Over the last twenty years, international environmental law has attempted to address the global threats to the health of our planet including ozone layer depletion, climate change, global deforestation, the pollution of freshwater resources and the oceans and species extinction. Unfortunately, the state of the environment is not improving as fast as environmental conventions come forth. The premise for this thesis is therefore that international environmental law is not effective in protecting the natural environment. Responsible for the survival of their families and communities, women in developing countries are the most vulnerable to environmental degradation as dwindling natural and freshwater resources and soil erosion threaten their survival base. Unfortunately, international environmental law does little to acknowledge this vulnerability and even less to assist women in developing countries cope with environmental degradation. The vast knowledge of ecosystems held by women in developing countries is also largely ignored, thus marginalizing their way of knowing and disregarding potential solutions to environmental problems. This thesis therefore takes a critical look from an ecofeminist standpoint at the traditional characteristics of international environmental law such as states' sovereign right to exploit their natural resources, states' right to development and the emphasis of international environmental law on science and technology. The thesis also examines emerging principles of international environmental law such as sustainable development, intergenerational equity, common concern of humankind, and the precautionary principle, which attempt to address some of the concerns raised by the more traditional approach. However, the thesis concludes that despite these new developments, international environmental law is still premised on an androcentric perspective of the natural environment which impedes it from achieving true environmental protection and which serves to continue the marginalization of women. In this thesis, I argue that a new conceptualization of the relationship between humankind and the natural environment is necessary in order to save our planet from ecological disaster and that ecofeminism can offer such an alternative view. Finally, the conclusion will suggest a few concrete ways of including women's perspectives and ways of knowing into the negotiation of environmental conventions and in their implementation. / Law, Peter A. Allard School of / Graduate

Ecofeminism has had a nonlinear developmental path. Although it was celebrated as a potentially revolutionary project in the 1970s, by the time climate change and environmental crises had worked their way into mainstream discourse ecofeminism had become practically unheard of. The purpose of this thesis is to reflect on the failure of early ecofeminism and to explore ecofeminism’s potential as a transformative project of the twenty-first century. This thesis is motivated by my own personal experience of ecofeminism as transformative and also by what I would call a recent resurgence of interest in ecofeminism by young students, budding feminists, and fledgling environmentalists that understand the climate and environmental crises as fundamentally linked to the oppressions of colonial capitalist-patriarchy. Recounting the origin, history, and marginalization of the project of ecofeminism, I explore the rift between materialist and spiritual/cultural approaches to argue that the effectiveness of ecofeminism is dependent upon a collaborative recovery from the damages done by extensive anti-essentialism critiques. The onto-epistemology of our current paradigm— defined by neoliberal capitalism and colonial patriarchy—limits response to the environmental crises of our times to that of incremental policy change that is more symbolic than substantive. I argue that, in order to escape the chains of the neoliberal/capitalist/patriarchal subject that are cast upon us by these predatory onto-epistemologies, we must envisage ways to be human otherwise; in reciprocal relationships with more-than-human nature. As a prefigurative project that centres the more-than-human yet maintains a comprehensive intersectional anti-oppressive framework, a contemporary ‘multispecies ecofeminism’ can endow us with this potentiality. In our times of immense ecological degradation and ‘point-of-no-return’ deadlines, ecofeminism is a needed ‘third story’ that resonates as revolutionary with young scholars of the twenty-first century. / Graduate

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Bangladesh's ready-made garment industry and its harsh working conditions have been the center of intense scrutiny for the past decade, especially following the massive death tolls of the Tazreen Fashions factory fire in 2012 and the Rana Plaza building collapse in 2013. While lauded by many for its tremendous contributions to the Bangladeshi economy and its employment of primarily women, the garment industry is responsible for causing harm both to the women who work there and the local environment. Women workers are physically and verbally abused in the workplace for little pay, while the factories emit pollutants that contaminate the drinking water in surrounding areas and destroy crops. The global North, while being the main destination for exports from Bangladesh, refuses to intervene in a meaningful way to help the people who supply cheap goods for them, even in spite of highly publicized agreements to help improve factory safety, like the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. This paper will examine the Bangladeshi garment industry using an ecofeminist lens. Doing so helps to illustrate the various power relations involving gender, capitalism, and the environment that characterize the industry. These axes of power, all stemming from the same mindset of superiority, reinforce one another both ideologically and materially. Seeing how these different issues – including harassment, pollution, crop loss, and forced displacement – are connected will help to determine how to best solve each of these individual issues.

