Ethics in Practice

Environment

race - a special cosmic value, distinctive from and superior to all other life - by what token shall it be manifest?

By a society decently respectful of its own and all other life, capable of inhabiting the earth without defiling it? Or by a society like that of John Burrough's potato bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself? As one or the other shall we be judged in "the derisive silence of eternity."

Thinking Like a Mountain

A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.

Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land. It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who scan their tracks by day. Even without sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound ofa fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces. Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them.

My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die. We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed

the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable sliderocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is

taking over the wolfs job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to

The Land Ethic

the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

Gail Stenstad

The "hole" in the ozone layer is 17 percent larger in 2000 than it was in 1999. 1 This may seem rather far away from our everyday concerns. Thousands of acres of rainforest are destroyed every week. Again, something distant, a niggling thought on the periphery of our more immediate concerns. ("What if?" we wonder. What if there really is an atmospheric "point of no return"?) Photos of the dying birds, coated with oil after the foundering of the Exxon Valdez. (A picture is worth ten thousand words, we have been told, and we know it to be so.) Frogs in a number of Minnesota's lakes are turning up with grotesque deformities. Acid, rain, "they say." Two heads. Three legs. No eyes. Why? How? (Something isn't quite right, we think.) I live twenty miles from town in semirural southern Appalachia. Last summer the air burned my throat and eyes, day after day. Impossible to ignore. What is in the air? How did it get there? Who is responsible? What, if anything can I do about it? What, if anything, should I do about my ever-increasing perception and understanding that we are destroying the air and the water and the soils that all of us, humans and other animals and plants alike, depend on?

Ecofeminism (ecofeminist philosophy) provides a clear analysis of the context in which these questions emerge. With the understanding gained, we can respond to the challenges these concerns pose to us. We need to know

how we can do what we discover we should do. What is ecofeminism? The word itself clearly indicates its double concern with ecological and feminist issues, but "ecology" and "feminism" narrowly construed only give us minimal descriptive conditions, a double commitment to eliminate the oppression of women and to stop destroying the ecological matrix in which we live. However, ecofeminism is broader and deeper than this minimalist description. When the two (feminism and ecological concerns) are brought together, the result is a commitment to resisting and eventually eliminating all forms of oppression (based on gender or class or race or culture or politics) and destructive domination (of nonhuman others and nature in general). It is a specifically feminist analysis of environmental concerns that yields this result.

In this context, what do I mean by a "feminist analysis"? It uses gender as the starting point, as the initial category by which the analysis will be organized. This does not imply that sexism is more important than racism or environmental destruction. Ecofeminism is not reductionist; most ecofeminists would not claim that "the oppression of women is the cause of environmental destruction" or that "if we eliminate sexism, we'll all live in harmony with our fellow humans and the natural world.,,2 Why not, then, call this perspective something like "anti-oppressionism," instead of eco feminism?

[O]ne of the goals of feminism is the eradication of all oppressive ... categories and the creation of a world in which difference does not breed domination - say, a world in 4001. In 4001, an adequate environmental ethic would be a feminist environmental ethic, and the prefix "feminist" would be redundant and unnecessary. Similarly, the prefix "environmental" ... would be unnecessary. But this is not 4001. (Warren, 2000, p. 92; see also p. 62)

In 2001, the designation "feminist" has critical power, in a way that even the designation "environmentalist" does not. A superficial kind of "environmentalism" is respectable. Even Exxon would have us believe that they are truly concerned about the caribou and sea petrels. "Green" sells. Gender issues, on the other hand, seem to more directly involve people's very self-identity and, in a sexist culture, their self-esteem, and so they tend to provoke a more viscerally defensive reaction. As we shall see, this reaction is also intrinsically linked to our perception of and relation to nature and to the environment.

Further, ecofeminism received both its practical and theoretical impetus from feminists. On the practical side, we have a quarter century of feminist environmental activists. On the theoretical side, we have the work of feminist historians (Merchant, 1980; Eisler, 1988), theologians (Reuther, 1975; Daly, 1978; Gray, 1981), and philosophers (Shiva, 1988; Warren, 1990) who, using as their starting point the experiences of women, began to clearly articulate a pervasive, multifaceted web of connections between the oppression of women, environmental destruction, racism, classism, and (neo)colonialism.3 The connections are empirical, historical, and conceptualltheoretical. Let me briefly explain what is meant by each of these.

