The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development

Fable: A Response to Melissa Leach’s ‘Earth Mothers

and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion
Rose and Fell’

Niamh Moore

ABSTRACT

This contribution offers a response to Melissa Leach’s paper ‘Earth Moth-

ers and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell’,
published in an earlier issue of Development and Change. Leach’s article
examined the rise and fall of the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental
carer’ in environment and development discourses. Specifically, it appeared
concerned with the role of ‘the northern ecofeminist’ in popularizing this
figure, and the notion that women have a special relationship with the envi-
ronment. This response points to the reliance on the figure of the ‘northern
ecofeminist’ as a foil to gender and development (GAD) discourses, and sit-
uates this anxiety over the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’
in the context of some key feminist debates of the 1990s. Conflicts between
GAD scholars and ecofeminists can be understood as one manifestation of
tensions over essentialism in feminism. Attending to how conflicts over es-
sentialism have been worked through in feminism could productively inform
efforts to think through the nexus of gender, environment and development.

INTRODUCTION

In an article published in Development and Change in 2007, Melissa Leach

reflects on a thorny issue for those interested in gender in the field of devel-
opment studies, that of the once ubiquitous, now reviled, figure of woman
‘as natural environmental carer’ (Leach, 2007). Part of a special issue based
on papers from the conference ‘Beyond Gender Myths and Feminist Fa-
bles’, hosted by the Institute of Development Studies and the University of
Sussex, Leach’s article offers an account of this mythical figure, and how
she has variously appeared and disappeared in development and other dis-
courses and practices from the mid-1980s onwards. As is clear from the title
of her contribution, Leach is particularly concerned with the role of ecofem-
inism in popularizing this figure, and the notion that women have a special

I would like to thank Anne Rudolph, Julia Woodman and a number of other colleagues, as well
as the anonymous reviewers, for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Development and Change 39(3): 461–475 (2008). 
C Institute of Social Studies 2008. Published

by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St.,
Malden, MA 02148, USA
462 Niamh Moore

relationship with the environment. While initially this image was mobilized
to make critiques of, and claims from, development agencies, Leach identi-
fies how ultimately it became a major prop to approaches being developed
by mainstream development agencies, ‘mobilizing the extra resources of
women’s labour, skill and knowledge’ (Leach, 2007: 71) or ‘justifying envi-
ronmental interventions targeted at women exclusively’ (ibid.: 72).
Leach and her colleagues have been hugely influential in critiquing these
practices, and in tracing how often many of these interventions ‘have proved
counterproductive for women or have failed to conserve the environment or
sometimes both’ (ibid.: 72). In her 2007 article, Leach set out to examine
‘to what extent are images of nature-caring women still deployed, where
and why’ (ibid.: 68), and seems relieved that such images are much less
prominent than they were, although she speculates that ‘earth mother myths
may still be perpetuated through ecofeminist writings and certain strands of
ecocentric environmental activism, mainly in the north. But they appear to no
longer permeate, even implicitly, the environment and development policy
and action statements of donor agencies, governments and NGOs’ (ibid.: 78).
However, while the figure of the woman as environmental carer may have
retreated, another figure, that of the ‘northern ecofeminist’, continues to loom
large in Leach’s work. Despite Leach’s uncertainty about whether what she
terms ‘earth mother myths’ are still being perpetuated by northern ecofemi-
nists (and environmentalists), ecofeminism continues to act as a foil for her
argument. While much may have changed in the intervening years, it would
appear that ecofeminism, or, more precisely, its role in certain narratives
of gender and development, has not. And this is my interest: the continu-
ing appearance of the figure of the ‘northern ecofeminist’ in Leach’s work,
and the implications of the reliance on a critique of ecofeminism for our
understandings of the nexus of gender, environment and development.
In responding to Leach’s article, I would like to situate this anxiety over
the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’ in the context of some
key feminist debates of the 1990s, not least because attention to how these
conflicts have been worked out in related domains might productively inform
development debates. 1 Furthermore, attention to feminism in the 1990s may
help us fully appreciate the intensity of conflicts over ‘essentialism’, and
relatedly universalism, which have often been at the centre of objections to
the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’. The urgency to engage
in these debates, which Leach recounts in her article, was not only about a
planet being destroyed, not only about the impact of western lifestyles on
people, women and men, living all over the globe, but was also about what
was at stake in feminism in the 1990s.
In dominant narratives of the recent feminist past, the 1980s appear as a
long decade of crisis, when the fantasy of global sisterhood was revealed as

