A Political Ecology of Women, Water and Global Environmental Change

Stephanie Buechler, Anne-Marie Hanson, Stephanie Buechler, Anne-Marie S. Hanson, Anne-Marie Hanson, Stephanie Buechler, Anne-Marie S. Hanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138232242
• eBook ISBN: 9781317749820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This edited volume explores how a feminist political ecology framework can bring fresh insights to the study of rural and urban livelihoods dependent on vulnerable rivers, lakes, watersheds, wetlands and coastal environments. Bringing together political ecologists and feminist scholars from multiple disciplines, the book develops solution-oriented advances to theory, policy and planning to tackle the complexity of these global environmental changes.

Using applied research on the contemporary management of groundwater, springs, rivers, lakes, watersheds and coastal wetlands in Central and South Asia, Northern, Central and Southern Africa, and South and North America, the authors draw on a variety of methodological perspectives and new theoretical approaches to demonstrate the importance of considering multiple layers of social difference as produced by and central to the effective governance and local management of water resources.

This unique collection employs a unifying feminist political ecology framework that emphasizes the ways that gender interacts with other social and geographical locations of water resource users. In doing so, the book further questions the normative gender discourses that underlie policies and practices surrounding rural and urban water management and climate change, water pollution, large-scale development and dams, water for crop and livestock production and processing, resource knowledge and expertise, and critical livelihood studies.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, development studies, feminist and environmental geography, anthropology, sociology, environmental philosophy, public policy, planning, media studies, Latin American and other area studies, as well as women's and gender studies.

1 Introduction

Towards a feminist political ecology of women, global change, and vulnerable waterscapes

Anne-Marie Hanson and Stephanie Buechler

DOI: 10.4324/9781315796208-2

Water flowing, never ceasing

Always on the move

Living and thriving

Frogs leap, fish dive,

The current's alive too!

Humans just pass it by,

Not giving a second glance,

But a river is fantastic,

You just have to give it a second chance

You can sit by the running water,

Magnificent sights to see,

Like a sapphire colored dragonfly,

Enjoying the morning breeze

There might be a javalina,

Having a sip to drink

Please don't scare him away

The river is his too!

We humans are too greedy,

All the water we use up,

Is enough for a pack of dogs,

And we don't seem to care!

We need to preserve water,

Or all the animals will leave,

Then we'll be all alone,

What a horrible place it would be!

Celina Scott-Buechler (2006; age ten)

On May 15, 2014, the Colorado River reached the ocean in the Gulf of California for the first time in over 20 years. A major drinking water source for over 40 million people in the western United States, throughout its history the Colorado River has also irrigated farmlands, supplied energy and resources for mining and urban centers, and enriched wildlife in a once-lush-but-now-desert Mexican delta. As part of an agreement and experiment between the United States and Mexico to restore riparian ecosystems in the delta, water was released from Lake Mead (Hoover Dam) to mimic the historic natural flooding that had halted due to a number of conditions (Postel 2014b). Decades of population growth, damming of the Colorado and other major rivers in the American Southwest, and climate change have contributed to water resource pressures across the southwest U.S. and northern Mexico (Postel 2014a; Waterman 2012). While the river reaching the sea seemed like a news-worthy triumph for the delta ecosystem, it will take serious changes in individual water consumption, community conservation efforts, as well as high-level policy and management changes to prevent future human-induced water scarcity in the southwest border region (Castle et al. 2014).

The poem above was written by a ten-year-old girl upon moving to Tucson, Arizona, who noticed the strange phenomena of rivers that either no longer flow at all or only flow when there is sufficient rainfall. A daughter of two environmental social scientists, she learned many things about water resources from living with them in semi-arid central Mexico and south India. Living in these water-scarce regions helped bring an appreciation of water that she carried with her to the southwest U.S. For example, she would partake (often by dancing outside) in the exuberance felt by all with the first rains of the North America monsoon in Tucson, the Asian monsoon in India, and the start to the rainy season in central Mexico. She took walks along streams or rivers with her family and with her classes at school in Tucson, thus becoming aware of dynamic ecological contexts that included human and animal life. Through her life experiences and a unit on water taught by her fifth grade teacher, she began to connect human activity with impacts on water bodies and on life that depended on those water bodies. This, in effect, was linking the political and the ecological, and it is a connection that can easily be grasped from a very young age. Time and again it is clear that this intimate connection is not fully understood or appreciated either by the general public, by policymakers or by scholars; yet the ramifications of this lack of understanding can be significant.

In particular in the U.S. southwest border region, ‘ecological’ concerns linked to global change are often under-publicized by the media when there are ‘political’ concerns related to immigration, border security, and drug violence in the same areas. Most recently, the many unaccompanied children who cross the desert areas of the U.S. southwest border to reunite with families and to seek asylum has focused attention on the political violence and poverty that are occurring in Central America. Only minor attention has been paid to gender issues in this migration. For example, in contrast to previous years when mainly men migrated from Central America, according to the Women's Refugee Commission, today nearly 50 percent of those migrants are girls, most between age five and 17 (de Silva Iddings 2014). Another recent media report documented a case of a Honduran mother and young daughter who took a loan from a drug trafficking gang to pay for their border crossing into the U.S. southwest, only to be caught and deported back to the danger and gang violence they were trying to escape (Stargardter and Palencia 2014).