Empirical connections can be seen in data and narratives that link the oppression of women with environmental destruction.

Women do more than one-half of the world's work, but receive only 10 percent of the world's income and own only 1 percent of the world's property. Women-headed house-

holds are a growing worldwide phenomenon, with between 80 and 90 percent of poor families headed by women. When one remembers that the three elements that make up the major part of Third World disasters are deforestation, desertification, and soil erosion, and that, among humans, it is the poor who are most significantly affected by them, one can then understand why women and children will be disproportionately victims of these disasters. (Warren 2000, pp.8-9)

The connection is not one-directional. The fact that "women's work," which in many places in the world is essential but unpaid subsistence work, is not valued as much as "men's work" has a decidedly negative impact on the environment. One example of many that could be invoked can make this clear. In India and many other Third World countries, the management of rural household economies is primarily the responsibility of women. They raise and gather much of the food, carry water from the village well or pump or nearby river, tend the milk cow if the family is fortunate enough to have one, and gather fuel for heating and cooking. Many of these activities are dependent on local native forest stands. These native forests yield food, fuel, fodder for animals, building materials, medicines, tools and utensils, and a means of earning a little income for someone skilled in gathering and using the gifts of the forest. But such women's work, and the products of their subsistence labor and local barter economies, are not measured in calculations of GNP or GOP. In terms of such economic measurements, women's work has no value. Then, when a country such as India, for example, engages in economic development, only those activities that are economically measured contribute toward development goals. The mixed native forests that rural women depend on are cut to make way for monoculture timber stands managed on the principles of Western forestry, to efficiently produce lumber and fiber. But then the rural women have lost essential means of sustaining their households. Alternatives are often not available, due to customs that may deny them access to other land, or to

Environment

credit. Meanwhile, indigenous knowledge and practices of reciprocity and care that sustained the villages and the forests, is gradually lost. (Warren, 2000, pp. 2-6) When the monocultures succumb, as they often do, to pests or diseases, the outsiders bring in their chemicals, which enter the groundwater, worsening an already dire situation. The result is a vicious circle of oppression and environmental destruction. Similar analyses have been done around the issues of population, desertification, and monoculture agribusiness. They all show bidirectional interconnections between genderand race-based economic oppression and environmental destruction. 4 And though the analyses begin with women's experiences, cultural imperialism, racism, and economic oppression are unavoidably and inseparably implicated, in case after case.

Has it "always been this way"? Apparently not, as the work of the historians and cultural anthropologists indicates otherwise. Much work has been done to try to uncover the historic roots of patriarchy. Several elements have emerged, including (I) widespread invasions of warring, patriarchal Indo-European nomads between about 4000 and 1500 BeE (Eisler, 1988), (2) the emergence and gradual spread of patriarchal monotheism (Reouter 1975; Gray 1981), (3) the dualism and rationalism of the Greeks, and (4) the effects of modern philosophy - in both its rationalist and empiricist modes - and the scientific revolution (Merchant, 1980; see also Griffin, 1978 and Plumwood 1991). The cumulative effect of these events was to devalue both women and "nature" as compared to men and "culture."

What emerges here is more than a random conglomeration of events that only incidentally link the oppression of women with a destructively negative attitude toward nature. There has been, in the long-dominant traditions of the western world, a conceptual identification of "woman" and "nature," whereby value has been removed from women and nature, and assigned to men and their cultural activities. A multifaceted conceptual framework emerged which included these mutually exclusive dualistic pairs: reason/emotion, spirit/body, mind/ body, heaven/earth, culture/nature, Man/ Woman (Man and Woman not as unique and

variable men and women, but as idealized images). The first item in each pair was associated with Man, and the second with Woman. The second term of each pair was valued less than the first. If the highest value was placed on reason and mind (by the Greeks or the modern rationalists), women were said to be irrational and moved only or mainly by bodily impulses. In religious philosophy, God was at the pinnacle of a Great Chain of Being, followed by the angels (disembodied beings), Man, and then, much lower, Woman and tribal people ("savages"), both of which were considered closer to animals and to nature generally than to God and Man. As instantiations of Man, possessed of the faculty of reason (or in other cases, under the inspiration of God), men were de [acto owners of the power of naming, of the power to articulate and codify this developing conceptual framework and its means of enforcement. A clear and dramatic example that draws together several of these points is that of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), sometimes referred to as the father of the modern scientific method. The cultural milieu in which he wrote included the entrepreneurial exploration and conquest of the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia, as well as the Inquisition, with its use of torture to force confessions, and its obsessive focus on women. Bacon advocated treating nature in the same fashion. His words speak for themselves, in his written response to King James I's repeal of the milder English laws to legalize harsher forms of torture and the death penalty for witches:

