Corporate engagements with pressing environmental challenges focus on expanding the role of the market, seeking opportunities for growth and developing technologies to manage better environmental resources. Such approaches have proved ineffective. I suggest that a lack of meaningful response to ecological degradation and climate change is inevitable within a capitalist system underpinned by a logics of appropriation and an instrumental rationality that views the planet as a means to achieve economic ends. For ecofeminism, these logics are promulgated through sets of (...) hierarchical and interrelated dualisms which define the human in opposition to the realm of “nature”. This has led to the resilience of ecosystems, social reciprocity and care being unvalued or undervalued. An ecofeminist, care-sensitive ethics is proposed that focuses on the interconnections between human and nonhuman nature and on affective engagements with the living world. A practical morality is developed that sees the self not as atomized nor as self-optimizing, but as a self in relationship. Such an ethics is necessary to motivate action to contest capitalism’s binary thinking, evident within corporate environmentalism, which has re-made the web of life in ways that are not conducive to planetary flourishing. (shrink)

Some bioethicists have proposed a legalized market in human organs as a solution to transplant waiting lists and global poverty. Solutions to organ procurement problems that are solely market-based would unfairly shift the burdens of medical procedures onto developing nations. Market advocates base their claims on the understanding of organs as property, a position that should be problematized. Instrumentalizing people in this way is part of the broader commodification of animals and the environment. Combating the market mentality requires a return (...) to the holistic view of bioethics that led to the founding of the field. (shrink)

This theoretical exploration is an attempt to conceptualize the link between gender and urban environmental health. The proposed ecofeminist framework enables an understanding of the link between the urban physical and social environments and health inequities mediated by gender and socioeconomic status. This framework is proposed as a theoretical magnifying glass to reveal the underlying logic that connects environmental exploitation on the one hand, and gendered health inequities on the other. Ecofeminism has the potential to reveal an inherent, normative conceptual (...) analysis and argumentative justification of western society that permits the oppression of women and the exploitation of the environment. This insight will contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying gendered environmental health inequities and inform healthy public policy that is supportive of urban environmental health, particularly for low‐income mothers. (shrink)

Do ecofeminism and new materialism share common features? In ecofeminist literature’s concern for the nonhuman, one could foresee feminist theory’s “material turn” that would eventually lead to new materialist feminisms. In this paper, I argue that they indeed share some common interests and features; they both want to rethink the environment and what constitutes it, but from different angles. On the one hand, ecofeminism is more oriented towards understanding structural oppression of women and nature, including animals, while new materialism wants (...) to reconceptualize agency precisely by looking at the posthuman and the transhuman. I present a wide scope of common features between both fields as well as their mutual tensions. (shrink)