Tag: Colonialism

  • An Invitation to Rethink Thanksgiving

    Every November, roughly 46 million turkeys are killed in the United States for the sake of “American Tradition.” These are curious, socially intelligent birds capable of recognizing flock mates, forming hierarchies, and communicating with unique vocalizations, yet most are reduced to a dining table centerpiece, living just 14–20 weeks before slaughter despite a natural lifespan of 10–15 years. Their short lives, filled with fear and pain, expose the uncomfortable truth that gratitude and violence are braided together in the modern Thanksgiving ritual.

    Talking about turkeys means confronting the systems—colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist—that shape their lives and deaths. Thanksgiving, too, cannot be separated from the mythologies that erase Indigenous histories, stewardship, and struggles for sovereignty. This holiday invites us to rethink what, and who, we actually celebrate, honor, and consume.

    Photo by Meelika Marzzarella on Unsplash

    Most U.S. turkeys live in industrial sheds holding 6,000–20,000 birds and are genetically engineered to grow unnaturally heavy and fast. Their bodies become so large that many cannot stand without pain, often developing joint damage, leg deformities, and heart failure; because of these proportions, they are bred almost exclusively through forced artificial insemination, with their natural social and reproductive lives erased and relabeled as “efficiency.”

    Packed tightly together, birds are subjected to “management” practices like beak trimming, desnooding, and detoeing, which remove sensitive body parts without anesthesia and can cause long-term pain, altered behavior, and difficulty eating or moving.

    Most turkeys raised for Thanksgiving live on litter soaked with feces and urine under artificial lighting designed to maximize growth; their rapid weight gain often outpaces skeletal development, and many collapse from heart or lung problems. This is not tradition. It is industrial design masquerading as holiday ceremony, where bodies are treated as commodities and exploited to produce life that exists only to generate profit, encapsulating patriarchal capitalist values.

    The harm of industrial turkey production does not exist in a vacuum; it is built on stolen land, exploited labor, and ecological harm —precisely the systems that ecofeminism, antispeciesism, and degrowth aim to dismantle. Barns, slaughterhouses, and feedlots sit on land taken from Indigenous peoples which are converted into monoculture grain fields, while underpaid and often migrant workers shoulder the physical risk and trauma required to keep cheap meat flowing.

    EPA analysis of animal feeding operations documents how these facilities generate concentrated manure, air pollution, and water contamination, turning nearby communities and ecosystems into sacrifice zones. Turkey manure is a significant source of pollution, and animal agriculture overall drives at least 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions while occupying about 80% of U.S. agricultural land when accounting for all livestock and their feed crops.

    Thanksgiving intensifies this logic of overproduction: ever-bigger birds, subsidized grain, and millions of pounds of turkey waste each year. In a staggering display of patriarchal capitalism’s disregard for life, it is estimated that 8 million turkeys will be thrown in the trash this Thanksgiving. In this context refusing turkey becomes more than a dietary preference; it is a small but powerful act of rejecting growth-obsessed holiday consumption in favor of justice and planetary boundaries.

    And yet, as animal agriculture continues to threaten ecological stability, this year’s H5N1 bird flu outbreaks expose how fragile the turkey industry really is. Since late summer 2025, between 2 and 2.2 million turkeys have been infected or mass-killed, leaving the U.S. with its smallest turkey flock in ~40 years. Zoonotic outbreaks like H5N1 are not random accidents; they are features of a system that concentrates animals, waste, and workers in the same polluted spaces.

    These mass culls—often carried out through ventilation shutdown—are presented as “biosecurity,” but they are predictable fallout of confinement, genetic uniformity, and high-density sheds, as discussed in my last post “What We Do to Nature Makes Us Sick – Literally.”

    While entire barns of turkeys are being killed by diseases produced under colonial agricultural conditions, the Thanksgiving myth of Pilgrims and peaceful feasts continues to sanitize the very systems that inflicted parallel harms on Indigenous peoples. It frames settlers as generous hosts while erasing the Wampanoag and other Indigenous peoples’ harvest ceremonies, land relations, and histories of epidemic and dispossession.

    By hiding the ongoing theft and enclosure of Indigenous territories, the Thanksgiving story obscures how industrial animal agriculture depends on those same lands for feed crops, confinement facilities, and slaughter plants.

