Chaia heller biography of michael

The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.

The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes. While some works combine archival inks with acrylic and gouache paint, others combine the medium of pen and ink with gold leaf and premium gold acrylic to achieve a raised dot, three-D effect.

Other works are collage, incorporating found objects, and decorative papers. She utilizes a variety of surfaces including canvas, gesso board, bristol board, water color paper, and wooden board. The mythology of a pure commodity based on consumer and producer protection and constraint conceals the deeper reality of a grotesquely immoral economic system which is sucking the very life out of the planet, along with over ninety percent of its inhabitants.

Focusing on the content of consumption allows consumers to remain within the kingdom of consumer heaven without looking down to see the very hell that capitalist production makes of the earth. Adams describes this concealment as the fabricated nothingness of meat, a popular perception shared by most consumers of factory-farmed meat products.

In experiencing the nothingness of meat, one realizes that one is not eating food but dead bodies. Just as meat-eaters often fail to appreciate the subjectivity of animals that are plundered by factory farming, consumers in general fail to recognize the subjectivity of the people who are exploited in the production of commodities in general. For instance, while people are often unaware of the suffering of the factory farmed calf when they buy a plastic-covered slab of veal; they are often unaware of the struggle of women workers in a multi-national textile industry that produce the very shirts on their backs.

In addition, when we consider the social and ecological devastation caused by agribusiness, we see that the consumption of vegetable products is often as immoral as the consumption of animal products. For instance, a banana is not always a more moral food choice than a chicken. When we reveal the social context of banana production, we are confronted by a moral paradox: while the content of the banana a form of non-sentient plant life may represent a moral food choice, the social relations surrounding the agricultural production of a factory-farmed banana, may render such a food choice immoral.

When we reveal the nothingness of a banana, we become aware of the truly lethal social and ecological realities that deliver the banana from the Third World to the First. Most bananas sold in the First World constitute a cash crop which many Third World countries export in order to repay their debt to the World Bank or to the International Monetary Fund.

These crops are cultivated on soil which could be used for the cultivation of foods for the local community itself. Consequently, people across the Third World literally starve while their land is controlled and converted to export zones for cash crops such as fruits, vegetables, sugar, tobacco, coffee, and timber. Agricultural workers are paid slave wages, denied health benefits, and are exposed to pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers bananas are one of the most pesticide-toxic fruits.

As we recognize the complex and contradictory nature of capitalist production, it becomes clear why activism regarding the unethical consumption of meat often exceeds activism regarding the unethical consumption of commodities in general. While animals have been reduced to a specific commodity that we may eliminate from our diet, commodities in general thoroughly permeate our social world.

It would be impossible to expel each one from our daily lives. The fact is, within a global capitalist system, we are largely unable to determine the modes and ethics of production. It is understandable, then, that many of us focus on areas of consumption such as diet over which we feel we can exercise some control. However, the longer we focus on the ethics of consumption, as if we could consume morally within a capitalist system, the longer before we reveal the inherent immorality of the capitalist system itself.

The desire to spare animals from disrespectful and harmful practices must be elaborated to include an overall challenge to a capitalist system that threatens the very survival of people. Ultimately, it becomes immoral to separate contents of consumption from forms of production; for in so doing, we turn our heads from the social, ecological, and political costs of global capitalism itself.

Despondent about the degradation of ecological and social life, people look to the most obvious visible tropes of modern and postmodern society: technology itself. All around us, we see new technologies sprout up within Newsweek or on the nightly news. Yet we play no direct political role in determining what effect they shall have upon our social and ecological lives.

Hence, computer, nuclear, communications and biotechnologies, represent sources of tremendous concern for those concerned with social and ecological justice. Everything from media to medicine, from data to dating has been radically transformed by a tool invented barely 50 years ago. Too often, no one is to blame when a technology goes wrong.

Instead, each ecological disaster is portrayed as a case of technology out of control. Or, worse, when we do identify individuals or institutions as accountable for disaster, our analysis often remains too narrow: when the Exxon Valdez spilled its lethal tons of oil, the drunk driver of the oil rig was identified as the guilty party rather than the broader institutions of capital and state apparatuses which stress and regulate workers and natural processes for profit.

When we blame technology in general, not only do we fail to identify corporations who financed the technology, but we fail to identify the state who granted the patent, and subsidized the corporation, excluding citizens from the decision making process. The truth is, talking about technology is often an excuse for not talking about institutionalized power.