[T]he use and practice of [witchcraft, sorceries, charms] is to be condemned, yet from the consideration of them, ... a useful light may be gained, not only for a true judgement of the offenses of persons charged with such practices, but likewise for further disclosing the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object - as your majesty has shown in your own example. (Cited in Merchant, 1980, p. 168)

And again, in his text, The Masculine Birth (if

Time:

I am come in very truth leading to you nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave. (In Merchant, 1980, p. 170)

The language Bacon uses here makes clear the perceived links between women and nature, and the advocacy of brutal domination of both by men.

Of course, not all men have had this power. Farmers, laborers, peasants, men of color: these were not the men who wrote the benchmark texts of philosophy and religion or met in the theological councils of the Church. The more we understand about the historical development of western culture and its ideas, the more we can see that race, gender and class have been and continue to be decisive determinants of one's place and value in society.

Conceptual frameworks are key elements of any culture; they gather the basic beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions that both reflect and shape the society. An oppressive conceptual framework is one that functions to justify and maintain relations of domination and subordination, whereby the subordinates are systematically restricted and controlled. Two of the key features of oppressive conceptual frameworks are value-hierarchical thinking, as well as disjunctive and exclusive value dualisms, as outlined above. The other is the logic of domination. It is the logic of domination that provides the rationale for turning a conceptual framework into an oppressively functioning social structure. The logic of domination links the assumptions and value judgments about the essential characteristics of people or other beings (assumptions such as "women are emotional, men are reasonable" and value judgments such as "reason is superior to emotion") with a premise such as "superiority justifies domination." That kind of rationale underlies sexism, racism, and the assumption that humans are entitled to dominate nature. In the nineteenth century, public and political discourse was riddled with references to native Americans as savages, brutes, beasts and animals, and this was used to justify a governmental policy of physical and cultural genocide (in the land of freedom of religion, many native Americans were forbidden kv

law to practice their indigenous religions until 1973). Similar rhetoric about black people was prevalent during the transition from slavery to the era of Jim Crow laws

Two things are clear from even this very brief perusal of history. First, seeing women as "closer to nature," and nature as "like a woman," has been intrinsic to the subordination of both. Therefore, any attempt to understand sexist oppression or to address the reasons and motivations for our destructive domination of nature must take these connections into account. All forms of oppression and destructive domination are implicated. As long as "white," "male," "American," or "rich," entails superiority and entitlement to dominate those not so characterized, we will be living in a society that reflects and reinforces oppressive conceptual frameworks. Feminism, then, becomes a "movement to end all forms of oppression" and destructive domination (Warren, 1990, p. 130). As long as the logic of domination rules anyone domain, it will be difficult if not impossible to reduce its hold in any other.

A clear and concrete example of the way that a feminist analysis shows the role of linked oppressive conceptual frameworks in understanding environmental issues is population control. We have all heard about the so-called "population explosion," and know that the focus of discussions of it is the birth rate in Third World and developing countries. Granted: the world's population is growing astonishingly large. What usually is overlooked by those advocating technological birth control and even enforced sterilization of poor women in India and Africa is the role of paternalistic colonialism and capitalistic "development." For millennia, women in tribal and other indigenous societies had their own means of controlling the number of births. But when their cultures are dominated by outsiders, their traditional ways of life and work devalued and even destroyed, as in the forestry example discussed above, the result is that traditional practices are either lost, or lose their relevance, because the cultural matrix in which they were embedded is gone or drastically changed. Often, one result is that more children are born, as a means of attempting to simply survive. When a family has

Environment

to range farther to get food or water or fuel, more workers are needed. Boys can also go to the city and perhaps send a little money back to the village. There is another reason to suspect that racism and sexism more than concern for the environment motivates some of the harsher talk of population control, when we remind ourselves of the fact that the United States has less than four percent of the world's population but consumes between thirty five and forty percent of the goods and energy produced. Or, to put it another way, each of us in the US, on average, consumes three hundred times what one third world person does (Heller, 1993, p. 225). Where is the real "population problem"?

