Women and the Environment

(Response to Kirk overview)

            “A culture against women is a culture against nature.” (Kirk p. 560)

            All across the world, globalization is affecting women by altering the environment.  In India, where seed companies have licensed their products to farmers, those farmers often kill themselves because they cannot repay their debts.  In America, women farmers are often niche workers, working on infertile land and conducting laborious agriculture.

            What’s the source of the problem for the environment?  Patriarchy.  Capitalist values lead to raping the environment.  Militarist values lead to war, and in the home, the devaluing of women and violence against them.  In our modern patriarchy, technology is above nature in our hierarchy of values, and we treat nature like we treat our world’s women: with rape, disregard and marginalization.

            High cost low output globalized farming is partly to blame.  Biodiversity in Punjab has been reduced.  Wheat and Rice are grown primarily, and there is an influx of disease and pests.  Chemical fertilizers and pesticides require massive amounts of water.  Overwatering leads to desertification.  In this way, the global capitalist environment has created local devastation in India.  To recoup debts, people sell their daughters, or since a daughter requires the father to give up a large dowry, often those babies are killed.  In India, there are 925 women for each 1000 men.  Even then, capitalist agriculture returns 1/3 of it’s input labor and money, while a natural region with natural agriculture returns it’s input as crops by 20 times!

            Capitalism has polluted our oceans.  The Aleut or Eskimo, who still eat lots of sea mammals, build up PCBs in their breast milk.  PCBs are petroleum fuel pollutants that build up in the breast milk of those who are affected, and those pollutants are passed onto the young.

            Even when the governments of the world have surpluses of grain, Earth’s people go hungry.  The Earth is enough for everyone’s needs, but not for some people’s greed.  Capitalist greed and devaluation of women go hand in hand however.

            “Why women?  Because our present patriarchy enshrines together the hatred of women and the hatred of nature.” (Kirk p.560)

            The situation is bleak but not impossible.  Feminism encourages us to be non-violent, and to address the human species place in the web of nature.  We can only rape and kill our planet, and our women, for so long.  We are at a cusp in today’s society – do we go forward, into the sustainable future, and abandon patriarchy and capitalism, or do we go backward, catapulting our corporations into wellbeing, and sending the human race back 10,000 years into slavery?
            How are women connected to the environment?  Deep ecology is one idea that combines with feminism to promote the idea that we are all connected to the environment.  The environment is feminized, with imagery like the "virgin forest" or "raping of the earth" - it's resources must be productive.  A bioregion can only support so much agriculture and water use - we must learn to live sustainably and be ecofeminists.
            Part of the problem is that there is a lack of international environmental justice.  Companies can pollute the environment, even with smokestacks polluting the air, yet that's government sanctioned.  A lot of waste gets located in poorer communities due to "Not in My Back Yard" syndrome which advocates relocating waste sites away from communities - who are able to advocate against it.  The communities which are too poor to advocate, their mothers and fathers are probably hard at work, end up hosting toxic waste because of government subsidies that are available to bulk up the budget of local communities.
           Food and water security is a huge issue - sometimes our food and water comes from distant communities that due to international regulations have been forced to provide exports at the expense of other government and community efforts that might benefit locals more.  If we can create re-localization, and focus on remaining sustainable within our particular bio-regions, then neighbors are feeding one another and the global demon of capitalism is defeated.  We all get to choose how we spend our dollar, after all, and the more we spend local the more we defeat globalization and the more attention we can spend on our local environment.
            Water supplies suffer from globalized economy - there is pressure on governments from international corporations to privatize pristine water supplies in foreign communities.  When water isn't bought by global corporations, it's polluted, and unfit for drinking.  Many small communities suffer from pollution, especially after floods and natural disasters.  The #1 cause of infant death, diarrhea, worldwide results from intestinal bacteria and virus that come from dirty water.

            What we need is a paradigm shift in human thinking.  The institutions which my country gave birth are sucking up the life of this planet, and in an attitude of systematic physical and spiritual violence, globalization is devastating local farms and bank accounts.  Where will our world be in 100 years?  Will corporations rule the world, with governments taking the back seat, and people living under their thumb?  Or will people rule the world, and the corporations will exist to further the needs of the people.

