This is Environmental Ethics by Wendy Lynne Lee

Author:Wendy Lynne Lee [Lee, Wendy Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119122722
Published: 2022-06-30T06:22:27+00:00

Shades of Leopold’s plain citizen certainly color this description, and Curtin lends it yet more depth arguing, first, that “[w]omen’s knowledge is inherently collaborative…the project of the whole ecological community” (p. 90). She gives as an example cooking, the sharing of culinary traditions, and seed sharing (p. 90). Second, Curtin argues that “[w]omen’s knowledge is … transparently situated” (p. 90). That is, “to form an opinion, women need to know the life histories of the people and contexts they are speaking about” (p. 90). Third, “[w]omen’s knowledge is temporal” (p. 90). Yet “if it grows out of actual contexts and histories, it is also future-directed… [It] operates not only in the spaces between individuals but also in the times between generations” (p. 90). Lastly, Curtin argues that “women’s knowledge is bodily knowledge.” Because cultural dualisms have defined women in terms of the body and nature, women tend to cultivate knowledge that integrates head and hand. Their knowledge consists more in “thoughtful ways of doing” than in “ways of thinking about” (pp. 90–1).

The dualisms Curtin refers to are precisely the same that White credits for the rise of Christian anthropocentrism, but while Curtin is careful to remind her reader that her own account generalizes—practices vary across culture, geography, and ecology—she also insists the ecological and relational quality of women’s knowledge offers something vital to developing a more ecologically oriented ethic. Indeed, the very conditions under which many indigenous women engage in subsistence farming may, argues Curtin, offer a reason to take women’s knowledge seriously, “Poor Third World women,” she writes, “cannot even pretend to escape the temporal reality of life that is demanded by caring labor… Caring labor produces transparent knowledge; such knowledge is superior just because it is transparent, situated between nature and culture. Survival depends on it” (p. 92). For Curtin, the prospect of transparency in the relation between nature and culture evinces an important moral value: honesty or frankness—a value Leopold advocates for the plain citizen. Because caring labor, moreover, is about labor that’s collaborative, temporally situated, and bodily, and because it’s intimately associated with survival—with life and death—it surely makes sense to characterize it as the work of conscience, ecological conscience.

Whether the expert knowledge Curtin describes is rightly characterized as ecocentric, however, is an important question whose possible answers shed light on what ecocentric means and what it requires with respect to action. No doubt, Leopold’s principle, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise,” is not what’s in the forefront of the minds of the Indian women Curtin describes in the performance of caring labor. By the same token that these women cannot pretend to be able to escape the caring labor required of their life conditions, so too such a principle would likely present itself to them as the kind of indulgence—a “way of thinking about”—for which they have neither time nor resources. A knowledge that “integrates head

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