A feminist analysis of environmental issues, in clearly elaborating the function of oppressive conceptual frameworks and their logic of domination, helps us avoid falling into some perniciously sloppy thinking about the causes of environmental problems. To say, for instance, that "we" human beings should just stop abusing nature, is an egregious oversimplification, implying a nonexistent equality of benefit and blame.

Blaming "humanity" for nature's woes blames the human victims as the perpetrators ofthe ecological crisis ... For example, laborers in Third World countries are reduced by multinational conglomerates to instruments of ecocidal destruction. Like laborers in Auschwitz, they labor to bury a culture and history they love. These laborers fight daily to survive the low-pay slavery that subjects them to deadly working conditions, yet they too are subsumed under the sloppy category of "the accountable human." Failing to expose the social hierarchies within the category of "human" erases the dignity and struggle of those who are reduced to and degraded along with nature. (Heller, 1993, p. 226)

Such failure also allows the powerful institutions that benefit from oppression to shift the blame to those who are oppressed. And in a world in which we have internalized a deep insecurity about our own value (to the extent that we are not white, male, highly intelligent or economically successful), it is all too easy to fall

prey to this ploy. The ecofeminist analysis of the empirical, historical, and conceptual connections between modes of human-over- human oppression, and destructive domination of nature, will help us avoid that trap.

The Limitations of Other Approaches

Philosophers have tried to deal constructively with environmental issues for about thirty years. In that time, they have encountered some difficulties. Traditional ethical theories, whether consequentialist, deontological, virtueoriented, or some combination thereof, were constructed do deal with issues of behavior among human beings. When animals have been mentioned, it was incidentally (as in Kant's comment that someone who would abuse animals may also be more inclined to abuse humans; the latter, not the former, is the moral wrong). As for plants, or species of animals, or the atmosphere, oceans, or biosphere, they simply are not within the scope of traditional ethical theories.

However, many philosophers concerned with environmental issues have tried to extend the scope of the traditional theories, using various kinds of moral extensionism to argue for the moral considerability of whatever or whoever they think should be included. The arguments for the moral considerability of animals, for example, typically focus on animals as having characteristics such as sentience (Singer, 1998) or the possession of interests and rights (Regan, 1980) to justify the claim that we have moral obligations to (individual) animals. To argue for the moral considerability of species, whether of plants or animals, or of larger ecological units, philosophers have argued that such entities have intrinsic, not just instrumental, value. These arguments may use criteria similar to those put forward by animal welfarists, in making the intrinsic value of species or ecosystems or watersheds derive from the assumed intrinsic value of the sentient and self-aware beings that depend on them for life (Rolston, 1998). All of these approaches to environmental issues share two key features: (1) one form or another of moral extensionism, and (2) a commitment to trad-

itional models of theorizing, which understand theory principally as an articulation of necessary and sufficient conditions or criteria for moral action.

Recall how oppressive conceptual frameworks depend on a logic of domination, and how a logic of domination works by determining a hierarchy of relevant characteristics to be dualistically valued, with the added premise that such differences in value create a superior- ity-inferiority distinction that justifies domination of the inferior by the superior. Moral extensionism takes up one of the traditionally favored, highly valued characteristics (such as sentience and self-awareness) and attempts to extend it (or a notion of intrinsic value derived from it) to nonhuman others. In making such arguments the heart of their position, moral extensionists are unable to question the logic of domination as such. Not only does this limit the scope and depth of their analysis, it tends to leave them philosophically blind to the women/ race/class/nature interconnections that must be acknowledged by any effective approach to environmental issues. Even less traditional approaches use a kind of moral extensionism to make their case. Some deep ecologists, for example, take an expanded (human) self as one of their core insights. We see ourselves as essentially relational in our dependence on plants, animals, and the biosphere. This awareness of strong dependence fosters an expanded self- identi~y: I am the earth, the plants, the animals, the waters, the forests. Since we are fundamen-

tally inclined to pursue our own self-interest, this expand~d self-identity should motivate an

