Gender and Environmental History: From Representation of Women and Nature to Gender Analysis of Ecology and Politics
Author(s)
Leach, Melissa; Green, Cathy
Abstract
Gender distinctions have been absent from most of the research on colonial environmental history. Two recent policy arguments have made gender a key issue, however: the issues of ecofeminism, and the role of women in the environment and sustainable development. These arguments have been applied to rewrite some aspects of environmental history, often reducing complicated relationships and processes to simplifications. A new gender-based view of environmental history uses historic examples from India and Africa to demonstrate the correlation between environmental processes and the human processes of labor, property rights, and power. Data are drawn from the agricultural regions of the Northern Province of Zambia, forest development in the Jarkhand region of India, and rice development in Gambia.
