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 Women
and the Environment
by Theresa Gordon
The following is from a
speech given to CAPOW (Coalition of Australian Participating
Organisations of Women) in 1993 by Theresa Gordon, one of the truly
great Australian environmental campaigners. Theresa became a lead
campaigner after growing up in the shadow of a lead zinc smelter.
It is a challenge being a messenger for the environment. It is
virtually impossible not to paint a gloomy picture. To be
knowledgeable on the environment is a very uncomfortable burden.
Late last year 99 of the world's greatest scientists (many Nobel
prize winners) got together to look at world wide environmental
problems. The conclusion was; they warned that we only have 30 years
before the world becomes very significantly qualitatively less
habitable.
But speaking here today is different. Today is the day I get to talk
about the environment in the only place that there is not only a
world of hope but I believe it is one of the only places that there
is hope, and that is in the united voice and strength of women.
I will speak later about the impact we as individuals and a group
can have on the environment, but first I will look at the spiritual
nature of environmental degradation.
In pre-Christian times the fertility of women and the earth were
celebrated. The gods and goddesses were not distant gods of the sky
but gods and goddesses of the earth connected to fundamentals of
life such as the fertility of both the earth and women. At around
the same time as Christianity took a dominating hold over these so
called pagan attitudes, the powers of women as the healers and
midwives were crushed by three hundred years of witch burnings
during which 9 million European women were killed. This ever
effective tool, fear, forced women to disconnect themselves from
their skills and intuition, and as a consequence they became
disempowered and devalued. We have since been dominated by
patriarchies both within the church and the medical field, including
birthing practices, technology, agriculture and society in general.
The effect of this on the environment has seen man plunder and
dominate, controlling and exploiting our natural resources. I
believe women must regain power and also allow themselves to
redevelop intuitive skills and not devalue our gift of nurturing. I
also believe it is time to bring the gods (whatever doctrine) down
out of the sky and connect them to the mother earth. We need to
realise our spirituality should be connected to the air, the water
and the land in a way that will ensure we no longer take these
essential life giving elements for granted. We must look upon
environmental degradation as a sin not only to our gods, but to
ourselves.
This extract from a prayer by Michael Leunig, from his book A Common
Prayer, although harsh, highlights for me the nature of our
environmental sins.
Father do not forgive them for
they know precisely what they do.
Those destroyers of earth's beauty and goodness,
Those killers of nature, do not forgive them.
Those betrayers of nature's love.
Those exploiters of nature's innocence.
Those poisoners. Do not forgive them.
It is true. There are no more excuses. We must stop and move
towards positions. In this area we can learn much from the
indigenous people of the world that have struggled against the tide
to hold on to this gift of oneness that they still share with the
earth and its elements. There is none more beautiful and powerful as
our own Australian Aboriginal dreaming, to highlight what I mean.
And as this year is the year of the indigenous people, it is a great
opportunity to reach out and learn, and hopefully regain the feeling
that we are a part of this complex web of life, and that we must
stop the destructive domination of our natural resources.
On a more practical level, we must look at women's place in the
environmental debate today. "Women are the mainstay of the
majority of current programmes for environmental conservation in
Australia. Household recycling, tree-planting programmes, Landcare
groups and domestic energy conservation are activities in which most
of the actual work is done in a voluntary capacity by women. Yet the
great majority of waste production, land development and energy use
is in industry, in which women hold few decision-making
positions" [Brown & Broom, 1992] This serious imbalance
must be addressed. Women also have to cope with conflicting
environmental messages. "As the principal teachers and managers
of households, we are expected to practice recycling, reusing and
renewing materials and reducing consumption, so that our impact on
the earth is less" [Brown & Broom, 1992] Yet we are
expected to do these things in an environment that continually
subjects us and our families to messages of wasteful
hyper-consumerism. It is not an easy job to find a balanced
perspective. Do we pour phosphates into our mop buckets and washing
machines everyday and therefore be party to toxic algal blooms? Or
do we use more environmentally friendly detergents which do not
remove the lead dust?