attitude of "biospheric" or "ecocentric egalitarianism" (Naess, 1998, pp. 207-8; Fox, 1998, pp. 227-9) Putting such a strong emphasis on identifying with nature has led some deep ecologists to advocate positions that not only ignore gender, class and race or culture issues, but are counterproductive even in strictly environmental terms. One of the platform elements in Arne Naess's formulation of deep ecology, for example, is that "The flourishing of nonhuman life requires a smaller human population" (Naess, 1998, p. 197). I have yet to see deep ecologists such as Naess acknowledge that this issue needs to be addressed in a way that

does not put the blame and responsibility for population control on Third World women. Until such theorists acknowledge the conceptual frameworks and logic of domination that reflect and reinforce oppressive social and economic structures, such talk about the need to reduce population is at best a platitude and at worst, implicitly (though I would assume unintentionally) sexist and racist. 5

The romantic drama of ecology is over ...

The dragon no longer hovers over the romantic countryside flashing the generic name tag of "technology" or "humanity." The dragon has finally taken off its mask. It wears the face of the capitalist draining the blood from the land and the people of the "Third World." The dragon wears the fist of the batterer beating the last breath from the woman who dared to survive. The dragon wears the face of domination, the face of all institutions, ideologies, and individuals who strip people of their land, culture, passion, and self-determination. (Heller, 1993, p. 239)

Traditional ethical theorists fail to take adequate account of the power of oppressive conceptual frameworks, and thus are weakened by becoming either the dragon or the knight. When the knight rides out to slay the dragon, who is this knight, and what is he doing? How does he distinguish the knights from the dragons? Is he going to slay the women of Africa and India, in order to rescue "Mother Earth" and the "virgin forests" from all those hungry human mouths? Obviously, no moral philosopher has that explicitly in mind. But without a clear understanding of the role of oppressive conceptual frameworks, and the recognition that if we are going to stop the ongoing destruction of the environment, we need to commit ourselves to eliminating all forms of oppression, we will find dragons lurking under the knights' gleaming armor. We simply cannot impose theory-derived imperatives on people whose lives and situations we do not and most likely cannot understand. But then we might well wonder, of what practical use is moral theory?

Environment

Transformative Power: Linking "Should" to "Can"

The deep ecologists are clearly right about this: moral exhortation contrary to people's perceived self-interest is usually ineffectual. Any theory that ignores this fact, or ignores the actual, practical contexts in which people live and act, will also be ineffectual. Here, we get to the heart of the matter: The core of ecofeminism (all forms ofoppressive and destructive domination must end) must be articulated in such a way as to motivate practices in specific contexts. Otherwise it remains just another ineffectual bit of moral exhortation.

Already in just doing the thinking - heeding women's experiences, seeing the connections, understanding the way that a logic of domination functions to "justify" the ideology of oppressive conceptual frameworks - the possibility of personal and institutional change begins to open up. How? To even begin to know how to act, or to change, or to see how institutions should be transformed, we must understand the actually existing situation. Historical understanding helps us to see clearly that there is nothing essential about sexism, racism, or our destructive domination of nature.

[I]f power relations stem from pre-political or universal truths about human nature, the basis of power relations is removed from the realm of political and social debate. We cannot challenge the legitimating basis of the power structure because we think it cannot be otherwise. (Birkeland, 1993, p. 26)

Knowing that the familiar structures of power are historically and culturally contingent denies them the cloak of necessity and inevitability. Oppressive conceptual frameworks are learned, not hardwired. They can be questioned, resisted, and changed. We also begin to see, however, how the institutions of domination shape and constrain us. In a sense, we cannot begin to act freely until we name and understand the reasons for our unfreedom. This appears contrary and puzzling at first. The question here seems to shift from the ethical

question "What should I do?" to the practical question "What can I do?" Knowledgeable or ignorant: aren't we powerless either way?

Here we must move beyond the ecofeminist description and analysis to the question of whether there can be a viable ecofeminist philosophy that is not only descriptive, but transformative (prescriptive and enabling). Ecofeminism has had to confront and struggle with the issue of the role of theory, as well as the question of the relation of theory to practice, and it has done so creatively and fruitfully. The best versions of ecofeminism yield an environmental philosophy that adequately responds to the actual situation and its needs, while avoiding the pitfalls to which traditional ethical theory is subject in attempting to deal with environmental issues.

