Gender and environmental education in the time of #MeToo

The second special issue of The Journal of Environmental Education devoted to gender and environmental education comes at an interesting moment in popular culture. The #MeToo movement, founded by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to support girls and women of color who had experienced sexual violence, became a global phenomenon in 2017 when celebrities popularized the phrase as a hashtag when discussing sexual violence and harassment in the entertainment industry. The hashtag took off, with 12 million tweets in the first 24 hours (Mendes, Ringrose, & Keller, 2018), from 85 different countries that had at least 1,000 tweets each (Park, 2017, para. 1). While the movement has been galvanizing for many (Mendes et al., 2018), feminist scholars nonetheless have concerns about its unfolding, including the erasure of Black activist women in many accounts (Emejulu, 2018) and lack of awareness of how race, class, and celebrity status are factors that influence why certain testimonies are more likely to be heard and believed (Zarkov & Davis, 2018). Zarkov and Davis (2018) also worry that too much focus on individuals may downplay that sexual violence is a collective problem that requires “grass-roots activism as well as transforming institutions” (p. 5). At this point, as Mendes et al. (2018) observe, “we still know very little about what hashtags like #MeToo actually do; or whether and how they can produce social change” (p. 3).

So what does #MeToo have to do with environmental education? There is no reason to think that the various sites where environmental educators work such as schools, universities, parks, museums, and nongovernmental organizations are immune to sexual violence, harassment, or discrimination. Indeed, the three of us have personally experienced or heard about so many sexist as well as heterosexist, racist, classist, ableist, and sizeist incidents over the years that we know well that oppression occurs in our midst. Some of the problems have been documented publicly, like the ways in which feminist research and particular voices continue to be marginalized in environmental education research and practice (Gough, 2013; Gough, Russell, & Whitehouse, 2017; Gray, 2016; Piersol & Timmerman, 2017; Russell & Fawcett, 2013), who occupies gate-keeping roles such as journal editors (Russell & Fawcett, 2013), and the unrecompensed emotional labor expected of women in environmental education (Lloro-Bidart & Semenko, 2017). Other matters have been discussed only in private conversations or raised in Environmental Education Feminist Caucus meetings. This second special issue is timely, then, in further illuminating some of the ways environmental education research, theory, and/or practice is gendered.

We begin this issue with an article that, sadly, is especially timely in the days of #MeToo. Teresa Lloro-Bidart's article, “An Ecofeminist Account of Cyberbullying: Implications for Environmental and Social Justice Scholar-Educator-Activists,” offers a disturbing firsthand account of the misogynous vitriol that feminists and other critical scholars can encounter in the digital world. Targeted by far right trolls, online harassers who seek to discredit academics generally, and critical and feminist scholars in particular, Lloro-Bidart uses an intersectional ecofeminist lens to analyze the sexism, homophobia, racism, xenophonobia, ableism, and speciesism underlying the attacks she experienced. She shares the various ways she was supported by her institution, professional associations and networks, and through her personal relationships with human and companion animals. Given all of us doing critical and feminist work in environmental education are vulnerable to such attacks, we appreciate that she was willing to share her painful experience and insights with us.

Intersectionality also features prominently in the next article by Naomi Mumbi Maina-Okori, Jada Renee Koushik, and Alexandra Wilson (“Reimagining Intersectionality in Environmental and Sustainability Education: A Critical Literature Review”). Interested in how intersectionality has and has not been taken up in the field, they analyze the ways in which gender, class, race, sexuality, ability, body size, and species have featured in past writing. Drawing on their own lived experiences as well as feminist, Black, and Indigenous knowledge systems, Maina-Okori, Koushik, and Wilson illustrate the ways that ecofeminism, queer pedagogy, Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives, land-based education, and biocentric ethics have informed intersectional analyses in the field. Identifying a need for a broadening and deepening of such analyses, they call for more intersectional activist-oriented research that focuses on the interconnection of social justice, individual and collective wellbeing, and peace.

Connections between social and environmental justice are also raised by Tracey Rizzo (“Ecofeminist Community-Engaged Learning in Southern Appalachia: An Introduction to Strategic Essentialism in the First Year of College”), who reflects on over ten years of teaching a gender and environment course. Critical of the essentialist position taken by some proponents of ecofeminism who asserted that women are inherently more connected to and concerned about environmental issues, the curriculum seeks to problematize binaries like man/woman and human/nature. Nonetheless, Rizzo has found that both she and her students engaged in strategic essentialism as they grappled with their assumptions about gender and environment and worked with community partners. Pondering the complex interplay of gender, sexuality race, and class in this particular course, Rizzo concludes that engaging with ecofeminism does enable students to challenge anthropocentrism, heteronormativity, and Whiteness as well as to participate productively in eco-justice activism in their community.

