Patriarchy, colonialism, inequity and sustainability

 I’ve been feeling very flat for a few days (hopefully not Covid) so having a very quiet time and came back to this blog that I’ve neglected over the last few years. I’m planning to retire from teaching about climate change and health fairly soon, although I may go on doing voluntary work (I’ve given two voluntary talks so far this year), but before I do I’d like to publish an article on the relationship between patriarchy, colonialism, inequity and sustainability (or ecological breakdown more logically - that is, those factors are causative of ecological breakdown and we need to get rid of them to achieve sustainability).

I wrote a plain language version of my article about ‘economism’, which partially covered some of these issues, for The Conversation last year. However they decided not to publish it, which threw me a bit more than it probably should have. I might publish the draft plain language version here separately. The frustrating thing was they suggested it wasn’t topical or relevant, whereas it’s really relevant particularly now with an election due. Anyway I’ll leave that for a separate post.

The main unfinished business arising from my PhD studies is this relationship between patriarchy and the other factors named above. Of course there has been a lot of ecofeminist scholarship in this area but it seems to have dropped off and been largely ignored or forgotten in mainstream discourse. I’d like to do a really plain language explanatory article on this, but publish it in a high level journal to get some coverage.

At present I think patriarchy is an ‘elephant in the room’ or ‘fish don’t see water’ phenomenon - people don’t see it because it’s so ordinary, and it also has been somewhat successful in absorbing women/feminism into patriarchal structures and systems without fundamentally changing them.

The relationship between patriarchy, colonialism, inequity and ecological breakdown (which may not be the term I’ll eventually settle on but will do for now) is in broad terms:

- By patriarchy I refer to ‘pyramid’ type social systems and structures in which those at the ‘top’ have both more power and more wealth/control of resources, and in which men dominate the ‘top’ positions. (It’s important to note that these can to some extent be held by female spouses and relatives of men also, which is an ancient feature of patriarchy).

- patriarchy appears to be (particularly according to Gerda Lerner if my memory is correct) the oldest and original form of systemic inequality with these features. In previous societies it seems there may have been inequalities of power, but they weren’t systematically accompanied by inequalities of wealth and resources. For example in First Nations of current day Australia (which is where I’ll locate some of my discussion since it’s the country I know most about), there may have been some forms of patriarchal power but it seems  generally agreed by early observers that resources were distributed according to need.

- patriarchy in the sense I’m using it is not timeless but appears to have begun several thousand years ago in areas of Middle East/Southern Europe. This possibly may have been related to invasions of what was a fertile area of people from less fertile areas? (Need to look at this question more closely)

- in these areas at least it seems to be pretty clearly linked to changes in religious belief and cultural myths, particularly to the rise of monotheistic religions centred on a male god.

- patriarchy is the basic systemic form of inequality - the belief or acceptance that it is right for certain people to have not just more power but also more wealth and resources/control of resources than others. It has also never been simply been about men having power over women but also about hierarchies amongst men, these two aspects are integrally linked. All men might be ‘heads of the family’ in patriarchal ideology but they were never all equal, they always competed and formed hierarchies

Gerda Lerner suggests the successful dominance of women set the pattern for dominance of groups of men which colonialism and racism are based on - that is, successful groups of men didn’t just destroy their male opponents but learned how to enslave or subordinate them systemically (leading to systems of slavery and colonialism).

The idea that certain men could hold power of resources underlies enclosures of the commons, mercantile households, and capitalism. They all rely on systems of inequality and couldn’t exist if the systemic idea of inequality wasn’t socially legitimised.

Control and enclosure of common land (which was common for socially defined groups of people not for everyone) underlies systemic and large scale land/ecological degradation (? Need some more analysis and info here)

- development of fossil fuelled industry then added climate change and greatly hastened this process.

- (incidentally the ideological rationale for this now is ‘productivity’ which basically seems to be the assumption that anything that saves human expenditure of energy is good - which from a public health point of view is wrong and should be critically opposed although it might be a bit tangential here)

Taking a break here but these are developing lines of argument to be further refined.