ECOfeminism

Ecofeminism: Power, Ecology, and the Architecture of Domination

Ecofeminism did not emerge from lifestyle branding or aesthetic environmentalism. The term was coined in 1974 by French thinker Françoise d'Eaubonne. Yet it was during the 1980s and 1990s that ecofeminism consolidated academically, developing into a serious body of work within philosophy, environmental ethics, and political theory.

At its core lies a provocative thesis: the logic that has historically subordinated women is structurally linked to the logic that legitimizes the exploitation of nature. These are not parallel injustices. They are interconnected expressions of a deeper architecture of domination.

Ecofeminism argues that ecological devastation cannot be understood solely as a technical failure or policy gap. It is rooted in hierarchical systems of thought that normalize control, extraction, and instrumentalization. The crisis of the planet is inseparable from the crisis of power.

Two Key Thinkers

Vandana Shiva

Writing from the Global South, Shiva connects patriarchy, colonialism, and ecological destruction. In Staying Alive(1988), she critiques Western models of development and exposes how extractive economies disproportionately impact women, particularly in rural and indigenous communities. Her work reframes environmental damage as a political and epistemic issue, not merely an environmental one.

Karen J. Warren

Warren brings philosophical rigor to ecofeminism. In Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000), she articulates the concept of the “logic of domination” a conceptual framework that justifies hierarchical dualisms such as man/woman, culture/nature, reason/emotion. For Warren, dismantling ecological destruction requires dismantling this logic at its roots.

Not One Ecofeminism, but Many

Ecofeminism is not monolithic. It contains diverse currents:

• Cultural or spiritual ecofeminism, which explores symbolic and cosmological connections between women and nature.

• Materialist or social ecofeminism, which focuses on capitalism, colonialism, and economic structures.

• Philosophical or ethical ecofeminism, which interrogates the conceptual foundations of hierarchy and domination.

Reducing ecofeminism to the idea that “women are closer to nature” misses the point and risks essentialism. Contemporary ecofeminist scholarship actively critiques such simplifications.

Ecofeminism is not a green trend dressed in moral language. It is a sustained theoretical tradition with internal debates, methodological diversity, and decades of intellectual development.

If anything, its enduring relevance suggests something unsettling: ecological collapse may not be a failure of knowledge, but a consequence of how power itself has been imagined and organized.

And that shifts the question from how we manage the planet to how we rethink domination.

You just handed me a full civilizational autopsy and said “translate.” No pressure. Fine. Here it is, clean and faithful, no poetic embellishment, just the message doing its work.

We live in finite bodies. The bodily dimension remains invisibilized. We need other people.

Women’s bodies bear witness to medical and political domination.

We live in deeply aging societies. The final years of life often unfold in extremely vulnerable bodies. The process of accompaniment, and the need for special care.

Throughout life, but especially at certain moments in the life cycle, we become dependent.

Autonomous people and dependent people: this is a FALSE DUALISM.

We are interdependent people. Vulnerable beings who need to be cared for.

We are ecologically dependent. We depend on the Earth. On its goods and its limits.

Biodiversity is, without doubt, the golden heart of the Earth.

Species have always gone extinct, but never before with the speed and radicality we see now: 100 species a day.

A possible life. A real life.

The process of socialization within the family framework. From birth, we are instilled with a sense of duty to care. And with guilt and punishment when we fail to fulfill that duty.

The bad mother.The bad daughter.The bad wife.

Those who do not follow gender mandates are punished. Patriarchal family logics.

Book: Critique of Loving Thought. We almost rejoice in renouncing our own life project in order to care for those around us. It is assumed that women possess and are prepared for this loving function.

Fear operates. The home is the safest place we can inhabit.

Ecofeminism offers a different way of looking at the world.

Ecofeminism proposes a “loving gaze” toward all beings and nature. A loving gaze means accepting the independence and difference of the other; genuinely trying to know what we relate to, taking sincere interest and seeing beyond our own will and interests. This interconnection between human beings and the whole gives value to the other without denying ourselves. It allows us to distinguish our interests from those of others.

