Global Environmental Challenges and the Role of Colored Ecofeminists

Introduction

Ecofeminism, an interdisciplinary enterprise blending insights from ecology and literature, is a theoretico-empirical movement that offers shared platform for both environmental activists and the environmental litterateurs to break free from the male dominance. It starts with the basic assumption that the woman and nature are twin victims of gender and environmental injustice perpetrated by the male supremacy and thus reveals the adroit ratiocination of the Euro-American patriarchal culture predicated on the binary oppositions which prioritize men over the women while nature/environment is subordinated to culture. These supremely powerful patriarchal systems embedded in capitalist, neo-liberal, neo-colonial global structures mainly operate on the mighty principle of binary oppositions embedded in the social system and ideological structures of patriarchal society where women coupled with nature are discriminated against and thrown into near total existential vacuum on sexist and biological grounds. While the scope of feminism is usually circumscribed to the notions of sexism, racism, and heterosexism to illustrate the subjugation of women, ecofeminism makes a daring proposition to save humanity by liberating both woman and nature from any unjust domination by calling for a new system of thought and action that decentralizes and humanizes the relation between woman and nature. In this theoretically supported backdrop of the conceptual/(con)textual of the domination of woman and nature/environment by the global capitalist patriarchal (thought and social) structures, the theoretical and literary contributions of the women from world marginalized communities will be discussed to highlight how employing the insights of ecofeminist theory the Native Indian and Afro- American female novelists and environmental activists have not only provided the insight into the numerous forces working together for the subjugation of the intertwined categories of women and nature by patriarchal demagogues in capitalist, neo-liberal, neo-colonial, highly technologized and implacable democratic set ups of the global North but also presented in the form of decentralizing and humanizing the supreme antidote to patriarchal and anthropecntric propaganda. The symbiotic rather than anthropocentric and humanistic rather than sexist and racialized vision of life envisions the revolutionary reality which can serve as an antidote to racial, sexist and anthropocentric philosophies plaguing the woman and the environment.