It is often an excuse for not talking about the specific ways that institutions such as corporations and the state collude in shaping technologies that are socially and ecologically unjust. It is an excuse for not talking about the lack of real democracy. We cannot fight social institutions merely by critiquing social mediums, or the material expressions of culture.

Just as art and language represent social mediums, technology is a social medium that represents a cultural practice of technics or a prosthetic engagement with the world. Social mediums such as art, language, and technology are often determined by social institutions such as the state, capitalism, or patriarchy. Although there exist popular grassroots artists and technicians who maintain degrees of autonomy from large hierarchical institutions, their cultural practices impact far less dramatically upon society than those subsidized by powerful institutions.

In France, language is actually controlled by the patriarchal state which manages and sustains not only highly gendered linguistic standards, but the incorporation of foreign language and food as well. However, while it is wrong for the state, corporations, or universities to autocratically determine any aspect of social media, we cannot abolish authoritarian institutions merely by protesting against language, art, or technology per se.

Whereas we may create the alternative of a feminine language, there will still exist patriarchy and the state which oppress women. Despite romantic dreams of the inherent goodness of technologies of the past, there exists much in our technological history that is to be desired. Rather, it was a set of social relationships that allowed for the horrific collusion between a fascist state, a racist ideology, a legacy of anti-Semitism, and an entrepreneurial factor, giving way to genocidal devastation.

Low technologies that are supposedly fulfilling a benign function, are not always liberatory on a social level. Similarly, the enormous solar collectors in the Southwest represent a low technology of preposterous proportion. Rather than promote local and direct expression of technological ethics, such large scale technologies promote instead the centralized power of the state and corporations who engineer and execute the design of their own choosing.

It is indeed crucial that our technological practices do not degrade natural processes. Yet it is also necessary that we do not harm the social world by usurping community self-determination. Are technologies blank slates to be written upon by those in power? Nothing could be farther from the truth. However, while we might say that a nuclear bomb is not neutral we could not say that the technology of nuclear bombs alone determined the events in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Although the nuclear bomb represented a necessary condition for the nuclear bombing of Japan, it did not constitute a sufficient condition. Similarly, organic fertilizer is structurally biased in a clear direction, albeit a positive one. It is constituted by the very intention underlying its design to enhance, rather than deplete, the composition of soil and water.

Rather, it is a set of social relationships that determines the scale by which agricultural workers will be able to apply organic fertilizer, as well as whether the soil and water will be too damaged by previous chemical abuse. Hence, whereas organic fertilizer represents a necessary condition for an ethical and ecological agriculture, it alone represents an insufficient condition.

The sufficient condition for a liberatory organic agriculture is a social and politically just context: the reconstruction of political and social institutions which not only ecologize, but democratize agricultural practice. At this juncture we might ask ourselves: why are there so few discussions which explore questions of institutional power in regards to technology in the Ecology Movement?

Many of us who grew up in post-cold war America have little consciousness of a revolutionary tradition. Few are aware that there existed a time before the state or capitalism. We accept these hegemonic institutions as inevitable, irreplaceable, and taken-for-granted. Therefore, when we are moved to critique society, we focus on questions of social mediums we believe we can change, rather than on social or political relationships and institutions which we see as universal and insurmountable.

Now surely, Sale knows as he takes a hammer to the machine that the computer possesses no autonomous institutional social power. He knows that the computer is neither neutral nor technologically determined, but that it represents a social medium, a social-technological expression of the institutions of the military, the state, and corporations such as IBM or Microsoft.

Yet Sale belongs to no municipal political forum in which his position regarding the goodness or badness of computer technology has any authentic political power. If Sale were to think socially and politically, rather than romantically, about the computer he smashes, he might think about how, while it might feel cathartic to smash the computer, there might be still more oppositional ways in which to express his sentiments regarding computer technology.

Instead, Sale might have thought to perhaps share his computer, for instance, with a community center some forty blocks down in the Lower East Side, called Charas, where radical activists in the Puerto Rican community are engaged in oppositional work for social, ecological, and political change. Activists at a non-profit organization like Charas, who may not be able to afford a costly computer, might be able to use the machine to publish a newsletter for the activist community or might use it for some other activist project.