            How about we start some for-the-people global corporations?  To start, let’s end seed royalties – everyone has the right to grow food!  What’s more important – lining the pockets of our capitalist industry, or providing for the wellbeing of local farmers and consumers?  Not only does quality of food and diversity of crops suffer when large companies move in, but the farmer is turned into a slave to world markets – which are inherently unstable.  Buy local, sell local, end globalization!
 

Women in Crime

            The situation for women who are pitted against institutional law (and inadvertently, secular values) is somewhat bleak.  Sometimes, when society has not assumed it’s responsibility for the individual, women live in state of poverty by no personal intention but are stuck by a variety of institutionalized systems of inequality such as planned parenthood, which assumes control of the direction of the welfare applicants life, regardless of it’s affect on the wellbeing of the applicant.  These women in poverty, many of whom are hardworking, hold strong values, love their children and husbands, become criminals in our system sometimes just for accepting the help of welfare and being unable to comply with the requirements.

At other times, when a good job is a long commute (think Maine), and the economy is slow moving with few opportunities, women in poverty turn to drug dealing to put food in their families mouths without being taxed, which is understandable when the other option is seeing your family starve.

            The United States is #1 in the world for producing criminals, where we are 5% of the world population, but we have 25% of the world’s prisoners (Kirk p.444).  Is this because law enforcement is keeping us safer?  Unfortunately it is partly because the definition crimes has been broadened.

            “The dramatic increase in imprisonment of women has been driven primarily by “the war on drugs” and mandatory sentencing for drug offenses…” (Kirk p. 446)

            In 2006, women made up 7.2% of imprisoned humans in America.  29% of women in prison are imprisoned for drug offenses, and 34% were imprisoned for violent crimes.  When women become violent, it is generally in self-defense against abusive spouses and partners.

            In the movie “Sin by Silence,” Brenda Clubine, a woman incarcerated for killing her abusive husband, kept up spirits behind bars by implementing a women’s support group of at least 25 women who were all survivors of abusive husbands that they had killed in self defense.

            It’s not just self defense.  It’s not just that these women are abused.  The abuse is physical, emotional, psychological, and rational.  And only in 1992 was “battered women syndrome” considered admissible evidence in court.  Some women who had dispatched their terrifying and cruel husbands before 1992 were not able to get a proper defense.  Brenda eventually wrote to the governor and got her case appealed.  Other women appealed and were turned down.

            Emotionally this is sacrilege.  These women, who could have been anyone’s sisters or friends, these loving women who spoke most of the time of caring for their children and making sacrifices for the kids, these women are in jail.  Some of them have been in prison for over 25 years.  We removed them from society, but put them under secure circumstances to “rehabilitate them.”  The only good that was done to them was what good they accomplished for themselves by connecting with their feelings and forming a support group. 

It makes me wonder.  What if in our system of law, if a judge meted out a consequence, he was willing to accept the same consequence on himself if he was wrong?  I think our society would be less happy go lucky about handing out punishments and severing women from society if judges were more liable to the wellbeing of those they supposedly incarcerated with the intention of “improving through participation in the justice system.”

Finally, for those women incarcerated, are they treated equally?  Forced to use the “facilities” in front of male guards, dress and undress in cells open to male prison authority’s eyes, not allowed to touch or hug their loved ones, the answer is no.  New York operates a boot camp for women where women are forced to have short hair, are humiliated for disobedience, and emotionally broken in a military style.  Is this equal treatment?  It has been called “equality with a vengeance.” (Kirk p.454)

            What’s the solution?  Incarceration is treating the symptom of the problem of women, poverty, and crime.  Education is the most pro-active approach we have.  Unfortunately, prison budgets are going up and school budgets are going down.  Pat Carlen argued that versus incarceration, women ought to be supervised within their communities, where they can remain connected to their children and families, and continue to feel like a human being (prison is degrading on the self and sense of self).  On top of education, women need therapy!  For the amount of money we spend on the criminal justice system, how about free mental and emotional health care?  Am I being too bold in saying that the best way to address emotional and mental stability is through proven therapeutic practice, not punitive measures?  Are human beings animals, that we learn best by the whip?  No indeed women are thinking, feeling creatures.

