Epiphanies 2022: Is a gender-neutral environmentalism possible?
I know that's a fairly weird thread title, but stay with me here: In a world which inevitably slants toward the male experience as the default, women are disproportionately impacted when things go wrong. For example, female-led households are more likely to be in poverty, so when there is an uptick in unemployment, a civil war, a market crash, floods, hurricanes, you name the emergency...it's frequently a double-whammy for women.
I'm now going to make three propositions:
One: It is generally* accepted that the climate crisis is real, and potentially represents the greatest threat to life on earth of them all.
Two: It is generally accepted that the primary authors of the climate emergency are big corporations, not ordinary people on the ground.
Three: Notwithstanding (Two), it is somehow an urgent moral necessity that ordinary people on the ground be the ones who make changes to their daily lives to 'help the environment' or else be marked as pariahs.
And four (yes, this is the Spanish Inquisition) that until we achieve some kind of perfect distribution of domestic labour between the sexes, (Three) will fall inevitably harder on both women and those in poverty than on men.
Speaking out of my own experience as a woman, it seems to me that the moral imperatives around 'being kind to the environment' always seem to go like this:
"Why are you using disposable nappies/wipes/nursing products/period products?" but not: "Why are you shaving with a disposable razor?" Then there's "Why are you wearing fast fashion?/Why are you using those (affordable) cleaning products?/Why are you using plastic wrap in your kids' lunches?" but not: "Why do you own an enormous tranche of plastic collectibles/star wars lego/why do you have a hobby that involves engines and fossil fuels/why do you need three monitors on your desk?"
Yes, this is all very first-world stuff, but to the extent that disposable nappies and disposable period and nursing products are demonised, women are disproportionately guilted and/or inconvenienced. Not to mention that any of the ethical and environmentally kind alternatives come with a high up-front cost, which is problematic for households in poverty, which...disproportionately women...
Is there anything we can do about this? Would re-framing the questions we're asking help at all?
*I am aware that the length and breadth and depth of 'generally' varies from country to country depending on the local prevalence of young-earth-creationism and/or vast seams of coal...
I'm now going to make three propositions:
One: It is generally* accepted that the climate crisis is real, and potentially represents the greatest threat to life on earth of them all.
Two: It is generally accepted that the primary authors of the climate emergency are big corporations, not ordinary people on the ground.
Three: Notwithstanding (Two), it is somehow an urgent moral necessity that ordinary people on the ground be the ones who make changes to their daily lives to 'help the environment' or else be marked as pariahs.
And four (yes, this is the Spanish Inquisition) that until we achieve some kind of perfect distribution of domestic labour between the sexes, (Three) will fall inevitably harder on both women and those in poverty than on men.
Speaking out of my own experience as a woman, it seems to me that the moral imperatives around 'being kind to the environment' always seem to go like this:
"Why are you using disposable nappies/wipes/nursing products/period products?" but not: "Why are you shaving with a disposable razor?" Then there's "Why are you wearing fast fashion?/Why are you using those (affordable) cleaning products?/Why are you using plastic wrap in your kids' lunches?" but not: "Why do you own an enormous tranche of plastic collectibles/star wars lego/why do you have a hobby that involves engines and fossil fuels/why do you need three monitors on your desk?"
Yes, this is all very first-world stuff, but to the extent that disposable nappies and disposable period and nursing products are demonised, women are disproportionately guilted and/or inconvenienced. Not to mention that any of the ethical and environmentally kind alternatives come with a high up-front cost, which is problematic for households in poverty, which...disproportionately women...
Is there anything we can do about this? Would re-framing the questions we're asking help at all?
*I am aware that the length and breadth and depth of 'generally' varies from country to country depending on the local prevalence of young-earth-creationism and/or vast seams of coal...
Comments
I think this topic might be better suited to Epiphanies.
I'm closing the thread temporarily while I consult backstage.
Hostly beret off
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
Alan
Ship of Fools Admin
Is there is a difference in the way that individuals reflect… and then choose to act…. on wider matters of deep concern?
Certainly I would agree that lots of these of the Lists Of Things To Do are very often domestic, but tbh I guess it depends on who is responsible for choosing and buying those items .
As an easy example, my husband does All the shopping.
But whilst governments and companies continue to feed us the lie that if Only we all made big domestic changes, then climate change would go away….we ‘re stuck.
