Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"The National Rescue Chilan Cypress Forests Campaign between 1998 and 2000 was one of Taiwan's most high-profile environmental movements. The campaign began as a concerted effort to put a stop to the operations implemented by the Veterans Affairs Commission, the managing authority of the old-growth forests in Chilan. The environmental activists then went on to demand a new national park in the area, which was approved by the central government in 2000. Focusing on the ways in which activists articulated the rationale for their protest against a seemingly technical issue, this discussion centres on the discursive themes in the activists' narration of relevant events and environmental history of endemic cypress forests. Drawing on Luhmann's thinking, it argues that an assessment of such discourses should take into consideration the protest/issue distinction specific to modern social movements."

This article draws on research at an eco/feminist peace camp set up to facilitate blockades against clear-cut logging in coastal temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada in the early 1990s. The camp was said to be based on feminist principles and sometimes these were even articulated as eco/feminist principles. The slippage between these terms provides a focus for my discussion. Specifically the article explores the apparent paradox of the sheer vitality of this eco/feminist activism, and in particular its insistence on international connections, in contrast to the widely circulating accounts of the end of feminism, and especially the end of global sisterhood, which emerged in the early 1990s. Thus this article is also necessarily about how recent histories of eco/feminism, including tensions between theory and activism, are narrated. I take as a departure point references to the work of Vandana Shiva and the Chipko movement which circulated in accounts of the camp, and explore ways in which eco/feminists might read such utterances as more than evidence of a naive and problematic universalism. I situate eco/feminism's internationalism genealogically in feminism and eco/feminism and read this as a counter-narrative to the ending of global sisterhood. Through paying attention to various movements, back and forth, between Clayoquot and Chipko, Canada and India, and drawing on Anna Tsing's notion of 'friction', I offer an account of what has been at stake in disavowals of the possibility of reading Chipko as eco/feminist, and suggest the importance of a more generous reading of eco/feminists' attention to the Chipko movement.