by Sophia Gumbs

Wangari Maathai

In her 2004 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, Professor Maathai commented that “protecting and restoring the environment contributes to peace; it is peace work. . .  . I always felt that our work was not simply about planting trees. It was about inspiring people to take charge of their environment, the system that governed them, their lives, and their future.” 

Professor Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) was a well-known enviromental activist, professor, author, and feminist from Nyeri, Kenya. She was a professor of Veterinary Anatomy and was the chair of the department at the University of Nairobi. She wrote several books, including The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience, Unbowed: A Memoir, The Challenge for Africa, and Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World. She was chair of the National Council of Women of Kenya (1981-1987), at which point the seed was planted– pun intended ;)– which would lead to the founding of her eco-feminist organization for community-based planting of trees to combat poverty and promote environmental health: the Green Belt Movement. 

The Green Belt Movement was founded in response to the calls of rural women in Kenya who were facing challenges with environmental-related food insecurity, issues with the water supply, and the inaccessibility of firewood. The GBM organized women from these communities to plant trees together, which helped to address some of the issues they were facing, bring them together in community, provide them with compensation, and improve the environmental health and services in their communities. 

Wangari Maathai is my eco-shero because she taught me to look to my own culture, my own people, and my own community for solutions to the problems we face: all of the tools we need to be healthy and to take care of the environment which we depend on can be found within our own communities, customs, and selves.

Vandana Shiva

Dr. Vandana Shiva earned her Physics degree from the University of Punjab and her Ph.D from the University of Western Ontario. She founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, which does research in India around both environmental and social issues (and, inevitably, their overlap) in conjunction with local social movements and community-members. Dr. Shiva also founded Navdanya, which has served farmers, including women farmers, across India in addition to conserving native seed and championing fair trade. She has written a number of books, including but not limited to The Violence of the Green Revolution, Monocultures of the Mind, Biopiracy, Stolen Harvest, Water Wars, and Staying Alive. 

Dr. Shiva has carried her womanhood and sisterhood at the forefront of her work: she founded the gender unit of the International Centre for Mountain Development, helped found the Women Environment and Development Organization, and launched (within Navdanya) Diverse Women for Diversity, a local, national, and global program focused on both biological and cultural diversity as well as access in the food and water systems. 

Dr. Shiva comes from an ancestry and community of environmental stewardship and care: her mother was a farmer, her father fought to conserve forests, and women from her home community in the Garhwal Himalaya organized in resistance– the Chipko Movement– to deforestation in the Himalayan region which had been making their daily tasks much more difficult. I consider Dr. Shiva an eco-shero because she lives through a deep understanding that we are one with the Earth, that Her fate is tied up in and determinant of ours, and that we are happiest, healthiest, and most vibrant as humans and human cultural communities when Earth is allowed to sprout diverse and natural fruits– literally and figuratively.

Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke is a well-recognized indigenous American environmental and political activist focused on sustainability and indigenous justice and cultural-informing in development, energy, and food systems. She was schooled at Harvard University and Antioch University. She serves as Program Director for the organization Honor the Earth, and she founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project in her own community, the White Earth reservation in Minnesota. The Project aims to preserve the land and cultural traditions of the Anishinaabeg, and it has legally returned more than a thousand acres of stolen and occupied indigenous land. 

LaDuke does work to defend indigenous food plants against corporate “ownership” and genetic adjustment. She founded and has served on the board of the Indigenous Women’s Network, amplifying the interests and contributions of indigenous girls and women and centering them in the movements for indigenous land sovereignty, food sovereignty, cultural-spiritual sovereignty, and environmental and social justice for indigenous communities. 

LaDuke is also a farmer of indigenous food, and has been part of indigenous-centered movements battling alien genetically modified rice varieties being grown on indigenous land and oil pipelines being built through indigenous land and water. LaDuke has written many books, including and not limited to Recovering the Sacred, All Our Relations, and Last Standing Woman. 

Nina Gualinga

Nina Gualinga is a young Kichwa indigenous Amazonian woman who has been central in the indigenous rights, environmental, anti-capitalist, and eco-feminist movements in Ecuador. A community of women from her home of Sarayaku recently sued the Ecuadorian government and successfully forced the Ecuadorian military and oil companies out of their land after experiencing an invasion of their land, deforestation, displacement, extreme (tw) sexual violence, and torture. She has specifically been focused on oil extraction in indigenous communities, with her community of Kichwa women and their activism as a beacon of hope, family, community, freedom, action, and justice. 

Gualinga and her fellow Kichwa women have a vision for the world– sumak kawsay– which imagines and moves toward a future in which capitalism has been defeated and replaced with communities free to live culturally- and spiritually- rich lives, shaped by the ancestors and their knowledge, in love and care for Earth and Her caretaking power. 

Nina Gualinga is my eco-shero because she is part of an international visibility-producing, radical, deeply liberating movement of small ethnicities and communities in the Amazon, in Ecuador, in South America and beyond. She and her community center women and womanhood in their radical anti-capitalist, anti-colonial resistance: Sarayaku is a birthplace, and the Kichwa a mother, of eco-feminism, a triumphant and deeply spiritual response to the tragic calls of neo-colonialism, capitalism, extractionism, racism, Judeo-Christian hegemony, and beyond.

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a black, lesbian, radical feminist organizer and poet from New York and of diasporic black migrant background. She has written a number of works, including but not limited to Uses Of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power, Sister Outsider: Essays And Speeches, and Need: A Chorale For Black Women Voices. 

In her book The Cancer Journals, written in light of and grounded in her experience of breast cancer, Lorde shows herself to be a pioneer of intersectional and womanist breakthrough movements concerned with the environment and, more specifically, with the interconnected web-like relationship between the social, class, gender, sexual, racial, and earthly, natural experiences of multiply-marginalized people. Lorde spearheaded this womanist, black-forward, lesbian-forward, woman-forward, poor-forward practice of Earth stewardship, respect, and especially revolutionary grassroots mobilization for the Earth and for marginalized, exploited people. 

Lorde’s art and theory have deeply impacted me, and I detect spiritual and physical grounding in Earth in all of her words, whether they be about race, gender, sexuality, or class. She taught me that my and/or my comrades’ experiences of marginalization, racialization, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, etcetera can be healed through building spiritual, physical, and socio-cultural relationships with Earth. She taught me too that our resistance to oppression– through community-building, radical organizing, healing, and communal love and accountability– can be rooted and can draw some of their strength and power from those relationships we build with Earth.