Tag: Environmental Activism

  • What We Do to Nature Makes Us Sick — Literally

    With COVID-19 cases rising again globally and health agencies monitoring potential threats from bird flu (H5N1, H9N2) and yellow fever, global organizations — including the World Health Organization (WHO) — have recognized the ongoing risk. They recently signed a new Pandemic Agreement to improve preparedness, as high-threat infectious hazards continue to increase due to animal agriculture, deforestation, urbanization, and global wildlife trade.

    Photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash

    Research over the past several years, particularly the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Workshop Report on Biodiversity and Pandemics, has revealed how pandemic risk and biodiversity loss are interlinked consequences of unchecked ecological exploitation, economic growth, and lack of effective policy.

    These risks compound: habitat destruction not only accelerates species extinctions but creates more pathways for dangerous viruses to emerge, multiply, and move into human populations.

    Root Causes: How Human Activity Drives Spillover

    Over 70% of new diseases in people—and nearly all pandemics, like COVID-19—originate from animal microbes also known as “zoonoses”. These spillovers occur when human activities disrupt natural barriers, usually through activities like:

    Agricultural expansion. Converting natural habitats like forests and grasslands into farmland is responsible for over 30% of emerging disease events, making it one of the strongest predictors of spillover. Land use change like this causes increased contact between humans, livestock, and wildlife, which makes it easier for diseases to pass from wild animals to people (zoonotic spillover).

    Intensive livestock production. Factory farms crowd genetically similar animals together in unsanitary dwellings, creating ideal conditions for pathogens to spread and evolve. Animals in factory farms frequently suffer from a variety of illnesses, and many of these conditions often go unnoticed or untreated due to the sheer number of animals and unmanageable animal-to-worker ratios. These environments substantially increase the probability that a disease will jump from animals to humans.

    Deforestation. Clearing forests for agriculture, logging, or settlement destroys wildlife habitats and forces animals into closer proximity with people and livestock. More than 70% of deforestation is driven by agricultural expansion, particularly for grazing and feed crops.

    Urbanization. Rapid growth of cities creates densely populated areas where diseases can spread quickly and where expanding development pushes into formerly wild spaces, increasing human contact with wildlife.

    Global wildlife trade. The legal and illegal trade of wild animals transports pathogens across borders and brings stressed, diverse species into close quarters with humans, creating ideal spillover conditions.

    Together, these activities fragment habitats and expose people and livestock to roughly 1.7 million undiscovered viruses, an estimated 600,000 of which could infect humans.

    A World Wildlife Fund (WWF) analysis adds that pandemic risk is best understood as feedback loops: agricultural expansion, luxury wildlife demand, industrialization, and global trade all reinforce each other, making spillover not just a single event but the product of complex, interconnected systems.​

    Increasingly, scientists and policy leaders advocate for the “One Health” approach—a recognition that human, animal, and ecosystem health are inseparably connected. One Health calls for collaborative action across medicine, veterinary science, agriculture, and environmental protection, aiming to address the root causes of disease outbreaks and ecosystem collapse at their source rather than simply reacting to emergencies. 

    These root causes mirror the forces behind climate change and global inequality: weak regulation, extractive industries, and profit-driven systems that degrade the very ecosystems acting as our first line of defense.

    Animal Agriculture: A Major Driver of Climate Breakdown and Pandemic Risk

    Animal agriculture sits at the center of both ecological disruption and disease emergence, making it one of the most significant contributors to pandemic risk.

    Livestock farming is responsible for 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, produces 37% of human-caused methane, and drives widespread deforestation, water contamination, and biodiversity loss. As global meat consumption rises, the demand for land and feed crops intensifies, pushing agricultural expansion deeper into natural habitats.

    Industrial livestock operations also create ideal conditions for infectious disease evolution. Crowded, genetically similar animals enable viruses to spread rapidly and mutate. Many zoonotic pathogens — including avian and swine influenza and antibiotic-resistant bacteria — originated in high-density livestock systems. Live animal transport and global supply chains further amplify transmission risk, moving pathogens across borders at rapid speed.