Further exploring work done with community partners, in this case focusing on the complicated positionality of academic researchers, Marilyn Palmer, Peta White, and Sandra Wooltorton (“Embodying Our Future Through Collaboration: The Change Is In the Doing”) seek practices that enable them to act as transformative, activist environmental educators while also resisting the pressures that come with working in neoliberal, corporatized universities. Working from a poststructuralist ecofeminist epistemology and inspired by writing on “friendship as method,” Palmer, White, and Wooltorton describe their collaborative, autoethnographic study that led them to co-write two stories that fictionalized painful research experiences. These stories helped the authors uncover various contributors to unsustainability in their work contexts, including sexism, and raised further questions for the authors about how to navigate their university and community contexts.

Also concerned with the persistence of gender inequity, Denise Mitten, Tonia Gray, Sandy Allen-Craig, TA Loeffler, and Cathryn Carpenter (“The Invisibility Cloak: Women's Contributions to Outdoor and Environmental Education”) note that while women represent about half the professionals working in outdoor environmental education, rarely are they mentioned in histories of the field nor listed as leaders in textbooks and in popular media. Women also have been given far fewer awards and honors and are less likely to be invited to be keynote speakers at conferences. Tongues firmly in cheeks, Mitten and her colleagues suggest that women in in the field might be wearing invisibility cloaks, for how else might one explain this gender asymmetry? They offer suggestions for why this inequity persists and seek to remove the invisibility cloaks from five women who did make significant historical contributions to the field.

Gender inequity also features in the next article by Yodida Bhutia and Georgia Liarakou (“Gender and Nature in the Matrilineal Society of Meghalaya, India: Searching for Ecofeminist Perspectives”). They were curious about whether or how an ecofeminist worldview might inform perceptions about women, nature, and environmental work in an Indian state where it is women who inherit property and that is renowned for having many women's groups devoted to environmental protection. Through an exploratory, qualitative study with university students, most of whom will become teachers, they found pronounced gender differences, with more men believing that women ought to be responsible for domestic environmental tasks and should leave political environmental work to men, and many of the women contesting those positions. One area of convergence that Bhutia and Liarakou noted was that both the men and women in their study supported the development of agricultural practices that might not be sustainable in the long term.

Also interested in ecofeminism as well as feminist new materialism, Annette Gough and Hilary Whitehouse (“New Vintages and New Bottles: The ‘Nature’ of Environmental Education from New Materialist and Ecofeminist Viewpoints”) build on their earlier work on feminist poststructuralist methodologies in environmental education research. Observing shifts in the field over the ensuing fifteen years, including critiques of poststructuralist approaches by new materialists and reinterpretations of ecofeminism, Gough and Whitehouse reconsider how they have positioned the body and nature in their own work. They note the ways in which new materialist and ecofeminist ideas have been, and not been, taken up within environmental education. While concerned about the anthropocentrism of some feminist new materialism, they nonetheless see potential in both streams of feminist environmentalism and recommend environmental educators engage seriously with these viewpoints.

The final article in the special issue delves into a topic that has received very little attention in environmental education: masculinity. In their article, “Boys Being Boys: Eco-Double Consciousness, Splash Violence, and Environmental Education,” Sean Blenkinsop, Laura Piersol, and Michael De Danann Sitka-Sage share three powerful vignettes that illustrate the ways in which limited conceptions of masculinity can affect environmental caring in boys, encouraging indifference to the natural world even to the point of normalizing ecological violence. The authors urge educators to be cognizant of the pressure on boys and to be both aware of and trouble masculine norms that discourage eco-care. Given the paucity of work on masculinity in environmental education, we hope that this article inspires others to pursue research in this area.

Indeed, we hope that this second special issue on gender and environmental education as a whole inspires further research, including by those who have not previously attended to gender but are now pondering the ways in which gender may be at play in their work. We are encouraged that this special issue has contributors from Australia, Canada, Greece, India, Kenya, the Opaskwayak Cree First Nation, and the United States, but we remain keen to hear voices from other parts of the world. Excited by the resurgence of interest in gender and various feminist approaches to environmental education research, theory and practice, we look forward to seeing more such work in the pages of JEE as well as other journals in the field.