Ecofeminism to Escape Collapse

Feminism has gained a very strong following in Spain in recent years, as the massive feminist demonstrations of March 8th of 2018 and 2019 showed, and I would dare to say that much of its success is due to the popularity of the ecofeminist message and the slogan “put life at the center”. It is increasingly evident that we need a society in which economic growth and capital gains cease to be the main –and almost the sole– objective of economic policy (and of society itself). We need economic policies to be oriented towards the most important goal: the well-being of human life in equilibrium with the Planet.

In that sense, it is good news that feminist economics is developing and posing a radical critique of capitalism, since the economy is our metabolism; that is, our relationship with energy and matter. We cannot aspire to change society without changing this material base. However, as Amaia Pérez Orozco recognizes, feminist economics still lacks a clear political commitment and finds it difficult to translate its criticism into concrete economic measures that go beyond common policies to other sectors of the left.

From my point of view –which comes from systems dynamics and environmentalism rather than from feminism– one of the tools that can best help feminist economics articulate a coherent discourse is the pattern of collapse. The collapse is one of the basic patterns of growth and can be compared fairly closely with the behavior of the capitalist economy, since it reflects its tendency to expand and overexploit. Understanding this pattern is essential when it comes to defusing the collapsing drift that our society is taking and I believe that a large part of the measures that can be taken to deactivate this collapse pattern are, basically, ecofeminist measures. But, before talking about the relationship between ecofeminism and collapse, I would like to describe the collapse pattern itself.

Read Margarita’s full article here on Resilience.