Ariel Salleh (ed.): Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology. Spinifex Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-7453-2863-8
In the age of equal opportunity and unisex underwear the once-great feminist movement seems about as incendiary as a lukewarm cup of tea.
That's not to say that the 'f' word went the way of dinosaurs completely. While we weren't looking (nor, perhaps, paying much attention) feminism managed to claw its way back into the wings — if not under the spotlight — by morphing into something at once profound and problematical.
Welcome to the hot topic (or hot potato, depending on your viewpoint) of ecofeminism: a 21st-century reaction to a 21-century 'crisis of democracy and sustainability'.
According to www.thegreenfuse.org, an environmental philosophy site based in the United Kingdom, ecofeminism centres on the belief that 'the domination of women and the domination of nature are fundamentally connected, and that environmental efforts are therefore integral to work to overcome the oppression of women'.
Although the movement has been criticised for being reactionary and for valuing inclusivity and difference, ecofeminists argue that their thinking is designed to establish a new balance by exposing the 'limits of current scholarship in political economy, ecological economics and sustainability science'.
The United States author and academic, Peter Dickens, writes: 'Marginalised groupings must be recognised as a source of new theoretical understandings, critical for social and environmental justice to be achieved.'
And so it was with a combination of thrill and trepidation that I approached the collection of essays, Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology, compiled and edited by Sydney researcher and author Ariel Salleh,
A few pages in, however, I found myself both on familiar ground but completely out of my comfort zone.
When I wasn't grappling with concepts such as 'energetics' or 'Marx's labour theory of value' in Ewa Charkiewicz's essay 'Who Is the 'He' of He Who Decides in Economic Discourse?', I was stumbling over the comprehensive European Union emission figures provided in Meike Spitzner's essay, 'How Global Warming Is Gendered'.
Of course, since I am neither the community leader nor the 'student of political studies, movement politics or critical geography' of whom Salleh writes in her introduction, I am clearly outside the book's primary audience.
'These essays are a call to people who care,' she writes, and though I understand that Salleh means to care in a professional sense, it rubs me up the