1. See Jackson (2006) for a recent account of the benefits of cross-disciplinary research for
development studies, drawing on a feminist framework.
The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development Fable 463

just that — a fantasy. ‘Feminism’ was called to account for reflecting the
concerns of white, middle-class, northern, heterosexual, able-bodied (etc.)
women. Critiques came in particular from Black and Third World women
and from post-structuralist theory (not mutually exclusive categories), which
refuted any politics founded on the category, or identity, of ‘woman’. The
notion that all women shared an essence or identity and that this could provide
a foundation for politics was shattered. In some narratives there was anxiety
about the end of feminist politics and the ‘retreat’ of feminism into the
academy. Other accounts narrated the emergence of post-structuralist theory
as a manifestation of theoretical sophistication which allowed essentialism
to be left behind in the naı̈ve 1970s and early 1980s (Hemmings, 2005).
In the wake of these crises, for many essentialism became anathema and
anti-essentialism de rigueur, and the critique of essentialism amounted to a
pejorative slur on the inadequacy of one’s feminist politics. Though rarely
cited as an exemplar in these debates, we might productively understand the
fraught exchanges between ecofeminism and those engaged in the field of
gender and development as one manifestation of the effects of the critique
of essentialism in feminism.
While many of those in the field of development studies who were ini-
tially involved in the critique of the figure of ‘woman as natural environ-
mental carer’, and of the northern ecofeminist, appeared to have abandoned
their critique by the late 1990s, elsewhere (some) feminists and ecofeminists
have been reflecting on the painful fallout of the intense exchanges over
essentialism. These reflections might productively be examined before fur-
ther re-engagement with the intersections of development, environment and
gender.
It is also worth remembering that, for many, feminism is a profoundly
passionate politics. Clare Hemmings, commenting on a response to one of
her own papers, writes that this work needs to be understood not just as
‘a job of mechanical deconstruction’ because ‘much feminist [and I add
environmental] work is concerned with the emotional investment needed to
sustain feminist work of a range of kinds’ (Hemmings, 2005: 119; see also
Jackson, 2006). She continues:

[f]eminist emotion, then, is central to the feminist stories we tell, and the way that we tell
them. Challenges to these stories, from within as well as outside feminism, are frequently
experienced and responded to at an emotional level, and as a result an account of the ways
of telling feminist stories needs to be attentive to the affective as well as technical ways in
which our stories about the recent feminist past work. It hurts because it matters, when we
are passionately invested in feminist practice. (Hemmings, 2005: 120)

The stories then, that Leach and I (and others) tell, are passionate stories,
invested in different ways of understanding feminism, with different accounts
of what is at stake. I write, after all, in the wake of more hyperbolic exchanges
between some ecofeminists and those working at the interface of gender and
development (see, for example, Jackson, 1995, 1996; Mellor, 1996; Salleh,
464 Niamh Moore

1996). My intention here is not repetition, but is in part to try to take into
account what has been at stake in these rather painful exchanges, so that
rather than being implicated in narratives of the end of feminism, stories of
conflict will constitute part of the ongoing and continuous story of feminism.
I make a number of points in brief below: I suggest a more complicated
account of ecofeminism; I query the apparent need to attribute ecofeminism
to the ‘north’, and the implications of doing so; I gesture towards feminism
as a context for anxieties about ‘women and environment assumptions’; I
point to a rich vein of feminist theory which highlights the damaging effects
of the critique of essentialism, and queries its adequacy as critique. However,
my main interest is not in providing an alternative account of ecofeminism,
but rather in posing the questions of how the ‘northern ecofeminist’ appears
in Leach’s narrative, what work this figure is invoked to do, and what the
effects on the overall argument are.