After giving his computer to activists at Charas, Sale could have then joined his neighborhood association where he could have engaged in a political debate regarding the social and ecological ethics of computerization while discussing too, the need for direct democracy. He could have discussed the need for political forums in which we all may participate in making decisions regarding an even broader spectrum of social and technological issues.

Rather than point his weapon at the dragon of technology, industrial society, or mass society, he could have discussed how computer technology is driven by an undemocratic global capitalist economy. Moreover, he could have assisted others in understanding how capitalism in general dehumanizes people and destroys the rest of the natural world.

However, were he to take such a position, would he have ended up being featured in Wired magazine? Each of us must ask ourselves such difficult questions as we enter discussions concerning technology, or any social medium, for that matter. We need to constantly ask ourselves: are there necessary pieces of the picture that we leave out, and why?

The fact is, we can often glean more support for critiquing a social medium such as technology or for slaying vaporous dragons such as mass society or industrialism than for attempting to abolish and transcend social institutions such as the state or capitalism. We must extend our critique beyond social mediums because social institutions exist prior to and independent of such mediums.

For example, while merchant and rural factory capitalism emerged as a dehumanizing system prior to the emergence of industrial capitalism, the state preceded the emergence of capitalism itself. And so the question remains: just because we have no direct democratic control over our economies or state and thus over technological practice , do we cease to critique technologies which we esteem to be socially and ecologically dangerous?

Are we obliged to choose between a critique of technology per se and a critique of the state or capitalism? Clearly, the answer to these questions is no on both counts. Questions concerning technology may allow us to broaden our thinking about the lack of political and economic democracy surrounding particular technological practices.

We can explore the specific harms of particular technologies, calling for social and political action, while broadening our understanding of the political and economic context in which we have little control over capitalist and state practice. In this way, each specific issue concerning technology provides a forum to speak generally about the need for economic and political democracy.

Each time we talk about a specific technology or about technology in general, without discussing the urgent need for political democracy, we miss a vital opportunity to raise consciousness regarding the broader context of social or ecological change. In love, there is a paradox. In order to know and understand that which we love, we must first know ourselves.

We must engage in a continual process of becoming conscious of our own beliefs, prejudices, and desires if we are to truly see that which we love. When we fail to know ourselves in this way, the beloved can be nothing more than a projection of our own desires, a projection that obstructs our vision of the desires, history, and distinctiveness of those we love.

In order to truly love nature, society must know itself; it must understand its own social, political, and economic structure, understanding in turn how each individual benefits or suffers from such structures. Rapt with his own image, Narcissus saw neither the color of the water, nor did he feel its coolness against his fingers. As social creatures, we look at the world through social eyes.

For instance, if we are not conscious of the social-religious causes of our own social guilt and self-hatred, we will romanticize nature as a pure and superior being before which we feel puny, humbled, and wretched. In contrast, a radical love of nature entails that we become aware of the history of ideas of nature in addition to politically resisting social hierarchies that nurture distorted understandings and practices of nature as well.

In particular, we must extend this critical self-consciousness to our poetic and visual expressions of our desire for nature. We must be critical of our use of metaphors and images of natural processes, making sure that they do not reproduce racist or sexist cultural stereotypes. Indeed, a metaphor which emerges within the language of an indigenous people cannot always be translated into the language of a culture that emerged in an era of modern and postmodern capitalism.

Often, the origin of words and their historical relationship to oppressive ideologies actually contradicts the very spirit of liberation that ecofeminists attempt to convey. Within the current society, female metaphors of nature cannot be abstracted from Western patriarchal values, desires, and definitions of women that saturate media, religion, and educational forums.

Because we are social creatures, our understandings of nature will never be pure or free of social meaning or contingencies. Nature is not a thing from which we can separate ourselves and know completely, no matter how liberatory our culture or language may be. During the past several decades, strands of ecological theory have emerged reflecting diverse expressions of the desire for ecological integrity.

By tracing the development of specific ecological discussions within a wider ecology movement, we may gain an appreciation for the challenges and possibilities that arise as particular groups begin to explore the connections between social and ecological justice. Yet as this chapter illustrates, ecological activists may also express this desire in more social and political terms, linking problems of ecological degradation to questions of hierarchy and oppression within society.

Using ecofeminism as a case study, this chapter examines the process by which different groups approach ecological issues from a more social, rather than individualistic or romantic perspective, recasting questions of nature in terms that reflect their own identities and situations. It is through exploring the connections between ecology and social justice that ecofeminists ground their desire for ecological integrity in concrete social and ecological realities of everyday life.