1. We're all exhorted to separate our waste between what can and cannot be recycled, and to put different categories of recyclables in different boxes. Most of us do so with great care. However, the local authorities don't collect waste from commercial premises. They're not allowed to. Although commercial entities pay taxes, they have to pay for their waste collections. So it's entirely up to them whether they employ a contractor who collects recyclables separately or one who just takes the lot mixed together. Some are assiduous. Some probably don't bother. I'm not convinced anyone actually knows. Yet think how much more waste comes from the commercial sector. Imagine, just for example, how much food waste even a small restaurant generates compared with you.
2. If you travel through any business area, look at how many offices still leave their lights on all night.
Our place has motion-activated lights overnight, which work fine, until you're working late one night, and you're the only person on your floor, and you're not moving, because you're sitting at your desk working, and suddenly all* the lights go out and you have to get up and do a little dance to be able to see again.
*Well, OK - not the emergency light circuit. It doesn't get pitch black.
Going back to the OP, I suspect that there are very few things that don't have a differential effect on one gender or the other, on average, because our society is still quite gendered.
Some of these are a question of scale. Babies get through a lot more nappies than anyone gets through razors. In general, the idea that you buy something, use it once (or a few times) and then chuck it away applies to nappies, plastic wrap, and cheap disposable fashion, but not to plastic crap that you buy and keep on a shelf / in a box for decades. I suppose "fast fashion" is gendered because of some stupid societal expectation that women should have vast wardrobes and not wear the same outfit multiple times. Personally, I'd say that the thing to fix here was society's stupid expectations.
Although I happily used disposable nappies on our kids. We thought about washable ones, and some of our friends used washable ones, but we decided we didn't have either the time or the energy to deal with that. And I don't feel even slightly guilty about making that choice.
The same goes for multiple monitors on a desktop - yes, it uses a bit more energy, but if it makes you more productive, it's probably worth it. A relevant metric would be energy used per unit of work accomplished, not energy used per day.
Your hobby with fossil fuels and engines? That probably depends what it is - and again, on the benefits and the scale of the costs. It's easy, as you point out, for people to get all puritanical over the speck in someone else's eye whilst ignoring our society's collective logs.
Sure, but the manufacture of plastic goods is a problem as well, not just the disposal. And the collectibles only continue to be manufactured because there is a continued market for them.
Again, we are on a slightly different wavelength - I was thinking about the considerably increased energy of manufacture (and chemicals used) if certain sectors of society routinely use three monitors. (I had in mind coders and gamers, two sets which I imagine have considerable overlap and which I know to be heavily skewed male).
Well, sure, but the reason that coders and the like often use multiple monitors is that it makes them significantly more productive. You could, for example, eliminate a monitor and use a printed paper reference document instead, but it's probably worse environmentally to keep printing reams of paper.
My general approach to these things (whether it's monitors, nappies, or whatever else) is to want to price the environmental cost in to the cost of the thing, and then not worry about it any more. Each individual person knows how important their extra monitor, their disposable nappy, or their collectible plastic crap is to them.
But at what volume? How much plastic does a collector of plastic figurines (or whatever) carefully store in a display cabinet on an annual basis vs how much plastic do they chuck out because it was packaging for their dinner? It's easy to judge people for spending their money / doing environmental damage / whatever on whatever pointless stuff they like that you don't like. People tend to be bad at judging themselves by the same standard, because clearly all the things they spend their money on / do environmental damage with are valuable and important.
How do you score Alice's second monitor against Bob's foreign vacation?
I was thinking about a related issue earlier - that it would be great if we could make air travel cost what air travel actually costs, including the environmental impact/mitigation thereof, and that this would be; 1. Really excellent for the environment, and b.) for once, something that disproportionately inconvenienced wealthy males.
But then I realised that anything that would make passenger air travel significantly more expensive would likely make all transportation of everything more expensive, this causing the price of everything to rise, which would once again impact more severely on those who need to spend most or all of their disposable income each week.
I can't see a way out except shedloads of regulation, including the kinds of regulation that'll just never happen (like getting rid of tax havens).
I wonder whether, ultimately, we're going to need some kind of carbon rationing system. Thinking about it, maybe the best way to do it would be to create a kind of closed system where the government taxes goods and services based on their emissions but that money is ring-fenced and goes back to every resident at a flat rate. That way the wealthiest end up paying a lot more and they are encouraged to choose greener alternatives, but the poorest end up better off even with essentials like food and fuel increasing in price. Sort of a green UBI.
