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An invitation-only event: If you’ve not been invited and think you should, if you feel part of a movement for ecofeminism in Denmark, then feel free to get in touch!
We’ll be having a fireside chat with Ariel Salleh to celebrate midsummer and the first volume in her trilogy ‘The Androcene and Its Others‘, which “…argues for treating the patriarchal-colonial-capitalist system as a single political entity. This invites a shared strategy of resistance among feminist, decolonial, socialist and ecological movements. In examining how workers, women and indigenous peoples are each manipulated by a culture of systemic dualisms, the books delve into the deep structure of political ecology…“.
Ecofeminism in Denmark will be an informal, friendly event – bring what you expect to find, including friends – and, if weather permits, hopefully around the fire where we will hear from Ariel about her life, work and the trilogy; and as a group we’ll chat about the state of ecofeminism in Denmark and beyond, explore the pluriverse and share notes on all the good things happening in the world and the glorious future awaiting human kind in alliances with all the other life form with which we share the complex web of life that sustains us all:
It is early spring, the dull, naked, gray spaces of winter are giving way to flowers blooming. We’re preparing the fireside in the zone we call the ‘heartlands’ by the ‘sacred cow shed’. Nice new and simple benches in raw oak from a local sawmill (https://egeskovgard.dk/) for a fireplace in a place called Oak Wood (Egholt) signal joy, happiness, and conviviality for the seasons to come.
When encountering ecofeminism in the 1990s – upon meeting Nina, whose mother was a psychoanalytical writer within the movement – many pieces came together in a young man’s mind: this makes a lot of sense. As Nina writes in a section titled “The Subsistence Perspective” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia entry on ‘Agroecology’ (2021):
“…The Subsistence Perspective
Agroecology and anthropology intersect conceptually in the “subsistence perspective” developed by ecofeminists since the 1970s (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999). Formulated through work with peasant and Indigenous women, it is a call for a new economics and politics (Salleh 2017), and connected to ideas of de-growth (Latouche 2011, 2019; Muraca 2013), commons (Federici 2018), and economies of marginalized, hidden, and alternative communities (Gibson-Graham 2005, 2008). Its radical proposition is that a society should be organized around the necessities of life (care, food, water, shelter), that their provision should be based on need rather than wealth or status, and that these life-sustaining activities should be performed in awareness of humanity’s mutualistic entanglements in a complex web of life.Past and present debates on social reproduction (Bhattacharya 2017; Federici 1975; Katz 2001), peasant economies, agrarian change, and the enclosure of commons (Clement et al. 2019; Luxemburg [1913] 1951; Meillassoux 1972; Mies 2014; Perelman 1984; Scott 1976; Thompson 1963) show that the organization of labor as commodity—and hence the economy as we know it—was possible only once people had been violently separated from their means of autonomous subsistence. The enclosure of land and natural resources was a central factor in this separation (see, inter alia, De Angelis 2007; Federici 2004; Thompson 1991), and, in order to institute individual freedom of contract, it was necessary to eradicate noncontractual social relations, such as “kinship, neighbourhood, profession, and creed” (Polanyi 1957).
Agroecological practices on farms and in landscapes aim to restore and enhance ecological health, biodiversity, soil fertility, and access to land through community (re)building. Such practices are based on the understanding that the health of soil is reflected in community, individual, and planetary health (Balfour 1943; Howard 1947; Wall et al. 2015), and that the act of eating is an agricultural act (Berry 1990), shaping bodies and habitats.
From the subsistence perspective, regenerating fertility, autonomy, and community health depends on a cyclic economy based on care, the valuing of productive and reproductive labor as well as the labor of nature, and on local engagement of communities with a permanent regeneration of the humanity–nature metabolism (Salleh 2017)…”.
We’re very much looking forward to spending midsummer around the fire with Ariel Salleh and, also, hopefully, connect with people who see themselves as part of ecofeminism in Denmark. Here’s more on Ariel from Wikipedia:
Salleh’s theoretical position is developed in Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the postmodern (2017/1997), Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women write Political Ecology (2009), and some 300 chapters and articles in the Journal of World-Systems Research (US), Globalizations (UK), Environmental Ethics (US), Arena (AU), New Left Review (UK), Organization & Environment (US), Environmental Politics (UK), and The Commoner (UK); with many anthology reprints and translations.
Her interdisciplinary analysis is seminal to political ecology as an emerging study of humanity-nature relations. The approach, an embodied materialism, emphasises the political economy of reproductive or regenerative labour in the world system. By relocating value in local everyday caregiving skills and indigenous knowledges, Salleh reconsiders social justice and sustainability questions like climate change and the neoliberal green economy and her current writing focuses on integrating the discourses of political ecology…”.
From: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bhoomicollege/25782447773
Ecofeminism in Denmark – a cultiwilding event