‘WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENT ASSUMPTIONS’

Leach identifies herself as one of a group of development scholars (includ-

ing Agarwal, Jackson, Joekes, Rocheleau, Fortmann and Wieringa) who
in the early to mid-1990s were involved in what she terms a critique of
‘women as natural environmental carers’, writing that ‘from a range of the-
oretical perspectives, but with a shared emphasis on gender relations and on
particular contexts, women and environment assumptions were debunked,
images reinterpreted and contextualised and alternative implications for pol-
icy and practice put forward’ (Leach, 2007: 68). 2 However, it is unfortunate
that Leach resorts to shorthands such as ‘women as natural environmental
carers’ and ‘women and environment assumptions’ for very complex and
differentiated issues, and it is telling that, while she does at times maintain
distinctions across a range of sites such as development discourse and pol-
icy, NGOs, and ecofeminism, these are often elided in her account. In the
end it appears easier to attach the image of woman as natural carer for the

2. Some of these scholars have been identified with GAD — ‘gender and development’ — al-
though Rocheleau has identified her perspective as ‘feminist political ecology’, and Agarwal
has described her position as ‘feminist environmentalism’. These naming and typologizing
practices are not exclusive to those working at the interface of gender and development.
Noël Sturgeon has provided a wonderful genealogical critique of the use of typologizing
practices in ecofeminism, and how new names have been used to disavow aspects deemed
undesirable. In Sturgeon’s account typologizing practices have been used to carve ecofem-
inism up into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ecofeminisms. Her account identifies how essentialism is
mapped onto ‘bad’ ecofeminisms, and anti-essentialist positions onto ‘good’ ecofeminisms.
Her account (drawing on the work of Katie King) would be worthwhile reading for anyone
concerned with upholding the distinctions between the various typologies in development
studies, including WID (Women in Development), WED (Women, Environment and Devel-
opment), GAD (Gender and Development), GED (Gender, Environment and Development);
see Sturgeon (1997a: Chapter 6, ‘What’s in a Name?’).
The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development Fable 465

environment specifically to ecofeminism, and to hold ecofeminism respon-

sible for the popularity of this figure, than to hold onto and pay attention
to the very slipperiness of the figure (and the different work she does at
different sites). Ecofeminism emerges as the main object of Leach’s critique:
‘As one of these academics, I can recall how imperative it seemed at the
time to promulgate such critiques. For while appreciating the attempt by en-
vironmental agencies to address gender, it seemed appalling and dangerous
that this was occurring through an approach with glaring flaws influenced
by dubious ecofeminist work’ (ibid.: 73).
Ecofeminists are produced here as the main culprits; while the efforts of
environmental agencies are ‘appreciated’, no such latitude is extended to ‘du-
bious’ ecofeminists. While the article does credit ecofeminism with some
redeeming effects, such as on the Miami declaration adopted by activists prior
to UNCED, and the preamble to Women’s Action Agenda 21 discussed at
UNCED (ibid.: 71), Leach ultimately focuses on the ways in which ‘ecofem-
inist fables came to be deployed in far less critical and politicized ways’
becoming ‘major props to the women, environment and development ap-
proaches being developed by mainstream development agencies’ (ibid.: 71).
Leach renders ecofeminism thus:

Ecofeminism is based on the notion that women are especially ‘closer to nature’ in a spiritual or
conceptual sense. As a multi-stranded set of approaches, developed largely amongst northern
academics, it is riven with theoretical differences and debates. Most stark perhaps is the
distinction between those taking an essentialist position, attributing the connection between
women and nature to biological roots, and those who see it as a social or ideological construct.
(ibid.: 70)

While gesturing to the complexity of ecofeminism, Leach (2007) does not

do justice to this apparent recognition. The overriding effect is the collapsing
of ecofeminism into essentialism. This is compounded by the limited cita-
tion of ecofeminist texts. The article only references early work by Carolyn
Merchant, Val Plumwood, Maria Mies, Karen Warren and Vandana Shiva,
and only attaches specific critiques of essentialism to Mies and Shiva, no
doubt because such a critique is much harder to sustain against Merchant,
Plumwood and Warren. There is little acknowledgement of the existence
of an ecofeminism which critiques essentialism, which insists on an anti-
essentialist stance, and which is focused on a critique of associations be-
tween women and nature in western philosophy. It is very difficult to read
the work of Merchant, Warren or Plumwood straightforwardly as either bi-
ologically or socially determinist or essentialist. Leach resorts to letting one
or two authors represent the whole of ecofeminism, without attending to the
specificity of their work. There are no references to the work of ecofeminists
who have also been involved in a critique of the figure of ‘woman as natural
environmental carer’. Neither does Leach reference explicitly ecofeminists
who are overtly post-structuralist or anti-dualistic in their stance, includ-
ing Plumwood. To the extent that she does provide an engagement with a
466 Niamh Moore

particular ecofeminist, her critiques are specifically of Vandana Shiva, and

her work on the Chipko movement. While Leach’s account of Shiva is also
brief, I address this here, because the work of Shiva, and accounts of the
Chipko movement, have been central in critiques of ecofeminism from those
working in the field of gender and development. Arguably when Leach is sug-
gesting ecofeminism’s influence in popularizing ‘women and environment
assumptions’, she is really referring to Shiva’s work.

