A “lifeline out of the COVID‐19 crisis”? An ecofeminist critique of the European Green Deal

Abstract

In early 2020, the world was rocked by a highly contagious, acute respiratory virus. Within a few months, many countries had gone into lockdown and were issuing mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing in what came to be known as the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Many theories quickly developed as to how and where COVID-19 emerged, although the definitive answer is still not available. Scientists do agree, however, that it is a zoonotic virus—meaning it is an infectious diseases transferred from animals to humans or vice-versa—and that the Wuhan market in China was a major, initial spreading location (Maxmen, 2022; Pigenet, 2020; WHO, 2021b). For some time now, the scientific community has been warning of the potential for increases in zoonotic diseases with the intensification of climate change and the rise of global warming as by-products of anthropogenic activities that have pushed animals and humans into closer contact (see, e.g., Schrag & Weiner, 1995). A joint-report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Livestock Research Institute (, 2020, p. 11) recently recalled that, “While pandemics such as [COVID-19] are sometimes seen as a ‘black swan’—an extremely rare event—they are actually a widely predicted consequence of how people source food, trade animals, and alter environments.” That report warns that, “the rising trend in zoonotic diseases is driven by the degradation of our natural environment” and results from anthropogenic activities, including agricultural intensification and conversion of land, wildlife exploitation, resource extraction, increased demand for animal protein and climate change. Despite the world being taken by surprise in early 2020, COVID-19 was in fact a foreseeable event. The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species (Shiva, 2020, 177). In Europe, the EU's response to the climate crisis came just weeks before COVID-19 erupted onto the global stage. Ursula von der Leyen, Head of the European Commission, presented the European Green Deal (EGD) to the world in December 2019. In early 2020, the EU was quick to acknowledge the connection between the climate crisis and the pandemic and doubled down on the EGD as its main policy framework for tackling both crises, hailing it as a “lifeline out of the COVID-19 crisis” (European Commission, n.d.). This article seeks to evaluate that claim by applying an ecofeminist perspective to question the prevailing orthodoxy upheld by the EGD. Ecofeminism is an umbrella term, as Karen Warren (1994) has suggested: one that captures a multitude of perspectives on the nature of connections within social systems of domination and is premised on the intersections and interconnectedness of people, nature, and the environment. As a theoretical framework, it is a way to frame the analysis of power within structures of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, and the role of institutions and policies in reproducing that power with an explicitly social, gender4 –understood as a social construct and not reduced to the male/female binary, and climate justice perspective.5 Ecofeminists argue for care-sensitive approaches to climate policy and see the current crises as a catalyst for changing the distribution of care work upon which our society is built. What has become clear is that we cannot tackle the current social and climate crises without recognizing how they are interlinked: climate, COVID-19, capitalism, and care (MacGregor, 2021). The first section explores ecofeminism as a useful theoretical framework with which to analyze the EGD. It expands upon how the interconnected and intersecting sites of oppression and domination that include patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism are intimately linked to the destruction and pillage of the environment. Section 2 addresses the issue of structural inequalities and the global challenge of climate change and zoonotic diseases by providing a critical analysis of the regulatory framework of the EGD. As studies have shown, policies intended to respond to the climate crisis have rather exacerbated existing inequalities (Beck, 2010; Harlan et al., 2015; World Bank, 2020). Furthermore, climate justice is all but void in the EGD's framework, with a glaring absence of the consideration of the “…intersection between climate change and the way social inequalities are experienced as structural violence” (Porter et al., 2020, p. 293). Section 3 builds upon ecofeminist perspectives and proposals on how reorganizing our economies around care work can reduce carbon emissions, but also lead to the systemic and structural changes that are needed to confront the climate crisis. The article concludes with a summary of its evaluation of the EGD as a “lifeline” out of the pandemic. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1953) declared that in the logic of patriarchy both women and nature appear as “other.” This idea was taken up by Françoise d'Eaubonne who connected the logic of patriarchy to the oppression of marginalized groups and the domination of nature in what she called “ecological feminism” in her 1974 book Le féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death). A decade earlier, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Carson, 1962) had launched the mainstream ecological movement in the Global North by sounding the alarm on the use of agricultural chemicals and the destruction of the environment. She accused the industry of disinformation and lying to the public about the toxicity and harm of its products and opposed veiled discourses of “progress” and “development.”6 Carson was critical of the domination of nature for capital gain, observing that, “We still