    The ongoing surge in bird flu outbreaks illustrates these risks: in 2025, millions of chickens and turkeys in North America have been killed to contain infection as H5N1 spreads rapidly in crowded factory farms, which serve as hotspots for viral mutation and transmission. When avian flu is detected in a flock, authorities typically employ mass culling methods—such as gassing or suffocation—which kills every bird in the shed to halt the disease’s spread. This process highlights the normalization of suffering and waste in our food systems.

    Research consistently shows that transitioning toward plant-based food systems would reduce emissions, restore ecosystems, and significantly lower the risk of emerging pandemics.

    Structural Causes: Capitalism, Inequality, and Rising Risk

    As discussed in my previous post on climate and wealth inequality, ecological damage is not evenly caused or experienced. Pandemic risk follows the same pattern.

    Large-scale deforestation, industrial agriculture, and wildlife commodification are often financed and directed by high-consuming nations and powerful multinational corporations like JBS and Walmart. These actors profit from activities that degrade ecosystems, while the resulting disease and environmental risks are displaced onto communities.

    In a growth-focused global economy, capital flows into industries such as factory farming, fossil fuel extraction, mining, and wildlife trade — sectors that depend on cheap land, weak environmental regulation, and low-cost labor. As these industries expand into biodiversity-rich regions, they fragment ecosystems, displace wildlife, and intensify opportunities for spillover. Global supply chains built for speed and efficiency further entrench this dynamic by externalizing environmental and health costs onto exploited nations and communities.

    The very industries that degrade ecosystems and compromise community health channel their profits to corporations and wealthy nations, widening the gap between those who bear the consequences and those who reap the rewards.

    Many of the world’s spillover “hotspots” lie in tropical regions managed or inhabited by Indigenous and rural communities who often lack the political power to resist industrial expansion by dominant nations. As a result, these communities face polluted waterways, degraded land, inadequate health infrastructure, and increased exposure to zoonotic disease. When outbreaks occur, indigenous and rural communities experience disproportionate illness, loss of income, and long-term social disruption. Meanwhile, high-consuming nations continue to benefit from exploitation and the availability of cheap commodities, while displacing the risks elsewhere.

    The WWF highlights that protecting Indigenous land rights, supporting community-led resource management, and ensuring equitable participation in conservation are not simply justice issues—they are frontline strategies for pandemic prevention. Indigenous management consistently leads to better conservation outcomes, healthier forests, and—by extension—lower pandemic risk.

    Calls for pandemic justice echo those of the climate justice movement: those who benefit most from ecological destruction must bear the greatest responsibility for prevention, restoration, and reparative action.

    How U.S. Policy Has Increased Vulnerability

    If we learned anything from COVID-19 its that reactionary approaches to pandemics are slow, expensive, and inadequate to the scale of the threat (WHO). Instead, prevention must start with transforming the policies that drive ecosystem disruption.

    However, recent U.S. policy decisions under the Trump administration have amplified vulnerability to disease emergence and environmental harm simultaneously.

    For example, despite warnings from experts about the risk of foot-and-mouth disease in Argentinian cattle, the Trump administration moved forward with policies to expand beef imports from Argentina, a decision that raises the risk of introducing animal diseases into U.S. herds and exemplifies the prioritization of economic and trade interests over ecological and public health safety.

    The administration has also greatly weakened the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has resulted in reduced protections against pollution and habitat destruction across millions of acres, leaving vital wetlands and other ecosystems vulnerable to unsustainable development.

    Additionally, there have been significant cuts and delays to federal research funding for emerging infectious diseases, undermining efforts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies to develop new diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments, and diminishing the nation’s ability to monitor and respond to public health threats.​

    Finally, the U.S. withdrawal from the (WHO) disrupted global data sharing and international public health collaboration, creating funding gaps in vital programs, limiting U.S. influence over international health policy, and reducing coordination on pandemic preparedness with global partners.​.​

    These decisions mirror broader climate deregulation: short-term economic gains for those in power, long-term social, health and environmental risks for everyone else.

    Plant Based Diets as Resistance

    When governments prioritize corporate interests over ecological and public health, it is easy to feel powerless. Yet individual choices — especially the ways we eat and where we put our dollars — offer a powerful form of resistance. A plant-based diet directly withdraws support from the industries most responsible for both climate instability and pandemic risk.