An exercise in bitterness means looking reality in the face.

The war against life. It is impossible to get out of a well if we are not aware that we are inside one.

We must know which well we are in. Myths, beliefs, mythologies that prop up an unsustainable system. We are not conscious of the extremely serious cultural and material situation. We are in a profound ecological crisis. An energy crisis. A materials crisis. A crisis of human care.

We reached peak oil in 2006. The moment when each barrel extracted has no equivalent reserves to replace it.

Neoliberal capitalism feeds on oil.

The industrial model of food production is entirely dependent on oil. Monocultures. Pesticides, synthetic chemical fertilizers, petroleum derivatives. On average, food travels 7,000 kilometers from field to plate.

The urban model: the growth of cities, where people commute from surrounding municipalities and provinces. Networks of highways and trains. Distance is no longer measured in kilometers but in time.

Everything comes from outside the city. In cities like Madrid, nothing essential for life is produced locally. It is unviable without cheap fossil energy. Without enormous quantities of cheap fossil energy, it is energetically impossible.

Oil has a high energy return rate. To obtain energy, energy must be spent. Oil yields a great deal of energy for little input.

In the past, one barrel yielded 100 or 120 units.

In Norway today, oil extracted from platforms yields about 30–35.

Oil production has declined. What is now used is so-called unconventional oil. You invest one barrel and obtain the equivalent of one to three.

Industrial global civilization was built around energy returns of 100 or 110. That oil no longer exists.

Nuclear energy is not a solution either. Its potential danger. Uranium is not renewable.

We are left with renewable and clean energies, which have long sustained part of the world’s population. Solar thermal energy return is around 10. Photovoltaic solar around 12. Biofuels between 0.8 and 1.2, essentially break-even.

This implies a brutal cultural transformation of ways of life. And it is arriving rapidly.

Progress. Well-being. Creation of life. For social majorities and nonhuman animals.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Davos Forum. The robotization of the economy.

To build robots, we need minerals. When you calculate existing reserves, the numbers do not add up.

Climate change metaphorically means the rules of the game have changed. The way living beings relate to nature shifts. Chicks hatch before the larvae they feed on appear. Nature operates through balances that allow life to adapt. When those balances are disrupted, living beings disappear.

Our species is a living species. We are the result of coevolution with plants, microorganisms, rocks, and other beings within biodiversity. A dense web of relationships, a life insurance woven from life itself.

Climate change. Material crises. Fisheries collapse.

Demographic patterns and aging. We are at a critical moment in our relationship with the planet. A care crisis within feminism: structural tension between the growing amount of care required for vulnerable bodies and the lack of time to provide it.

In wealthy societies, women have entered paid employment to claim full rights. Men have not entered households in equivalent numbers to care for bodies. The first tension appears.

Double and triple workdays.

Inside and outside. Tension.

The need for care has increased. More aging population. Some projections suggest that by 2060 or 2070, 60–70 percent of bodies may be elderly.

Demographic pyramids are shifting.

Even applying patriarchal logic where women care alone, the numbers do not add up.

Urban life increases distances between home, work, and caregiving responsibilities, demanding more time and more fossil energy.

Work schedules are incompatible with caregiving.

Feminist sociology speaks of enslaved grandparents, investing their time caring for grandchildren.

Class mechanisms: families hire women to perform care work. Poorly paid, in residences or domestic service. Highly vulnerable, often migrants.

If wealthy countries were surrounded by a wall preventing the entry of materials, food, biomass, and migrant labor, they would survive perhaps two months.

We inhabit a partially exhausted planet. Development has meant privileged sectors extracting time, labor, and resources from elsewhere, leaving people and places unprotected.

Territorial fascism. Hitler justified the Third Reich through expansion of “living space,” comparable to ecological footprint.

Ecofeminism asks: what cultural substratum of myths and beliefs sustains this system?

How was a world created that believes development and progress are compatible with its own destruction?

A fracture was created between humanity and nature, with humans perceiving themselves as separate and superior.