talk in terms of conquest. […] Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself” (quoted in Lear, 2009, p. 450).7 d'Eaubonne and Carson's works contributed to mainstreaming scrutiny of the conceptual and material links between the exploitation and domination of certain groups of people and the destruction of the environment. Their work resonated with feminists at a time when concern for the environment was also gaining traction. Ecofeminism emerged as a movement in the 1980s, coinciding with growing scientific and grassroots concerns about the link between global warming, climate change and anthropocentric activities.8 As the science around climate change gained currency in the political sphere, climate scientists became more vocal about the dangers of climate change and global warming. One outcome was the increase and spread of zoonotic diseases, which began to be seriously discussed in the scientific literature. In one analysis, Slingenbergh et al. (2004, p. 467), noted that the evolution of person-to-person pathogens of zoonotic origin were possibly triggered or facilitated by external factors, which they summarize as: “Disease emergence may thus be depicted as an evolutionary response to changes in the environment, including anthropogenic factors such as new agricultural practices, urbanisation, or globalisation, as well as climate change.” The dramatic evolution of climate change and global warming since the mid-20th century has alarmed scientists for decades, and despite powerful pockets of climate-deniers, it is now generally accepted that we have reached a tipping point. New research is suggesting that due to human activities, five of the nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorous and nitrogen), and most recently novel entities, in particular stemming from plastic pollution (Persson et al., 2022).9 Novel statistical analysis is also showing that the Amazon rainforest, the “lungs” of the earth, is at imminent risk of reaching a critical threshold of rainforest dieback, the point at which the rainforest begins to change to grasslands, savannah, or other less biodiverse landscapes (Boulton et al., 2022). Climate scientists have been muzzled for years, and although it is now no longer controversial, some politicians—with the support and investment of private libertarian thinktanks such as the Heartland and Cato Institutes, and powerful libertarians, such as the Koch Brothers—continue to question the urgency and therefore the policies with which to confront climate change.10 While the effects of extractive capitalism, in particular, have long been decried and resisted by Indigenous communities and their allies, it has only been with the real-time consequences of climate change in the Global North and the threat to capitalist global powers that governments are now adopting policies in consequence. Indigenous populations have forever been protecting nature and for generations have struggled against the destruction and pillage of their ancestral lands. Comprising less than 5% of the world's population, Indigenous peoples protect 80% of global biodiversity (Raygorodetsky, 2018). Demands for climate justice have swept across the globe, with Indigenous peoples and young people, often girls and young women leading the charge. The “revival” of ecofeminism in recent years coincides with growing criticisms of policy frameworks aimed at tackling the climate crisis, but which continue to ignore the structural and systemic issues that underpin it. Ecofeminists are now explicit about their intersectional approach (Kings, 2017),11 and are intentional about lifting the veil on the gender dimensions of climate change in a way that links struggles to dismantle patriarchy with struggles to dismantle capitalism and colonialism. Intersectionality plays a pivotal role in how to respond to the climate crisis since the dimensions of our identities impact upon and are impacted upon by climate change (see Amorim-Maia et al., 2022; Kaijser & Kronsell, 2014); yet, as MacGregor (2010, p. 223) astutely points out, that “there remains a curious silence on gender relations in the mainstream literature and policy discourse” on climate change; gender perspectives remain largely at the margins of climate politics. Sherilyn MacGregor (2010) compellingly argues that where gender analyses exist in climate debates, they relate to development issues rather than the gender differentiated causes and consequences of climate change. She (MacGregor, 2010, 224; italics in original) observes that when gender is discussed, it is only with respect to the material impacts of climate change with discourses focused upon the vulnerability of women as victims, but with disregard to gendered power relations and what she refers to as the “discursive framings that shape climate politics.” The consequences of which further impacts upon the disregard of life-sustaining work, or social reproduction, and the construction of feminized spheres of activity. Social reproduction has become just another source of profit-making (Nadasen, 2021) and the commodification of nature has led to new markets embedded in greening capitalism, a discussion we return to below. Women are furthermore vastly underrepresented in decision-making in general, and environmental decision- and policymaking, in particular, with estimates that women hold approximately 12% of top ministerial positions in environment-related sectors worldwide (IUCN, 2020). Comparable underrepresentation in the top positions of environmental science also exist. MacGregor (2010, pp. 230–232) offers an analysis of what she calls the “masculinization of environmental politics” calling attention to how the institutionalization of the green agenda has resulted in the alienation and obscuring of lived experiences of climate change. Climate politics, she argues, is shrouded