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By Bobbie Willis Imagine that there are no grocery or convenience stores and that the better part of your day revolves around collecting food, water and wood or other fuel for fire and heat. If there were any problems with your water source or the soil in which your food and fuel were growing, you would be immediately aware of and affected by those problems. This is the scenario for women all over the world who, in tending to hearth and home, have become drawn into and involved with issues concerning the environment. The relationship between women and natural resources draws its strength not from biology — that is, not because women are born female — but from gender and the socially created roles that continue to fall to women in households, communities and ecosystems throughout the world.
PIELC 2003 Next week, March 6-9, the 21st annual Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) will bring together more than 4,000 activists, attorneys, students, scientists and concerned citizens from more than 50 countries around the globe to share their experience and expertise. There will be a strong contingent of domestic and, through collaboration with Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (E-LAW), international women environmentalists attending this year's conference. PIELC is organized solely by the volunteers of Land Air Water, a student environmental law society, and is sponsored by Friends of Land Air Water, a nonprofit organization. The conference theme, Environmental (in)Justice in the Global Village, honors the goal of listening to all voices in the environmental movement. UO law students Julie Meyer, Derek Rieman, Damien Hermecz and Jeremy Arey are serving as co-chairs for PIELC 2003. Meyer says that organizers knew early on they wanted an overarching, international theme to provide the conference's direction. "We wanted to emphasize the international nature of the movement," she says. Meyer also says that the theme is appropriate given the current state of world affairs. She is excited about the participation of so many women as keynote speakers and discussion panelists. "We hope that by recognizing these voices, it can help [these women] in their work and inspire other women to get started at the grassroots level," says Meyer.
Woman's Work All over the world, women have primary responsibility for rearing children and for providing enough resources to meet children's needs for nutrition, health care and schooling. In the rural areas of developing countries, women are also managers of essential household resources such as clean water, fuel for cooking and heating and fodder for domestic animals. Women grow vegetables, fruits and grains for consumption and also for sale — often, as in much of Africa, producing most of the staple crops. In Southeast Asia, women provide 90 percent of the labor for rice cultivation, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Ellen Dorsey, director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pa., says that the relationship between women and the environment makes sense on many levels. "Women understand the impact of environmental change on family health and function," says Dorsey. Environmental threats to the environment are, in essence, threats to family. Thus, says Dorsey, "Women have to deal with the impacts of environmental change. In the 1890s … it was women who started interest in the first regulatory measures of the industrial movement." With regards to the role of American women in the environmental movement as compared to women around the world, Dorsey says the one constant is that "women do not have access to power the way men do." She says, "I think women historically respond to crises at a community and household level, and they organize on a community, household and grassroots level, too." This holds true domestically and internationally. Dorsey believes that women will lead, and are in fact already leading the environmental health movement. She says, "We are seeing increasing incidents of environment-related illnesses affecting women and children. What was once a one in 22 occurrence of breast cancer is now one in eight. The last 20 years have seen a 10.8 percent increase in children's cancers." With such statistics around family health, it makes sense that women would become more strongly involved in the global environmental movement.
E-LAW & PIELC In 1989, public interest lawyers from 10 countries founded E-LAW. These lawyers had worked together through the public interest law conference, and as they talked, they discovered that communities in their countries faced similar environmental challenges. They realized that if they could share strategies and legal and scientific information across borders, they could promote environmental protection more effectively.
E-LAW gives public interest lawyers and scientists the skills and resources they need to protect the environment through law. Communications Director Maggie Keenan says E-LAW today serves as a hub connecting environmental lawyers all over the world. It provides technological resources and assistance that allow these public interest advocates to help one another no matter where they are. An E-LAW member under threat of arrest for advocacy in Eastern Europe, for example, can quickly and easily access advice and support from all over the world through the E-LAW network. A big challenge for environmental lawyers worldwide is getting governments to enforce laws already on the books. E-LAW facilitates the sharing of success stories. Today, more than 300 public interest advocates from
60 countries participate in the network. These advocates, working
in their home countries, know best how to protect the local environment.
By giving grassroots March 2-6, just before PIELC, 58 E-LAW grassroots advocates from 34 countries will arrive in Eugene to participate in the 2003 E-LAW Annual International Meeting in Yachats. Coordinating international travel for 58 people is, in itself, quite a feat for the less-than-a-dozen E-LAW crew. "Right now, we have two visas denied," says E-LAW staff attorney Jennifer Gleason. But she feels hopeful, even confident, that communication from Peter DeFazio's office to the two embassies in question will clear up the visa problems. E-LAW's staff notes that the state of world affairs has made it that much more complicated to organize this kind of an international meeting. Both Gleason and Keenan, though, are excited in spite of the obstacles. "It's an amazing group of people," they both agree, and the International Meeting has the feeling of a reunion of friends and family. After the International Meeting, many of these advocates will participate as panelists and keynote speakers at the PIELC.
