Harmonious Landscapes

I WAS A FOURTH-YEAR PHILOSOPHY student when Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto first fell into my lap. Accustomed to mostly dead, mainly male authors and frequently arcane texts, Haraway’s “Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit” was a welcome revelation. A Cyborg Manifesto rejects myths of femininity in which the female body has an intuitive grasp of nature. The cyborg is a playful metaphor, a synthetized being that mocks dichotomies like human/machine and human/animal.

It was only later that I discovered the Manifesto’s place in a tradition known as ecofeminism. I became fascinated by ecofeminism the way one becomes fascinated by any theory that feels intuitively true. Ecofeminism is holistic. It contends that colonialism, capitalism, oppression of women, and the climate crisis are inextricably linked phenomena—results of a Western cosmology defined by dualistic thinking, which takes existing forms of difference and renders them as hierarchies. Think human/nature, reason/emotion, subject/object, freedom/necessity, and so on—the former characteristics associated with a “higher,” male, rational being, the latter with female being and nature. Ecofeminists rally for an end to all relationships of power and dominance, which they see as mutually reinforcing. They yearn for a morality based on reciprocity.

In environmental documentary today, there are several female filmmakers picking up on threads of ecofeminism. Recent films by Heather Hatch, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nadine Pequeneza expose some of the destructive power relationships that divide humans from nature and sanction environmental damage. These filmmakers search