            Is a woman a criminal when she kills an abusive husband?  When she steals a loaf of bread, or sells her body?  Crime is situational.  A woman in a tough situation will sometimes commit a crime, even if it’s property theft to make some cash to get groceries or gasoline or propane.  Should we punish a woman for being a criminal?  Or should we address the situation that caused a crime to become necessary for a woman and her family’s survival?  We are faced in our society today with a tough choice:  are women criminals, or people?  Indeed they are people, and deserve to be treated humanely, and imprisonment and separation from society is at it’s least, inhumane.

Women in Religion

(In response to, Grandmother of the Sun: The Power of Woman in Native America (and other readings))

            “This spirit, this power of intelligence, has many names and many emblems.  She appears on the plains, in the forests, in the great canyons, on the mesas, beneath the seas.  To her we owe our very breath, and to her our prayers are sent…” (Paula Allen, p.1)

            Since the beginning of time, humans have felt the presence of the divine watching over us (or not).  Spiritual truth is a many sided diamond, with as many lenses as there are humans to perceive it in their lives.  We look today at women through a humanitarian lens, and we seek to uncover some of that spiritual truth as it relates to the oppression of women in modern religion.

Gender stratification is evident in many religions of modern time, from Islamic cultures where women are generally not allowed to be seen with men non-related to them, are not allowed to drive a car, and generally do not go to school, to Christian cultures where the priesthood and church hierarchy is a selection of males, and women are thought to have brought “original sin” to humankind, and indeed, the devil will someday arrive on earth in the form of a woman riding a multi headed dragon.

            Historically, we can look at the dark ages up to the sixteen hundreds, when the crusades were not only against the Muslims, whose culture survived the crusades in the arid regions more distant from central Europe, but against pagans and druids who made up the matriarchal culture of women-empowered witches.  Those women were considered heretics by the Church because they could ease the pain of childbirth using herbs (which seemed like magic – a Christian taboo), so those witches were burned or subjugated.  For some time, people of the countryside practiced both religions as a way of going half way with the authority of the church.  But eventually the old ways died out into secrecy as the church became more and more authoritarian.

            Speaking of the church subjugating locals, Europeans moved into Africa in the colonial period, where tribal worship began, where even today women practice the Shona culture.  In their religion, different land wand water animals are archetypes and family emblems.  Since a symbol can mean anything, we degrade that kind of culture in American perception as monkey worship.  In fact these animals are such a deep part of African life that they come to represent human value that is subjugated in modern times by the church.  The locals incorporate Christianity into their worship somewhat awkwardly, again attempting to go half way with the modern father-god-worship culture on Earth.  The locals are battling deforestation and depletion and export of natural resources among other problems.  A return to so called “ancestral values” is called for by the Kenyan Green Belt Movement.  It sounds like they are listening to their erotic sense of what is right and taking action against globalization, by planting trees and encouraging sustainable farming of local foodstuff.  Reclaiming their local sovereignty and recovering cultural meaning from dying religion is important to women whose culture and way of life has been uprooted and modified to suit the global agenda.

            Even Native American tradition (of the Hopi people) acknowledges the creative and central godly powers of Spider Woman and Sand Alter or Childbirth-Water woman.  However, the cultures belonging to pagans, Native Americans, and many other tribal peoples of the world have been marginalized in modern society.  The Goddess of the pagans and the Sand-Altar Woman and other tribal goddesses have been turned into representations of mere fertility, indeed, sexuality, as if a woman god must be a sexual creature.  Thought woman, creatrix of all things, whose thought allows all things to be and move in Hopi mythology, is marginalized this way:

            “To assign to this great being (Thought Woman) the position of “fertility goddess” is exceedingly demeaning: it trivializes the tribes and it trivializes the power of woman.” (Paula Allen, p.1)

            The stratification that has occurred, the suppression of the positive goddess images and beliefs, has been strategic.  Women have their place in Islam, in Christianity, and maybe a better place in druidism.  But how does this relate to women’s issues in today’s society?

