(Un)Natural Selection: The Drainage Of The Hula Wetlands, An Ecofeminist Reading

Abstract

Ecofeminist philosophy demonstrates and criticizes the interconnections between the domination of Woman, Native and Nature. These ‘Others’ have been represented in western thought as close to each other and as inferior. By the conceived virtue of being wild and unpredictable, unreasonable, passionate and lustful, they threaten Man, Civilization and Culture. A ‘natural’ and logical response to this threat has been the need to tame, possess and control, and even eradicate these inferior ‘Others’. I have used the ecofeminist approach to examine two geography books describing the Hula Valley, Israel, and the drainage of its wetlands in the 1950s. I have analyzed the two narratives by exploring the inter-connected attitudes toward Nature and ‘Native’ – the local Palestinians – in the specific historical context of place and time. The two texts exhibit divergent narratives, yet one emerged as the dominant (hi)story: the western discourse of modernity, of technical and scientific triumph over cultural backwardness and over wild and dangerous nature. Domination is thus constructed as natural, logical and inevitable, and its narrative traces a trajectory from evil to good, from chaos to order, while masking and hiding stories about power and privileges, land and territory.