in masculinized discourses; first, economic modernization with its focus upon climate change as a techno-scientific problem requiring techno-scientific solutions—we return to analyze the EGD in this context examining its solution to climate change through economically lucrative proposals such as carbon capture in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), renewable energies, electric cars, genetically modified crops. Second, environmental security, upon which we will not expand here; briefly and at the risk of oversimplifying, it is the argument that a scarcity of resources due to climate change and global warming will lead to more conflicts. These discourses offer little in terms of analysis and solutions for the social implications of climate change. There are some comparable elements of how policymakers have addressed climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic: the techno-scientific responses to the climate change and the military-style emergency responses to the pandemic as countries announced they were at war with COVID-19. An ecofeminist approach with its emphasis on intersectionality rather highlights the interconnectedness of these crises to work toward a solution rooted in people for people and the other-than-human world, not markets or profits. Although climate change affects us all, it does not affect us all in the same way. To make sense of the climate crisis requires us to make sense of how interconnected power structures emerge and impact upon different people, as well as upon nature; that is, how varieties of oppression and domination are interconnected and how different forms of one's identity intersect and overlap to impact upon one's experiences of climate change, particularly those of marginalized groups. These intersections came to the fore during the pandemic that made visible the interconnectedness of climate change, healthcare, gender, race, and class. It was, in many ways, a perfect storm, the eye of which culminated with shining a light upon sustained inequalities, systemic racism, years of austerity and neoliberal policies that gutted social welfare systems, together with the climate crisis. As COVID-19 rapidly developed and spread, healthcare systems across the globe were overwhelmed and the cracks in the system became cavernous; the role that gender, race, and class play in one's experience of health and disease and the impacts upon access to healthcare and prevention of disease became more visible. While gender impacts upon our experience of care, the gendered division of labor has meant that women, and to a greater extent racialized women, have shouldered a disproportionate responsibility for care work, and particularly unpaid care. Some studies are showing that while the pandemic has exacerbated the burden of care on all caregivers, that burden has fallen to a greater extent upon women and girls (Power, 2020). Moreover, the pandemic has disproportionately affected women, Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQI+, low-income, minority, and other marginalized communities, exacerbating inequalities across countries, as well as within them (Islam & Winkel, 2017; Porter et al., 2020). COVID-19 has brought to the fore the intersection of the climate crisis, social and economic inequalities, systemic racism, and the total failings of the neoliberal system that has so diligently sought to dismantle the welfare state and reinforce the individualisation of care. The inequalities entrenched by patriarchy and reproduced by capitalism seek to maintain the status quo of relations of power that are acutely hierarchical and gendered. A major global market, the EU has reinforced imperatives of capital accumulation by promoting an economic model based on deregulation, competition, and the free market. Shiva (1993 [2014], p. xxi) describes this as a world built “… around fictions and abstractions like ‘capital’, ‘corporations’ and ‘growth’, which have allowed the unleashing of the negative forces of the destructive Anthropocene.” Those core elements of neoliberal capitalism have exacerbated exploitation of marginalized and minority populations and communities, carers, and natural resources. Corporations, the quintessential vehicles of capitalism, have played a key role in the exploitation of people and nature. In collaboration and/or with complicity of states, they have been responsible for over-extracting natural resources, pillaging and land-grabbing protected Indigenous lands, and intimidating land rights activists. Across the globe and across industries, the effects of corporate violence impact populations and communities in different and disproportionate ways (Scott, 2020; Villamar et al., 2018). In countries with high levels of extractivist industries, the harms of extractivism and climate change bear more heavily upon women and girls, particularly racialized women and girls who are more often responsible for caring duties, including cultivating the land, collecting water, and childrearing (Federici, 2014). The burden of the survival of the family falls predominantly on women and is further exacerbated by the pollution of land and water as direct consequences of extractivist activities. Bernacchi (2020) draws particular attention to the role of Indigenous women in Latin America in reconstructing the social fabric of communities destroyed by extractivism, devastation exercised upon the land but also to women's bodies when they are subjected to violence in the “man camps” of mining towns (see also Carrington et al., 2010). Often these camps are on Indigenous lands that are being mined without consent.12 The serendipitous timing of the announcement of the EGD with the emergence of the pandemic has allowed for a real-time assessment of its policy-proposals as we live multiple crises that require prompt actions. We turn now