Feminism and Ecology: Realism and Rhetoric in the Discourses of Nature

Ecology and constructivism are motivated by broadly shared political aspirations and subscribe to similar critiques of technocratism, patriarchy. and "instrumental rational-ity. " But they diverge considerably in respect to the discourses they offer on "nature." By staging an encounter between ecological argument and feminist comtructivist theory, this article seeks to illuminate, and to indicate the means of resolving, the ontological tensions between these respective critiques of modernity. It recognizes that the construc-tivist emphasis on the "discursivity " of nature offers an important corrective to the more simplistic, and potentially reactionary, aspects of ecological rhetoric but defends a realist perspective as essential to the coherence of any gender theory and politics. Constructivist theories of knowledge and technology would seem in many ways to complement the argument of the ecology movement and to be motivated by similar political aspirations. Both have challenged the domi-nance in Western culture of technocratic conceptions of human progress and the means to secure it, and both have sought to expose the partial and manipulative dimensions of scientific rationality with a view to correcting its distorting and destructive social and environmental effects. Those construc-tivist approaches, moreover, that have developed under the influence of feminism, and that have drawn attention to the masculine bias of technologi-cal modes of cognition and the practices they sustain, are clearly consonant with the ecological emphasis on the links between patriarchal oppression and the destruction of nature. Yet despite these affinities of political outlook, there are considerable tensions of a more philosophical character between the constructivist empha-sis on the constitutive role of culture in the creation of &dquo;truth,&dquo; &dquo;reality,&dquo; and &dquo;value&dquo; and the ecological emphasis on the cultural destruction of a nature conceived as domain of independent reality and intrinsic value. We migh