VANDANA SHIVA, THE CHIPKO MOVEMENT, ‘NORTHERN’

ECOFEMINISTS AND GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT

Vandana Shiva has been particularly well-known since the publication of

her book, Staying Alive: Women, Environment and Sustainable Development
(Shiva, 1988), which popularized the Chipko movement in the west. Chipko
emerged in the early 1970s as a movement of villagers in the Indian Gar-
whal Himalayas who protested against commercial logging which would
have interfered with local subsistence use of the forests. The story of Indian
villagers hugging trees to prevent logging captured many imaginations. By
the late 1980s and early 1990s Chipko had become an iconic movement for
ecofeminists and (other) environmentalists, and became a ritual citation in
an ecofeminist litany of international grassroots activisms which also in-
cluded the Kenyan Green Belt Movement. This representation of Chipko
as an exemplary instance of ecofeminist activism was troubling for many
in development studies, but it also became increasingly troubling for many
ecofeminists.
Those working in the field of gender and development have made a number
of criticisms of Shiva’s account of Chipko, her role popularizing Chipko in
the north, and northern ecofeminists’ use of Chipko. Leach writes, ‘[w]hile
predominantly originating in the north, ecofeminism acquired a vocal in-
ternational presence in the 1980s. The work of Vandana Shiva was particu-
larly influential’ (Leach 2007: 70). She continues: ‘Not just through widely
published and accessible writings but also through presentations at interna-
tional meetings, her work generalized from her particular interpretations of
women’s experiences and the feminine principle in Hindu cosmology to con-
struct a notion of all third world women as still connected with the remnants
of a not quite extinct feminine principle, which could be recovered’ (ibid.).
Shiva’s account of maldevelopment, of the damaging effects of develop-
ment particularly on rural women, and of the death of the feminine principle
of prakriti, was particularly amenable to western audiences as it appeared
to parallel northern ecofeminist arguments about a time before western in-
dustrialization when gender relations and ecological relations were more be-
nign. As well as critiquing Shiva’s universalizing of Hinduism, development
scholars have also criticized her account of Chipko as a women’s move-
ment, and its ‘appropriation’ by ecofeminists. To refute Shiva’s narrative of
The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development Fable 467

Chipko, Leach and her colleagues turn to the work of subaltern studies scholar
Ramachandra Guha (Guha, 1989). 3 In his book The Unquiet Woods: Eco-
logical Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalayas, Guha interprets
Chipko as existing in a tradition of peasant resistance in the Himalayas, and
therefore not as an instance of women’s or feminist activism. He provides an
account of a number of the men actively involved in the Chipko movement,
and in leadership positions, which is invoked to further undermine accounts
of Chipko as a women’s movement. Given this reading of Chipko, persistent
reference to the movement as an iconic example of ecofeminism provides
further evidence of ecofeminists’ lack of local knowledge. This kind of local
knowledge and empirical detail is perhaps what development scholars, such
as Leach, have painstakingly gathered through their extensive fieldwork.
Yet, close to twenty years on, we might read these tussles between gen-
der and development scholars and ecofeminists over Shiva and the Chipko
movement more humorously. Accessible and appealing to western audiences,
Shiva has been outstandingly successful; after all we are still talking about
Chipko. Shiva has been able to use northern ecofeminists and environmen-
talists (and perhaps development specialists) to her own ends. Shiva is im-
portant for many reasons, not least her ability to irritate, to get under the skin
of many, from Monsanto executives, to gender and development scholars,
to northern ecofeminist academics. If I may provocatively — and perhaps
counter-intuitively for some — suggest, we might better understand Shiva
after Haraway 4 as a shape-shifter, a coyote, a hybrid figure, a cyborg, a
border creature; and a member of the Indian educated middle classes, a nu-
clear physicist, now turned global environmental activist, advocate of peasant
women in rural India, author of compelling books on the green revolution, on
Biopiracy, Monocultures, a feature of undergraduate courses at universities
throughout the north, foe of Monsanto.
Those who cite Guha’s account of Chipko as a peasant movement do so
as if it somehow trumps Shiva’s; as if Guha’s apparent greater knowledge of

