A Materialist Ecofeminist Reading of the Green Economy: Or, Yes Karl, the Ecological Footprint is Sex-Gendered

Citation:

Salleh, Ariel. 2020. "A Materialist Ecofeminist Reading of the Green Economy: Or, Yes Karl, the Ecological Footprint is Sex-Gendered." In The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies, edited by Hamed Hosseini, James Goodman, Sara Motta, and Barry Gills. New York: Routledge.

Author: Ariel Salleh

Abstract:

This chapter tells how the Green Economy ideology came to dominate international politics, but remains capitalist patriarchal, colonising, and environmentally ineffective. If policy makers, scholars, and activists, look more closely at differences of class, ethnicity, and especially sex-gender, they will see that responsibility for the global ‘ecological footprint’ is not equally shared. Comparison of consumer lifestyles versus ecosufficient provisioning reveals that workers from the non-monetised domestic and geographic peripheries of capital already practice a logic of sustainability. The hands-on multi-tasking labours of this ‘meta-industrial class’ lead to a skill-set that meets everyday needs while keeping the humanity– nature metabolism intact. Advocates of the Green Economy and more recent Sustainable Development Goals respond to global crises with business as usual, tech fixes, and ecological modernist policy. This externalises material costs on to less powerful communities and the ecosystem at large. Refusing this destructive cycle of entitlement and denial, people’s philosophies from ecofeminism to buen vivir are now joining together to create alternative futures.

Topics: Class, Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Environment, Ethnicity, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Year: 2020