Feminism in general, not just ecofeminism, has also been forced to confront the question of the role of theory. The first few decades of contemporary feminist philosophy were the product of mainly well-educated middle-class white European and American women. During the 1980s, women of color, women from Third World countries, as well as relatively uneducated women (activist farm workers, for example) began to speak up against the trend in academic feminism of acting as if there is such a thing as "woman" or "the woman's voice." It was pointed out in no uncertain terms that that kind of assumption, in denying or at least failing to recognize the unique experiences and ways of thinking of the great variety of women, came dangerously close to racism, c1assism, and in its own way, a perpetuation of oppressive conceptual frameworks. At the same time, others pointed out that the problem might also be located in the nature of theory itself, as traditionally construed. Theory has traditionally assumed the value of rational, objective distance from the matter under examination, and sought transhistorical truths and unitary reality (for example, essentialist claims about "human nature" or "women's traits"). Working from these assumptions, ethical theory has attempted to articulate and justify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which action can be considered "moral" and "good." Since theory thus construed (as it was by almost everyone at the

time) silenced the vOIces and invalidated the experience of most of the world's women, some feminist philosophers were inclined to reject theory-building altogether (Lugones and Spelman, 1983; Irigaray, 1985; Stenstad, 1988). However, in such a rejection of theory, some problems arise that are very difficult to resolve.

We are very used to thinking that if we say "X should do Y" or "institution Z should be dismantled or changed," we should provide some justification for saying such things. Without a theory, how are we to provide such a justification? Does it all come down to sheer subjectivity, ethics as a mere expression of approval or disapproval (so-called emotivism), or extreme relativism? If so, why is it wrong to pay women half the wage of men doing the same work, deny blacks an education, or abandon unwanted dogs at the side of the road? Philosophical anarchists and other atheoretical thinkers have responded with reasons that emphasize the need to work on these questions in an open, noncombative discussion, and noted that it seems that one should not be required to possess, ahead of time, a theoretical basis for saying that such things are wrong. And in fact, it has been the assertions and actions of those who strongly felt and believed that such things are wrong that eventually changed the weight of public perception and attitudes. Rosa Parks did not have a theoretical justification for refusing to go to the back of the bus. This is not to say that she had no reasons. However, those who thought she was "out of line" also had reasons. Competing reasons and competing feelings yielded differing evaluations of the rightness or wrongness of her act of resistance. In hindsight, we tend to forget that such an act was at that time controversial. According to everything an ecofeminist position has to tell us, Rosa Parks was a right-thinking, right-acting hero. But why do we say so? We can see her act embedded in the descriptive nexus that emerges from the ecofeminist analysis sketched above. In acting against racism, she acts rightly against the linked oppressive conceptual frameworks that support racism, sexism, and environmental destruction. But that may seem to be claiming too much. Description and analysis, while tremendously valuable, only go so far in helping us understand why her action, or our acts of recyc-

ling, or rescuing stray dogs, are right in resisting the institutions and logic of oppression and destructive dominance. It seems that at this point, we might want to take a closer look at whether some form of theorizing might have a helpful role to play.

The key is to carefully articulate the relationship of theory and practice. There are three key points in the discussion that follows, which traces how ecofeminism elaborates that relationship in a creative and transformative way.

A different understanding of the nature and role of theory.

2An articulation of what actually motivates real people in real situations.

3Attention to empowering us to act against destructive domination even though the institutional structures of power weigh heavily against our being able to do so.

Karen Warren's image of ecofeminist theory as a quilt is perhaps the single most helpful move that has been made to revise our understanding of theory in such a way as to redeem it and open up the possibility that it can actually do some work for us.

The "necessary conditions" of a theory (say, ecofeminist philosophical theory) are like the borders of a quilt. They delimit the boundary conditions of the theory without dictating beforehand what the interior (the design, the actual pattern) of the quilt does or must look like. The actual design of the quilt will emerge from the diversity of perspectives of quilters who contribute, over time, to the making of the quilt. Theory is not something static, preordained or carved in stone; it is always theory-in-process . .. An ecofeminist philosophical quilt will be made up of different "patches," constructed by quilters in particular social, historical, and material contexts, which express some aspect of that quilter's perspective on women-other human Others-nature interconnections. (Warren, 2000, pp. 66-7)

Ecofeminist philosophical theory is, in the first place, broader than just ethical theory. In