    Additionally, Indigenous relationships with turkeys stretch back more than 2,000 years and offer a radically different perspective of these animals than what is normalized by Thanksgiving as its celebrated today. Historical records show that Indigenous societies in the Americas valued the birds so highly that they tamed them at least twice for companionship and participation in ceremonies.

    This contrast makes clear that the way turkeys are treated today is not natural or inevitable—it is a political and economic choice.

    This web of ecological and social harm reveals that struggles for land, animal liberation, and bodily autonomy are never separate. Colonial systems reshape landscapes and species to fit extractive needs, while the same logic reaches into gender and labor. What happens to the land, and what happens to the animals forced onto it, mirrors what happens to the people whose labor and autonomy are also controlled.

    Under this lens, the Thanksgiving rituals that rely on women’s unpaid domestic labor and men’s authority at the carving knife become easier to recognize as extensions of patriarchal and colonial power.

    Ecofeminism names these shared roots and insists that none of these violences can be confronted in isolation. Instead of systems built on domination, extraction, and sacrifice zones, it asks us to move toward plant-based, low-impact, and degrowth-aligned ways of living that are grounded in care, interdependence, and respect for all beings.

    Reimagining Thanksgiving through this lens means refusing to isolate animal suffering from land theft, climate chaos, and labor exploitation.

    Supporting Indigenous land defenders, eating plant-based seasonal foods, and telling honest histories become interconnected acts of resistance to a system that treats life as expendable.

    In place of a holiday that normalizes mistreatment, these choices move us toward traditions rooted in reciprocity, repair, and the shared right of all beings to live and thrive.

  • Lusted After, Never Loved: How Patriarchy Undervalues Women and Nature

    Photo by Guzmán Barquín on Unsplash

    In our highly modernized urban landscapes, the 21st-century man often yearns for the wild adventures of imperial explorers from centuries ago. On weekends, they flee the drudgery of their 9-to-5 routines, seeking solace in nature’s grandeur—long-distance running through fields, climbing to the highest peaks, and gliding down snow-capped slopes. These landscapes promise beauty and joy, and an escape from the monotonous reality of daily life.

    Yet, beneath this pursuit of beauty and excitement lies a troubling pattern. The earth becomes a playground for exploitation, a backdrop for thrill and profit, with its habitats rarely cared for and the boundaries of the planet ignored and disrespected. Too often, the well-being of nature is neglected, just as the well-being of women is disregarded and undervalued.

    This is not a relationship of reverence, but one of conquest—where nature is engaged with only through doing, proving, and performing. In this worldview, stillness is weakness, and appreciation without extraction is unthinkable.

    The male voyager who dreams of visiting the earth’s most scenic destinations simultaneously ignores the degraded ecosystems that lie in between. He prefers that the deforested habitats with eroded soil, reduced fertility, and inability to support plant life any longer remain out of view— like a woman who no longer serves his fantasy. Whether it’s the body of a woman or the body of the Earth, what is not useful to him is ignored.

    As men set off on expeditions to indulge in personal growth and discovery by exploring their “motherland,” we women are left to wonder why we have no fatherland. If a woman yearned for the same experience, she would first have to reckon with the threat of violence—from the very men who claim the right to roam without fear.

    Under patriarchy, many men relate to women the same way they relate to nature: they desire only select fragments of the experience, never the whole. Their gaze lingers on isolated parts of the female body, stripped of emotion, thought, or need. Likewise, their relationship with nature fixates on curated landscapes that offer escape and pleasure—spaces that ask nothing in return. In both cases, the full being is ignored, left uncared for, while he takes what he wants and offers no restoration or consideration in return.

    Just as patriarchal systems fragment and objectify women, the dominant scientific paradigm dissects nature into categories and data points, stripping it of spirit, wholeness, and complexity. Male-dominated science systems, especially under colonial and capitalist influence, have long sought to classify, control, and extract rather than to listen, witness, and honor. The desire to “know” nature is often driven not by reverence, but by a need to dominate—just as women are judged and placed into boxes instead of being embraced in the full spectrum of our experience. In both cases, mystery is feared, and complexity is flattened to serve power.

    While it’s important to recognize how Western science has historically been shaped by colonial and patriarchal systems, it’s equally vital to honor the truth in many of its findings—especially when they reveal the urgent need for ecological care.

