Ecological Masculinities

Ecological Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations, Practical Guidance and Real World Examples
Assoc. Prof. Martin Hultman and Paul M. Pulé (PhD)

Building on our individual and collective experiences, this book acknowledges that the social and environmental problems we now face present enormous challenges to human systems and the fecundity of the Earth upon which we depend. we acknowledge that this book is no panacea. A multifaceted approach is required if we are to effectively address these massive problems socially, economically, politically, conceptually and practically to bring about a transition of human impacts on the Earth towards sustainability. With the alarming reductions in biodiversity, increased risks to Earth’s key living systems and the challenges facing a balanced approach towards human equality and the preservation of nature, we are in more than a pickle. Leader of Stockholm Resilience Center Professor Johan Rockstöm noted in a foreword that ‘… the planetary stability our species has enjoyed for 11,700 years, that allowed civilisation to flourish, can no longer be relied upon’ (WWF, 2016: 5).

With changes in climate already upon us, as the overwhelming evidence from climate science attests, we must find ways to manifest more harmonious interactions with Earth, each other and ourselves. The decades ahead will be decisive—these transitions are likely to be incremental and punctuated with sudden aberrations of great success and challenges. Responding creatively, it is now evident that we need an expanded capacity to conceptualise the scope of the problems we face, as well as a willingness to embrace tangible changes that will—in grounded ways—permit us to handle the struggles ahead with alacrity and grace. These necessary social and environmental changes are gendered; we are facing crises of society and the environment that have their roots in our very identities as men, women and others in combination with who we are as a species (Buckingham, 2015).

We have become complacent about the impacts of our travel habits on Earth’s living systems. In the industrialised West, we have grown accustomed to being the highest per capita resource consumers in human history. A common response to these problems is to seek someone else to blame—the US and China as the biggest global polluters; Christianity; the poor for not recycling or for having too many children, and so forth. Drilling down into the details we see that the ‘big ticket’ items of any effective critical analyses of the problems we face must include constructive analyses of imperialism, sexism and anthropocentrism. 

While we accept that we must take all of these scenarios seriously, we do not lay blame for our common problems at the feet of any one group. Indeed, rather than focusing on blame at all, we look to responsibility and accountability for our common problems and focus throughout this book on where that accountability and responsibility can be examined with and for men and masculinities specifically and as one piece in a complex puzzle. After all, we are all in this thing called life together.

Several prominent Feminists have previously identified the destructiveness of what we refer to throughout this book as ‘Industrial/Breadwinner’ approaches to life, pointing to the mutual oppression of women and nature by a male-dominated world as central to our problems (Laula, 1904; Wägner, 1941; Carson, 1951; Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 1993; Nightingale, 2006; MacGregor, 2009; Buckingham, 2010; Arora-Jonsson, 2013). A second and considerable body of empirical evidence critiques technological fixes and reformist policies and practices that we refer to as ‘Ecomodern Masculinities’ (Hultman, 2013; Hultman, 2017). In this book, we proceed to make the case for a third masculinities that we refer to as

In this book, we proceed to make the case for a third masculinities that we refer to as Ecological Masculinities, which we introduce as fresh discourse examining the intersecting terrain of men, masculinities and Earth. It is true that were we to settle for socially and ecologically destructive (what we refer to as Industrial/Breadwinner), and/or reformist (what we refer to as Ecomodern) masculinities, we are not likely to achieve the levels of transformation that are needed to steer us towards a truly sustainable world that honours life in all its forms. We must identify and analyse the former two as business-as-usual approaches, critiquing the limits of industrial/breadwiner and ecomodern drivers in addressing our mounting social and environmental concerns. 

The book moves us beyond these limits towards masculine ecologisation, arguing that such a transition is necessary if we are to successfully avert (or at least gracefully manage) radical changes in life for humanity and the other-than-human systems upon which we depend (Alaimo, 2009; Klein, 2014). The connection between global social and environmental destruction and the roles that men and masculinities play in manifesting them are becoming increasingly apparent (McCright and Dunlap, 2011; Pulé, 2013; Hultman, 2013).