    A plant-based diet reduces risk across multiple systems:

    • Lower pandemic risk: Reducing dependence on factory farming — one of the primary incubators of zoonotic disease — lowers the conditions that enable pathogens to spill over into human populations. Studies show that people eating primarily plant-based diets experience lower COVID-19 severity and improved immune outcomes.
    • Reduced land pressure: Animal agriculture uses 80% of global farmland but supplies less than 20% of calories. Shifting to plant-based diets frees vast areas of land for reforestation, ecosystem recovery, and carbon sequestration.
    • Climate mitigation: Plant-based diets reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 50%, while also decreasing water use, pollution, and resource depletion.
    • Biodiversity protection: Less demand for meat slows deforestation, protects wildlife habitats, and reduces landscape fragmentation — one of the strongest predictors of zoonotic spillover.

    Individual dietary choices can activate our collective power. Even small shifts — like choosing plant-based meals a few times per week — reduce pressure on natural habitats and act as a form of climate care.

    International health bodies like WHO, IPBES, and the One Health High-Level Expert Panel consistently affirm that addressing pandemic risk requires protecting ecosystems, reducing destructive land use, and prioritizing community well-being over extractive growth.

    Conclusion

    While plant-based diets strengthen pandemic and climate resilience at an individual level, systemic transformation is needed to address climate and pandemic risk on a global scale.

    The most effective pandemic mitigation strategies cited from IPBES to WHO, BMJ, and global One Health networks include:

    • Nature-first prevention: Restoring forests, ending deforestation, and protecting biodiversity hotspots maintain the ecological stability that prevents spillover. Healthy ecosystems act as protective shields against emerging infectious diseases.
    • Integrated One Health policies: Aligning human, animal, and environmental health strengthens surveillance, early detection, and coordinated responses across sectors. The One Health model is now widely recognized as essential for global pandemic preparedness.
    • Community-led conservation: Indigenous and frontline communities consistently achieve stronger conservation outcomes through place-based knowledge, stewardship, and long-term relationships with land. Their leadership protects biodiversity while strengthening social resilience.
    • Redirecting funding toward prevention: Investing billions annually in early-warning systems, ecological restoration, and public health infrastructure breaks the costly cycle of reactive crisis management. Prevention is more effective, equitable, and sustainable than emergency response.

    These solutions reflect the growing alignment between climate justice and pandemic prevention frameworks. Both demand a shift away from extractive, profit-driven models of growth and promote moving toward long-term ecological stability, community well-being, and global solidarity.

    Climate care is pandemic prevention. Biodiversity is a protective shield that stabilizes the climate, regulates ecosystems, and buffers humanity from disease. When we dismantle that shield, the consequences cascade through every aspect of life.

    The latest evidence, echoed by WWF, makes clear: The solutions that prevent pandemics are the same ones that restore justice and planetary health— restoring ecosystems, reducing reliance on animal agriculture, supporting Indigenous leadership, and enacting policies that prioritize people and the planet.

  • A Rebellious Return to Nature: Lessons from Hundertwasser’s Art and Activism

    Art has long served as a catalyst for change, connecting information to emotion and inspiring action. In the face of the climate crisis, human imagination may play a critical role in environmental activism by bridging creativity and science to drive transformation and innovation.

    Hundertwasser 1983

    The Science of Artistic Impact

    Several studies and projects support the idea that art can be a powerful driver for climate awareness.

    For example, research published in ScienceDirect demonstrates that artistic activism fosters emotional engagement, behavioral change, and civic participation. Additionally, the US Global Change Research Program has found that climate art exhibitions and educational programs can encourage communities to see themselves as part of the solution, inspiring both dialogue and action.

    Collaboration between arts and sciences transforms information into a sensory experience,  which makes it more likely that the information will elicit emotion and remain in our memory.

    Art’s power lies in its ability to make us feel before we act. By tapping into emotion, it connects intellectual awareness to moral responsibility. Art brings humanity to urgent political and environmental issues, allowing audiences to encounter them with new perspectives. This turns observation into involvement, inspiring people to envision how we might live differently in the future.

    As one artist-scholar observed, “The universal language of art can encourage people from all different backgrounds to want to develop actions to help live more sustainably.” 

    Art, in this sense, becomes an act of resilience. It reminds us that that restoring our bond with the environment can be as creative as it is urgent.

