Promotional Information

Two of Zed's best-known authors, one an economist, the other a physicist and philosopher, come together in this book on a controversial environmental agenda. Using interview material, they bring together women's perspectives from North and South.

About the Author

Maria Mies is a Marxist feminist scholar who is renowned for her theory of capitalist patriarchy, which recognizes third world women and difference. She is a professor of sociology at Cologne University of Applied Sciences, but retired from teaching in 1993. Since the late 1960s she has been involved with feminist activism. In 1979, at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, she founded the Women and Development programme. Her other titles published by Zed Books include The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982), Women: The Last Colony (1988), The Subsistence Perspective (1999) and Ecofeminism (2014). Ariel Salleh is Visiting Professor of Culture, Philosophy & Environment at the Nelson Mandela University, South Africa and Research Associate in Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Australia. A founding theorist of the ecofeminist movement, Salleh's sex-gendered critiques of ecosocialism, deep and social ecology, and postmodern feminism have provoked wide debate. Her publications include Ecofeminism as Politics (1997) and Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice (2009).

Reviews

Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies offer an all-embracing vision. They show the interconnectedness of these problems and trace them to their source: how our modern world has been relating to Nature since the time of the Enlightenment right up to the biotechnology of today; how superiority to and dominance over Nature has ensured the violence inseparable from our civilisation.
*[...] For all those, and certainly for humanists, who are wrestling with the ethical, sexist and racist issues raised by invasive reproductive gene technology, Maria Mies’ chapters on these developments are a must: she subjects them to the most thorough and thoughtful investigation based on what I see as sound humanist as well as feminist philosophy.'*

[Ecofeminism] presents a very focused, searing indictment of development strategies practiced by the North on the South.
*Anne Stratham, Feminist Collections*

In view of the post-modern fashion for dismantling all generalizations, the views propounded in Mies’ and Shiva’s Ecofeminism make refreshing reading. They show a commendable readiness to confront hypocrisy, challenge the intellectual heritage of the European Enlightenment, and breathe spiritual concerns into debates on gender and the environment. Technology development could benefit from their plea that progress through the control of nature must be replaced by cooperation, mutual care, and love.
*Emma Crewe, Appropriate Technology Journal*

Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, a German social scientist from the feminist movement and an Indian physicist from the ecology movement, are ideally suited to author a book of such broad intellectual, geographic, and political scope. while there are some notable differences in their approaches, they are crystal clear their adversaries as patriarchal capitalism, which they hold responsible for the colonization of developing countries, women, and nature.
*Karen T Litfin, University of Washington*

Dual authorship at its best, these complementary perspectives of an Indian physical scientist and a German social scientist combine to bring feminist scruples to bear on the environment, new reproductive technologies and masculinist thinking.
*WATERwheeel*

Read independently of the collection, many of the essays have innovative things to say to the political movements involved in fighting large scale development, nuclear energy, violence against women, wars and environmental destruction. Shiva’s discussion of the development establishment’s misnomer of poverty, her discussion of the biotechnology and the impact of GATT on third world women and informative political critique, and Mies on eco-tourism, German women’s response to Chernobyl, and her critique of body as property and self-determination in the context of surrogacy, are enlivening additions to important debates.
*Wendy Harcourt, Development Journal*