3. Leach also invokes accounts of Chipko as a movement where ‘women’s participation was
actually conservative of their subordinate position (Jain, 1984)’ (Leach, 2007: 76) and not
as ‘evidence of women’s closeness to nature but as a struggle for material resources in the
context of gender-ascribed natural resource dependence, and women’s limited opportunities
to out-migrate as compared with men (Jain, 1984; Peritore, 1992)’ (Leach, 2007: 75). This
latter argument would not be inconsistent with Shiva’s account of the Chipko movement.
However here I focus on the use of Guha’s work in refuting Shiva’s account of Chipko as
Guha has been widely cited in criticisms of Shiva’s account.
4. Indeed I am not the only one to draw parallels between Shiva’s work and that of Haraway.
Poonam Pillai links Haraway and Shiva through their common interest in ‘recasting dis-
courses of science and technology as culturally constructed and re-imagining both humans
and nonhumans as agents of nature’ (Pillai, 1996: 245, n. 90). We might remember that
Haraway has positioned herself as an ecofeminist while, like many, being critical of the
limitations of ecofeminism; but this should serve as a reminder of the dangers of reducing
ecofeminism to any easy essentialism (see, e.g., Sturgeon, 1997a: 187–8).
468 Niamh Moore

local history reveals Shiva as only a tourist in the region, as if all that inter-
national travel leaves her somehow less ‘Indian’, tainted by her contact with
the north and her popularity with northern environmentalists. Yet Guha’s ac-
count of Chipko as existing in a tradition of peasant resistance could be seen
as little different to Shiva’s invocation of the Hindu principle of prakriti —
as an invocation of a different kind of symbolic indigeneity, but one which
is more ideologically acceptable to certain development scholars and practi-
tioners. Similarly Guha’s gender politics are more acceptable to some. Shiva,
and ecofeminists more generally, are criticized for their focus on ‘women
only’, for their apparent lack of reference to men, and to ‘gender relations’.
Leach writes that ‘Shiva’s work, for example, subsumed any reference to
men into “peasants” or “tribes”. Thus as in WED [Women, Environment and
Development], it appears to be only women who have any environmental
connection’ (Leach, 2007: 71). At the same time Guha’s subsuming of ref-
erences to women in the Chipko movement into ‘peasants’ appears to pass
without comment by Leach. In this insistence on ‘men too’, gender relations
appear to be only understood as relations between women and men, as if
relations between women (and between men) are of little consequence, as if
attention to women and men is by definition theoretically superior to relations
between ‘women only’, and as if essentialism is automatically undone by the
inclusion of men. Attaching essentialism so carefully to ecofeminism means
that we may be less likely to examine some gender and development posi-
tions for their own essentialisms; a critique of essentialism is no guarantee
of anti-essentialism.
What is really intriguing about these various accounts of Chipko, and how
they are differently used by ecofeminists and those in the field of devel-
opment studies, is precisely how they point to the value of further study
of the Chipko movement. They are rarely presented as conflicting accounts
from which we might learn something about the contestation over gender
in movements. Rather, Guha’s account is generally presented as a corrective
to Shiva’s, and one by which we should be more convinced. Yet Shiva’s ac-
count of Chipko could be understood as a polemical overstatement in the
context of the prevailing sexism of accounts of Chipko which downplayed
‘women’s involvement’. The conflict over who ‘owns’ Chipko, over who did
the real work, must surely seem wearily familiar to anyone involved in any
‘mixed’ politics, but it is precisely this conflict, the various narratives mar-
shalled in support of each side, the negotiation of positions, that would make
an interesting study. Guha’s insistence that Chipko is a peasant movement,
and not a women’s movement, merely confirms that Chipko is indeed an
important site where nature, gender and culture have been hotly contested.
So perhaps neither ecofeminist nor development studies accounts of Chipko
have been adequate, but the possibility of further exploration has effectively
been foreclosed, and not only because of the ‘dubious work’ of ecofeminists.
This must (also) be understood as a powerful consequence of development
critiques.
The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development Fable 469