Plato separated the world of things from the world of ideas. Bodies were transient. Ideas conferred humanity.

This philosophy became political reality in Athenian democracy: 34,000 citizens debated the common good, supported by slaves who interacted with nature and wives who reproduced and maintained bodies. The patriarchal political subject is not viable. Its individuality is a fantasy sustained by invisible labor.

Descartes separated reason from embodied existence. Newton described nature as a machine.

Science became power: nature could be tortured to reveal its secrets. Knowledge at the service of domination.

Modernity becomes a war against life.

We need science placed at the service of life.

Silvia Federici argues that the birth of capitalism involved violence against women, including witch hunts. Women who had achieved autonomy and knowledge of reproductive control were persecuted.

Capitalism reduces value to price.What is the water cycle worth? Pollination? Unpaid domestic labor?

GDP counts bombs and wheat alike. War is measured as wealth. Pharmaceutical sales linked to illness are counted as growth. We measure destruction as prosperity.

Money becomes sacred. Growth justifies exploitation of rivers, labor, animals.

Work is defined only as waged labor. Others are labeled inactive.

Ecofeminism calls for placing life at the center. Recognizing co-dependence. Art is essential. Alternative languages. Reweaving bonds with nature.

Capitalist individuality is a fantasy mediated by money. Commodity fetishism hides the connection to land and labor.

Freedom as unlimited consumption on a finite planet means some having requires others lacking.

Life must be livable within ecological limits. Degrowth will happen, either through fascism or through equitable transition.

Poetry, visual environments, educational reform, social conflict, new structures. A new vital system must emerge.

Ecofeminism centers love, friendship, trust, reciprocity. A world where difference does not generate domination. Where no one stands above others. Where men do not claim authority over women, nature, or any being.

We reached peak oil in 2006. That moment when each barrel of oil extracted has no equivalent reserves left to replace it.

Neoliberal capitalism feeds on oil.

The industrial model of food production is completely dependent on oil. Monocultures. Pesticides. Synthetic chemical fertilizers derived from petroleum. On average, a food item travels 7,000 kilometers from field to plate.

The urban model: the growth of cities, where people commute from surrounding towns and provinces. Networks of highways and trains. Distance in cities is no longer measured in kilometers but in time.

Everything comes from outside the city. In cities like Madrid, practically nothing essential for life is produced locally. It is unviable without cheap fossil energy. Without enormous amounts of cheap fossil energy, the system simply does not work at an energetic level.

Oil has a key characteristic: a high energy return on energy invested. To obtain energy, you must spend energy. With oil, you get a great deal of energy while spending very little.

In the past, one barrel of oil yielded 100 or 120 units of energy.

In Norway today, oil extracted from offshore platforms yields around 30 to 35.

Oil production has declined. What we now use is known as unconventional oil. You invest one barrel and obtain the equivalent of one to three.

Global industrial civilization was built around energy returns of 100 or 110. That old oil no longer exists. We cannot use it because it is simply not there.

Nuclear energy is not a solution either. The potential danger of the facilities. Uranium is not renewable.

So it is not a solution.

What remains are renewable and clean energies, which have long sustained significant parts of the world’s population. Solar thermal energy has an energy return rate of around 10. Photovoltaic solar around 12. Biofuels between 0.8 and 1.2, essentially break-even.

This implies a brutal cultural transformation in ways of living. And it is arriving rapidly.

Progress. Well-being. The creation of life. For social majorities and nonhuman animals.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Davos Forum. The robotization of the economy.

To build robots, we need minerals.

When you calculate the existing reserves, the numbers do not add up.

Climate change metaphorically means that the rules of the game have changed. The way living beings relate to nature shifts. Chicks hatch before the larvae they are meant to eat have appeared. Nature functions through balances that allow life to adapt to specific conditions. When those balances are disrupted, living beings disappear.

Our species is a living species. We are the result of a process of coevolution with plants, microorganisms, rocks, and our companions in the universe of biodiversity. A dense web of relationships, a life insurance woven by life itself.