    Encountering Hundertwasser: A Philosophy of Color, Form, and Nature

    My personal belief in the power of art as climate action was reinforced during a trip to Vienna several years ago. I had saved my pennies for several years and planned the trip around viewing works from my two of my favorite painters, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, leaders of the Viennese Secession Movement whose paintings shaped my understanding of creative freedom. But it was while I was in Vienna that I encountered a new figure who would expand my thinking even further: Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

    My first encounter with his work was at the Kunst Haus Wien, where I was enthralled by the unusual curved lines and bright hues covering the face of the building. While visiting this magnificently strange structure and viewing the paintings inside, I learned that Hundertwasser was not only an artist and architect, but an ecological visionary and environmental activist as well.

    His work merged creativity and activism into one beautifully radical philosophy. Deeply inspired by the Viennese Secession Movement, which sought to break away from artistic nationalism and the conservative art establishment of the Austrian Empire, Hundertwasser envisioned an art form that healed both people and the planet.

    His work rejected modernist straight lines, which he referred to as “godless and immoral,” in favor of spirals, organic patterns, and radiant colors that celebrated life’s natural irregularity. He was a leader in the development of new techniques and the use of unconventional materials often using homemade paints  made from organic materials while having mastered many graphic techniques including lithograph, silk screen, etching, woodcut and mixed media.

    Hundertwasser believed that humanity had created a separation from nature that was detrimental to both people and the planet and that this “aberration” must be reversed. His artworks often depict structural, environmental, and human elements while advocating for harmony between them.

    Hundertwasser summarized his idea of a life in harmony with the laws of nature in seven points which are outlined in his “Peace Treaty With Nature.”

    Ecological Conservation Through Art

    Hundertwasser created original posters in support of environmental protection efforts such as whale conservation and the promotion of public transport. He dedicated the revenue from these posters to various environmental organizations, which was a key component of his environmental protection strategy.

    While visiting the Kunst Haus Wien, I was especially moved by Hundertwasser’s poster “Save the Rain – Each Raindrop is a Kiss From Heaven,” created for the Norwegian Nature Conservancy Association to raise awareness about acid rain and its impact on forests and fish. Seeing this work in person filled me with a deep, expansive gratitude for the miracles of the natural world.

    The phrase “Each Raindrop is a Kiss from Heaven” overwhelmed me with how extraordinary our planet truly is—how every organism, from grasslands to glaciers, plays a critical role in maintaining the balance that allows us to have clean air, water, food, and medicine. These everyday miracles are sacred gifts. Protecting them is not just an act of care; it is a privilege and our responsibility as beings on this earth.

    Manifestos for People and Planet

    Hundertwasser spread his ecological positions in numerous manifestos, letters, and public demonstrations. His “Mouldiness Manifesto Against Rationalism in Architecture” from 1958 introduced ideas that remain profoundly relevant today, including the concept of “tree duty” which views integrating vegetation into architecture as a moral and ecological responsibility, promoting the idea that trees should grow on buildings as living architectural elements.

    The 1958 manifesto generally called for humanity to restore its relationship with nature by returning to organic, evolving, and humanistic architecture. This vision foreshadowed current movements in sustainable design and biophilic architecture, which similarly emphasize harmony between humans, structures, and the environment.

    Tangentially, Hundertwasser campaigned for forestation of the city through rooftop gardens and “tree tenants” that integrate greenery into urban architecture. He also developed and promoted eco-friendly waste management systems, including humus toilets and biological water purification that used aquatic plants to clean wastewater naturally.

    His buildings, such as Vienna’s Hundertwasserhaus and Kunst Haus Wien, are living artworks characterized by vegetation and a jubilant embrace of imperfection.

    In a world of homogenized cities and ecological neglect, his work proclaimed a rebellious return to nature.

    Lessons from Hundertwasser: Honoring Non-Traditional Climate Action

    Hundertwasser’s activism teaches several vital lessons. First, resistance to environmental degradation does not only require scientific credentials—it needs vision, creativity, and the courage to break away from conventional norms.

    Hundertwasser’s “Everybody Must Be Creative” manifesto argues that creativity is a fundamental human right and necessity, not a privilege of artists. He condemned what he called “the new illiteracy”—the inability to create—claiming that modern civilization suppresses innate imagination through education and standardization. 