    Scientists warn that ecosystems may begin collapsing as soon as the 2030s under high-warming scenarios. Yet nearly half of conservative men deny the validity of climate science and the integrity of these projections. Just as the needs of nature are overlooked and seen as exaggerated under patriarchal systems—the stories and rights of women are often dismissed as false and treated with the same disregard.

    I have been confidently reminded by countless men in my life that nature has a way of healing itself as justification for their lack of concern about environmental remediation or protection. But nature can only heal itself from the current level of degradation if there are actions to support the healing process. This may include afforestation and reforestation projects that improve soil health, water cycle regulation, and carbon sequestration.

    This logic, used to excuse inaction, mirrors how society treats women: assuming we will keep nurturing, healing, and caretaking, even as we’re denied support ourselves. Women provide free labor in domestic settings with little support in place to sustain these efforts. The conditioned emotional unavailability of men masked as masculinity leaves women carrying not just the burdens of the home, but the parts of ourselves that men refuse to hold.

    Just as women’s caregiving labor is invisible yet foundational, nature performs essential labor that goes largely unrecognized. Ecosystem services like filtering air, cycling water, regulating the climate, and enabling food production are treated as infinite and free, even though they are the very systems that make human life possible. These life-sustaining processes, much like the domestic and emotional work women perform, are rarely accurately valued, protected, or even acknowledged.

    This pattern of denial and devaluation is no accident— it’s embedded in a larger system that places profit above preservation, and domination above care. Patriarchal capitalism has grossly undervalued nature for much of its existence. Global natural capital has been estimated to be worth $125 trillion yet, nature markets today are valued at only $9.8 trillion.

    As millions of acres of virgin land are opened to oil drilling, creating a product that will only further degrade the land, man’s inability to see intrinsic value without exploitation mirrors how he treats the women in his life. The global economy is built upon a logic that profits from domination and renders care invisible, with billion dollar industries built on the exploitation of the natural world and the exploitation of women—making it fundamentally reliant on undervaluing both.

    Like nature, our beauty is appreciated by man, providing experiences of pleasure and joy. We become the memories that make life worth living. But, we are rarely truly listened to, cared for, or recognized for our full value. We are lusted after, never loved— celebrated for what we offer, but not honored for who we are.

    As a woman, I cherish my beauty. I know its light and magnetism. It has given me connection, expression, and even power. But beauty should not be a reason for exploitation, nor a barrier to being cared for. I want to be held in my wholeness—my strength, my abilities, my sorrow and joy, my stillness and storm. I deserve to be cared for, not conquered.

    Like a goodhearted, patient woman who puts up with the constant chaos of a fiery man, nature is expected to do the same. To tolerate constant growth and expansion that feeds the desire for economic gain and domination harbored by men in patriarchal capitalist systems.

    Our societal structures support relationships devoid of genuine care and connection, enabling further disregard for human and ecological needs on a larger scale. This dysfunction reveals the urgent need for systemic change that confronts the intertwined roots of gender-based oppression and environmental degradation.

    Despite how patriarchal systems have long exploited women’s caring and healing capacities—without recognition or support—these traits remain powerful forces for transformation.

    Compassion, empathy, and emotional depth—qualities often labelled as “feminine”—must be revalued and woven into the foundations of any system that seeks sustainability, justice, and collective healing. These traits are not weaknesses to be exploited, but strengths that offer a path forward—when shared, respected, and integrated across societal structures.

    Throughout history, women have played a critical role in preserving the earth’s health—not just metaphorically, but through direct action. Women in rural and indigenous communities often possess deep knowledge of local ecosystems and have led protective efforts to sustain them.

    For example, in 1973, in the forests of the Indian Himalayas, a group of rural women led by Gaura Devi launched the Chipko Movement, which involved physically hugging trees to prevent them from being demolished. Their act of resistance was not only a defense of the forest, but of their community’s water, soil, and food systems. This was an embodied form of care—one that shows how women’s ecological knowledge and care translates into radical protection.

    This movement, like many others led by women across the globe, reminds us that care is not passive—it is defensive, assertive, and necessary for survival. In contrast to the extractive logic of patriarchal capitalism, these actions reassert a model of relationship based on interdependence and protection, rather than conquest.

    As women under patriarchal capitalism, we must be unwavering in our knowing of our own self worth. We are the creators of life—yet we must still fight to have our contributions recognized, our rights respected, and our full humanity honored. Just as we rise to defend our own dignity, we must rise to defend the ecosystems that sustain all life on Earth.