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Into the Into of Earth Itself is a poetry collection that investigates the relationship between ecological violation and the violation of women, as well as toxicity and toxic masculinity. In doing so, it draws from the histories of two Pennsylvania towns: Palmerton and Centralia. The former is a Superfund site ravaged by zinc pollution and currently under threat of hydraulic fracturing and pipeline expansion. The latter is a nearby ghost town that was condemned and evacuated due to an underground mine fire, which will continue for another 200 years. The manuscript uses visual forms and digital text mining techniques to craft poetry about these extractive relationships to land and women. The speaker asks herself: As a woman, how have I also been mined and fracked by these same societal technologies? / Master of Fine Arts / Into the Into of Earth Itself is a poetry collection.

The study of human-environment interactions by geography is traditionally conceptualized as the "man-land" theme in geographic analysis. Feminists and other post-structuralists criticize that conceptualization. Following those critiques, this study evaluates ecofeminism as a possible alternative to a "man-land" formulation. Ecofeminism is presented and analyzed as a school of thought that also studies human-environment interactions. Vandan Shiva's discourse and treatment of Chipko provide the central ecofeminist case study. The thesis elucidates ecofeminism's sensitivity to the geographic concept of place in order to determine whether or not ecofeminism is adequate as a geographic theory. Analysis of Vandana Shiva's texts reveals that ecofeminism universalizes and fails to accommodate the geographic concept of place. / Master of Science

This thesis develops a legal theory reflecting the insights of feminism and environmental philosophy. I argue that human beings are not ontologically separate, but embedded in webs of relationality with natural others. My primary purposes are to 1) delineate ways in which institutions of modernity (such as law and science) have precipitated ecosocial crisis through the attempt to dialectically enforce mastery and control over nature and women; and 2) explore alternate political forms and ontologies which challenge the classical liberalist view of the (human) individual as a radically isolated, discrete, autonomous being. My overarching theme is that law functions as a narrative that can both hinder and enhance the promotion of ecological ideas, and how ecofeminism can contribute to transformative projects of environmental philosophy and feminist law.

Virginia Woolf makes clear in her book A Room of One's Own that "[A] woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write…." This statement extends to all endeavors by women, including sport. The gap between men and women's sports is not bridged by monetary compensation. The domination of women exists in conceptual ideals and how those are expressed through our roles in this world. I use Val Plumwood's ecological feminist theory to expose the blatant masculinity imposed upon sport. I shall argue that sport is an arena of constant struggle over basic social conceptions of men and women. My endeavor is to implore traditionally masculine territory, and show sport as the domain of no single gender, but a field of simplicity and cooperation.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Elizabeth Dodd / This thesis analyzes the protagonists’ pursuit of alternatives to traditionally patriarchal value through economic and ecofeminist critical lenses. The female protagonists in Prodigal Summer resist being identified through the social legacy of coverture that is still present in the small Appalachian town they live. Lusa, Deanna, and Nannie demonstrate that their socio-economic independence, acquired mainly due to their educational background, allows them not only to disconnect themselves from societal beliefs that the woman should be in the margins of the male presence, but also to interact with nature differently from others. The women’s separation from the institution of marriage and their embrace of motherhood as a matriarchal structure that mirrors the example of the coyotes’ families are studied as main examples of how they distance themselves from the other characters’ attitudes in the novel. This rejection of old ideologies of womanhood in terms of patriarchal structures and their fight for new spaces in society is also present in their struggle to physically inhabit spaces long considered male domains. Defeating the notion that women belong to the domestic space of the house, the protagonists pursue a feminist identity in much wider settings, including forests and farms. The characters’ choice to consider nature as their home demonstrates that they welcome the concept of ecology and recognize the interconnectedness present in nature. This study shows that because of the protagonists’ feminist views, they can imagine different ways to both manage the land and their families. The land ethics they acquire thus refers to humans and non-humans equally.