Jane Roland Martin has pointed out that the critique of essentialism has
had methodological consequences, creating a chilly research climate which
has led to a retreat from certain topics and terms (Martin, 1994). We can see
this manifested in how any easy reference to Chipko now would be held to
be naı̈ve. Indeed, many ecofeminists now display their knowingness about
essentialism and universalism by marking their distance from and disdain of
suggestions that Chipko can be read easily as ecofeminist — rather than, for
instance, providing a more critical account of what it means to read Chipko
as ecofeminist, or examining the particular imbrication of gender, nature
and culture in the Garhwal Himalayas. Martin’s attention to methodological
implications is one example of a turn in feminism to recognize the limitations
of the very critique of essentialism. Whereas once the critique of essentialism
was felt to be very necessary (recall Leach’s account of the sense of urgency
which accompanied her work in the 1990s), even (and perhaps especially)
those who were once most vocal in calling for a critique of essentialism, have
since called into question its efficacy and have insisted on the dangers of
how it has been used.

ESSENTIALISM AND/IN FEMINISMS

One of the founding gestures of second wave feminism was to challenge argu-
ments that ‘women’s nature’ was to nurture, and that this ‘nature’ was founded
in women’s biology. Feminists challenged biological determinism, or essen-
tialism, by insisting on a distinction between sex and gender: sex was held to
be biological, gender and gender roles were held to be socially constructed.
While biology and nature were considered to be fixed and unchangeable, the
social was felt to be much more mutable; hence the importance of the term
‘gender’ for feminists in holding out the possibility of social transformation.
Yet despite this widely shared understanding of feminism, some feminists
(most notably radical/cultural feminists; and those espousing a feminist iden-
tity politics) have appeared to hold on to, or have been charged with holding
onto ‘nature’, the biological, and/or an account of feminist politics which
relies on an essentialized notion of ‘woman’ as the foundational subject of
feminism. From the mid-1980s onwards the labelling of any political or theo-
retical position as ‘essentialist’ has characterized many problematic struggles
among feminists. For many, the essentialism–anti-essentialism debates have
come to ‘define 80s feminism’ (Schor, 1994: vii).
For some an insistent anti-essentialism appeared to represent the answer to
the problem of essentialism. However, others, including those who once led
the call for anti-essentialism, have subsequently reflected on the effects of
this ‘compulsory’ anti-essentialism, particularly the use of essentialism as a
pejorative term to cast doubt on the sophistication of one’s feminism (Fuss,
1989; de Lauretis, 1989; Spivak, 1989). Teresa de Lauretis has written, ‘many
who, like myself, have been involved with feminist critical theory for some
470 Niamh Moore

time, who did use the term, initially as a serious critical concept, have grown
impatient with this word — essentialism — time and time again repeated
with its reductive ring, its self-righteous tone of superiority; its contempt
for “them” — those guilty of it’ (de Lauretis, cited in Schor, 1994, p. vii).
Similarly Spivak (1989: 128–9) has written: ‘what I am very suspicious of is
how anti-essentialism, really more than essentialism, is allowing women to
call names and congratulate ourselves’. While anti-essentialism was intended
as a response to the exclusionary politics of essentialist feminisms, anti-
essentialism has been revealed to rely on its own exclusions (Butler and
Scott, 1992). In recognizing how essentialism has been used to dismiss other
feminisms, theorists have also pointed to the limitations of essentialism,
and anti-essentialism, for feminism. Spivak, for instance, has argued that
‘essentialism is a trap. It seems more important to learn that the world’s
women do not relate to the privileging of essence. . .in quite the same way’
(Spivak, 1987: 89).
One alternative that has been posed is genealogical critique. This involves
a shift away from ascribing essentialism to various moments, instances and
strands of feminism, towards a genealogical examination of how essentialism
has been invoked and to what ends. Accounts which attempt to resolve the
‘problem’ of essentialism by positing more progressive accounts of feminism
often rely on a problematic opposition of essentialism and anti-essentialism,
and an assumption that this ‘problem’ can be resolved theoretically
(Hemmings, 2005). Yet essentialism and anti-essentialism are bound together
in ways which leaves neither easily extricable from the other (Ahmed, 1998;
Fuss, 1989). Some are now less concerned with identifying what essential-
ism is and where and how we might find it, than with focusing on how it is
used, and by whom, and to what effect (Champagne, 1995). For Spivak the
goal of essentialist critique is not the exposure of error, but the persistent
examination of the production of truths. Rather than providing a theoretical
resolution to the problem of essentialism, this kind of genealogical approach
offers a useful tool for the examination of how essentialism is invoked in
the production of various truths, for instance, the truth that ecofeminism is
essentialist. As Judith Butler (1990: viii–ix) has expressed it:

to expose the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as the effects of a specific
formation of power requires a form of critical inquiry that Foucault, reformulating Nietzsche,
designates as ‘genealogy’. A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender,
the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept
from view; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and
cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses
with multiple and diffuse points of origin.