In so doing, ecofeminism is largely able to articulate a social desire for nature, transcending many of the limitations that mark the wider radical ecology movement as a whole. Yet the history of ecofeminism has not been without hurdles. Emerging from a variety of different ecological and feminist tendencies, ecofeminists have often struggled, particularly in the early years, with questions such as how to avoid the tendency to invoke universal notions of gender, nature, and culture, or how to fit into a wider multicultural feminist movement.

This chapter explores a few of the primary trajectories by which ecofeminism originally unfolded in the s. Yet by studying these tendencies, we may gain a general appreciation for the wider context in which women were beginning to approach the question of ecology in the s, providing insight into the problems and possibilities that emerge as groups link questions of nature to issues of social, cultural, and political justice.

Within the radical feminism of the late sixties and early seventies, an organic sensibility began to germinate, eventually finding its expression within many ecofeminist writings today. Ecological politics has also played a role in grounding feminist politics. In the late sixties and early seventies, thousands of women were involved in political organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war and civil rights movements.

While participating in these struggles, many women brought to light glaring contradictions between the abstract principles and goals of political movements and their own personal, embodied experiences as women in the world. The women of the New Left soon grew tired of waiting. They began to recognize the contradictions between their own private, embodied struggles and the public, political ideals of larger struggles for social justice.

Standing together in kitchens, or while licking envelopes, women began to engage in informal discussions regarding contradictions such as the irony of fighting against U. This was caused by the fact that movement women found themselves playing secondary roles on every level—be it in terms of leadership, or simply in terms of being listened to.

They found themselves afraid to speak up because of self-doubts when in the presence of men. They ended up concentrating on food-making, typing, mimeographing, general assistance work, and serving as a sexual supply for their male comrades after hours. Women from all over the country formed groups where they could discuss their experiences in the movement and talk about the embodied details of their everyday lives.

The great wall between the public and private realm shattered as women began to examine the organic dimension of their own work, lives, and ways of being in the world. In developing the dialectical body politic, women began to examine an organic dimension to social life unexplored by the wider New Left. It would not be long before the contradictions between the body and the rest of the natural world would be pressed to give way to an understanding of an ecological body that stands in direct relationship to a political, social world.

To further contextualize this ecological impulse, it is crucial to locate radical feminism within the wider context of the New Left in which a new ecological movement was steadily emerging during the late s. Indeed, during these years, an ecological sensibility had developed, reflecting a rejection of middle-class suburban values, aesthetics, and cultural practices.

The publication of both books signaled a time in which people sought asylum from a world they perceived as sterile, impersonal, and disempowering. The U. Along with this new ecological sensibility, there emerged within radical feminism an implicit anarchist sensibility as well: a critique of hierarchy in general that flowed from a specific critique of male domination.

Seeking to incorporate this spirit of non-hierarchy into feminist projects and organizations, women adopted cooperative ways of working and relating together. These institutions were designed to give women freedom from particular bodily harms such as rape, battering, and abuse from the male medical establishment. Yet, in addition to representing a demand for freedom from bodily harm and oppression, there was a tendency within radical feminism to demand the freedom to enjoy the body as a site of liberation, passion, and pleasure.

Recognizing the degree to which their sexuality, creativity, and intelligence had been shaped by men, feminists realized that they could rethink their own bodily experience. Women began to create a new aesthetic based on an affirmation of sexuality, intuition, spirituality, art, and health. Instead, we see an attempt to ground questions of freedom in everyday social relationships and cultural practices that reflected values of collectivity, sensuality, health, and self-determination.

It is here, however, that the social desire for a new embodied sensibility took a risky turn. Moving from concrete issues of health, safety, and institutional structure to more abstract questions of cultural practice and meaning, radical feminism ventured into the pleasurable yet problematic realm of the symbolic. Why are her goddess images only white, western European, judeo-christian?

Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa? The radical potential of early feminism, then, was undercut by problems of symbolic representation and cultural practice; problems that reflected deeper issues of institutional racism within the movement. This Bridge created a forum in which women who previously had no voice in the feminist movement were able to write critically about issues of race, gender, culture, and power.

Other feminist writers of color during this time challenged as well an analytical framework predicated on a binary between domestic and public deployed by white feminists at the time. Attitudes towards work in much feminist writings reflect bourgeois class biases. They were so blinded by their own experiences that they ignored the fact that a vast majority of women were already working outside the home, working in jobs that neither liberated them from dependence on men nor made them economically self-sufficient.