Climate change. Material crises. Fisheries depletion.

Demographic patterns and aging. We are at a deeply critical moment in our relationship with the planet. A care crisis within feminism: a structural tension between the growing amount of care required for vulnerable bodies and the lack of time to provide it.

In our wealthy societies, women have entered paid employment to claim full rights. Men have not entered homes in equivalent numbers to care for bodies. The first tension appears.

Double and triple shifts.

Inside and outside. Tension.

The need for care has grown. More aging population. Some future scenarios project that by 2060 or 2070, 60 to 70 percent of bodies could be elderly.

As this increase occurs, demographic pyramids change.

Even applying patriarchal logic, where women care almost alone, the numbers still do not add up.

Urban life has increased the distance between where you live, where you work, and where you care for relatives. This requires more time and more fossil energy to move between places.

If the city has become a hostile place, it requires even more adult supervision and care.

Work schedules are incompatible with caregiving.

Feminist sociology speaks of enslaved grandparents, investing their time caring for grandchildren.

A class mechanism operates: families hire women to perform care work.

These jobs are poorly paid, in nursing homes or domestic work, highly precarious. Mostly migrants. The number of women migrating to perform care work has increased.

If wealthy countries were surrounded by a wall that prevented the entry of materials, food, biomass, and migrant labor, they would last perhaps two months.

We inhabit a partially exhausted planet. Development in the wealthy world has been a process in which privileged sectors extract and exploit time, labor, and resources from other places, leaving those people and territories unprotected.

Territorial fascism. Hitler justified the Third Reich through the expansion of “living space,” comparable to ecological footprint logic. Some sectors possess ecological and military power and exclude others.

Ecofeminism asks: what cultural substratum of myths and beliefs sustains this?

How has a world been created that believes development and progress are compatible with its own destruction?

An abyss has been created, a fracture between our species and the rest of life, with humans perceiving themselves as separate and superior, including over bodies.

Plato separated the world of things from the world of ideas. Bodies were transient, subject to death and decay. The world of ideas, the capacity to name and think, conferred human status.

This did not remain mere philosophy. It took political form in Athenian democracy. In Athens, 34,000 male citizens debated the common good in the agora. There were also slaves who interacted with nature to obtain food and materials, building the very spaces for debate. And 34,000 wives who reproduced and maintained bodies in the household, excluded from defining the common good.

The one who debates and legislates becomes a disembodied subject, unaware of the labor of care and of nature. The patriarchal political subject is not viable. Its claim to individuality is a fantasy sustained by invisible labor.

The political subject appears to float above bodies, like a patriarchal king of creation. Everything seems placed at his service to sustain his life.

In this gendered world, women are placed on the side of nature.

Descartes separated reason from embodied human condition.

In Discourse on the Method, nature, animals, and even human bodies are framed as mechanisms serving reason.

Newton described nature as a vast machine governed by mechanical laws.

Science becomes power: through science we can torture nature to extract its secrets. Knowledge becomes useful insofar as it serves human progress, as an exercise of domination over Earth.

This is the mechanism of the war against life. Modernity.

We need science placed at the service of life, aimed at preserving it.

Silvia Federici argues that the birth of capitalism involved violence against women, particularly the witch hunts at the end of the Middle Ages. Many of the women persecuted had achieved degrees of autonomy and knowledge about reproductive control, including abortion, at a time when expanding labor supply was economically crucial.

Capitalism as an economic framework defends the idea that something only has value if it has a price.

What is the value of the water cycle? Pollination? Women’s unpaid domestic labor?

These disappear from the economy. The umbilical cord connecting economy to nature and bodies is cut.

Production becomes whatever increases the economy. Cluster bombs and wheat production are both counted as growth. We stop distinguishing between what nurtures us and what crushes us.

GDP measures war as wealth. Pharmaceutical sales linked to illness count as growth. We contabilize our own destruction as prosperity.

Money becomes sacred. Growth justifies exploitation of labor conditions, rivers, animals.

