The task before us - women and the environment - includes related article

Women and the environment both provide societies with shadow subsidies; each is an undervalued resource. Yet after these years we are still talking about the difficulty of putting dollar signs on the value of nature and female labour.

In many communities civic concern about the environment is the "Trojan Horse" for citizen participation in local decision-making, and many of the most courageous actors are women. In many nations their commitment to live in harmony with nature and to respect its capacity to support life means questioning 300 years or more of the compartmentalization of knowledge and its separation from values. The process has gone so far that today we try to divide urban from rural policy and national from global realities.

Throughout history women have been the integrators, the thread linking children and the elderly, home and the resources of the community, the fruits of the field and the products people use. If we are to survive the twenty-first century and beyond, we must draw on their skill to reconnect many disciplines the better to perceive the relationships between them. We need to share the countrywoman's knowledge of foodstuffs, of flora and of fauna with the botanist, the genetic expert, the technologist, the pharmacist, the agricultural expert, and the engineer who builds roads and dams in rural areas. We need woman's voice in the design of habitats, whether urban or rural, for around the world she is the primary dweller. Male perceptions of social priorities and approaches to solving environmental problems needs to be enlightened and augmented by the perceptions of women. By their inclusion, the prospects for human development may be doubled.

In recent times, many cultures and nations have striven to dominate nature, to act as if they are not part of it. Concurrently men and women have found themselves increasingly cut off from their children and communities. This is the exact opposite of the situation in traditional cultures and agrarian societies. We are the first generation to put ourselves, through our self-indulgent ways, in direct and deliberate competition with our children and their future.

Women must assert themselves to achieve peace with nature. More and more they now occupy positions of influence. Those who are in positions of leadership have a special duty to support people in the front lines of environmental crises. They must raise their voices for the voiceless.

Women must turn their attention, too, to the decision-making processes which cause environmental destruction. They must be prepared to educate others. Men have pretended for too long that they can conquer nature; women can show them how to conquer the future by placing their decisions and activities within the context of what nature can tolerate. This means no longer confusing needs and wants. What people need, the environment was designed to provide. What people want may put us all under sentence of death.

All this can be changed. The human capacity needed to heal the world is not lacking within the community of women. The ability of women to say "no" is alive and well. They must say "no" to inappropriate development. They must say "no" to industries which expect public money to clean up what should not have been despoiled in the first place, or expect the vast subsidies of public taxes and growing bureaucracies to deal with pollution. Women must say "no" to the death and disease borne by contaminated land, air and water systems. Only by women saying "no" in this way can the world have hope in saying "yes" to future generations.

The Global Assembly of Women and the Environment

Bombarded by news of oil spills, contamination by toxic wastes and all kinds of environmental hazards, people often wonder what they as individuals do about it all. Quite a lot, was the answer given recently by women from seventy countries who met at a Global Assembly of Women and the Environment to share their experiences of working to combat environmental degradation.

The Assembly, held in Miami, Florida, from 4 to 8 November 1991, was organized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and WorldWIDE Network, an international non-governmental organization dedicated to advancing women in environmental management. It aimed, in the words of Dr. Mostafa K. Tolba, Executive Director of UNEP, to "establish benchmarks for how men and women can work together in specific ways to help solve national, regional and global environmental problems."

Over 200 projects presented at the Assembly showed how women have taken the lead in heading off all kinds of environmental disasters. These accomplishments, chosen because they were "affordable, repeatable and sustainable", ranged from the design of smokeless stoves, solar cookers and solar greenhouses to action against environmentally harmful projects such as dams that would have eroded fertile soil and threatened drinking-water supplies, and road construction that threatened to cause flooding.

Two projects, one from Asia and one from Latin America, illustrate the kind of action being undertaken. In India's Andhra Pradesh state, the degradation of productive land had led to the erosion of topsoil and the choking of water drainage systems, causing salinity, loss of food crops and increasing unemployment in the villages. Led by a local woman called Vasanth Kanibera, groups of village women decided to pool their resources and lease degraded land. No bank was prepared to lend them money, but they managed to raise a loan from a development society.

They then revived the land by the use of traditional farming methods in place of heavily-subsidized, market-oriented, mono-crop agriculture. The techniques they employed meant that there was no loss of topsoil, of crop diversity or of wasted rainwater. The project eventually involved 400 women in twenty villages. In three years, 700 acres of land were restored to productive use. The project was so economically and ecologically sound that the Government of India endorsed it for the entire state of Andhra Pradesh.

Meanwhile, across the world in Brazil, a woman doctor's investigation of a metallurgy factory that had operated for two decades without proper controls provided a case-study of successful action against industrial pollution. The factory had been emitting so much lead and cadmium into the atmosphere that the surrounding area's cadmium levels were found to be the highest in the world and its lead levels among the world's worst. A local river had also been despoiled by industrial wastes. Worse, the factory had been offering free "dret" (powdered wastes left after lead extraction) to poor families for paving gardens, backyards and roads. It had also distributed, free of charge, used filters from factory chimneys, which were put to use as bedspreads and rugs. Ten per cent of the children living near the factory were considered highly intoxicated by lead and cadmium poisoning and another 17 per cent at risk. Intoxication causes brain and kidney damage.

The doctor, Tania Tavares, took the lead in investigating and rectifying the situation. Under her direction a team of scientists and students of chemistry, biology and medicine from the University of Bahia researched the problem and proposed guidelines and solutions to local authorities.

The factory management was obliged to reduce the emissions of lead and cadmium and to accept responsibility for the medical care of poisoned children and adults. Lead levels were subsequently reduced by about 38 per cent and cadmium levels by 68 per cent. Nonetheless, the local population continued to show high levels of exposure, and Dr. Tavares and her team are still pursuing their investigation.

COPYRIGHT 1992 UNESCO
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