‘Mother Earth Is the First Woman to Be Violated'

By Gabriella Ribenfors

Along with weapons and drugs, the international trade in women is one of the most lucrative criminal industries. Human trafficking as a whole generates estimated profits of $150 billion annually; women and girls comprise over two-thirds of the overall victims and almost all victims of sex trafficking.

Unlike weapons and drugs, the same woman can be sold multiple times an hour within the sex trade, driving profits up and survival rates down. After being trafficked into the industry, women have an average life expectancy of 7 years.

The mining of female bodies ‒ for unpaid labour and prostitution (and, increasingly, surrogacy) ‒ mirrors the relentless global extraction of natural resources. Illegal mining, fishing, logging and wildlife trading all generate profits in the billions. At the same time, they destroy human habitats and decimate biodiversity, driving hundreds of species of microorganisms, plants and animals extinct every year.

Worldwide, the dominant power structures continually position women and nature as resources for consumption by the ruling male class. Both are considered commodities within social and economic systems that are ‘based on the assumption that nature is dead matter and women are passive objects’ as Vandana Shiva summarises during the FiLiA panel discussion Feminist and Ecological Politics.

Much of the exploitation of women and nature therefore occurs within lawful frameworks. Countries such as Germany that have liberalised their prostitution laws have experienced subsequent increases in human trafficking and violence against women. Surrogacy too is legal or unregulated in many countries, despite the prevalence of socioeconomic inequality between clients and surrogate mothers, with the latter vulnerable to coercion while also risking their physical and mental health. Similarly, despite an ongoing campaign for any act that causes widespread or long-term environmental damage to be criminalised as ecocide under international law, carbon emissions continue to climb to record highs.

Ecological destruction compounds the suffering of women, who comprise 70% of the world’s poor. Prevented from migration by cultural norms and childcare responsibilities, women are denied access to the land, resources and political power essential for surviving the climate crisis. Perhaps naturally, therefore, grassroots feminist movements often pursue environmental sustainability alongside women’s rights. Ecofeminism urges recognition of the fact that humans are not separate from nature but part of it. If we continue to seek to conquer and consume our own environment, ultimately the destruction will be ‘not only of nature and life … but of the very conditions of existence’, Farida Akhter warns in the FiLiA panel discussion.

In her FiLiA blog post Wild Nature, Wild Woman, Susan Breen describes ecofeminism as confronting ‘the commodification of women’s bodies, labour and knowledge, while also challenging the patriarchal re-conceptualisation of nature as a machine, as a resource, and as an “other”’. Biodiversity, with its complex and self-sustaining nature, is championed by ecofeminists as an answer to globalisation – a phenomenon violently imposed on regions, in opposition to the natural systems that gradually evolve within them.

As the cracks from globalisation widen, the UN has counselled that ‘we must learn from the time-won wisdom, knowledge and leadership of Indigenous Peoples, whose environmental stewardship stretches back millennia.’ Vandana Shiva emphasises the contrast between nature’s innate, interdependent web of life and the man-made global supply chains that are installed as a linear extractive system of ‘take, take, take’. In the same panel discussion, Susan Hawthorne cites Cynthia Enloe’s description of masculinity as a foreign policy issue. While importing food from countries where workers starve as the means of their subsistence is extracted for profit, wealthy nations have in return exported a ruthless ideology.

The UN commemorates 22nd April as Mother Earth Day. Motherhood generally is, however, both venerated and denigrated within capitalist patriarchy, located as the summit and the limit of female worth. It thus illustrates the continued relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft’s declaration more than two centuries ago that the challenge for women is to be perceived as human beings, rather than idealised and reviled as the fairer, weaker sex.

In the same way, Earth is simultaneously romanticised and degraded. Mass tourism to ‘dream destinations’ in ecologically fragile areas leads to the destruction of local ecosystems and the pollution of land, sea and air. In a three-year period, while a billion people watched BBC documentaries on the beauty of nature, we sent 30 million tonnes of plastic waste into the oceans and 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Google’s sister company Verily, part of Alphabet Inc., has framed its disease-curing mission as ‘to defeat mother nature’. Positioning progress as in conflict rather than in synchrony with the natural world is a concerning message from a subsidiary of one of the world’s powerful trillion-dollar conglomerates. With a woman killed by a man every 10 minutes, and the planet likely to pass the point of catastrophic warming in the next 10 years, a common thread binding femicide and ecocide is perhaps man’s dependence on his purported enemy for survival.

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Further listening and reading

· FiLiA podcasts

o Feminist and Ecological Politics

o Bright Green Lies: Reclaiming the Environmental Movement

· FiLiA blog posts

o Wild Nature, Wild Woman

o Kurdish Women Lead the Revolution

o Rojova: Women Restoring the Environment After the Devastation of War

o Breaking the Spirit of the Planet: Climate Catastrophe

· Books available via the FiLiA bookshop

o Silent Spring by Rachel Carson