Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, and the Politics of Care
My first encounter with the concept of ecofeminism was during my bachelor’s degree, in an English literature elective. Until then, my ideas of feminism, environmental questions, and scientific debates sat in separate compartments—each treated as though it belonged to a different intellectual world. But the day we read Vandana Shiva’s work as part of the English coursework, ecofeminism offered a language that pulled these strands together. It argued that the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women were not distinct injustices but expressions of the same systems of power—structures built on extraction, hierarchy, and the devaluation of labour and knowledge. As I read and wrote more about gender, politics, and science over the years, the depth of those connections became clearer. Ecofeminism did not merely place women and the environment side by side; it revealed how deeply intertwined our social, political, ecological, and scientific worlds are. What happens to land is insepar...