            Reproductive rights of women are affected.  Who has the right to reproduce, in Jewish societies, in Islamic societies, in China?  When there is a problem of female infanticide, it is clear that the males hold the right to reproduce themselves, and that females are merely utilized for this purpose.

            There is violence against women in religion.  In Islam, a tradition masquerading as a religion, women who are suspected victims of rape by their brothers are killed by their own families to restore the honor of the men.  Not only that, there is spiritual violence rampant in the religions of the world today.  Religions and institutions don’t want people to doubt, or at worst, listen to their own sense of truth.  The goal of institutional religion is to remove all doubt, to cut off a person completely from their own erotic sense of what is right and good.  This is spiritual violence.  Sometimes the oppression is internalized, and a person can be disconnected from their own sense of truth for a long time, and strongly support a system that marginalizes their own mental and emotional clarity about spiritual truth.

            The object of consciousness-raising is to reconnect with the erotic.  Religion, if it is to exist on earth, should exist in the service of the wellbeing of the human’s who practice it.  Religious truths extracted from doctrine must be humanitarian, and when they’re not, (e.g. in Catholicism, women are advised against birth control as being sinful), we need to take religion into our own hands and adapt it.  Once we are aware that stratification exists, we can take steps to change the entrenched values.

            At a micro level, women encounter stratification right in their homes, indeed, in Islam, the family is thought to be a microcosm of the Arabic community at large, and it is, for as long as there is violence against women in an Islamic or American home, there will be violence in the community at large.  At a micro level we face our friends and family and look at reshaping those bonds to be more permissive of women’s freedoms and rights.  At the national and global level, consciousness raising leads to acts of activism that change a country, or otherwise, a small act can be catapulted to the spotlight and given major meaning to the national and global communities.  Right now the “blu bra revolution” is occurring in Islamic culture, where some men who attacked a woman are being shamed and losing their honor instead of the woman who was assaulted and left half naked in the street losing her “sexual honor”.

            The path of least resistance is an issue to women in religion.  Often when we have raised our consciousness and feel some oppression in our own religion, it is easy to let it slide and be complacent, because to challenge the patriarchal status quo in the world’s major religions and your friends and family is a huge challenge.  The key is to pick your battles and choose your battlegrounds.  When we are persuading are close friends and family to be less gender stratified, a good tactic is to divide and conquer.  We can't persuade a person or society to change unless we understand the issues at work in their minds.

            Sexual Agency is an issue to women in religion.  In Islam, all sex outside of marriage is considered adultery and is illegal.  In Catholicism, women are allowed to have sex, within marriage, but not use birth control.  Abstinence is promoted in America for religious reasons, when “safe sex” policies world wide reduce teen pregnancy more.

            Social Conditioning is an issue because we don’t always get to choose our own religion, it is given to us by society and family, and indeed we accept it and it becomes a framework for the meaning in our lives.  The erotic is again important because sometimes we are socially conditioned to believe things that go against our wise inner nature, our erotic sense of truth.

            Overall women’s place in religion is tenuous.  We need women priests, we need Islamic women who are allowed to drive and leave their homes, we need native American kids taught that their gods are more than just sex and birthing objects.  How do we get there?

            Religion uses guilt to control women and men.  Look at body image in religion.  In Islam, women are objectified as such sexual objects that they must cover themselves lest they soil another man’s honor at a distance (or pants).  In Christianity, women are given images of the virgin Mary or the virgin de Guadalupe to hold themselves to, unrealistic images that are impossible to achieve and end up causing self doubt and lack of self esteem.

            My conclusion is that changing the attitudes of the world’s religions, institutions, and individuals will have to deal with addressing guilt.  Guilt is normally what we experience when we know we have done something wrong.  Religion uses guilt as a weapon, a threat of hell-fire, even in Wicca and Buddhism there is the idea of “karma” which will “come back and bite you in the ass.” for your bad actions and thoughts.  The other option is humor.  If we’re not feeling guilty about our failures, it’s because we know the God or Goddess looking over this universe has a knowing smile on its face.  The purpose of religion ought not to be to threaten guilt or punishment to insure cultural norms, but to encourage wellbeing and healthy functioning of women and men and encourage cultural norms to develop out of our own erotic sense of rightness.  Religion originally came from human insight, not the other way around, and we need to restore that attitude to the world’s dogmatic religions.

