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Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari, eds.,
FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY: GLOBAL ISSUES AND LOCAL EXPERIENCES, International Studies of Women and Place Series
(London: Routledge, 1996), xviii + 327 pages, paper $19.95.
Feminist Political Ecology is a substantial portion, and a good value for the money, for those interested in an intellectual meal from an environmental studies menu. Anyone who gets past the rather dry, and at times tough, conceptual overview is in for a treat. The meat of this book consists of well-researched and cogently argued case studies. The chapters range across continents and contexts as we are carried from Amazonia to West Harlem in New York City, from Austria to Kenyan drylands, and from a central Himalayan village to the Silesian industrial belt in Poland. The stated purpose of the book is to bring together feminist and political ecology scholarship while transcending familiar dichotomies between rural and urban environments and industrial and agrarian settings. The collection of eleven essays succeeds admirably in making these unusual juxtapositions of locales and themes. The opportunities presented for comparative exegesis of how gender inflects the politics of ecology, however, are not fully utilized.
By using "feminist" in their title, the compilers of this eclectic collection reveal their political persuasions. Many of the contributions reach out from the intimate details of their particular cases to the grand formulation of a female perspective on the environment and women's ways of mobilizing for environmental protest. In that sense, strong ecofeminist sympathies run throughout the volume. Rocheleau and her coeditors are quite direct about this stance in their introduction. But their capsule survey of the different strands of writing, which they identify as ecofeminist, feminist-environmentalist, socialist-feminist, feminist-poststructuralist, and environmentalist, does not provide an elucidation of what makes the residual ecofeminism of their position tenable. Thus, the relationship of gender analysis to political ecology remains vaguely established. Does gender take its place alongside class, caste, ethnicity, race, and interest group as a social category that we must give primacy to in different contexts? Or is it the task of feminist political ecology to underscore the omnipresence of gender issues within and across the multiple scales and categories of analysis that characterize political ecology as an approach to the study of environmental...