Accordingly, this book focuses on the intersecting terrain between men, masculinities and Earth as one vital and often-missed area of inquiry. We hold to this focus not to hold men and masculinities wholly responsible for our social and environmental problems. Rather, we seek solutions to one (important) problem and keep within the bounds of our respective expertise as gender theorists and social and environmental justice activists. Interestingly, understanding men and masculinities as changeable entities has produced a dichotomy of researchable categories of different configurations. We discuss them in detail below. For example, the terms ‘men’ and ‘masculinities’ are part of a complex and textured discussion little more than a generation old, that emerged in response to (indeed in some cases in misogynistic reactions against) the accomplishments of second-wave Feminism.

Nevertheless, scholars have not developed analyses of men, masculinities and Earth as a combined field of study—at least until very recently (MenEngage, 2016). This blind spot is ironic given the central role that men and masculinities play in the creation and maintenance of global social, economic and political systems. These are systems that collectively rely on the Earth’s resources to promote and maintain human (and indeed masculine) primacy. That primacy depends on extracting Earth’s resources for the benefit of a select and privileged few in largely destructive ways and ensuring that the wealth generated is distributed unevenly and without apology. Responding to this injustice, we critique Industrial/Breadwinner and Ecomodern Masculinities and make the case for ‘exit politics’ as we argue for Ecological Masculinities.

Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell studied masculinities within the environmental movement in the late 1980s (1990). In that study, Connell interviewed male activists who were proposing that they were in the process of doing ‘exit politics’ to move away from what he called ‘hegemonic masculinities’. We take that to be synonymous with Industrial/Breadwinner. This move from hegemonisation to ecologisation was, for Connell, a function of men choosing to steep themselves deeply and intentionally in the ecological discourse in ways that challenged masculine primacy within the communities that they functioned. The inquiry also challenged their views about the human/nature relationship (Connell, 1995: 2004). In our view, developing an environmental consciousness appears to increase the likelihood of dissonance towards men’s internalised superiority, as it affects women and human others as much as other-than-humans. In alliance with Connell’s inference, we note the need for this ‘exit politics’ where men and masculinities are able to actively and intentionally subvert male domination that accompanies hegemonic masculinities, replacing it with pluralised pathways towards deeper, greener, more caring expressions of self, in society and on the planet. Indeed, in The Politics of Reproduction, Mary O’Brien (1981: 62) deconstructed the normalisation of male domination through her critique of ‘malestream norms’.

This is a term we take throughout this book to be synonymous with ‘patriarchy’.[1] Our reference to malestream norms highlights the ways that male domination manifests through the private and public normalisation in modern Western men’s lives—both personally and professionally. For Feminist Weberian scholar, Roslyn Wallach Bologh, these malestream norms were fed by what she referred to as ‘daring’ values and behaviours that gained primacy in the West through the concurrent rise of the Protestant Work Ethic and Capitalism. She identified a ‘general problem with Western masculinity’ that has shaped modern Western structures of power, control and domination by assuring that men are economically, socially and politically positioned ahead of all other humans (Bologh, 1987: 145-168; Bologh, 1990: 2). For the sake of expediency and aligning our work with ecological Feminist scholar Karen Warren (1994), we extend this definition to include the domination of nonhuman nature, referring to the full spectrum of humans and other-than-humans who are ‘otherised’ in the wake of male domination as

For Feminist Weberian scholar, Roslyn Wallach Bologh, these malestream norms were fed by what she referred to as ‘daring’ values and behaviours that gained primacy in the West through the concurrent rise of the Protestant Work Ethic and Capitalism. She identified a ‘general problem with Western masculinity’ that has shaped modern Western structures of power, control and domination by assuring that men are economically, socially and politically positioned ahead of all other humans (Bologh, 1987: 145-168; Bologh, 1990: 2). For the sake of expediency and aligning our work with ecological Feminist scholar Karen Warren (1994), we extend this definition to include the domination of nonhuman nature, referring to the full spectrum of humans and other-than-humans who are ‘otherised’ in the wake of male domination as