            Finally, is it ok to be angry at God?  If we feel undervalued by our religion, if it hurts, what then?  It is only through the full expression of anger and the validation of the meaning and values behind the anger that can change the community or institution in question.  Being angry is so important, being connected to our own feelings.  I’m angry too.  Anger can’t go into a box inside, that’s a way to dissolve a person’s sanity away, that’s the ultimate spiritual violence we can do to someone, is to take away the agency of their self-respect.  Feel your feelings, they’re what the Goddess gave us to guide us in this crazy gender stratified world.

Globalization

(Response to Kirk: Living in a Globalized World)

            “The Global Call to Action against Poverty, the world’s largest anti-poverty coalition, continues to pressure the governments of richer countries to address global imbalances of wealth and power.” (Kirk p. 389)

            Globally, the system of capitalization keeps third world or “devastated” countries in poverty.  Workers are given low wages, bad working conditions, unstable positions, and often unsafe working conditions.  If the workers try to unionize, the big American corporations move their factory somewhere else.

            Democracy was originally a government “of the people, for the people.”  Unfortunately, corporations which were originally only legal entities have now gained rights and personhood in law:

            “In an 1866 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared corporations legal persons.  Gradually they were given a long list of civil and political rights, such as free speech, property rights, and the right to define and control investment, production, and the organization of work.” (Kirk p. 390)

            The laws of our country and the execution of its practices around large corporations creates a global state of devastation.  Third world countries have been exploited by global capitalism, their natural resources subject to international trade agreements.  The WTO uses secret tribunals to determine damages in trade disagreements between less powerful and more powerful countries.  The IMF requires countries to change structurally and value exports, much like Planned Parenthood controls women’s lives in exchange for so called “help,” which is largely enslavement.

            National organizations are restructuring our planet’s economy worldwide.  Small countries are being forced to organize their economies in a certain way, and pander to global interests, as well as secular and private ones.  Many countries were forced to remove price caps on food for instance, which leads to destabilization in favor of corporations who can maximize the profit margin and minimize wages paid.

            Overall I am appalled.  In Mexico the unemployment rate has reached 50%.  It’s not because Mexicans don’t want to start businesses, it’s because their rights have been infringed to the point that the large corporations and international community hold the economic playing cards.  The multinational corporations can sell and manufacture products at the lowest cost to themselves, causing a low-wage competition in devastated (third world) countries.  Part of the problem is the fluidity of capital – when a US corporation can move it’s operations without any responsibility to keep the locals in a third world country employed, massive devaluation and devastation of the third world country results.

If our society is to survive, worker rights must be advocated and corporations must be liable to the individual they employ.  If Nike wants to pull it’s operations out of one country and put them in another, it should bear a responsibility to the people whose lives it is displacing with its “conspicuous consumption” of the cheapest available labor on Earth.

We are additionally facing a pandemic of evil where women and children are sold into the global sex trade.  India panders to the corrupt cops and statesmen who conceal and continue running whorehouses.  When the cheapest labor is slave labor, and legislators are participating in the system, what can be done?  Who will police the police? 

It is extremely important for international journalists to penetrate unjust situations and expose them to world scrutiny.  Even then, it is not governments who will object – it’s the people who object, who know that if one of their brothers or sisters is enslaved, so might they lose their rights and privileges also.

This reading makes me wonder – when will globalization hit my backyard?  Will my friends, family, and neighbors be struggling against faceless corporations? We will have to make the choice to support our friends and neighbors and small businesses when that times comes, and it already has.  We struggle against the forces of local dismantlement and disempowerment every day, with each economic choice we make.  I only hope that my neighbors keep their female children, and do not resort to selling them into slavery because the global system hasn’t properly divided Earth’s resources to those that deserve them: the workers.

We all have a dollar to spend, and collectively, as we spend it, we shape the globe.  We need a system that maximizes human wellbeing for the many, not human wealth for the few.  Each day we make a choice between globalization and localization.  It is as simple as the choice between slavery and freedom.