“Who cares about social reproduction in a time of climate crisis?” Reflections from environmental justice scholar Giovanna Di Chiro

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]The enduring efforts by marginalized women across the world are sustaining community well-being in the face of the climate crisis, which is why their work of social reproduction is needed now more than ever. Professor of Environmental Studies Giovanna Di Chiro in her recent visit to the ISS spoke about the power of stories to turn our attention to the importance of social reproduction or life-making as part of “living environmentalism”. In this blog article, ISS Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development Wendy Harcourt shares some of Di Chiro’s reflections.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”28868″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]

Renowned scholar of environmental justice at Swarthmore College in the United States Giovanna Di Chiro visited the ISS on 12 June this year, where she presented a seminar titled “Social Reproduction in the Age of Climate Crisis”. In the seminar organized by the ISS Political Ecology research group, Di Chiro pondered the following important question: What would a just approach to ‘sustainability’ look like that supports ‘life-making’ in all its forms, even — or especially — in the wake of the ruins of capitalism?

Using a critical ecofeminist lens[1], she examined how neoliberal ‘green’ solutions[2] to the climate crisis have not taken seriously the material effects of embodiment and the capacity for communities (human and non-human) to accomplish social reproduction — that is, the capacity to sustain everyday life and to thrive into the future. I invited her to talk about this at the ISS, as her research insights are crucial for our ongoing collective efforts to address multiple, intersecting challenges and crises. In this blog article, I share some of her reflections.

The convergence of crises — and the convergence of struggles

Social reproduction risks are now intersecting with environmental crises, leading to the convergence of struggles for social reproduction and environmental justice. Giovanna Di Chiro’s work is inspired by women grassroots activists in the environmental justice movement in the United States who have been fighting for their survival and the survival of their children and families. These women activists have been seeking to stop the onslaught of toxic pollution from chemical factories, waste incinerators, and many other toxic assaults on their lives. In her research, Di Chiro has documented[3] how grassroots women leaders — who are largely poor and low-income Black, Brown, and Indigenous women — organize to build connections between environmental movements and women’s movements. These activists expose how the intersecting systems of hetero-patriarchy and racial capitalism have resulted in the poisoning of their air, water, and lands, and show how these have harmed their own reproductive health and the well-being of their communities.

Yet, despite decades of women’s environmental justice activism, the chances for everyday survival and possible futures for millions of people, and for billions of other species on the Earth, have gotten worse; we are all familiar with the horrible statistics of worsening climate disasters, the mass extinctions of plants and animals, and widespread violence and war. Adding to this the attack on reproductive rights in the US by the Republican right wing and the rise of neofascism worldwide, we see even more threats to social reproduction and survival into the future as it relates to environmental justice. Everyday survival is still a problem for many low-income Black and Brown communities in the US, and survival remains the first priority.

One example of the connection between social reproduction and environmental injustice is the recent decision by the Republican Governor of Louisiana to withhold millions in federal monies to repair the city of New Orleans’ decaying water treatment infrastructure (which is needed to prevent flooding, toxic lead leaching, and saltwater infiltration in the city’s drinking water due to rising sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico). He withheld this funding because New Orleans’s Democrat-controlled city government had refused to comply with the state of Louisiana’s total ban on abortion, which would require the city to arrest and prosecute low-income and poor women who seek abortions in the state.

Another example of the increased threat to social reproduction and its connection to environmentalism involves rising incidences of eco-fascist rhetoric that blames the “over-population” of immigrant bodies for jeopardizing the sustainability of our environment. In 2019, two years after Trump came into office and authorized anti-immigrant violence across the US, a 21-year-old white man opened fire at a busy Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, targeting the predominantly Latino and Mexican shoppers. He killed 23 people and wounded another 26. The shooter had earlier published a lengthy, online manifesto expressing his white supremacist, ‘eco-fascist’ beliefs, stating, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion of Hispanics.” He blamed Latinos for overpopulating the country and taking away real Americans’ jobs and destroying the environment. This is a revival of an extremist environmentalist politics blaming the invasion and over-breeding of racialized bodies for the country’s downfall.

‘Living worlds’ to counter global injustices

Many of today’s intersectional movements engage in creating new stories about building what feminist political ecologist Diana Ojeda[4] calls ‘Living Worlds’: stories about how we must live and especially about how we must thrive in these precarious times. Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer[5] urges us to work to change the world by prioritizing what she argued are the core features of building anti-colonial Living Worlds: raising good children, raising a garden, and raising a ruckus. They are ‘living environmentalisms’ of marginalized communities’ struggles for everyday life.

Di Chiro’s talk showed how social reproduction is at the heart of the environmental justice (EJ) movement. Social reproduction means not only care for children, families, and communities; it also means ensuring that you can breathe healthy air and drink clean water and that the places where you live, work, and go to school are free from toxic contamination. We learnt from her talk how sustaining everyday life should be at the heart of environmentalism and at the core of definitions of “sustainability.” In times of climate crisis and climate anxiety, it is important to understand how citizens can act and continue to resist, as well as flourish, in communities of care. Di Chiro’s pedagogical approach is, in itself, part of living environmentalism. She is among those environmental activists, scientists, and artists who write about what motivates them to act on social and environmental injustices, connecting their own personal stories to larger historical narratives and broader social and environmental issues.

References

[1] Di Chiro, G. 2017. ‘Welcome to the White (M)Anthropocene? A feminist-environmentalist critique,’ in S. Macgregor (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment. London: Routledge.

[2] Wichterich, C.  2015. ‘Contesting green growth, connecting care, commons and enough,’ in Harcourt, W. and I. R. Nelson (eds), Practicing Feminist Political Ecologies. London: Zed Books.

[3] See for example Di Chiro, G. 2015 ‘A new spelling of sustainability: engaging feminist-environmental justice theory and practice,’ in Harcourt, W. and I. R. Nelson (eds), Practicing Feminist Political Ecologies. London: Zed Books.

[4] Ojeda, D. et al. 2022. ‘Feminist Ecologies,’ Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Vol. 47, pp. 149–171.

[5] Wall-Kimmerer, R. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1719410637773{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]

About the author:

Wendy Harcourt is Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University in The Hague.

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