JOIN USSeeing the environment from a gender lens
The sixth assessment of the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report presents unsurprising but hard-hitting findings about the impact of human-induced climate change on human systems and ecosystems. The report noted that indigenous people, ethnic minorities, low-income households, and those residing in informal settlements were the worst affected by the ongoing climate crisis. Climate change and global warming have already caused massive biodiversity loss and put indelible pressure on food and water systems. Thus, the appropriate way forward, according to the report and other sources would be to adopt a mix of adaptive and mitigative measures that can reduce risks and vulnerabilities and help build climate-resilient processes. The success of these measures would depend on a range of factors — from the presence of effective governance bodies and supportive public policies to sufficient financial resources.
Despite much progress over the years, adaptation gaps still exist, and lower-income population groups benefit the least from adaptive measures (as cited in the IPCC report). Moreover, recent events empirically support this claim. If we take the recent heatwave plaguing northwest India and Pakistan as an example, we see that it has been rightfully described as anomalous not only because of its intensity, but also because of its duration, speed of onset, and massive geographic spread. As a result, it adversely impacted some of the most vulnerable people — rickshaw and auto drivers, construction workers, and other daily wage labourers whose livelihoods are dependent on them as they step out in the scorching heat to work. But most of them are men, what about women and girls?
A 2017 report by the Aspen Institute found that gender discrimination, social norms, and taboos about female health all contributed to worse health outcomes for poor women in India during heatwaves. In fact, contrary to popular belief, women and girls are at a higher risk for heat-related illness and death than men during heatwaves due to a lack of access to proper indoor toilets, poor ventilation, and a dearth of basic household appliances like fans and coolers. The ongoing heatwave is just one manifestation of the much larger climate crisis, but its disparate impact on poor women and girls demonstrates something that not even the IPCC report acknowledges clearly — namely how ecological crises systematically affect people of minority genders and sexualities, including women and girls.
Ecofeminism
One of India’s most prominent ecofeminists, Vandana Shiva, adopts what some have called a radical/socialist approach to ecofeminism; and in her seminal book, Staying Alive, first published in 1988, she recognised the impact of environmental degradation and reductionist economic policies on Third World women’s bodies, lives, and livelihoods.
In an updated 2010 edition, she writes in detail about how almost every aspect of the modern, scientific, technocratic global food-industry complex — from seed production and fertiliser manufacture, from mono-cropping and deforestation to artificial irrigation — was inextricably linked to gender-based violence in the developing world. While her work is powerful (and has also been called “one of the foundations of modern ecofeminism” in India), it unfairly essentialises women and femininity just as it does men and masculinity.
Her work, although consequential in giving a voice to the voiceless, makes no distinction between biological sex and gender and fails to acknowledge the existence of orientations beyond the heteronormative sexual construct. Some scholars like Meera Nandy, who vehemently disagrees with Vandana’s work, have pointed out the issues with Vandana’s essentialist claims, but very few Indian ecofeminists, including Meera, have ever highlighted the lack of attention given to the intersection of queer identities with the environment (or what is also called “queer ecology”).
Queer ecology
Indeed, limited scholarship on queer ecology exists in the Indian context. Yet, what the IPCC report reminds us is that the most vulnerable communities among us —and they would include queer people — are the most adversely affected by ecological catastrophes. Take for example the story of one unnamed transwoman in Chennai whose experience of social stigma and housing discrimination made it difficult for her to not only live in her own house during the rainy season because of floods but also made it difficult to find another accommodation because of housing
discrimination — a form of discrimination that the Supreme Court of India recognised explicitly in its landmark judgement in National Legal Services Authority vs Union of India (2014) in the context of transgender rights.
The apex court also recognised a litany of other social, cultural, and economic rights that transgender people were deprived of simply because of society’s apathy towards their gender identity. In addition to housing, these deprivations impact employment, nutrition, health, and wellbeing, all of which are constitutive elements of a person’s substantive freedoms (capabilities) and outcomes (achieved functionings), according to economist Amartya Sen, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and others.
Transgender and queer people, thus, sit at a unique disadvantage when their sexual orientation and gender identity are the basis of deprivation. And when this deprivation is seen in the context of the climate crisis, it comes as no surprise that these communities are hit hard. So while one may or may not agree with Vandana’s critique of modern western capitalism, one cannot deny its direct impact on the environment and its disproportionate impact on girls, women, transgender, and other marginalised people.
From contributing to school dropouts and precipitating forced displacements, from causing poor health outcomes to laying the conditions for gender-based violence, the climate crisis “magnifies” existing stressors on women, girls, queer people and others by pushing them into a cycle of endangerment that is difficult to come out of.
‘De-gendering’ environmental issues
Today is World Environment Day and June is celebrated as Pride Month in most of North America and other parts of the world. This year, let us put a spotlight on the problems associated with “de-gendering” environmental issues. The adaptive measures in the IPCC report are no doubt steps in the right direction, but even these suggestions don’t go far enough for they don’t acknowledge gender and sexual minorities as vulnerable groups deserving of possibly specialised interventions.
At a time when even the so-called leading nation of the free world, the United States of America, is set to witness a radical and unprecedented rollback of historic women’s rights, and at a time when transgender people in India continue to face hurdles in the face of piece-meal progress despite years of struggle, we must recognise that if we truly want to live on a sustainable and equitable planet, we can no longer divorce environmental issues from important questions of gender and sexuality.
(The author is a Programme & Communications Manager at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and Nyaaya and can be reached at sahgalkanav@gmail.com)