Women of the World A short list of the remarkable women from both near and far who will be in Eugene for PIELC and E-LAW:
Attorney Carla Garcia Zendejas is based in Tijuana where she works with U.S. and Mexican NGOs on cross-border issues such as water monitoring, sustainable power plants, law reform, right to know, and public participation. Garcia Zendejas works with E-LAW on outreach and capacity building throughout Latin America. Dolores Huerta co-founded United Farm Workers of America, along with Cesar Chavez in 1962. Trained as a teacher, she turned to direct action to eliminate the brutal conditions of poverty that defined the lives of her young students in the 1950s. Huerta lobbied for the first law granting farm workers the right to collectively organize and bargain for better wages and conditions. She is still active in the fight for the rights of farm workers, women, and the environment. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho is the co-founder and director of the Institute of Science and Society (ISIS), a nonprofit organization working for social responsibility and sustainable approaches in science. ISIS initiated the "Open Letter from World Scientists," which demands a moratorium on releases of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), a ban on patents on life-forms and living processes, and support for sustainable agriculture. Attorney Rizwana Hasan is director of programs at the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA). She was recently invited to speak in the United Arab Emirates about initiating public interest environmental law in that country. She is a member of Women and Environment Task Force for the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development. Fatima Jibrell, executive director of Horn Relief, has faced war, drought and harassment while working to organize women and protecting natural resources in Somalia. She achieved a major victory by securing an enforced ban on the export of charcoal from the Puntland government in northeast Somalia. Jibrell received a 2002 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work and leadership in creating an environmental movement to protect diminishing natural resources in Somalia. Prof. Svitlana Kravchenko of the Ukraine is the UO's 2002-2004 Carlton & Wilberta Savage Visiting Professor in International Relations and Peace, where she directs a program called Human Rights for ALL. Kravchenko is founder of Ecopravo-Lviv, one of the first two public-interest environmental law organizations established in the entire continent of Eurasia (Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union). As president of Ecopravo-Lviv and E-LAW Ukraine, Kravchenko trains citizens, officials, legislators, and judges to recognize the environmental rights of citizens and to help build a modern Ukraine with an environmentally sustainable economy. Mercedes "Meche" Lu of Peru is a trained biochemist and pharmacist. As E-LAW Science Circuit Rider for Latin America, Lu collaborates with advocates in their offices across the region to help protect citizens from the health impacts of industrial pollution, oil exploitation, mining, leaded gas and toxic pesticides. Russian attorney Vera Mischenko, co-founder of Ecojuris, Russia's first public interest law organization, and winner of a 2000 Goldman Environmental Prize, is a legal pioneer working to protect Russia's environment through law. Mischenko brought the first successful lawsuits against the Russian government in defense of citizens' environmental and health rights. Since 1993, E-LAW has supported Mischenko's work to protect native forests, halt ill-conceived development projects and challenge multinational oil companies.
Vandana Shiva is the founder and director of Research Foundation for Science Technology and Natural Resource Policy. Shiva won the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, known as "the alternative Nobel Prize" for her work in connecting women and the environmental movement. Shiva is an adviser to governments in her native India and abroad, and a member of the International Forum on Globalization, Indian National Environmental Council, Women's Environment and Development Organization, and Third World Network. Founder of Navdanya, a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds, she is concerned about the pirating of indigenous people's rights to use their natural resources. Shiva works with communities to stop threats to forests and agricultural land. Noel Sturgeon is chair of the Department of Women's Studies at Washington State University. She has written on the ecofeminist and the anti-militaristic movements. Her book, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, and Transnational Environmental Politics, analyzes the ecofeminist understanding of nature, gender and race to evaluate their effects on movement coalitions and environmental consciousness. Sturgeon has also been an activist in the women's peace movement. Panels & Workshops The four-day Public Interest Environ-mental Law Conference includes more than 125 panels, workshops and multimedia presentations addressing nearly the entire spectrum of environmental law and advocacy. Topics include: Forest protection and ecological restoration. Grazing and mining reform. Labor and human rights. Air and water pollution. Native American treaty rights. Globalization and "free" trade. Environmental justice. Corporate responsibility. Marine wilderness. International environmental law. Water rights and dam removal. Oil and gas litigation. Genetic engineering. Urban growth. For conference schedule and information, visit www.pielc.org,
or call PIELC at
The Impact on Women Women have the responsibility for managing household resources, but they typically do not have managerial control. Given the variety of women's daily interactions with the environment, they are the most keenly affected by its degradation. For example: Deforestation or contamination increases the time women must spend seeking fuelwood or safe, clean water, and increases women's risk of water-borne disease. In the state of Gujurat, India, women now spend four or five hours a day collecting fuelwood, where previously they would have done so once every four to five days. Soil erosion, water shortage and crop failures reduce harvest yields; soil exhausted from overuse reduces the productivity of household gardens. Toxic chemicals and pesticides in air, water and earth are responsible for a variety of women's health risks. They enter body tissues and breast milk, through which they are passed on to infants. In a village in China's Gansu province, discharges from a state-run fertilizer factory have been linked to a high number of stillbirths and miscarriages. Water pollution in three Russian rivers is a factor in the doubling of bladder and kidney disorders in pregnant women, and in Sudan a link has been established between exposure to pesticides and perinatal mortality — with the risk higher among women farmers. In urban settings in particular, air and water pollution can be extreme, and sanitation and waste treatment poor or non-existent, presenting new threats to health, particularly for women, who have the highest levels of exposure. In the Indian cities of Delhi and Agra, for example, drinking water comes from rivers heavily polluted by DDT and other pesticides. From U.N. report, "The State of World Population 2001"
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Woman's Place