In this way, questions of race and class complexified previously universal notions of gender and the body tied to the feminist project. As the writers in This Bridge illustrated, the body politic, originally intended to counter the abstract politics of men in the New Left, had given rise to a cultural feminism that presented a new set of abstractions.

By failing to sufficiently articulate issues of race, class, and ethnicity, radical feminists were unable to fully clarify the many social factors that determine the particular ways in which women experience and resist oppression. Audre Lorde, again, in her letter to Mary Daly, questioned Daly on the white bias surrounding her body politics, stating:.

You fail to recognize that, as women, there are vital differences which we do not all share. For instance, breast cancer; three times the number of unnecessary eventrations, hysterectomies and sterilizations as for white women; three times as many chances of being raped, murdered, or assaulted as exist for white women. These are statistical facts, not coincidences nor paranoid fantasies.

Audre Lorde was one of the first radical feminists to bring to body politics an understanding of the relationship between race, health, class, and gender. In her ground breaking work, The Cancer Journals, Lorde examined the specific social context in which she had been exposed to toxins at home and at work. Indeed, degrees of immediacy and historicity were lost in the translation as white women began to extrapolate from their own lives a politics of representation that often either appropriated or excluded the experience of women of color.

And as we shall see, this problem of how to engender new meanings surrounding categories of non-hierarchy, body, gender, and nature, persisted as a nascent desire for nature continued to emerge within radical feminism. In turn, the nascent anarchist impulse that marked the cooperative structure of feminist organizations speaks to the revolutionary potential within feminist body politics.

To explore the movement of radical feminist body politics into an explicit desire for nature, we will return briefly to the earlier days of the movement. Here, once again, we witness a set of mostly white, middle-class activists for whom ecological questions will represent an attempt to make sense out of abstract understandings of categories of nature and gender: understandings that will reflect their own identities.

The WITCH movement represents one of the first feminist actions that expressed an explicit ecological sensibility. The group was explicitly non-hierarchical, and their style was theatrical, humorous, and passionately strident. A coven in New York City leafleted a statement hat would anticipate later ecofeminist writings:. Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, non-conformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary.

This possibly explains why nine million of them have been burned. Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists turn dross into gold and you devalue the whole idea of money! They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all—one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing sexual, economic and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.

In one action, a coven in Washington D. In , Carolyn Merchant published an important feminist perspective on the scientific revolution, further contributing to this newly developing feminist ecological literature. However, the ways in which women articulated the causes of ecological problems varied immensely. Hence this book called Woman and Nature grew.

Yet while Griffin reproduces the essentialist tendency that had emerged within cultural feminism, she does extend a radical feminist analysis of social hierarchy to an exploration of ecological concerns. Thus in Woman and Nature, Griffin suggests the idea of a potentially complementary relationship between society and nature, given the right social conditions.

By the early eighties, feminists began to define the organic sensibility latent within radical feminist body politics in more explicitly ecological terms. Women began to cultivate a desire for nature that conveyed a yearning for a more cooperative way of life free of sexism and ecological degradation. During this time, another movement had been gaining steam.

Chaia heller biography of michael

In the seventies, anti-nuclear activism emerged as one of the most potent political forces within the New Left. In particular, the nuclear issue brought together both radical feminists involved in feminist peace politics and women interested in ecology. While nuclear militarism resonated with concerns of feminists peace activists, nuclear power became the focus for feminists concerned with problems of ecology and health.

It was in this context that many women began to make connections between the domination of women in the domestic sphere within personal, sexual relationships and the destruction of the natural world by public institutions such as the military and the nuclear industry. The feminist peace movement, emerging out of radical feminism and the civil rights and anti-war movements, greatly informed a newly emerging ecofeminist activism.

Inspired by the philosophy of anti-racist peace activists such as Barbara Deming, feminists had been developing an anti-militarist movement in response to mounting U. Learning of the nuclear testing in Nevada in the fifties and the subsequent rise in birth defects and gynecological cancers, they also discovered the current problem of nuclear waste for which there was no safe means of disposal.