to scrutinize the EGD, which has not only been accused of failing to provide a gender perspective and missing the mark on a “clean” economy within its “green” capitalism but in the process is producing/enabling climate colonialism, which Olúfémi O. Táíwò (2019) defines as “the domination of less powerful countries and peoples through initiatives meant to slow the pace of global warming.” Despite overwhelming evidence over the past decades, governments have been slow in responding to the science and restrained in addressing and delivering upon the demands for action by climate activists. In 2015, a glimmer of hope shined when the EU and all of its Member States signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement agreeing upon three fundamental goals: (1) reduce global GHGs to avoid a global temperature increase over 2°C this century while pursuing efforts to limit the increase even further to 1.5°C; (2) review countries' commitments every 5 years, with a long-term emission reduction strategy due before 2020; (3) provide financing to “developing” countries to mitigate climate change, strengthen resilience and enhance abilities to adapt to climate impacts. The preamble of the Paris Agreement acknowledged gender equality and called for gender-responsive approaches. The European emissions reduction strategy materialized in 2019 as the EGD. It is premised on making Europe the first climate neutral continent by 2050 by achieving zero-net emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), while continuing economic growth by decoupling from resource use, and providing a “just transition” for European citizens. Van der Leyen (2019) proclaimed it as “Europe's man-on-the-moon moment.” Achieving net-zero means that the number of GHGs emitted does not exceed the number removed from the atmosphere through what is known as carbon capture. The method to capture and store carbon is controversial, with scientists and climate activists still debating its potential as it relies heavily on still early-stage technology. That technology involves capturing the emissions from power plants and factories, condensing it, and storing the carbon monoxide underground. Activists have criticized the net-zero policy as a costly band-aid solution that does not reach the heart of the problem: rather than taking the bold and necessary steps to cut the use of fossil fuels entirely, carbon capture literally pushes the problem underground. It is a way for the EU to frame its policy-framework as building a social and economic relationship with nature through “climate-friendly” or “green” capitalism and a new kind of growth. Underpinning the EGD with a growth-objective has sparked criticism and has been rebuked as a plan for the preservation of capitalism, not the transformation to an alternative, sustainable system (Varoufakis & Adler, 2020). Moreover, the EGD has provided little more than lip service to a gender approach, which was recently criticized by its own Rapporteur for the Commission for the Environment, Climate Change and Energy (ENVE; see Tütö, 2022). The European Commission states that the EGD should serve as “[…] a new growth strategy that aims to transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy, where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in 2050 and where economic growth is decoupled from resource use (European Commission, 2019a, p. 2, bold in original).” Following its announcement, the EU rapidly put into place several action plans targeting different policy areas including industry (March 10, 2020), circular economy (March 11, 2020), biodiversity (May 20, 2020), and energy transition (July 2020). The Commission also announced its ambitious “fit for 55” package which regroups Directives and Regulations that underpin its climate goals. In addition, the EU legally enshrined its climate goal for carbon neutrality in a Climate Law adopted in July 2021. The Climate Law applies collectively but not to each Member State individually; in other words, the EU is collectively committed to achieve net-zero, but individual states are not; practically, this collectively lowers the mark rather than set robust individual national targets with proportionate efforts to take into account varying starting points for each state. Furthermore, while the EU climate policies are aimed at adapting and reforming its industries to the current climate reality, its proposals to provide a stronger regulatory framework for carbon emissions is a thinly veiled plan to save capitalism from itself. Frank Pearce (1976) detailed how the capitalist state intervenes in the market or imposes regulations upon industry when the legitimacy of the capitalist state is at risk. There is a mystification of the process, which he called “the imaginary social order,” whereby the new regulations are viewed by the public as a general good; the public sees these regulations as the state responding to its demands, but Pearce demonstrated that it is rather an act of self-preservation. The EGD has been generally well-received by governments and civil society groups and has set out ambitious targets. However, a closer look at the framework reveals some fundamental gaps: First, the initial communication for the EGD was devoid of a gender perspective.13 Gender analyses remain weak in the EU's proposed green transition. Despite an attempt to respond to its failure to address gender through its Gender Equality Strategy (March 2021), and like many gender-sensitive policy frameworks, the EU has focused upon women's economic empowerment rather than tackling the burden of care that falls more heavily on women and gender minorities (MacGregor et al., 2022). In other words, there have yet to be any proposals to tackle the systemic and structural inequalities that underpin a gender-based division of labor resulting in paid and unpaid