    Hundertwasser reminds us that solutions to complex problems such as the climate crisis demand imaginative engagement from all fields and backgrounds, making creativity an essential skill across disciplines.

    His philosophy insists that ecological stewardship is a community responsibility, one that flourishes when everyone, from architects to artists and activists to ordinary citizens, claims a role in restoration and advocacy.​

    It is essential to recognize that climate action thrives through diversity of approach. Non-traditional methods like art, music, storytelling, and participatory design can catalyze real change, inspire empathy, and build movements.

    By embracing creative resistance and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, we can expand our impact—making space for everyone to contribute, innovate, and inspire.

    To honor Hundertwasser’s legacy means advocating for the importance of art alongside science and ensuring that sustainability remains a vibrant, imaginative movement.

  • The Virgin Suicides as Ecofeminist Parable

    Cecilia was an embodiment of compassion, her quiet gaze falling on what others overlooked: the elm tree in the yard, the “othered” boy at a party, species facing extinction. In her presence, small details grew unbearably heavy, as if she carried the grief of the world before she had even lived much of it.

    To be a compassionate person living through the sixth mass extinction and the rise of fascism is to feel that same weight—a witness to a civilization numbed by capitalism and distraction, yet burdened with knowledge.

    Cecilia’s attention to suffering is not merely sensitivity: it is radical witness. She refuses to let the decline of the natural world or the pain of the vulnerable fade into the background hum of everyday life.

    Watching The Virgin Suicides now, what lingers is not its pastel suburban nostalgia but the undercurrent of warning woven into every frame. The film feels like a mirror, revealing the mundane ways our own world ignores cries for help until monumental tragedy erupts.

    “The Brazilian turbot frog was added to the endangered species list today. That’s the third animal this year.”

    As scientific consensus declares our world is in the midst of its sixth mass extinction, society insists we carry on as though nothing has changed. Capitalism numbs us with relentless demands, leaving little room for mourning. Extinction becomes something to scroll past, something someone else will fix. It hums behind commutes and the tired sigh at the end of a shift. The weight of it is carried silently by those who still feel it, those whose compassion refuses to shut down.

    In The Virgin Suicides, this dynamic is captured in miniature. Cecilia speaks with clarity, her words sharpened by her reserved demeanor, but her mother is distracted—hands busy performing unpaid domestic labor, mind splintered across endless obligations. It is not cruelty that keeps her from actively engaging, but exhaustion, the kind that dulls empathy. The Lisbon household becomes a metaphor for our society at large: a place where care exists but isn’t given the attention it deserves, where voices of warning are muffled by the ceaseless clatter of survival, societal expectations, and maintaining the status quo.

    Unlike the five mass extinctions that came before—driven by meteors or volcanic eruptions—this one is driven by humans. Greenhouse gases emitted in the process of manufacturing unnecessary goods raise global temperatures, land-use change devours habitats to grow crops for animals that were bred purely for the sale of their dead bodies, and synthetic chemicals permeate ecosystems. Species are vanishing at 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate with nearly 40% of amphibians and a third of all assessed species now standing on the brink of existence.

    To feel this devastation while living under the very system that creates it is infuriating. Capitalism steals our time and mental energy even as it drives pollution and ecological collapse. Simultaneously, our political and economic systems block climate solutions because they are not immediately profitable. Life on Earth is sacrificed for quarterly earnings reports.

    During the Trump administration, this unraveling only accelerated. The EPA pursued the largest deregulatory campaign in U.S. history, rolling back more than thirty protections on clean air, water, and climate. Efforts were made to revoke the endangerment finding—the scientific foundation for regulating greenhouse gases—effectively stripping federal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Energy expanded oil and gas leasing and expedited approvals for liquefied natural gas. By allowing for increased, unregulated emissions as scientists warn of irreversible tipping points, the administration made its position clear: profit will be protected, even if it means sacrificing life itself.

    Meanwhile, the National Environmental Policy Act was hollowed out, cutting public input and oversight, giving corporations unprecedented access to public lands with minimal accountability. The Endangered Species Act was revised so that only direct killing of a species counted as “harm,” allowing habitat destruction from mining, logging, and development even in areas where species are facing extinction.

