by Greta Gaard

About Greta Gaard

Greta Gaard is Professor of English and Coordinator of the Sustainability Program at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Her work emerges from the intersections of feminism, environmental justice, queer studies, and critical animal studies, exploring a wide range of issues, including interspecies justice, material perspectives on fireworks and space exploration, postcolonial ecofeminism, and the eco-politics of climate change. She is author or editor of five books and over fifty refereed articles, and her most recent volume is International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (2013), coedited with Simon Estok and Serpil Oppermann. She is currently at work on a manuscript titled “Critical Ecofeminism,” and her creative nonfiction eco-memoir, The Nature of Home (2007), is being translated into Chinese and Portuguese.

Ecofeminism

book Keywords for Environmental Studies

Was Rachel Carson an ecofeminist? Technically, no—the term “ecofeminist” did not appear until a decade after her death—yet Carson’s work exemplifies ecofeminist praxis (the inseparability of theory and practice). Observing an unusual and alarming phenomenon of environmental health (massive bird deaths), Carson used scientific methods to trace the various avenues for sustenance in the songbirds’ lives—air, water, food, habitat—and discovered that overexposure to pesticides was the lethal agent. Making interspecies connections among the environmental health of avians, humans, and ecosystem flows (air, water, food), Carson (1962) argued for an end to pesticides, publishing her findings in a voice both literary and scientific. In the final months of her life, Carson faced down strong corporate assaults on her work while battling breast cancer, an illness later found to have significant links to the synthetic chemicals she studied.