Ecofeminists Lead the Way

12 August, 2021

Rep. Loren Legarda, deputy speaker of the House of Representatives of the Philippines. Photo: UN DRR

This article by Shazia Z. Rafi was first published by Women's Media Center

Heat waves, wildfires, floods, severe drought, and a global pandemic are threatening our lives, deluging our health systems, and bringing the global economy to a near halt.

But over the last several years, one source for remedies to these problems — ecofeminists (activists whose work incorporates ecological, health, and equality campaigns) — have moved from protesting outside the halls of power to become elected legislators writing and passing the environmental protection frameworks that they campaigned for and that our planet desperately needs.

Women’s groups have long been at the forefront of citizen activism for the environment and health, starting with a generation that not only read Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring but adopted it as a manifesto. Their motivation was the urgency of environmental damage from nuclear testing; their protests were entwined with nuclear disarmament campaigns. In Germany, a young ecofeminist, Petra Kelly, founded Die Grünen, the first Green Party, in 1979. In 1982, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “forging and implementing a new vision uniting ecological concerns with disarmament, social justice, and human rights.” She was elected to the Bundestag (German parliament) in 1983 and reelected in 1987. “I remember hearing her speak in Southern Tyrol; she was very, very charismatic,” says Marijana Grandits.

Grandits was the director of Europahaus, a nonprofit campaigning to protect the rainforests, when the Austrian Green Party asked her to join their slate of candidates. The Austrian Green Party emerged from two successful activist campaigns — to shut down a planned nuclear power plant, and to protect an ancient forest from destruction for a hydro-power plant. “We students sat in protest for days in the December cold, and we succeeded,” she says. “Today the forest is a national park. I joined [the] party 1986 and I took that activism to Parliament.”

In the United States, former Rep. Bella Abzug, Democrat from New York, in 1991 co-founded the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), which brought women in the thousands together in Miami to prepare policy positions for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Summit) in the Women’s Action Agenda 21.

The Rio Summit and its five-year reviews strengthened the global Green Parties across all continents. “Ecological issues were mainstreamed across politics by the Greens,” recalls Grandits. These Green MPs pushed their governments for strong environmental protection laws and eventually led negotiations for the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, which by November 2016 achieved the fastest ratification of any global agreement.

South Asia remains an exception, with no headway by Green Parties in a political system of entrenched left to right party politics. Ecofeminists such as Vandana Shiva, a fellow WEDO board member of Abzug’s, have not crossed over into legislative politics. Women legislators including, in Pakistan, Sen. Sherry Rehman, chair of the Climate Change Caucus, and Munaza Hassan, chair of the Standing Committee on Climate Change in the National Assembly; and, in India, Meenakshi Lekhi, MP, now minister of state for foreign affairs, have competing priorities, including human rights, gender-based violence, and international affairs.

Early environmentalists came from the “population control” perspective, which focused on the number of people Earth can sustain. Ecofeminists and other leaders from developing countries brought new perspectives that changed that framework to one of protecting health and curbing destructive consumption/production systems. One of the more compelling leaders was the late Wangari Maathai, who started the Green Belt movement in 1977, organizing thousands of women to plant 40 million trees in Kenya’s Rift Valley. “I realized power would have to be dealt with head on,” recalled Maathai, “when I took on the real estate developers who were going to destroy Karura Forest in Nairobi,” the largest urban forest in the world. In 1999, she organized the local community to occupy the forest as human shields against armed developers. Attacked by security guards, she suffered a severe head injury. Even more determined to protect the environment through law-making, she was elected to Parliament in 2002, becoming assistant minister for the environment. Karura was declared a national park, and Maathai went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Women legislators from southeast Asia, with waves of climate disasters in recent decades, have picked up Maathai’s baton and are continuing the fight on environment and health committees. In the Indonesia House of Representatives, Rep. Mercy Barends chairs the Green Economy Caucus (GEC). From a small-islands constituency, she keeps Indigenous women at the forefront of her concerns. At a World Bank meeting in 2018 she recited a poem by a Papuan Indigenous poet, Mama Yosepha, who led the resistance against the world’s largest gold-mining operation. Barends is a powerful orator linking environmental destruction with gender inequality and gender-based violence. “The assumption of money value over nature, as if we were dominant over nature’s laws or ecological principles, definitely brings nature to be overexploited,” she posits. “Patriarchy is a manifestation of this sense of superiority.”

A younger generation across parliaments is pushing legislation to transition their economies away from thermal and fossil fuel. In Indonesia, the GEC is working on the New and Renewable Energy (NRE) bill, which would transition the nation’s energy production from 11% to 25% renewable energy, and which includes a fund to finance the program. The secretary of the GEC, Rep. Esti Widya Putri, is a key author of the NRE bill. Reminiscent of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she is the youngest person in the House, and the bill has much in common with the Green New Deal in its economic cost-benefit approach. “We are adding environmental costs to fossil fuels to make RE more competitive,” says Putri.

The undisputed master of taking laws across the finish line is Rep. Loren Legarda, deputy speaker of the House of Representatives of the Philippines and former chair of the Senate Committees on Finance, Climate Change, and Foreign Relations. Legarda is a former national news anchor who produced documentaries on endangered species and award-winning programs on polluted lakes and oceans.

“I realized documentation of problems was not enough, public awareness was not enough,” says Legarda. The idea to run came during an interview with President Fidel Ramos, who asked Legarda to test the waters for the Senate. “So, I tested the waters in 1998; I won with 15 million votes.”

Legarda has led the charge on environmental and climate action with a slew of laws in her three terms in the Senate — covering clean air, solid waste management, clean water, renewable energy, climate change, and adaptation and resilience; she is widely known as “the Eco-Warrior.” In 2009 Legarda established the Climate Change Commission (CCC), a cross-ministerial body to implement the Climate Change Act. “Now even the nay-sayers are espousing the climate line,” she says with satisfaction. “The president of the republic is now the head of CCC.”

Realizing that laws only work if the funding is there to enforce them, Legarda pushes implementation and funding legislation. For example, when she spearheaded the passage of the 2018 Expanded National Integrated Protected Areas System Act, Legarda ensured that 94 environmental protection boards were set up to oversee the 94 nature preserves protected under the act. “The CCC was an unfunded law,” she recalls. “When I became chair of finance committee, I funded it with one billion pesos.”

Her latest bill is PENCAS (Philippine Ecosystem and Natural Capital Accounting System) Law, which uses the U.N.’s environmental accounting to put a monetary value on pollution expense and on income from natural capital (such as natural resources, forests, and water systems), which she says should count as “economic input … We cannot protect [or] manage what we can’t account for. Our economy will only be as robust as our natural capital.”

What is most striking about these eco-warriors is their resilience in negotiating the law-making process. Legarda in particular has mastered legislative poker. “Some senators took out the funding provisions for the PSF [People’s Survival Fund, a funding stream for adaptation to climate change],” she says. “I let them pass it, and then I put in a different bill to finance the PSF.” She succeeds because she not only outwits the resistance; she cares enough about the environment to outlast them.