    The result: expanded drilling and logging in once-protected areas, collapsing protection of land and wildlife, and increasing threats to species from the lynx to the cutthroat trout.

    This is the disease that will kill the planet, the relentless prioritization of corporations and profit over living beings. Entire species were written off as collateral damage for short-term profit. It is the same logic that underpins patriarchy and fascism: that life—human or nonhuman—can be measured, exploited, and discarded when inconvenient.

    Under U.S. law, corporations are granted personhood, giving businesses more rights than entire species of  animals that are capable of feeling grief and pain as their food supply and habitats are destroyed.

    Just as entire species are erased for profit, so too are people devalued when their existence doesn’t serve the dominant order.

    “Everyone, look! His ears wiggle if you scratch his chin!”

    At Cecilia’s party, a boy with Down syndrome named Joe becomes the target of thoughtless amusement. The guests chant for Joe to “sing [his] song,” laugh as they scratch under his chin to make his ears wiggle, and reduce him to a spectacle. Cecilia’s expression grows doleful before she quietly excuses herself to her room, for the last time.

    The cruelty at this party echoes forward into our own time, where governments stage wars against those who deviate from the dominant mold. Fascist systems rely on this dehumanization—reducing entire populations to caricatures or burdens—to justify harm.

    I do not blame the boys mocking Joe; they are children shaped by a society that rewards cruelty and punishes difference. In this world, vulnerability is branded as weakness, and to stand out is to invite ridicule. Cecilia, by contrast, represents those who refuse to fall under the spell of apathy—the ones who can recognize injustice without needing it explained and feel it too heavily to ever partake in being part of  the status quo that upholds it.

    The Trump administration echoed this mockery with severe, targeted campaigns against marginalized groups, including disabled people. It slashed workplace protections, undermined housing rights, cut critical disability services like Medicaid, and weakened equity in education—each policy signaling that disabled people were obstacles to profit rather than humans deserving dignity.

    Executive orders called for forced institutionalization of people with mental health disabilities and the unhoused, while funding was cut from community-based, evidence-backed programs. Simultaneously, decades of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts were unraveled, rolling back protections for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and minority-owned businesses.

    Dehumanization, once embedded in law, normalizes violence against the most marginalized. This has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy since the founding of our nation,  enabling systemic oppression of marginalized groups for centuries.

    To stand with Cecilia is to know the ache of compassion. To witness systemic cruelty with an open heart is to carry grief, to refuse numbness, and to choose solidarity over convenience, even when it hurts. It binds us to one another, insisting that we recognize injustice rather than look away.

    “Elm trees. How many pages can you write about dying trees?”

    As the boys sift through Cecilia’s journal, they dismiss her many entries on the elm trees in their neighborhood as boring. Yet her attention to the ordinary is a radical act.

    Throughout the film, the dying elm trees stand as a symbol of decline—a slow disease spreading through the neighborhood, mirroring the suffocation inside the Lisbon home. The neighborhood’s impulse to cut them down reflects the desire to sanitize decay, to maintain a façade of suburban stability by erasing what feels uncomfortable.

    Cecilia’s devotion to protecting the elms is her refusal to turn away from truth and suffering. She embodies what it means to remain present with loss in a culture that prefers distraction, denial, forgetting, and toxic positivity. To mourn openly, to name tragedy, to refuse normalization is itself resistance.

    In our own time, being able to grieve climate and humanitarian crises is resistance: it breaks through the capitalist logic that tells us to keep working, keep consuming, keep scrolling. The girls’ ability to be present with the dying trees mirrors those who understand the magnitude of loss our planet is currently experiencing, yet continue trying to heal it.

    Climate optimism divorced from grief is blind ignorance. To pretend that the reversal of climate protections and the acceleration of planetary damage under Trump’s policies are anything less than devastating is dishonest. But grief need not paralyze us.

    When we allow ourselves to feel the weight of what has been lost, we clear the ground for informed action—organizing, advocating, voting, defending the vulnerable, and demanding policies that restore life and dignity.

    “Given Lux’s failure to make curfew, everyone expected a crackdown. But few expected it would be so drastic.”

    When Lux breaks curfew on the night of the homecoming dance, all the sisters are punished. Their brief taste of freedom collapses into total isolation. Lux is forced to destroy her rock records—ritualistically cutting off rebellion and self-expression.