The onus needs to be on manufacturers to find other sources for plastic-type materials - so many things use plastic because it's really useful and has a lot of properties that glass or cloth or metal etc just doesn't.
Much the same can be said for the dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, many more such and especially the refrigerator.
Yes, it would, but air travel should be costed realistically, and if that makes air freight more expensive, then so be it.
@Arethosemyfeet's suggestion of a "green UBI" is one I've made before, and it, or something like it, does the right sort of things for you:
1. It makes environmentally harmful things more expensive than less harmful things
2. It empowers people to make choices, rather than dictating to them what they can and cannot do
3. It doesn't screw the poor over, whilst at the same time allowing and encouraging the poor to make the same environmental choices as the rich
But it only works if the tax is applied fairly to everything. Governments are usually very bad at that - they like to pick favourites, or get pushed by campaign groups to pick favourites, and so your simple scheme ends up with a whole load of holes in it that ruin the credibility of the concept.
I was actually much taken with the suggestion @Arethosemyfeet made, but my gut feeling is that it's so eminently sensible that it's bound to be anathema to anyone actually involved in policymaking...
The issue of pricing flights realistically can be easily dealt with by investing in and encouraging low-emission bus and rail travel (and other forms of public transit like trams), and expanding its reach into more rural areas. That would for example make it easier and cheaper for people to take domestic vacations.
Ferries also need to be looked at - the ferry and cruise industry is hugely polluting, but ferries are still a fairly popular way to travel between the UK/Ireland/mainland Europe. Increases ferry routes that are able to be less polluting would be great - we have the hovercraft service between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, and I don't know if large hovercrafts could be developed for longer crossings. But of course everything feeds into other aspects - if people are going to use slower transport options like trains and ferries, they will inevitably need more vacation time as well as the transport being affordable.
You can make, for example, polyethylene, from plant alcohols. Crude oil is a convenient source of hydrocarbons, but it's not the only one. But underlying bioplastics tends to be industrial plant cultivation that is also frowned at by environmentalists (cf. palm oil). Lots of people would like to tout cellulose-based plastics (eg. from hemp) as the fu
A wet weekend in Wales on the bus is hardly comparable to a weekend on Ibiza. And in general, the "subsidize the alternative" approach ignores the fact that choosing not to do something is also an alternative.
Price flights according to the environmental damage that they do. Price bus rides or train rides according to the environmental damage they do.
Do not under-price buses just because they're less bad than planes: to do so fails to give appropriate credit to choosing not to make a journey.
Which is ultimately what that delivers.
You can’t have coal fire in London because smog, no matter how rich you are. There is not a golden ticket you can buy saying it’s ok to do.
Ultimately, we have to stop treating this as a problem solvable by the free market.
I don't think anybody is proposing no regulations. But there's a whole raft of activities that are a bit bad, but not really bad, and regulation is the wrong tool to solve those, because it does the wrong thing.
Because you can't regulate to say "this is a bit bad, so you shouldn't do it very much, but a bit of it is OK" - regulation gets you a choice between "no" and "fill yer boots".
The issue with ferries is that emissions are directly leached into the sea. Clearly they or a similar form of travel like hovercrafts are essential for travel around the UK and Ireland, but they're still a lot more directly polluting than eg low-emission buses or trains. That just means more investment is needed for resolving those issues.
But improved and subsidised bus/train services will also improve everyday infrastructure in a way cheap flights don't - it would have a lot of benefits. Cheap flights and the impact that has on human geography has side-effects other than just the pollution. You can't use the market to solve problems that the market created in the first place, especially since in the UK public transport is extremely expensive and is priced far above its environmental cost.
Not sure what this means. I'm pretty sure marine diesel engines exhaust into the air like any other engine.
A thousand times this. Not least because the best possible thing that every single human can do for the environment is consume less, and that's absolutely antithetical to the prevailing view of how a market should work (growth, growth, growth).
People don't choose not to make the journey. They drive instead, one of the worst ways to do short trips from an environmental viewpoint. This sounds like a case of making the best the enemy of the good.
We were subsequently told that a plane would have been greener. Apparently the impact of an overnight ferry, with cabins, dining room, kitchens etc, is greater than a plane which just provides seats and a single meal on a tray.
My difficulty is with proposition three. Primary responsibility for mitigating the climate emergency must rest with the public and private sectors by the imposition of Government regulation. While primary responsibility remains with ordinary people exercising "choice", the burden will continue to rest upon women.