Ecological issues that contribute to the rise in migration to the U.S. are rarely examined in this focus on child migration from Central America. The ecological issues are, however, linked with current economic and political conditions and include deforestation and intensified tropical storms. In 2007, Hurricane Felix affected 198,000 people in Honduras and Nicaragua, mainly in low-income Miskito Indian communities whose fishing grounds and agricultural fields were damaged (Nielsen 2010). In 1998, Hurricane Mitch caused almost a full year's precipitation to fall on most of Central America in a matter of days, and many rural and urban communities have never fully recovered. The lack of viable livelihood options has pushed some adults and children into business with criminal gangs and/or to migrate north in order to be able to have viable alternative livelihood options that are free from gang violence. Twenty thousand people were killed and two million displaced by Hurricane Mitch; most of those killed were in Honduras and, to a lesser extent, in Nicaragua and El Salvador (McLeman and Hunter 2010). As McLeman and Hunter explain:

Decades of prior civil conflict in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador had created large populations of highly vulnerable people in the region, leaving many thousands of impoverished households occupying marginal and inherently hazardous lands in both the countryside and urban peripheries. These hazardous lands included steep slopes prone to failure and easily flooded low-lying areas. The vulnerability of these households was further exacerbated by ongoing deforestation and land degradation, and governments' inability to take measures to alleviate the endemic poverty.

(2010:452)

This is contrasted with the case of Belize where Hurricane Mitch also struck, but with no lives lost, likely due to better environmental conservation programs in coastal areas, lack of previous civil conflict, and more progressive policies aimed at reducing social inequalities (ibid.).

As these examples indicate, ecological and political issues combine to significantly affect local populations, especially the poor. Those who are most vulnerable to poverty in Central America, including women and children (on urban Honduran boys see Schmidt and Buechler 2014), now comprise over half of the migrants to ‘El Norte’ in search of an economically and physically (bodily) secure future.

Gender, water, and global environmental change

The goals of our edited volume are to further explore these uneven and scalar relationships between political, social, and ecological systems through current international empirical research and to generate multidisciplinary scholarship in feminist political ecology on gender, water, and global environmental change. We focus on the practical implications of women's work and knowledge networks, and how these are linked to other forms of social differentiation as played out through the many forms of human relationships with water and global change. To the extent that people depend on water resources that are increasingly limited and linked to multinational political decisions and global climate shifts, this volume underscores the need for further attention to be placed on the particular political, environmental, economic, and social systems within which livable habitats are made and unmade.

People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally, or otherwise marginalized are often highly vulnerable to the substantial and increasing impacts of environmental change (Romero-Lankao et al. 2014). Women and other marginalized groups in economically poor world regions are the most vulnerable to negative effects of environmental change, and yet, grassroots activist groups in these areas are often the most resilient and vocal proponents of protecting the environment at both local and global scales. We build on previous feminist political ecology research to recognize that, most often, so called ‘minorities’ by gender, race, class, and ethnicity are unfairly disadvantaged in the face of restricting political economies and climate extremes (Salleh 2009b).

The studies included in this volume illustrate some of the recent changes in political and ecological climates that have had severe consequences for natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans (Romero-Lankao et al. 2014). Deterioration of water quality, rising temperatures, and changes in the seasonality, quantity, and duration of precipitation are combined issues that increasingly alter human, animal, and plant demand for water resources. At the same time, more extreme weather and climate events—including droughts, floods, hurricanes, and intense rainfall—further the impacts on economic sectors, resource-dependent livelihoods, food security, and human health (Alston 2013). In particular, extreme changes to surface water and coastal resources intersect with urbanization, agricultural intensification, and large-scale water use processes to intensify already existing social, economic, and environmental inequalities.

This volume calls attention to these inequalities as they are tightly linked to issues of women, water, and rapid environmental change. As Nelson and Stathers argue, “everyone plays a role in socio-ecological systems” (2009:65). For that reason, ecosystems and social systems must be examined in relation to each other, as both have different capacities and go through stages of adaptation to change (Holling et al. 2002). Resilience scholars influence our study of how natural resources will be impacted by global environmental change and “how localized environmental degradation, resource rights, and a changing climate will interact” (ibid.:63).

We focus on women not as unitary subjects, but as strategically important for future resilience and mitigation of global change issues as they are experienced in localized sites and through embodied subjects. Women generally experience worse environmental conditions than men for many reasons. Across all cultures, races, and ethnic groups, women are more likely to be poor than men, exposing them to environmental change and environmental problems endemic to poverty in rural and urban areas (Buckingham et al. 2005). Women frequently are the caretakers, health care providers, food provisioners, and small-scale farmers, and are responsible for domestic water provision and management (Bennett et al. 2005; Buechler 2009; Radel 2009). These roles are often ‘naturalized,’ unpaid, and under recognized, but also bring women into daily and direct contact with environmental pollution and resource scarcity and give access to issues linked to political and climate shifts (Salleh 2009b). Often children accompany women in their daily work, and women thus pass on knowledge about political and ecological conditions related to water resources to future generations. Organizations...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Feminist political ecology and large-scale water resource management
• PART II Women and innovative adaptation to global environmental change
• PART III Stories, narratives, and knowledge production of socio-environmental change
• Appendix: Tlingit/Tagish stories
• Index