care work disproportionately falling upon women and girls. Or to recognize the inherent value and low-carbon potential of care work more generally. An integral part of Europe's strategy is the EU's emphasis on creating a market for its green transition, with local and sustainable jobs through the creation of employment in renewable energy sectors and construction for refitting buildings for energy efficiency. A critique of the green market may be articulated on two fronts: first, jobs in renewable energy sectors face persistent gender inequalities. Multiple agencies confirm that women are underrepresented in energy sectors, with women's participation in STEM jobs far lower than in administrative jobs. Moreover, there are persistent and significant gender wage gaps (see IEA, 2022; IRENA, 2019). Year on year, women continue to be paid less and be given less prominent positions in the workforce at large, and particularly in the renewable energy sector. Second, the EGD has overlooked the importance of care work both in terms of sustainability and of its inherent value. There is a need to expand the definition of “green” work and what a “green” economy looks like, more on this in the last section. Moreover, the EU's delivery plan suggests that by investing in renewable green technologies and green mobility, the EU will also be helping its international partners and supporting its companies to serve this new, growing market. Achieving the goals of the EGD is thus premised upon maintaining growth by changing gears to “climate friendly industries…clean technologies…green financing” (Van der Leyen, 2019). So, while the EU has set out a strategic plan, it is one that is constructed in the same logic of growth and capitalist imperatives that led us to the climate crisis in the first place. The EU laid out its plans to deliver the EGD at COP26. It included several proposals, beginning with transforming European society to create new opportunities for innovation, investment and jobs that are in line with its goals of becoming a climate neutral continent. The outcome of this transformation is meant to bridge inequality gaps and build upon the competitiveness of European companies. Along with these proposals the EU set out plans for sustainable mobility, premised upon green technology with the growth of a market for zero and low emissions vehicles and massive investment into infrastructure to be able to charge those vehicles. Linked with the drive to greener mobility is the imperative of reducing carbon emissions from transport; and, in line with this goal, in June 2022, the European Parliament adopted legislation to include road transport in its ETS by 2026. It is also proposing to extend its carbon pricing scheme to the aviation and maritime sectors, although this remains under debate. There are plans to reduce consumption, increase energy renewables used in industry, and renovate buildings to make them more energy efficient. In keeping with its goal of a “just transition” for Europeans, the EU established the Social Climate Fund to support citizens most affected or at risk of energy or mobility poverty. Other proposals include restoring and protecting biodiversity, however just this year the Commission moved to renew the marketing authorisation for known harmful substances such as the herbicide glysophate, an issue to be followed closely in 2023.14 The EGD's proposals are underpinned by a push for “breakthrough technologies for renewable energy, energy-intensive industries, energy storage, and carbon capture, use and storage” (European Commission, 2021). In other words, the pivotal action of the EGD is an emphasis on green technology, with the latent goal to maintain the status quo of our consumerist society, framed as moving from old-growth strategies to new-growth strategies. Green-tech is popular among consumers, businesses, and politicians because it is a solution that offers the possibility to maintain our current comforts with minimal sacrifices (Malcolm & Floyd, 2015). Moreover, much of the “tech” in “green-tech” is dependent upon raw materials largely sourced outside of Europe.15 Those raw materials are violently extracted from the earth by corporations often as joint-state ventures in a process of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2003). Green-tech does little to confront the flaws of accumulation and consumerism. Its response is to substitute one (brown) capitalism for another (green) capitalism, without tackling the systemic paradoxes, the structural inequalities and the inherent contradictions of “growth” strategies that sustain privatized gains and socialized losses. Petter Næss (2016) has called this an “illusory” idea of green growth and green capitalism. A central problem of “greening” capitalism is that it is still capitalism, with an imperative of limitless economic growth despite finite natural resources within a market-based economy. According to the EGD, it is possible to maintain growth through decoupling, which the OECD (2002) claims occurs “…when the growth rate of an environmental pressure is less than that of its economic driving force (e.g. GDP) over a given period.” But there is no empirical evidence to support decoupling. Rather, as Parrique et al. (2019, p. 31; see also Hickel & Kallis, 2019) note, “In all cases, the reduction in environmental pressures falls short of current environmental policy targets. After [their] extensive search, it is safe to say that the type of decoupling acclaimed by green growth advocates is essentially a statistical figment.” It is therefore unsubstantiated that decoupling can lead to sustainable growth. More accurately, as David Whyte (2020, p.74) remarks, “It is certainly not controversial anymore to assert that the economic growth paradigm is impossible to decouple from environmental destruction.” The focus of t