Women and the Environment

Issues of place and location are intricately related to women’s agency, or their ability to determine and decided their own lives and identities. A person’s location will be a large determining factor for their economic standing in the world, both in terms of the work that they will do and their proximity to the worst facets of environmental destruction.  In “The Story of Stuff,” they talk about the material economy and its five parts: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. The book refers to an “ethical dimension to living in any location,” but these ethics are not followed when the parties with power to control materials and production, and in turn resources and the labor force, live elsewhere (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 535). The movie mentions that 51 of the world’s 100 largest economies are corporations, which explains why so many governments around the globe have sold the rights to natural resources to corporations, privatizing industries like water and electricity. This global restructuring of the world’s economy has drastically changed women’s work. As the agribusiness is taken over by corporations, women’s role as cultivator of locally grown foods diminishes, and her work changes. The work of providing food for her family, deemed unproductive, is replaced with something else, perhaps factory work, that will be “productive” because value is given to those who consume, therefore it is vital to have a work force there to produce. Because of the linear and expanding nature of the material economy, new resources and industries must always be created. Water is privatized to become a for-profit industry, at the same time as “water supplies are polluted,” making more work for the women who have to travel farther distances to provide clean water to their families daily, or who have to find greater income to pay for access to a resource which was assumed to be “available to all to fulfill our basic needs” (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 545).

This system, in addition to women’s work, affects the ways in which women organize. Women are likely to organize around issues that affect them and their environments, so depending on what aspect of the market economy a woman is most directly implicated with, she will likely identify accordingly. If she lives in Mexico and work in a Maquilladora, she may organize around labor reform. She also may organize around issues of pollution and reproductive justice, as her location has determined the effects on her environment, which will affect her health and the health of any future children. These issues of production, consumption, labor, and the environment are all connected at intersections, all of which will shape women’s work, identity, and autonomy in these decisions.

Kirk, Gwyn, and Okazawa-Rey, Margo. “Women and the Environment.” Women’s

Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. By Kirk, Gwyn, and Okazawa-Rey, Margo.

New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 2010. 535-549. Print.