In April, outside the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia, Herminia Colque, an indigenous woman from the Andes, spoke about how mining—that is, the industrialized excavation of natural resources for financial profit (often the profit of a distant private company and its shareholders)—inherently threatens her homeland and the entire planet. I watched and listened to her via Democracy Now online. As she spoke, a sign flashed across the screen that read, “la causa principal de climate change es capitalismo.”
We are in the midst of a global spin-out of the “free-market” capitalist system that has led even Alan Greenspan to acknowledge that the system is flawed. 1 That system is literally and imminently threatening to destroy life on the planet as we know it. Yet most of us who live within it are deeply colonized by its supporting myths. We need different structures, with different supporting stories, to live beyond it.
Democracy Now often presents a radical view of things like economics and climate change, yet consistently goes to liberal, white, unchallenging feminist spokespeople from large organizations when there’s a “women’s issue” to cover. 2 In this moment, deeply multi-issue, holistic feminisms have a lot to offer in conversations around global capitalism and climate justice. Feminisms that challenge gender binaries, feminists who integrate supposedly opposite genders into our wholes; feminisms that connect questions about limited roles based on gender to questions about all kinds of borders and cages; feminisms that interrogate gazes and objectification; feminisms that see how all abuses of power, and all violences, and all kinds of liberation, are related—feminist voices concerned with paradigm shifts around power and resource sharing are needed in spaces like Democracy Now—feminist voices whose vision is holistic, cooperative rather than competitive, collaborative rather than individualistic.
- “Greenspan Admits ‘Flaw’ to Congress, Predicts More Economic Problems” on PBS Newshour Website (originally aired October 23, 2008).[↑]
- Ditto for LGBT issues, where recent coverage bizarrely focuses on inclusion of gays and lesbians in the U.S. military, an institution otherwise vehemently critiqued on the show.[↑]
