Fertile Ground: Women, Earth, and the Limits of Control

In Diamond's far-reaching eco-feminist vision, the struggle for women's rights is inseparable from the struggle for ecological sanity, the eradication of militarism and opposition to the industrialized, wealthy nations' exploitation of poor countries. Her passionate, challenging manifesto critiques mainstream feminism which, she contends, has become stalemated by its contention that women's freedom resides in gaining control over women's bodies and sexuality. Diamond, who teaches in the University of Oregon's political science department, views new genetic screening techniques as part of a masculinist ``medical heroics'' that threatens the well-being and dignity of women. After scanning the damaging effects of agribusiness and Western-style development on traditional societies and their ecosystems, she outlines a diversity of alternative practices and protests--organic farming, small dam projects, community-based child care networks, campaigns for land redistribution in India, a women's ``peace camp'' on an English military base--that offer the possibility of sustainable social justice and democratic empowerment. (July)