Lois Ann Lorentzen
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, California 94114
U.S.A.
This paper explores the participation of women in popular environmental movements in El Salvador to affirm the claim made by Vandana Shiva that women, "whose minds have not yet been dispossessed or colonised" are in a privileged position to aid in creating new intellectualecological paradigms (Shiva, 46). The paper begins by describing grassroots, female-headed environmental movements in El Salvador. Such movements have generally started with efforts promoting community development, literacy and political empowerment. However, the fights concerning who owns and/or controls land are the most characteristic of the nascent popular-environmental movements. Such battles take one of two forms: struggles to overturn current ownership patterns and to reform current land use, or efforts to preserve traditional land ownership and use patterns against the encroachment of the industrialized world.
Writings from the growing Salvadoran ecofeminist movement will next be addressed, analyzing writings by Mercedes Canas and writiers in the feminist magazine Palabra de Mujer. In these writings, the relation between women and the environment/land is explored, including analyses of popular expressions linking woman's body with the land. The context of ecofeminists to argue a feminist methodology, activism, and resistence, informed by women's role in subsistence.
Finally, the argument will be made that those women most impacted by environmental degradation given their roles in subsistence, provide insights into "alternative" development models, new understandings of environmental ethics, and strategies for nonviolent resistence.
Vanadana Shiva. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed Books, 1988).
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