For Feminist Weberian scholar, Roslyn Wallach Bologh, these malestream norms were fed by what she referred to as ‘daring’ values and behaviours that gained primacy in the West through the concurrent rise of the Protestant Work Ethic and Capitalism. She identified a ‘general problem with Western masculinity’ that has shaped modern Western structures of power, control and domination by assuring that men are economically, socially and politically positioned ahead of all other humans (Bologh, 1987: 145-168; Bologh, 1990: 2). For the sake of expediency and aligning our work with ecological Feminist scholar Karen Warren (1994), we extend this definition to include the domination of nonhuman nature, referring to the full spectrum of humans and other-than-humans who are ‘otherised’ in the wake of male domination as Others.[2]

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[1] Patriarchy is a term derived from the Greek ‘rule of the father’ and traditionally refers to the social, political, moral and proprietary primacy of men above all Others on Earth. For, Gray, women have been positioned to be the care-givers of life, which directly linked women to the life-giving potency of the Earth; their labour is defined in terms of meeting basic human needs such as food, cooking and services to the family, such as cleaning and childcare (Gray, 1982: 21). The term finds its origins in Mesopotamia dating back to 10,000 BCE (Lerner, 1986). In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood (1993) made a strong case for the need to make a more accurate transition from critiques of anthropocentricism to the routing of androcentrism if we are to effectively address contemporary social and environmental problems.

[2] Karen Warren’s contribution to the discourse on ‘otherised’ Others is a critical analysis of what she refers to as a ‘logic of domination’, defined as ‘a logical structure of argumentation that ‘justifies’ domination and subordination … assumes that superiority justifies subordination … [and] is offered as a moral stamp for keeping Downs [as-in oppressed Others] down’ (Warren, 1987: 6; Warren, 2000: 24, 47). The phrase ‘human and other-than-human Others’ is derived from Warren’s discussion on a ‘logic of domination’, which provides select men within patriarchal social arrangements with an injunction to marginalise, background and inferiorise any one (human or other-than-human) who does not fit within the parameters of select and advantages norms that we define and refer to throughout this book as ‘malestream’ norms.

Warren noted that injustice, inequality and the benefits and burdens of oppressive socially constructed mind-sets (or conceptual frameworks) are the by-products of patriarchy (Warren, 1987: 6; Warren, 1994: 180). Consequently, otherising results in the inferiorisation of all women and all other humans who do not fit within the parameters of traditional masculine privilege—specifically, gay men, queers, bisexuals, transgendered men and also includes, in some instances, the ‘otherising’ of men who have physical disabilities, men of colour, poor men, or men who choose to participate in tasks that cut against the patriarchal grain, such as activism, childcare, nursing and so forth, as well as other-than-humans. This abbreviation for all otherised groups and individuals as ‘Others’ or ‘all Others’ enabled Warren to deconstruct the mechanisms of oppression within male-dominated society as applied beyond the bounds of men and masculinities, which paved the way for her to seek remedies to the hubris of male domination with sensitivity to rich and varied alternatives to this mutual oppression that was posited by Ecological Feminism.

Her particular rendition of Ecological Feminism might be thought of as transformative, aspiring to specific and measurable outcomes that challenge superiorised men while positing liberation for women and nature. Warren’s Ecological Feminism constructed an ethical platform that was ‘care-sensitive’ in the context of a liberated society and remains necessarily Feminist and ecological. When taken to its logical conclusion, such an Ecological Feminism has applications to gender/nature relationships, challenging the caring virtues of mothering, nursing and friendship that are traditionally ascribed to women and extending these qualities to all human beings, regardless of gender identities (Warren 1994: 97, 113). Warren suggested that these ‘care-sensitive’ ethics were achievable through a tripartite process of moral reasoning:

• The injunction to concurrently care about oneself and others

• The universal application of cooperative and ‘care-based’ ethics; and

• The facilitation of caring actions (Warren, 1994: 108)

This progression guided both women and men towards caring actions. Ironically, traditionally feminised ethics are often lost or underplayed when stood against malestream ethics (Warren, 1994:108). However, such ethics readily fail to be noticed in the domination patterns that characterise Western malestream societies. Warren’s Ecological Feminism is devoted to ‘theory-rebuilding’, which aims to subvert male domination by enhancing moral reasoning, motivations and practices of cooperation and care for the self in connection with others that have currency for both women and men (Warren, 1994: 98, 11, 113).