Climate Chaos: Ecofeminism and the Land Question

by Ana Isla (editor)

Climate change is already under way with unpredictable consequences. Evidence of changes to the earth's physical, chemical and biological processes is obvious everywhere. Greenhouse gas emissions have increased the carbon cycle concentration in the atmosphere. In the past, half of this carbon was stored in forests, while the other half was removed by oceans, but with deforestation and warming oceans, oxygen is at its lowest breathable point. Ecological degradation is global and the earth is becoming increasingly inhospitable with unprecedented weather events. The changing temperature has altered the balance of communities and degraded ecosystems. For example, in May 2016, as a result of a drier winter combined with an unusually hot, dry air mass over Northern Alberta, Canada, the temperature climbed to 32.8 °C (91°F) (Daily Data Report) resulting in 49 active wildfires covering an estimated 522,892 hectares. During the summer of 2017, hundreds of wildfires also razed thousands of hectares in the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. More destructive events due to warmer ocean surface temperatures are also taking place. Warmer oceans hold less dissolved gases, including oxygen, which affects marine organisms, particularly mammals. In January 2014, in Peru's Pacific, more than 400 dolphins washed ashore dead (Foley); similarly, in New Zealand, in February 2017, more than 400 whales had beached themselves to die (Farewell). El Niño, which is a cold, low-salinity ocean current that runs along Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, has been heating and altering weather in all Pacific Rim countries. Each of the El Niño and La Niña cycles in the past twenty years have occurred with increased frequency and violence. In sum, the latest scientific evidence tell us that we are approaching climate global average temperature is rising, if another decade of business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions continues we can reach 2° C, a dangerous warming threshold. Climate change deepens ethical issues explored and discussed by ecofeminists around the world. This book describes the academic field of material ecofeminism, provides an overview of the land question, and explores how reigning discourses of "sustainable development" have led to a commodification of nature and have effaced the multiple visions, uses, and relationships of local human communities. The articles in this book are spaces of political projects and values that nurture anticapitalist, antipatriarchal, and anticolonial oppressions. We argue that the centrality of resisting the colonization of Mother Earth and Pachamama is supreme.

352 pages, Paperback

Published January 30, 2019

About the author

Ana Isla is Professor with a joint appointment in the Sociology Department and the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST) at Brock University. She also has an affiliation with the Social Justice Program. Isla’s research focuses on the consequences of the Earth Summits, and sustainable development, in particular in Costa Rica and Peru. She is the author of The Greening of Costa Rica: Women, Peasants, Indigenous People, and the Remaking of Nature (2015).

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of essays. On the Land Question taught me so much. Like the Cree word “kanawayhitowin,” meaning a call for the spirit in all to come and protect each other. This concept underpins a lot of what environmental justice means in practice, not just concept. There are so many places I wanted to highlight (it’s a library copy I read so I didn’t). Another Cree word, “kwakwu,” meaning porcupine, but more textually, a woman who can defend her territory in quiet and non-confrontational ways...but when provoked will do everything to protect themselves their kin and their land. “Joyful calmness, youthful thinking, and open negotiation are among their strongest medicines of defense.”

There are so many pieces that disrupt prevailing narratives and fictions. Like the ability to purchase emissions offsets, and how this green economy is actually just a new stage of capitalism, pushing the burden of protecting the land onto the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. Reforestation efforts resulting in homogenous forests are a misguided attempt at ameliorating its own transgressions that big plantations use as they exploit the land. Repeat after me: a monoculture is not a forest. The Kyoto Protocol failed, it has not reduced emissions, it has abetted big corporations to propel climate change. There are so many other essays I laud. The one by Rachel O’Donnell on Biotech and biopiracy, on the plant based contraceptives in Guatemala was a favorite, illuminating, terrifying and edifying.

I highly encourage anyone interested in environmentalism to pick up this book. Something for everyone here. Something everyone needs to hear, here.