The Gaia Hypothesis and Ecofeminism: Culture, Reason, and Symbiosis - 1 views
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Ihering Alcoforado on 02 Jun 10In our time, the human species has acquired the capability to destroy both human life and much of the biosphere that hosts it. This potential is even more dangerous as the processes of globalization unfold, especially in their corporate and oligarchic modes, which contribute to increased poverty and environmental degradation. This situation makes the development of a new mode of reason necessary. In this article, I propose to analyze the discursive continuity between the Gaia hypothesis and ecofeminism as a space from where this alternative mode of reason is emerging. This alternative mode of reason, I claim, posits symbiosis rather than independence as the basic form of relatedness between individual entities. Symbiotic reason, I suggest, is exponentially feminine, for women's bodies are predisposed to be two-in-one-to be hosts to other bodies in pregnancy.[ 1] Symbiotic reason understands life as an interrelated web in which each individual is a small node that exists thanks to the others' presence. Life resembles a Deleuzian rhizome, a multiplicity of elements in a free-range order, with each element different from the next, yet all recognizably part of the whole.[ 2] If symbiosis is the axiom on which the new rational mode of thinking rests, then symbiotic reason is ecofeminist.[ 3] Ecofeminism, short for ecological feminism, emerged from a feminist interest in science - the area of knowledge that claims reason and rationality as its own turf. In the 1980s, feminist science studies exposed the white male perspective behind the alleged objectivity of Western science.[ 4] In the 1990s, ecofeminism evolved as a mode of feminist discourse concerned with ecological issues that Western science was unable to resolve.[ 5] While major agents of corporate globalization such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are accustomed to treating the Earth as assemblage of consumable resources, many ecofeminist philosophers are keenly aware that the Earth may ve