Few people remember the ecofeminist movement of the 1980s, spearheaded by my friends Ynestra King, Starhawk, Grace Paley, Dorothy Dinnerstein and others. Many of the young activists from around the world living with me at Place to B in Paris for the duration of the Cop21, would have to wait decades before being born. But others like Casey Camp-Horinek, Ponca Nation elder, who spoke Monday at the Women on the Front Lines of Climate Change event, were at Wounded Knee and marched with Ceasar Chavez. And she was on-stage surrounded by young women from Ecuador, forest protectors, the Dakotas, fracktivists, and Alaska, protectors of the fragile Arctic coast.
Legacies are curious. People might be forgotten, the events that were seminal to us then, The Women’s March on the Pentagon, for instance, are unknown by the young and yet the essence of those teachings and our learnings suddenly reappear in young people driven by visions of a habitable world.
The Indigenous women who commanded the attention of the room full of women and some men all day on Monday refer to each one of us as “my relative”.
“My relative, we can save you. We can show you how to survive on Mother Earth, if only you will listen to us.”
“We are of one heart,” says a woman whose tribe in Northern Alaska is protecting the last 5% of sea shore off-limits to off shore drilling, a breeding ground for the caribou as well as many species of migrating birds. “Whatever happens to the caribou happens to us,” she says. “We have a story that this is the birth place,” this piece of endangered coast her tribe has fought to protect for generations. If the birth place of all is destroyed by drilling, all of life will die. Their fight to protect this slice of endangered coast land becomes through origin myth a fight for the life of all.
And we must begin to think of our treasured places like this, as birth places of our Earth consciousness and of all we hold dear for now and our for our children’s and their children’s sake. Even my urban Fort Greene Park, with its birds and squirrels, its plain and chestnut trees and over-trodden dog and soccer fields becomes generative, giving rise each walk to my Earth consciousness.
“Do we,” asks an Indigenous woman, “get the honor that humanity will continue on earth?” Do we deserve our gifts of water, air and land?
The Indigenous Women of America are releasing a Treaty in Defense of Mother Earth. I raise my hand and pledge to sign it. It calls for direct actions in defense of earth to be taken at each equinox and solstice, that is, every three months through the year.
The urgency is palpable now. Peoples who see their hunting lands eroded, their island nations sinking into a polluted sea, are losing not only livelihoods but cultural memory, stories, myths are sinking, too. They speak of Environmental Genocide—the wiping out of people because of who they are and where they live and all that they hold dear, the destruction of ways of life that sustains whole peoples and Earth for generations. All threatened now.
They stand on the front lines. They seek to protect us by sharing their struggle to save their lands and selves and by demanding that the “world leaders” at the Cop21 listen and respond. “1.5 to stay alive,” they chant. Temperature rise must be kept at 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“My relatives,” they say, “listen to what we know.”
On Wednesday night, after rehearsal for our readings of “Extreme Whether”, in French and English, I go to a French climate change play fully staged in the beautiful Teatre de la Ville in the very interesting Abessess neighborhood. The play, “Les Glaciers Grondants” (“The Rumbling Glaciers”) written and directed by David Lescot is elaborately staged and well performed, with a musical score played on piano, drums and horns, a singing African Pope who blesses the world in soaring Gregorian gibberish, a young man who rolls all about in a large hoop, and a polar bear who climbs an ever-growing array of white blocks that remind me of refrigerators.
The central character, a doppelganger for Lescot, is on a year-long assignment to write an article about climate change. He embarks on an everyman journey through the worlds of climate talk and climate talkers: he meets chief denier Richard Linsden, professor emeritus of meteorology at MIT and vocal fossil fuel apologist; and gets caught up in a production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (it’s so, I think, that Shakespeare’s profound use of nature imagery to illuminate maco-and microcosm at once qualifies him as the precursor, along with Ibsen, Chekhov and, naturally, the Greeks, to the eco-esthetic emerging in the Anthropocene. So much so that I often say, in short-hand, take the nature imagery out of Shakespeare and you are left with a series of meaningless sword fights.),
Lescot’s Everyman meets a array of climate activists and climate scientists—a dedicated reporter, he seeks out the full assortment of those who say or have said something about climate change, and, also, the weather.
At the same time that Lescot’s hero strives to make sense of the chatter around climate change, he is involved in his own personal drama of being alive—and the “heroic quest” to write his article, like all journeys into the unknown, has deleterious effect on the home life. In this case, his relationship goes on and off again with a girl-friend, who may or may not be pregnant, then is pregnant, but did have a one night stand with someone else, though she is certain the child she carries is his. He is less certain, naturally, how could he know, that he wants an unplanned child, and less certain still that he wants a child who just might be from another man’s sperm.