Genealogical critique then also involves attention to narrative, and to rup-

tures in narratives, calling into question linear, teleological, progress narra-
tives. For Hemmings many accounts attempt to resolve the ‘problem’ of es-
sentialism theoretically, that is, by posing essentialism as an impasse which
The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development Fable 471

feminists must overcome, usually through a theoretical process of ‘linear

displacement’. Similarly Ahmed has argued ‘essentialism is not a concep-
tual horizon that can simply be transcended’ (Ahmed, 1998: 91). Yet this
is the kind of solution to essentialism that is manifest in Leach’s paper,
where she writes that ‘as environment and development discourses have
moved on, so these ecofeminist fables seem largely to have retreated back
into the world of academic writings and fringe environmental groups which
originally spawned them’ (Leach, 2007: 82). Leach’s narrative allows envi-
ronment and development discourses to have moved on, whereas ecofem-
inism is left behind. This narrative resolution allows ecofeminism to be
relegated to the margins of debate, consigned to academia and environmen-
talism and the north, and therefore excluded from, and not in need of, further
consideration.
Against this kind of linear displacement narrative Hemmings poses the
need ‘to suggest a way of imagining the feminist past somewhat differently
— as a series of ongoing conversations rather than a process of imagined
linear displacement’ (Hemmings, 2005: 131). Noël Sturgeon had already
made an analogous point, specifically with reference to development de-
bates, which bears repeating: ‘rather than see the recurrence of essentialist
moments in development discourses on women being a part of an ongo-
ing process of political struggle stimulated by feminist interventions, these
scholars [Agarwal, Jackson, Leach and Rao] critique “ecofeminism” instead’
(Sturgeon, 1997a: 145). As Ahmed notes ‘the “problem” of essentialism is
not one which can be resolved once and for all, but rather demonstrates the
importance of ‘a continual reflexivity over how the borders which sustain
conceptual entities such as “woman” and “women” are constituted through
acts of exclusion or othering’ (Ahmed, 1998: 91). In this way we can un-
derstand Leach’s narrative as relying on the attachment of essentialism to
ecofeminism, and the othering and exclusion of ecofeminism from debates
about development.
Thus genealogical critique also points to the always compromised nature
of academic knowledge (Bennett, 1998 cited in Saukko, 2003: 116). As well
as excluding ecofeminism from consideration, a further effect of Leach’s
teleological narrative is the naturalizing of her own role and that of other
critics. Leach’s account at times presents her work and that of her colleagues
as almost ineffectual, concluding that the current scarcity of the image of
woman as natural carer for the environment means ‘not that we were spectac-
ularly successful as debunkers, but that the discourse was doomed and only
ever temporary. A flawed argument served a time-bound purpose which has
diminished as broader environment and development concerns have altered’
(Leach, 2007: 68), in an account which ironically naturalizes rather than ac-
counts for change. This account also obfuscates how her work might have
been implicated in these discussions, as elsewhere (ibid.: 77) she acknow-
ledges the impact of her work and that of her colleagues: ‘While it may have
taken a group of vocal academics to articulate and elaborate some of these
472 Niamh Moore