Work is defined only as waged labor. Others are labeled inactive. Sub-labors. No subsequent rights.

Those who control employment define wealth and organize territory and time. Cultural power has been ceded to them. Their priority is profit.

From an ecofeminist perspective, life must be placed at the center. Co-dependence must be restored. Art is essential. Alternative languages are needed to heal the fracture between abstraction and everyday life. We must reweave broken bonds with nature and rebuild emotional and material relationships among people and with the Earth.

Capitalist individuality is a fantasy mediated by money. Commodity fetishism hides its separation from land, labor, and sentient beings.

If freedom means having whatever I desire on a finite planet, my having may mean someone else’s deprivation.

We must center the possibility of life being livable within ecological limits. Degrowth will happen whether we choose it or not. The question is whether it unfolds through fascism or through equitable transition.

It will require poetry, visual environments, installations, alternative educational curricula, social struggle. It will not be easy, but transformation is unavoidable.

Ecofeminism places central value on love, friendship, trust, and reciprocity. It seeks a world where difference does not generate domination. A world where no one stands above others; where men do not claim authority over women, nature, or any other being.

READINGS:

The Second Sex examines, from social, historical, psychological, sexual, and biological perspectives, what it means to be a woman. Simone de Beauvoir concludes that what we call “woman” is a social construction, and as such, one is not born a woman but becomes one. Across more than 700 pages, she explores, confronts, and questions the supposed “knowledge,” beliefs, and prejudices surrounding women and femininity, arguing that under the logic of oppression neither sex truly benefits; both are forced into uncomfortable and restrictive roles.

Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis** consists of thirteen essays and was first published in 1981. The book has become a foundational text for feminism, while also serving as a key reference for the study of racism and classism.

Gender and Feminism explains in detail what a gender perspective consists of and why it is essential for achieving equitable human development and inclusive democracy. Each section connects feminism with the various political, social, and justice struggles that women continue to lead.

They are not “micro.” They are everyday forms of sexism.

Feminist Anthology, Las Tesis

Pain and Politics: Feeling, Thinking, and Speaking from Feminism by Marta Lamas

MORE:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Works by N. K. Jemisin

The Liars' Club by Mary Karr

The Country of Women by Gioconda Belli

On the Verge of Extinction by María Reimóndez

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Americanah,We Should All Be Feminists, andHalf of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Clearings in the Forest by Marisa Madieri

The Herbalist by Toti Martínez de Lezea

A Country Year and From This Hill by Sue Hubbell

Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates

The Cloud by Gudrun Pausewang

Love by Toni Morrison

Geography of My Body by Ana Aupi

The Origin of the World by Liv Strömquist

References, edited by Fundación Cepaim

Stories that Capture Stars, On a Corner in the City, and Words that Sustain Us by Virginia Pedrero and María González Reyes

My Mission Was to Get Close to Miranda by Belén Gopegui and Rocío Martínez

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn, John Peterson Myers, and Dianne Dumanoski

Changing the Glasses Through Which We See the World (Various Authors)

The Victories of an Indian Woman Against the Plunder of Biodiversity by Vandana Shiva

Staying with the Trouble (Spanish edition often titled Como una hoja) by Donna Haraway

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

The Gaia Oracle by Érawan Aerlín

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

This Changes Everything,No Logo,The Shock Doctrine, andNo Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein

Ecofeminism for Another Possible World by Alicia Puleo

The Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers by Carol Schaefer

Toward More Animal Worlds by Laura Fernández

Unstoppable! Feminisms and LGTB+ by Pandora Mirabilia

Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

Patriarchy of the Wage by Silvia Federici

Women in Contemporary Science: The Needle in the Haystack directed by Ana M. González Ramos

Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees by Franck Prévot

Feminism for Beginners by Nuria Varela

Frankenstein (edited version by Isabel Burdiel) by Mary Shelley

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

Run for Your Dream by Giuseppe Catozzella

The Daughters of Egalia by Gerd Brantenberg

Feminist Subversion of the Economy by Amaia Pérez Orozco