is Mother”.

Rangan then goes on to explain Shiva’s elaborate feminist logic. Women in India are an intimate part of nature both in imagination and in practise. At one level, nature is symbolised as the embodiment of the feminine principle, and at another, she is nurtured by the feminine to produce life and provide sustenance.

According to Vandana Shiva, even the legendary Bishnoi love for nature is a feminist environmental action, when, 300 years ago, they were led by a woman called Amrita Devi to cling to trees to prevent them from felling. Embodying the same feminist principle, the Garhwal women clung to the trees to prevent their economic exploitation by the patriarchal elements of society (like the British colonisers, timber merchants in independent India, etc.). In Shiva’s own words: Peasant women came out, openly challenging the reductionistcommercial forestry system on the one hand, and the local men who had been colonised by that system, cognitively, economically, and politically on the other.

Rangan concludes that it is precisely by this constant insertion of “Chipko women” into Shiva’s narratives that she is able to reinforce her own authenticity as an eco-feminist in contemporaryenvironmental discourse.

, while outlining the details of the so-called movement, does so with an objective detachment. This, however, does not fail to convey to the reader the thought thatShiva’s concept of eco-feminism seems to be just a convenient rhetoric with little basis in fact. This

of Myths and Movements



is true of a lot of other rhetoric we are at times fed by environmentalists: Were the British ruthlessly mining the Garhwal forests of its timber? WereGarhwali women dead against the economic exploitation of their forests, while their men were insensitive predators? To Rangan, it is not important whether these myths are based on fact, but the motives that perpetuate them. Nevertheless, she examines these ‘givens’ in-depth, and reveals to us the truth in itscomplexity. Fortunately, Rangan has the advantage of distance; as a researcher in an Australian University, she is not burdened by the politics and counter-politics that often govern the local environmental discourse.

It is always a challenge to bring science to those not possessing that specialist knowledge, but Rangan has written an eminently readable book. In fact, the book is unputdownable. The strength ofthe book is not just its impeccable research, but its gripping style. Both academics and laypersons – not to forget the activists – will find it invaluable in understanding the science and politics of our rapidly degrading environment.Pankaj H Gupta works with video for development, and is an occasional documentary filmmaker and wr i te r . He can be contac ted a [email protected]

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