ideas, we were clearly not the only people thinking them. I vividly recall
the hungry reception of my critique of WED amongst the various student,
practitioner, donor and NGO audiences to which I presented these ideas in
meetings in the early 1990s’.
Against Leach’s teleological narrative, a genealogical account would be
interested in moments of rupture. Genealogical critique might allow us to
pose the question of why the critique of the figure of the ‘woman as natural
environmental carer’ waned in the late 1990s. A critical genealogy would
be interested in Leach’s own assumptions, interests and investments. Not
least, genealogical critique might also pose the question of whether certain
gender and development positions are themselves immune from the charge
of essentialism? Acceptance of Guha’s account of Chipko could certainly be
seen as one manifestation of essentialism. However, rather than dismissing
and excluding such positions from any serious consideration on account of a
purported essentialism, genealogy allows us to ask why essentialisms emerge
in particular moments, what purposes they serve. While Leach offers a potted
history of the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’, and relatedly,
of ecofeminism and gender and development, she does not offer a critical
genealogy.
Refusing to read ‘women and environment assumptions’ straightforwardly
through the lens of essentialism might enable more productive accounts of
the intersections of gender, environment and development. Essentialism can
be too blunt a tool for examining the slipperiness of ‘women and environment
assumptions’. Some examples of alternative readings include, for example,
Poonam Pillai (1996). Pillai resists the urge to reduce Chipko and Shiva’s
account of Chipko to essentialism, or to spend her time critiquing west-
ern ecofeminism. In this process she produces an account of Chipko from
which both GAD scholars and ecofeminists could learn much. Similarly the
exchanges between Anna Tsing, Yaakov Garb and Noël Sturgeon in the col-
lection Transitions, Environments, Translations: Meanings of Feminism in
Contemporary Ethics (Garb, 1997; Sturgeon, 1997b; Tsing, 1997), offer a
further engagement with Chipko, essentialisms and universalisms, and ques-
tions of translations between ‘east’ and ‘west’, and ‘north’ and ‘south’. In
my own work, which turns to women’s activism in the North, I provide a
reading of the figure of the maternalist feminist environmentalist activist
(Moore, 2007a). Here I call into question, rather than assume, the essen-
tialism purported to be rife at sites such as feminist peace camps (Moore,
2007b). Paying attention to the ‘politics of essentialism’ means that the figure
of the feminist peace activist, or the feminist peace camp, need not be read as
overdetermined. Rather, such sites can also be understood as sites of struggle
over the meaning of ‘woman’, and the practice of ecofeminist politics, where
it becomes possible to understand that ‘woman’ and the iconic ‘woman as
environmental carer’ are not necessarily reified, but may also be refigured
(Moore, forthcoming).
The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development Fable 473

IN CONCLUSION

Understanding conflicts over the figure of woman as natural environmental

carer between those in development studies and ecofeminists as one mani-
festation of the critique of essentialism, allows us a broader context through
which to understand these conflicts, and at the same time offers resources for
any possible return to the field of environment and development. My inten-
tion here has not primarily been to substantiate a counter argument to Leach
by producing a series of citations which resolutely demonstrate that ecofem-
inism is not essentialist, or indeed that it is insistently anti-essentialist; or
that it is not quite as essentialist as many have made out. It is rather to point
to possibilities which have not been taken up in Leach’s paper. The critique
of essentialism (in ecofeminism or elsewhere) is no longer sufficient, if in-
deed it ever was. This point is not new, but it has long been established, and
this perspective could usefully inform any re-engagement with the terrain of
gender/environment/development. In focusing substantial energy on attach-
ing the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’ to ecofeminism,
and in producing an account of ecofeminism which has stressed essential-
ism above all else, some gender and development positions have produced
an account of themselves which rely on exclusions, and result in certain
losses.
Having established the current scarcity of the problematic figure of the
woman as natural carer for the environment (though also somewhat regret-
fully the relative paucity of any gender perspective), Leach concludes her
paper with a somewhat ambivalent and weary call that ‘perhaps it is time
for a new round of concerted engagement with the changed world of envi-
ronment and development policy which attempts to put gender back in the
picture on more politicized terms’ (Leach, 2007: 82). There is little sense of
any of that original urgency, however, which drove earlier engagements in the
messy nexus of gender/environment/development. Leach does mention the
work of Schroeder (1996) and Li (2002) as offering accounts ‘which explore
the intersection of gender, dynamic ecological processes and environmental
politics across multiple scales’ (Leach, 2007: 82). In addition to these I am
suggesting that there are now (and always were) a host of other resources: the
vast work on the limitations of the critique of essentialism; and on how essen-
tialism has figured in the narratives of feminism; as well as much ecofeminist
work which cannot easily be reduced to essentialism, which might support
the kind of research which Leach proposes. And possibly in taking on board
feminist work on essentialism and anti-essentialism, the development of a
genealogical critique of the critique of essentialism, and a perspective which
recognized that ecofeminism was never only essentialist, a re-engagement
with the field of environment and development need not be quite so
weary.
474 Niamh Moore

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Niamh Moore is a researcher in the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-

Cultural Change (CRESC), University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL,
UK (niamh.moore@manchester.ac.uk). She is currently writing a book on the
significance of eco/feminist activism against clearcut logging in Clayoquot
Sound on the West Coast of Canada for the University of British Columbia
Press.