NickSouzaEcoFem

Greta Thunberg has quickly become one of the most famous people in the world. She is a teenage environmental activist, who has spoken around the world about the dangers of climate change. As a result of her popularity she has faced a very unique form of misogyny. Greta in many ways represents what the Kyriarchy hates most. Greta is young, a woman, and an environmentalist. I find that she faces this misogyny from both ends of the political spectrum. Those on the left, hold her up as a paragon who should lead a movement against climate change, whereas those on the right have a different kind of obsession with her, they view Greta as the embodiment of ignorance (for not attending school), socialism, and liberalism.

Today I’m going to look at and analyze an article about Ms. Thunberg, from the National Review (a right leaning publication that I have a love/hate relationship with) and is written by Rich Lowry.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/greta-thunberg-climate-activist-united-nations/

The National Review article is entitled “No, Don’t Listen to Greta Thunberg” and begins with the following “Greta Thunberg needs to get a grip”. This is remarkable (which I mean in the traditional sense of the word) to me for a number of reasons. 1. Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review, he is 51 years old, and has written 4 books. Yet he is so triggered by a teenager he has to not only write an article about her but begin it with “get a grip”. Throughout the article Thunberg is painted as an irrational, immature brat. Lowry uses some of Thunbergs own words in order to paint her this way, making numerous mentions of her “How Dare You” comment.

Lowry occasionally comes close to making a fair point though, I do agree with him That Greta is being used by those around her. The wealthy often invite her to speak, in my opinion usually for the purpose of virtue signalling and nothing more. They like having a young passionate speaker talk about an issue that they can pretend to care about. But that’s about as complementary of Lowry as I can be.

Not once does Lowry actually refute (or attempt to refute) any of the truths about climate change, global warming, deforestation. Instead he spends the article attacking Greta. This allows him to 1, prejudice the reader against climate issues without actually mentioning them directly, and 2. appeal to those that just wanna have a rebellious view.

I could not help but think about ecofeminism the entire time I was reading this, as it pretty much shows the way in which nature and misogyny are linked. The simplest definition of Ecofeminism that I can come up with is that, it is an ideology that believes that anti-nature, and anti-women views are linked, and the interests of both women and nature can easily advance each other. Ecofeminism purports that men (or at least men in power) view both women and nature as something that they are to control,destroy, protect,etc. Nature and women do not have their own autonomy.

At the center of Ecofeminism are Warrens 8 connection between women and nature which are as follows:
1. Historical: Ecofeminists believe that domination of women and men stem from the same events.
2. Conceptual: Women and nature are valued similarly.
3. Empirical and Experimental: There are cultural and spiritual links between nature and women.
4. Symbolic Connections: The Patriarchy justifies the oppression of both women and nature.
5. Epistemological Connections
6. Political Connections
7. Ethical Connections
8. Theoretical Connections.

I personally find the symbolic connections to be the most interesting. Particularly when it comes to language. The ways in which nature is described and women are described have a lot of layover. For example we describe both as fertile, in the case of nature it refers to land in which crops can be grown, and in the case of women, it is used to describe women that are ripe (another example) for pregnancy and child rearing. To me the language that we use is the best argument for how men view both nature and women as something to be used.

I personally was a bit disappointed when I looked at the top 20 feminist blogs on Feedspot. While some of them were good, I found that many of them were very surface level, and kind of supported the sort of corporate, mainstream, milquetoast feminism we encounter in mainstream media. Despite not identifying as a feminist myself (I don’t identify for a number of reasons) I have a respect for conviction and the more academic aspects of feminism. I love reading theory, studies, different points of view, etc as long as it feels like the person put serious effort and thought into it. I didn’t feel like that was the case for a lot of these blogs.

The Ms. Magazine blog was particularly interesting. I’ve known about Ms. Magazine for years, as it is seen as of great historical importance and it launched the careers of numerous feminists. Perhaps Gloria Steinem. While preparing for this post I re-read the wikipedia entry on Ms. Magazine just as a primer and in the second paragraph of wiki entry it says the following ” it enjoyed great popularity but was not always able to reconcile its ideological concerns with commercial considerations”, this seems pretty accurate to me. While I am sure Ms. has done many good stories in its time and was a trailblazer, the blog is in my opinion brain dead.

The majority of the posts in this blog seem to be a “Today in feminist history” story. I don’t mind these personally, as I’m a bit of a trivia nut, and I’m happy to read about Shirley Chrisholms 1972 presidential run for the 300th time (I do not mean this sarcastically), but after a while it would be nice to sink my teeth into something a little meatier. the Ms. blog rarely delves into an issue that could be controversial to its readers and mostly seems to write about mainstream Democrat stances and anti-trump statement. Now I am not saying that either of those are wrong just that they get a bit tiring.

What I do like about the blog is that it does cover both modern events like the 2020 American presidential election and also brings up history (like the series of posts I mentioned above) and this is definitely something I would like to incorporate into my blog, as one I am interested in both and two, I think in order to really be informed you need to have a good knowledge of history and what is happening currently. I just wanna do it in a more in depth way than the Ms. Magazine blog does it.

Now about myself, my name is Nick and I am a student at UMASS Dartmouth as a history major, I work at a public school as a ASD (autism spectrum disorder) paraprofessional. History and politics are two hobbies of mine. I annoy all of those around me by constantly arguing, info dumping, or watching anything related to politics. I hold libertarian views and believe in small government. I live in New Bedford Massachusetts.

For those who don’t know, New Bedford is a small city on the water. One of New Bedfords main industries is fishing, especially Lobster which is popular in the area. New Bedford is actually the most popular fishing port in the country, This means that damage to our waters would hit New Bedford particularly harshly. There can’t be a fishing industry without fish and right now fish are struggling. Throughout the 20th century New Bedford factories dumped toxic chemicals into the harbor, which in addition to potentially causing cancer in humans also caused the death of harbor wildlife. While dumping in the harbor has obviously stopped today, the dumped chemicals still reside at the bottom of the harbor and resident are forbidden from catching and eating fish from certain areas of the harbor. Clean up has been discussed but the city and state government has done little to actually clean up the harbor and make it safer. I’m a fishkeeper myself and have 6 aquariums (totalling about 70 gallons of water and over 100 individuals fish, snails, and shrimp). This coupled with being a New Bedford resident has made me become very passionate about clean oceans, protection of endangered fish, and clean water in general.

To any of my readers, I hope this post didn’t feel like a waste of time for you, and while a lot of the subject matter above probably came off as pretentious, I assure I do my best to be approachable, modest, and considerate. I don’t like hurting feelings, I don’t like cruelty, and I don’t like arguing for the sake of arguing, what I do like is leaving my echo chamber and communicating with people different from me.