The change needs to happen at the level of production and packaging consumer products, not on ordinary people trying to work out whether this or that packaging or product is environmentally sustainable. The so-called "free market" solution is garbage because consumers are subject to advertising and as a population have insufficient knowledge to make informed decisions.
Wooh! I'm back typing baby!!!!!
The change needs to happen at the level of production and the packaging of consumer products. Ordinary people can't be required to save the planet by working out whether this or that packaging or product is environmentally sustainable. The so-called "free market" solution is garbage because consumers are subject to advertising and as a population have insufficient knowledge to make informed decisions.
Just remember - fingers not toes.
Much more gender-sensitive financing is required so that womxn get access to property and land ownership, inheritance of property, micro-loans and education about more resilient planting and growing crops to cope with climate change. Food security is a major issue and traditional ways in which rural farming communities could protect land from environmental degradation, save seeds in viable seedbanks and store grain etc are no longer sufficient as desertification and extreme weather conditions wreak havoc in many areas. Without equitable gender access to decision-making bodies and gender representation in local banking and financial monitoring services, development isn't likely to happen.
Rural farming is still often led by womxn in the developing world and traditional crop-growing routines are not flexible enough since they are bound up with small-scale subsistence farming that is risk-prone and low-input. All too often the change to more supposedly profitable farming means cash cropping with tobacco (or in the case of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, a shift to government-subsidised marijuana for export). This in turn means more reliance on imported food and mono-cropping is associated with poor soils, erosion, disease and pest proliferation.
Hi, @Simon Toad ! My difficulty is with proposition three also - hence the 'somehow' and the 'moral'. 'Moral responsibility' is used a great deal in the public sphere to subtly control women's behaviour/range of choices.
Glad you're back typing - (what happened?)
As always, @MaryLouise , you bring an additional perspective to bear. IMO, the majority of those living in the developing world get a free pass as far as environmental responsibility goes, because they consume less than westerners.
It's somewhat tangential, but the censoriousness with which such activities as chopping down rainforest in Brazil and Indonesia/Malaysia to grow soy/palm oil is viewed has always irritated me. As if Brazil was creating or maintaining a demand for soy products! As if chopping down forest to grow a monoculture cash crop was something the Malaysians thought of themselves - as if they started the whole rainforest clearance thing. No, wait, that was the British and their rubber plantations...and now the west is standing around shrieking about how appalling it is that these countries are exploiting their resources and destroying their delicate ecosystems.
That's not a "free market" solution - that's just a confusing choice.
A free market solution to environmental damage would include the damage in the price (via a carbon tax, or whatever else), and then the market should naturally prefer alternatives that are less damaging, because they will be cheaper.
But perhaps in some cases, the alternative isn't a good replacement. And in those cases, it's OK to say "we don't have a good bioplastic alternative for this yet, so we'll use oil-based plastic". And you don't need micromanaging regulation to do that for you - you just need to tax oil, and everything else follows from that.
I agree with you that the idea of shoppers standing in a supermarket trying to figure out which of the shampoos on offer is the most environmentally-sound is a bit ridiculous.
@anoesis I was reading a quotation from Wendell Berry this morning: "Eating is an agricultural act". It reminded me of the huge amount of labour needed to grow, harvest, prepare food for families and communities, labour often now invisibilised by Western consumerism. For most of human history, women have had to forage for fuel (firewood and dry grasses, dung, seaweeds) and spend hours pounding manioc or soaking dried cod, handrolling couscous, salting meat or drying fruit for storage, working to make folk remedies and medicines for home use. Hours and hours of work each day and now much of that traditional labour has been fetishised for luxury imports (the pasta of Italian nonnas) and mechanisation has altered so much of how we think of agriculture, battery farms or abattoirs, how we are able to live in denial of how the food we buy in supermarkets reaches us and who does the work we don't like to think about.
In one way, I couldn't agree more with you on the moralising attitudes towards deforestation or animal rights in the developing world. There's a difficulty though in that as wildfires and devastating floods becomes an ever-present climate change reality for impoverished and under-resourced parts of the world, those countries will bear the brunt of unsustainable agriculture and the impact will be global. The floods from Cyclone Idai that literally drowned the sea port of Beira in Mozambique a couple of years ago had a great deal to do with wide-spread deforestation -- this coastal nation has seen as much as 15 percent of its tropical and hardwood forests disappear in illegal logging and charcoal production in less than a decade. Refugees from the flooding fled to Zimbabwe and Zambia, countries not able to offer much to those in need of shelter and healthcare. While logging industries are associated with Chinese extractive imports, the work of charcoal production or slash-and-burn forest clearing is largely the role of rural wives and mothers trying to keep families alive. So much needs to change, but not simply to suit Western agendas.
