Preventing violence in a time of climate change
“You know the sun shines hotter than ever before,” sings Tracy Chapman. “She has been clear-cut. She has been dumped on. She has been poisoned and beaten up,” reads the lyrics to her song, “The Rape of the World.” Last week. I listened to the song for the first time probably since it came out in the mid-90s at the suggestion of colleague Ann Simonton. “Mother of us all, place of our birth,” the song continues, “We all are witness to the rape of the world.”
“Drawing a connection between earth and the female body has been common across the globe for millennia,” says Simonton. “Clearly women aren't closer to nature than men are, but it is vital to acknowledge the disproportionate impact of the current climate and ecological emergency on women and the resulting increase in hardship, violence and rape.”
Simonton is a commissioner and former chair of the City's Commission for the Prevention of Violence Against Women and a longtime activist for social justice issues in Santa Cruz. Created through an ordinance in 1981 with first meetings held in 1982, one goal of the commission is “to make ending violence against women the highest priority in the City of Santa Cruz.” Alongside fellow commissioners including Karen Madura, Simonton has helped create the 40th anniversary celebration of the commission which will take place this week. Festivities include a hybrid-documentary film premiere on Tuesday night at the Del Mar, a signmaking event from 3-7 p.m. Wednesday at the MAH, and finally the “March for Women's Rights (Everyone Welcome)” at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Santa Cruz County courthouse.
In her organizing, Simonton has intentionally bridged connections between what has been siloed as “women's issues” with other social and environmental justice causes that affect the entire community and addresses oppression in all forms. While it remains unfortunately common misinformation that feminism intends to swing the power imbalance from a male hierarchy to a female hierarchy, at its core feminism is a movement for social justice, seeking equality for all gender identities and for an end to harm.
Similarly, representation does not simply call for swapping out men in positions of disproportionate power for women in the same roles — it insists on a new system.
In that vein, Simonton and others believe that ocean conservation, sustainability, and climate change advocacy play a major role in feminism and the women's rights movement. “Many leaders of the climate change movement are indigenous women of color,” Simonton points out.
In fact, there's a whole tree branch of feminism devoted to exploring the connections between women and nature — ecofeminism. It argues that women and nature have a shared history of exploitation, domination, and oppression under a capitalist patriarchy. The “power-over” structure common in hierarchical societies is often dictated by gender (man), race (white), and the goal of accumulating wealth at the price of destroying nature and nonhuman life. Women and those who do not identify as cis-hetero white men in these social systems suffer along the same lines.
In climate change, ecofeminism remains very relevant. Frontline communities, those that are affected “first and worst” by climate shocks, are disproportionately women. You may remember a recent column about how losing the right to access abortion will cause exponential suffering for women in times of climate change, particularly low income women and women of color.
Women, particularly women of color, have led restorative conservation movements to liberate themselves, their community, and their nonhuman nature kin. Vandana Shiva, an Indian ecofeminist icon, pushed back against Big Ag and GMOs that have put small farmers out of business and caused the death and suicide of countless members of her community. She's spent decades advocating for food sovereignty and seed knowledge, seed saving, and seed sharing. Shiva literally wrote the book on ecofeminism that goes by the same title.
Another heavy-hitter ecofeminist scholar based in Santa Cruz is Donna Haraway. Haraway received her doctorate in biology from Yale and studies the intersection of biology and the culture of politics among many other subjects.
Presently, she is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz and active at its Science and Justice Research Center. She's also a featured speaker at CPVAW's March for Women's Rights this Thursday. Haraway has questioned objectivity in male dominated science culture, inquiring how we determine who exactly is the royal “we” that poses scientific queries and postulates “objective” conclusions — and how that is influenced by patriarchal and gendered norms.
I once received a lawyer bill by a former employer for writing about gender bias in ocean science. Women are still not allowed to even name the very soup they swim in every day. Misogyny prevents women from attaining equal pay and accolades compared to men in science and sustainability roles, and it leads to less accurate scientific outcomes.
Many science and sustainability institutions are not equitable nor safe places for women, LGTBQIA+, and TQBILPOC community members. Too many of us determine where we surf, hike, camp, boat, and work based on the level of harm that could be done to us or the harm we know that has been done to our sisters. Just last December, seven scientists stepped forward to share their #metoo experiences at the highly acclaimed Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, one of the most sought after research facilities on earth.
We recently celebrated 30 years of ongoing protections for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Let's provide equal allyship for this momentous anniversary celebration of CPVAW. I'm grateful to Simonton and the Commission for their inclusive and intersectional approach and the diverse participants invited into solidarity. Forty years ago, the city of Santa Cruz endeavored to end violence against women and all that entails, and we still have a ways to go.
In a 2019 interview on “For the Wild” Haraway gave us a short call to action. “You show up,” she said. “You show up at the demonstration, you show up at the meeting. You become informed about struggles that are not necessarily your own but which you are in alliance with. You show up.”
Men in surf, sustainability, ocean, science, and climate, I look forward to seeing you show up alongside us at the march.