Enjoying the heatwave baking Europe? Beer gardens, barbeques, beer bellies - this weather seems like an opportunity to get an early tan. But we’re choking on the sense of foreboding in the thick humidity. This heatwave highlights an ugly truth; society does nothing but take from Mother Nature, and she is furious. We are in for a telling off like never before: a climate breakdown. To survive this, we need massive social change. Society - sexist as it is - has a face not even a mother can love.
The IPCC warn that we have 11 years left before irreparable damage is done to our climate. We face a scorchingly bright future. Yet we elect leaders that deny climate breakdown (Trump - you kiss your mother with that denying mouth?), that expand our airports (Heathrow? To be grounded by Gaia) and that protect their shares in BP. World leaders pay lip service to both equality and ecology.
To avoid droughts, floods and wildfires, we must all be feminists. Literature, the great art form, tells us so. The Earth is constantly characterised as feminine; take Fitzgerald’s promising “fresh green breast of the new world”. Or Steinbeck’s “full green hills” of the American landscape as “round and soft as breasts”. Wordsworth recounts being “led by her”, by Nature, feminine as she nourishes and produces. But don’t be fooled. She will no longer nourish the badly behaved children of the Earth. Nature has and will retaliate against the exploitation with which mankind treats her; a battle women have fought for centuries. We must stop exploiting the Earth, stop “raping methodically, raping without passion” (Steinbeck again) our provider, our mother which we have violated since she birthed us. Yes, that’s right. Climate breakdown is hideously Freudian. Way back in 429 BC Sophocles told us we are a bunch of motherfuckers - a reality so ugly it makes you want to tear your own eyes out.
At the end of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a woman breastfeeds a starving man. This moment resonates through an eco-critical reading, conveying hope despite the dust storms of Depression-era America. As our climate breaks down, we can expect the mother of all Dust Bowls. But respecting the female experience can salvage the future. Women, provided their ability to nourish is valued, can save us. The patriarchy teaches us to disrespect our feminine provider, to worship instead the essentially masculine capitalist system, selfish enough to steal oil from land and sea, fuelling machinery that poisons the air we breathe.
We need societal change to halt the climate breakdown; luckily, necessity is the mother of invention. We must behave better to avoid being complicit in our own self-destruction. Be a feminist. Respect your mother.
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