...or labour significantly reduced by industrialization.
Being able to produce food without so many people is huge, because it frees up all those people to do other things. Sure - if you can find a niche market selling food hand-crafted by traditional methods to people with too much money, then good for you. The size of that market is limited.
As you point out, the impacts of climate change, deforestation and so on are going to be felt most strongly in those communities. The West might be preachy and moralistic, but it's also significantly insulated from these problems.
I think part of the problem is women's time and work and safety not being valued but that there's also ableism involved.
Take recycling - in homes where domestic work falls mostly on the shoulders of women effectively working a second shift, making disposing of rubbish an onerous task involving rotas for bins and sorting is going to impact women disproportionately. It also can have a terrible effect on disabled people whose disability leads to impaired executive function who can end up in hoarding type situations because they weren't able to follow the complex rules or indeed for people with other disabilities or illnesses who didn't have the right amount of energy at the right time for the recycling rota of bin collection or who end up with more rubbish than fits in the deliberately small landfill bin because they missed collections because of their disability etc.
Then there's active travel in situations where women and trans/NB people may be exposed to harassment or attack but are expected to use modes of travel much less safe from attack/harassment than a car. And of course my sight impaired partner can't cycle at all...
I think this is why Green parties/Eco movements should be very aware of equality issues - there need to be plans in place for how these unintended ill consequences that affect women, trans/NB and disabled people will be solved. At the moment certainly where I live, I think it's a bit of a 'Devil take the hindmost' approach. I'm in favour in principle of all these things but do think they could be done with more attention to not imposing disproportionate burdens on people in difficult situations or situations where structural inequality is in play.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/shaken-up-cyclist-sexually-harassed-26716120
So @anoesis I think there does need to be more thinking about gender and disability issues in eco-friendly initiatives - perhaps when councils are bringing in these measures there needs to be an audit where people from disadvantaged groups get a say on them and there needs to be a focus on mitigating harms like these.
That's an interesting point - there's an advantage for cyclist safety for keeping cycle paths away from roads, so you don't have so many points of contention between cars and bicycles, but if you go to the places the roads aren't, they tend to be the deserted sheltered places where there aren't any people either, and so you're more likely to feel (and maybe be) unsafe from lurkers.
Places that are safer against lurking malefactors (by virtue of having more traffic) also have more traffic.
Physical separation is the gold standard for cycling infrastructure but the separation needn't mean "miles away through deserted playing fields". Alongside the road is often best as the road is where it is because it's the way people want to go.
I thought truly shared space was the gold standard?
Well, I was talking about the gold standard for segregated infrastructure. I'm not particularly a fan of truly shared space, at least as things are now, because the attitudinal changes that would be required are so massive they'd take decades to happen.
"Truly shared space" doesn't work well for higher-speed routes, because it creates contention between slower-moving bicycles and faster-moving traffic. Segregating traffic by speed is both safer and more efficient.
"Shared space" in a small area of city centre, or comparatively low-traffic residential areas, is something different.
@KarlLB:
When I still lived with my parents, one of my regular cycle routes was down a dark back alley by a drainage ditch, and then through a park. Because it was shorter. Yes, there were roads around the outside, but cycling across the park made for a much shorter journey. Thinking about it, my brother has a very similar route to get to and from the station for his commute - he can cut through a local park, or go twice the distance around the roads.
Optimizing for shortness of journey time as I do, the closest I can get to a straight line basically always wins for a bicycle, but doesn't win for a car: wide fast roads that go a little further often win.
The flip side of this is that if you provide a cycle route that is "miles away through playing fields" and makes for a longer journey than the road, I'm almost certainly going to keep cycling on the road.
I fear it's a bit of a catch 22 on two fronts really. First railways were often built rather separate from existing populations so they can be a bit isolated. Secondly, as I understand it, the best protection is frequency of use. Finally features such as being in a cutting can increase the sense of isolation. I'm not sure how that can be addressed since they are essential to the flatness of the path. I suppose that once the path is used frequently the other features stop making it unsafe.