The girlfriend stages a miscarriage, calling him from the hospital with news that she is hemorrhaging and he is truly concerned. Later, though she tells him that she has had, not a miscarriage, but a planned abortion. He is relieved and concerned, then relieved and a bit sad. One can forgive the hero for feeling jerked around.
They break up. She starts seeing someone else, even as the accumulating news about climate change continues to overwhelm.
I’m reminded of an American play, “The Great Immensity” also done elaborately with music, video and a great deal of money, at the Public Theater, two years ago. Also the story of a journey of a male Everyman who meets scientists and naturalists coping with problems of extinctions, melting ice and disappearing cultures on climate’s front-lines, trying to make sense for a larger public whom he represents and all the while the wife at home longs to get pregnant.
He sends her frozen sperm, unwilling to interrupt his epic quest.
Both plays come together in my mind because in both climate change is juxtaposed with reproduction and both male characters must struggle to make sense of and find their way in a threatened world and to the womb. Each of these plays reveals the hero’s fragile and fraught tie to the central earth drama of gestation and birth. Take a leap to a classical form, think of Agamemnon on the beach caught between his love for his child and his need to sacrifice her to the gods of war, or Lear, for that matter. Men have been forever caught between their solo destinies and their real bonds to children.
From an ecofeminist perspective, which is mine, both these contemporary male authored climate plays utilize without fully being able to transcend the tension between the female body, her procreative powers, her association with the Earth and their own needs to be central to the tale. The tragic wish to dominate, rather than take part, has brought us to this moment of potential ecocide.
Without a deeper understanding of the tie between self and earth than patriarchal culture provides there will be no hope.
Now is the time to own the fact that men had to, and often in all cultures still feel that they must, own and control the bodies of women in order to assuage their own fears about whether or not the child is theirs—often a child they may not even want or may wish to use for their own aggrandizement.
At the same time as patriarchy established full control over a “nonliving nature,” an earth that was to be owned and penetrated, her innards extracted in the forms of coal, oil, gas, precious minerals, woman had become property. As women were demeaned as being mindless, soulless, Earth and all of nature were declared equally inert, thing-like and unfeeling. Thought, ethics, creativity, the ability and necessity to journey freely on the epic quest was granted solely to the male. Cutting him off from the source even as he cut down the forests and mined the hills.
Women, say ecofeminists, have been treated like the Earth, and the poor Earth has suffered and suffers like the worst-used woman. And the reason for, the great propeller of the rapacious plunder we call history is man’s own confusion and uncertainty, his terror, about his own fragile role as a procreator and nurturer.
Cast away he has been on his quest for knowledge and for conquest, he’s become uncertain, terrified, tragic. Lost.
Male colleagues in the ecofeminist quest for justice for Mother/Sister Earth as the Indigenous peoples rightly name our biosphere rightly understand and affirm this analysis and doing so they step forward to accept their co-role as nurturers, care-takers and supporters of all life.
Doing so, they let go the masculine anxiety about reproduction (which alienates) and enter freely into the birth experience, receiving as a friend recently did, the head of his newborn from the bloody open, pulsing vagina of her mother, there to experience, without the wild pain and delight of the cervix wrenching open inside of him, only seeing and imagining her strength, his own role as helpmate, his own awe for her, his love, and his new love, the child delivered straight into his hands.
My friend is Iraqi, and his journey as a refugee from the ravages of war and displacement, his very journey as a refugee out of the nightmare of 21st century destruction, has brought him to a new world view in which he humbles himself before the miracle of birth.
He is no longer a stateless wanderer, but suddenly is present and able to take part. He belongs to the generative earth. He receives the child into his arms and heart. His loyalty, his willingness to accompany a woman on this most sacred journey, to be there with her as helpmate and witness, his ability to learn and know through his senses, to stand in awe, receive and feel, allows my friend to undo the old stories of war and suffering which he has experienced, the death that he has seen and to enter he said, a place of a “light heart.”
And so, in order to make sense of climate change, in order to gather strength and insight to fight the destruction of our Earth with every fiber of our being, so the personal life needs take on deeper meaning. One can stand and receive life as if at the mouthpiece of the womb, open-armed, receptive.
We, too, like Earth, become re-enlivened, strong in the ways that matter most—in our own ability to be there, fierce, and humble, allowing and fostering in all the ways each one of us is able all the miracles of a living world.
“My relative, I can save you if you listen to me,” say those who have lost the most through conquest. They speak with open hearts nurtured by their love of Earth.