The female face of environment

A BIBLIOGRAPHY is useful not only as a guide to further study and research, but also because it gauges the current attitudes and obsessions prevalent in academia. Researchers in the North are slowly waking up to a fact long recognised by activists and writers in the South: that environmental issues cannot be divorced from a host of other problems such as poverty, social prejudices and sexual discrimination.

This drive towards a holistic understanding of environment is apparent in Heleen van den Hombergh's guide, which is a documentation of literature available on the related issues of gender, environment and development. To cynical readers who could view the links between these as yet another irrelevant compilation, van den Hombergh gives three reasons why the links are relevant. According to her, the sexual division of labour usually means women are closer to issues of development and environment than men. The feminisation of poverty, she says, "implies that the worldwide crisis of environment and development, combined with the male bias in development policies and cooperation, have caused the relatively stronger impoverishment among women." Finally, the prevailing gender ideology in society means that women are at a disadvantage when it comes to sharing resources. These three facts together make women's experience and understanding of environment quite different to that of men.

The strengths of van den Hombergh's guide lie in her methodical and exhaustive research, which results in a clear description of the different views that shape the scope of subjects such as ecofeminism, international policy and environmental theory. Her chapter on theoretical approaches to gender, environment and development is especially noteworthy for its thoroughness. The reason this particular section works so well is perhaps that it is explicitly about theory and the debates within theory.
Bibliography redundant It is when van den Hombergh discusses activism that her bibliography seems somewhat redundant. She writes: "It is easy to fall into the trap of making a strict distinction between theory and practice, as if it concerned two different worlds." However, the very distinction she argues against is apparent when she writes about actual grassroots movements such as Chipko or the Green Belt movement in Kenya. As it concentrates on interpretations of the movements rather than the movements themselves, the section seems insubstantial.

While the guide is extremely informative, it seems to ignore the fact that much of the research in this field is done at the level of small articles in journals rather than in large publications.

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