The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India

Abstract

This chapter argues that women, especially those in poor, rural households in India are victims of environmental degradation in quite gender-specific ways. It outlines the ecofeminist debate in the United States and one prominent Indian variant of it, and suggests an alternative conceptualization. The chapter traces the nature and causes of environmental degradation in rural India, its class and gender implications, and the responses to it by the state and grass-roots groups. It examines for an alternative transformative approach to development and suggests that women’s and men’s relationship with nature needs to be understood as rooted in their material reality, in their specific forms of interaction with the environment. Ecofeminism embodies within it several different strands of discourse, most of which have yet to be spelled out fully, and which reflect, among other things, different positions within the Western feminist movement. A growing privatization of community resources in individual hands has paralleled the process of statization.