The issues of militarism, male violence, and ecology came together to form a truly ecological, broad-based body politic. In , the crisis at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island served as the catalyst for a beginning of ecofeminist direct action. This first major ecofeminist event was initiated by feminist activists Ynestra King and Celeste Wesson during an interview on WBAI radio in New York in which they discussed the crisis from a specifically ecofeminist perspective.

Many of the conference organizers and attendees identified as social anarchists who had been involved in the anti-nuclear movement. With that sense, that ecological right, we oppose the financial connections between the Pentagon and the multinational corporations and banks that the Pentagon serves. Those connections are made of gold and oil.

We are made of blood and bone, we are made of the sweet and finite resource, water. We will not allow these violent games to continue. If we are here in our stubborn thousands today, we will certainly return in the hundreds of thousands in the months and years to come. This motherist sensibility often blamed for creating yet another romantic essentialism was translated into the creation of a form of direct action that came to be associated with ecofeminist actions in the future.

We create an iconography designed to bring people to life—parading with enormous puppets, quilting scenes from everyday life, weaving the doors of the Pentagon closed with brilliantly colored yarn, waltzing around police barricades, shaking down fences, spray-painting runways, placing photos of beloved places in nature and children woven in the miles of fencing around military installations, wearing flowers and brilliant colors as we face into the gray and khaki of militarism, opposing machines with hand-crafted alternatives.

By , an international ecofeminist network had emerged. Setting up camp outside the gates of the base, women lived in tents and shelters and were re-evicted each morning by the military police. Subsequently, in solidarity with Greenham, women in the U. Finally, in the mids, a group of ecofeminists began to specifically address issues of race and class in relationship to the ecofeminist project.

Initiated in , the WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute was founded by a group of radical women of color, ecofeminists, and feminist peace activists including Ynestra King, Gwyn Kirk, Barbara Smith, Rachel Bagby, Luisah Teish, and Starhawk, who came together to create a multi-racial, multi-cultural forum in which women could discuss issues of race, gender, class, peace, spirituality, and ecology.

Following the suggestion of Barbara Smith, WomanEarth became the first feminist institute to be organized around the principle of racial parity, giving equal voice, participation, and leadership to both women of color and white women. While WomanEarth sought to become an educational and political institute that could provide a base for an ecofeminist movement, internal struggles within the organizing group regarding race and class privilege, in addition to financial pressures, led to the eventual dissolution of the project in Responding to critiques of racism within the feminist movement as a whole in the mids, women such as King understood that ecofeminism had to prioritize the question of racism if the movement was to achieve political validity and integrity.

This body politics was predicated upon the ability of radical feminists to link questions such as health and sexuality to systems of male dominated hierarchy, reflecting a nascent, and sometimes explicit, anarchist impulse. And as we have seen, this nascent anarchism within body politics finds expression within early ecofeminist claims regarding the connection between ecological degradation and questions of social domination and oppression in general.

At this point in the narrative, it would be helpful to take a few steps back to explore a key political and theoretical context in which Ynestra King, a major figure in the early years of ecofeminist activity, developed ecofeminist theory and activism. That desire for nature is social ecology. Social ecology is a branch of the radical ecology movement that surfaced in the U.

Since its inception, social ecology has played a major role in shaping radical ecological politics both in the U. Beginning in the early s, Murray Bookchin, the theorist primarily associated with the theory, began to examine the social and political origins of ecological problems from a leftist perspective. While offering a philosophical and historical analysis of the relationship between society and nature, social ecology is praxis-based, calling not only for direct action, but for a reconstructive vision of a confederation of communities engaged in direct democracy and municipalized economics.

While an ecological sensibility emerged within the body politics of radical feminism in the s and 70s, a nascent feminist sensibility surfaced within social ecology. The common denominator that led both radical feminists and social ecology to make the connection between ecology and feminism can be traced back to the anarchist impulse within both theories.

Inspired by the newly emerging radical feminist movement, Bookchin too, saw in feminism, as he saw in ecology, the potential for a movement that was general enough to include, yet not be limited to, economic concerns. In , the Institute for Social Ecology ISE , which Bookchin co-founded in , invited Ynestra King to develop what would become the first curriculum in a feminist approach to ecology, thus coining the term ecofeminism.

Through a critical reading of these essays, King explored the evolution of feminist drinking from the first to the second wave, looking at moments of liberalism, rationalism, and essentialism within file different strands of feminist theory, examining their implications for ecological theory and feminist peace politics. Again, as theorists such as bell hooks pointed out, poor women of color in the U.