Ecofeminism: Home, History, and Heritage of Ecology

In the contemporary moment, debates on ecology and women have become globally synonymous, reflecting the interconnected challenges of war, patriarchal and social political, and economic exploitation, women’s health, and food insecurity. While ecofeminist thought can be traced to ancient cultural philosophies, its articulation in the 1970s brought it into sharper association with environmental studies. Today, the entwining of women and ecology has become indispensable for understanding widespread ecological and social injustice, extending beyond sociology, politics, and geography into literature, culture, linguistics, and philosophy. Over the past four decades, ecofeminism has grown into a globally significant field of study. A bibliometric analysis (Yadav & Sinha, 2024) reveals more than 800 publications indexed in Scopus between 1994–2023, reflecting the rapid expansion of ecofeminist scholarship in fields ranging from sociology and literature to political ecology and philosophy. This intellectual growth parallels pressing environmental and humanitarian crises. According to UN Women (2019), women make up nearly 70% of the world’s poor, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2020) reports that women constitute 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, yet they own less than 15% of land worldwide. This systemic dispossession exacerbates women’s vulnerability to ecological degradation, food insecurity, and climate-induced displacement. The home, house, history, and heritage of ecology premises the inevitable links among women, the environment, and cultural traditions. On one hand, home and subjectivity are conjoined to unravle the perosonal, social, psychological and cultural self of women, on the other, house develops a physical connection through possession and constructon of impersonalized spaces such as aesthetic, and shelter reflecting sense of self through environment. As such these public and private dichotomies and links transcend ethnic, social, political, and historical boundaries, providing intellectual and philosophical space to examine how power dynamics, gender, body, psyche, wisdom, and interpersonal relations are entwined with ecological concerns (Plumwood, 1993; Shiva, 1988). Foucaultian concept of hererotopia is helpful to interconnect the development of the gardens, parks, and plantation with the continuum of empire whereby these ecological sites not only acquire historcity but also subvert the connections between and among these worlds within worlds by transforming and unsettling them into a discrsive space of diffrence and other. Ecofeminist activism has historically arisen in response to global crises: Françoise d’Eaubonne’s coining of ecofeminisme (1974), the Women and Life on Earth Conference (1980) organized after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, and the Chipko Movement in India (1970s), where rural women hugged trees to resist deforestation, all highlight ecofeminism’s practical and political grounding (Mies & Shiva, 1993). More recently, climate-induced migration has emerged as a distinctly gendered issue. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC, 2021), more than 30 million people were displaced by climate-related disasters in 2020 alone, with women disproportionately affected due to caregiving responsibilities, limited access to resources, and entrenched structural inequalities. These displacements deepen women's experiences of trauma, intertwining loss of place, identity, and belonging, and compelling a rethinking of concepts such as home, history, ecology, and heritage. Ecofeminism brings together psychoanalytic, feminist, and environmental perspectives to explain how gender, identity, and the oppression of women are rooted in the same patriarchal structures that sanction the exploitation of the natural world. By examining power dynamics through psychoanalytic frameworks, drawing on key thinkers such as Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, and integrating insights from behavioral and environmental theories, ecofeminism illuminates the interconnectedness of psychological, social, and ecological systems that sustain patriarchal dominance. Ecofeminism, therefore, is no longer only a philosophical critique but also a political response to climate change, militarization, destruction of war, and global exploitation. It not only disputes the hierarchical dualisms of Western rationality—nature/culture, man/woman, human/animal—that perpetuate oppression (Warren, 2000) but also challenges women’s relegation to domesticity. By bridging philosophy, activism, literature, and politics, ecofeminism foregrounds the interconnectedness of being, and challenges systems of domination that threaten both ecological balance and women’s survival. It urges and invites women to acquire and recalim their voices, bodies and narrative of their self identities from patriarchal subjection by embrassing their unique feminine experience with environment, and nature.This Research Topic welcomes relevant themes including, but are not limited to:• Ecofeminism and Philosophy: Revisiting feminist critiques of Western rationality, dualisms, and Enlightenment reason• Home and Heritage: Domesticity, ecology, and women’s cultural and environmental inheritances• Literary and Cultural Representations: Ecofeminism in fiction, poetry, visual culture, folklore, and oral traditions• Coloniality and Ecology: The ecofeminist critique of colonial exploitation of land, women, and non-Western peoples• Women, Embodiment and Ecology: Connections between the female body, health, sexuality, and environmental politics• Activism and Resistance: Ecofeminist interventions in global movements against war, nuclearization, and ecological destruction• Indigenous and Spiritual Ecologies: Pre-colonial and indigenous philosophies of interconnectedness and their contemporary retrievals• Capitalism, War, and Exploitation: Intersections of patriarchy, militarization, and capitalist economies in ecological crises• Language and Ecofeminism: Linguistic representations of nature, gender, and power• Transnational Ecofeminism: Comparative and cross-cultural perspectives on ecology and women’s struggles worldwide Topic editors: Bushra Naz, Stacy Blythe, Haroon N. Alsager, Sadia Irshad, Kath Woodward Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/75818/ecofeminism-home-history-and-heritage-of-ecology