An ominous trend is developing that is seeing women
being handed the burden of responsibility and guilt for
environmental matters. "Manufacturers should be held
responsible for their environmentally damaging products. We must not
allow the onus to be put on women to solve problems such as domestic
waste when it is the manufacturers who create waste." [Brown
& Broom, 1992] This is where women's groups working together can
make the difference. If the groups represented here today put
collective energy into the forcing of legislation to combat excess
packaging and ban heavy metals from packaging inks and adhesives, it
would not only be helping the environment. but also telling
governments that women will not allow themselves to be used.
As some of you may be aware, I have been involved
for two years with the problem of lead contamination in the Boolaroo
area. The situation at Boolaroo is again one that is seeing
housekeepers, whom we all know are mainly women, being handed the
area's problem. When the discovery was made that the majority of the
children had excessive blood lead levels, the answer came in the
form of "behavioural guidelines". This means training the
house keeper, changing behavioural patterns so that a family can
learn to safely live with lead. This includes damp mopping daily,
damp wiping all food preparation surfaces before preparing food,
washing children's hands frequently, washing all toys frequently,
only vacuuming whilst children are out of the room...the list goes
on, but I would think that you get the idea. This has neatly handed
the burden of responsibility onto women. Of course, what happens
when some poor woman does all she can humanly possibly do, and her
child's blood lead level does not come down? Well, she can blame
herself.
Last year at the Speers Point Park annual
Environfest, I overheard a conversation at a company display. Some
women were enquiring about the problem of children's lead levels.
They were told by the industry representative that there was nothing
to worry about because the children that had high blood lead levels
came from dirty homes. He didn't mention that the Industry emits 30
tonnes of lead from the stack each year, along with an estimated
additional 15 tonnes of uncontrollable emission from buildings. You
still may be thinking "Behavioural guidelines" seem a
sensible short term solution. Well yes, but they were never
originally offered as short term, and the NO LEAD group thought it
prudent to make a fuss to ensure that the words "short
term" accompanied these guidelines after finding out the women
of Port Pirie in SA have been following behavioural guidelines for
fourteen years. Two years down the track, in Boolaroo, behavioural
guidelines are still all that has been offered, along with a lot of
research, and there has been no change in blood lead levels.
They knew from Port Pirie that these guidelines
were largely ineffective and unsustainable, but they do effectively
shift the burden of responsibility, and relieve the pressure of
obligation to do something about the cause. Whether it has to do
with waste management or contaminated sites, we must stop this
insidious shifting of the burden of guilt and responsibility onto
women. It is happening, it is serious, and we must again take
collective action to halt this becoming normal practice.
There are, however, obvious and important
individual actions which we should take responsibility for, such as
recycling, reusing, reducing, composting and conserving. But I
believe that, along with the usual preaching of these practices, it
should be pointed out that it is not easy to do all these things,
and that it is yet another burden for women to handle. So I would
like to say again, try to find the balance. Don't expect yourself to
do everything instantly, and don't feel guilty if you find something
is too much. It would be negligent to make no effort at all, but it
is enough to set realistic goals and chip away at your own pace.
It is also very much the time for women to reach
in and use their intuition and common-sense to decipher the truth on
environmental matters. The unfortunate situation is that the vast
amount of research money lies with the multinational companies.
International truth has been, and continues to be, distorted time
and time again. I will give only a few examples out of the many
which I have experienced in my own issue. In an area that found a
lead industry not wanting to rehabilitate toxic soils, they produced
a report which concluded that lead in air has more impact on
children's health than lead in soil. In the case that finds an
industry not wanting to bring down emissions, they produced a report
which concluded that avoiding soil and dust exposure is more
important to children's health than lead in air. Similar situations
can be found for pesticide use, herbicides, effects on water
quality... the list is endless. Along with vested interest come the
many reports supporting the appropriate weight of evidence to suit.
So it is time to ask. firstly, who may have funded this study and
who would benefit from this result? Then use your own judgement and
stick to it. I suggest this is prudent practice in health matters as
well as environmental. The cold hard facts are that governments
cannot afford to produce enough independent research to keep abreast
of the times, and this offers the advantage to industry.
Apart from the outward practical things we must do,
we also, as educators, nurturer's and givers of life, must take the
responsibility of helping ourselves and our families cease taking
for granted the basic gifts that this earth and this life hold for
us. We must connect our human spirit with our physical environment.
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