“The climate crisis is not gender neutral,” says Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-editor of the anthology All we can save: truth, courage and solutions to the climate crisis, a book of essays and poems written entirely by women collaborators. “It is born of a patriarchal system that is also entangled with racism and white supremacy and extractive capitalism. And the unequal impacts of climate change make it harder to achieve an equal gender world.”
Faced with this reality, the world needs to take a feminist approach to tackling the climate crisis, she adds. This includes a collective mission to change who is leading the solutions to the crisis and what the focus will be.
A multiplier of injustice
“The intersections of climate and justice and feminism include the disproportionate impact of climate change and the entire climate on women,” says Jacqueline Patterson, director of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program. “We also add the goal of the race, of course, and the additional risks exclusive to COPD women and, more specifically, black women.”
Climate change developed in an unjust world and is now exacerbating the vulnerabilities and inequalities experienced by women, particularly those living in rural areas or the global south and those who are black, indigenous or other people of color. Patterson reflects on this injustice in the essay “At the Intersections,” which appears in All we can save collection. She opens with an anecdote about the first time she saw racism, misogyny, and poverty clash with environmental issues as a Peace Corps volunteer in her father’s homeland, Jamaica. Later in his career, as a human rights activist working internationally to combat HIV / AIDS and gender injustice, Patterson learned the story of a woman who left her native Cameroon to cultivate her community. they had dried up, to the point of becoming the victim of a rape. and then to contract HIV at the country’s border. “These stories brought tears to my eyes,” he writes. “There is a pandemic of devastating impacts at the intersection between violence against women and climate change.”
These days, in his work on environmental justice with the NAACP, Patterson is committed to ensuring that communities in “desperately desperate circumstances, communities that don’t even think about it,” such as those that don’t have running water or electricity, e.g. don’t stay out of the climate conversation. And that means not only including them, but deliberately prioritizing them and making sure their voices are heard at all levels. She wonders, “How can we make sure we don’t continue with the evils of the past when it comes to assuming that the rising tide will lift all ships?”
“A Feminist Climate Renaissance”
According to Wilkinson, these injustices of the climate crisis also reveal a leadership crisis. What we really need, she and All we can save co-editor Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, writes, is a “feminist climate renaissance.” Without this, a just and livable future becomes impossible. “Research shows that women’s leadership and equal participation deliver better results for climate policy, reduce emissions, and protect the land,” Wilkinson adds.
In fact, many of today’s most influential climate leaders are women. On the international stage, Christiana Figueres, as head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was the architect of the historic Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, which in its preamble called for the need to empower women in climate decision-making. Celebrities like Jane Fonda have drawn attention to the climate crisis through civil disobedience and the Fire Drill Fridays, inspired, of course, by the activism of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and the powerful Fridays for Future movement that began. Government women also lead the climate. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern recently declared a climate change emergency and pledged her country to leave carbon neutral in 2025. Meanwhile, in the United States, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the visionary for the Green New Deal, a plan for the country to move away from fossil fuels and into a clean energy future. And in recent years, groups such as the Sunrise Movement, led by Varshini Prakash, have done critical work by inserting the climate crisis into American public discourse.
Wilkinson and Johnson see four main characteristics shared by leaders like these. First, they prioritize making a change over responsibility. “We have to overcome ego, competition, and control: everything patriarchal, supremacist, and hierarchical that stands in between burns a lot of energy and prevents us from collaborating,” Wilkinson says.
Feminist climate leaders also tend to have a deep commitment to justice and equality. You also need to have emotional intelligence. “This is the biggest challenge humanity has ever taken on and we will not solve it just with our prefrontal cortex,” Wilkinson states. “We have to come to this as whole human beings. And that means pain, uncertainty, anger, anxiety, but also really fierce love.”
Finally, feminist climate leaders recognize that building community is a prerequisite for building a better world. The community has incredible wisdom, while “individualism falls short with good ideas and certainly with a sense of purpose and joy,” says Wilkinson. Fostering this sense of community in the broad climate movement is often a first step, especially when allies from disparate groups come together. As founder Colette Pichon Battle, founder of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, advises, before several groups of women can be at the forefront together, they must heal relationships and reconcile the unjust social dynamics that exist among their various communities.
The good news is that women are uniquely prepared to take on this task of social and environmental healing. “Women have had to develop a set of skills to cope and nurture in order to see the survival of our families,” says Patterson, who adds that caring for a family in the most serious circumstances has been incorporated into the ‘DNA of black women, who carry the trauma of slavery. “Women just had to do it,” she says.
For her part, Wilkinson says she sees evidence of the growth and power of the feminist climate ecosystem every time it spins. Leaders of the youth climate justice movement embody these characteristics and a growing number of women sit at the national table (including former NRDC President Gina McCarthy, another All we can save collaborator, who now directs internal climate policy from the White House). “There are a lot of signs that this galloping herd is getting bigger and faster and stronger. And that gives me a lot of courage,” Wilkinson says.
Power and joy
For their nonprofit All We Can Save Project, Wilkinson and Johnson have developed a 2030 vision for women who lead the climate to have the power to create transformative change and experience profound joy in their work. Their community-oriented approach to resolving the climate crisis prioritizes the collective upliftment of the spirits of others and helps generate momentum, both of which serve as an antidote to the twilight that the only climate warrior can sometimes consume. “We’re really into that idea of power and joy,” Wilkinson explains. “Power is what you need for change to happen. And frankly, joy is what needs to appear every day.”
With climate feminists at the forefront, more resources and investments could be made for transformative climate work that transgender and transgender women and non-binary leaders are already doing (developing solutions, researching and writing, doing community organizations) often at night or the weekends. These leaders and their teams can also serve as examples and mentors for emerging climate feminists of all sexes and ages.
And, of course, men can also be climate feminists. “There’s a very important role for men, and I think it starts with listening,” Wilkinson says. “And when we consider the basic approaches to climate leadership, things like compassion, connection, creativity, collaboration, care, commitment to justice, it’s all open to people of any gender.” She points out that men in positions of power — whether they control funding or platforms or lead an institution — may be more intentional to help change the face of climate leadership. They can invite more women and others from diverse backgrounds to bring ideas and lead projects, or they can take a step back and let others make decisions and set their sights.
This collaborative work is increasingly urgent. “Even now, in the 11 hours of climate action, so many people with power deny, block and delay or make empty promises about what they will do,” Wilkinson says. “It’s absolutely devastating. But I think the tide is changing. I think we’ll win.”
She adds that Ireland’s former and first female president, Mary Robinson, sums up the situation perfectly with the motto of the Mothers of Invention podcast: “Climate change is a man-made problem, with a feminist solution!”
Republished with permission from Council for the Defense of Natural Resources.
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