Wise Women for Loving Nature

From Rachel Carson and Julia Kristeva to Rebecca Solnit and Nandi Chinna, the writers and artists featured here are ‘patron saints’, Rod Giblett shows, of a special aspect or approach to environmental conservation and contemplation: femopolitical ecology. Through their bodies of work, these women make a collective call and create a compelling case and manifesto for loving nature, especially its fertile and life-giving functions. This is ‘femopolitical ecology’, the political ecology women create in writing or artworks for all people that deconstruct and decolonize the gendered construction of reality, not only of living beings, but also of processes, places and spaces, and nurtures love for them.The truly transnational group of women come from a vast range of backgrounds across the north-south divide. Their work comes from a variety of disciplines and approaches, including psychoanalysis and feminism, and uses different materials, media and genres, such as poetry, painting, novels, essays, textiles and baskets. As Giblett argues, all of these Wise Women for Loving Nature have a common concern with having and showing respect and reverence for the creativity and fertility of the life of the earth. Many write or create artworks expressing and nurturing love for wetlands and share a common critique of the masculinist, misogynist and patriarchal fascination with death, especially in the modern, capitalist, corporate-state cult of death manifested in war and the war against nature, including people and places. They sometimes collaborate with each other and often corroborate each other, creating fempolitical ecology.

Rod Giblett is Honorary Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Deakin University, Australia, and author of Modern Melbourne: City and Site of Nature and Culture (2020), Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Waking to Nature with Thoreau and Benjamin: Or, Psychopolitical Ecology (Bloomsbury, 2025).