Patriarchy and Environmental Attitudes

One of the central claims made by ecofeminism is that abuse of the environment is linked to the abuse of the women and other marginalized groups. The patriarchal ideology establishes white western men as the dominant groups and then defines all other groups in relationship to them. The dominant group is thus the standard of personhood, while marginalized persons become “other.” To make either the environment or a group of people a target for abuse they must be defined in abjection to the dominant group, which is to say they must be defined by their exclusion from the dominant group and rendered the “other.” In contemporary US society, women and marginalized groups are defined as “other” in relationship to white men just as the environment is defined as “other” in relation to human activity. Thus, ecofeminists argued that the oppression of women and marginalized groups are linked to the abuse of the environment. One of the weaknesses of the ecofeminist paradigm is that many of its central claims lack empirical testing. The purpose of this study is to examine the link between patriarchal attitudes, and attitudes and behaviors relating to the environment. If the ecofeminist claim is correct, then higher levels of sexist and racist attitudes should be positively correlated with environmentally destructive behaviors and the exclusion of nature from the self-concept