    This scene reflects a broader political truth: freedoms granted to women under patriarchy are always conditional. When women step too far outside the lines, those freedoms are swiftly revoked.

    The Lisbon sisters’ confinement reflects the powerful backlash against feminist gains over recent decades. Throughout the 2010s, feminist activism surged globally: #MeToo exposed pervasive sexual harassment, more women entered parliaments and leadership positions, and advances in reproductive rights, education, and workplace protections expanded possibilities for women worldwide. Intersectional approaches linked gender justice to racial, economic, and environmental struggles, increasing visibility and solidarity.

    However, the early 2020s witnessed a wrenching rollback. The Trump administration catalyzed a rapid erosion of women’s rights: abortion access was severely restricted in multiple states, federal funding for women’s health and family planning was slashed by billions, and research on women’s health was defunded. These efforts often weaponized “gender ideology” rhetoric to justify aggressive anti-rights campaigns, fueling a broader resurgence of fascist and ultraconservative forces globally.

    The persistence of this backlash reveals a grim truth: women’s freedoms remain fragile, granted only on patriarchal terms. The Lisbon sisters’ punishment after their brief glimpse of freedom is a stark metaphor for our moment—reminding us that the struggle for bodily autonomy, justice, and liberation from patriarchal control is far from over.

    “If the boats didn’t bring the fungus from Europe, none of this would have happened.”

    As the landscapers prepare to tear down Cecilia’s beloved elm, the sisters cry out in protest. Bonnie reminds us that Dutch elm disease was not some inevitable act of nature but a byproduct of human trade and carelessness—fungus carried across oceans on ships, entwined with commerce. The landscapers’ solution, cutting the tree at its base, is cruelly ironic: it attacks the symptom while leaving the deeper systems of circulation and extraction that enabled the disease in the first place untouched.

    Likewise, mainstream visions of “green growth” treat ecological collapse as a technical glitch to be patched with electric cars and renewable technologies—solutions often accessible only to the privileged—while ignoring the extractive capitalist, colonial, and industrial systems that drive ongoing environmental devastation.

    The logic of infinite growth, heralded as progress, clashes fundamentally with the reality of a finite Earth. Humanity currently consumes natural resources at a rate equivalent to 1.7 Earths annually, outpacing the planet’s ability to regenerate.

    Efficiency gains boasted about by green growth advocates often provoke more consumption rather than less, and “decoupling” growth from extraction remains illusory at the scale our survival demands. Overreliance on technological solutions and market-driven approaches risks perpetuating exploitation and inequality rather than remedying them.

    True repair requires a reimagining of how we live with the land and with one another. A holistic response sees ecological, social, technological and economic systems as bound together, demanding solutions that honor planetary limits while centering justice and care. It means dismantling the conditions that created the climate crisis, and building systems rooted in reciprocity, not profit.

    “Our daughter showed us an article. It’s a less aggressive therapy.”

    While the sisters continue to protect Cecilia’s elm tree, their father recalls her suggestion of a less aggressive therapy than cutting them down and offers it to the landscapers.

    The treatment Cecilia proposed echoes the values of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism critiques patriarchal systems that dominate and exploit both women and the natural world, offering instead an ethic of holistic care, reciprocity, and regeneration. It emphasizes that nurturing and healing are not sentimental choices but ethical necessities.

    Cecilia’s quiet advocacy for regeneration over destruction mirrors this ethos. She resists the reflex toward violence and control, choosing repair and restoration instead.

    Yet the suggestion is brushed aside, dismissed as impractical. The landscaper embodies the worldview of patriarchal capitalism: one that trusts only in domination and quick fixes, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the need for deeper transformation. From this vantage, technological solutions are enough, while the roots of exploitation—patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism—remain invisible, untouched.

    This denial exposes the obstacle at the heart of our ecological crisis. The same system that isolates the girls and destroys the elms is the one that devours the earth’s resources and rescinds women’s rights when our presence threatens its control.

    Without confronting the systems that train us to treat life as disposable, attempts at “repair” will replicate the same harm. True healing demands more: a commitment to regenerative ways of living grounded in justice, care, and respect—the very principles ecofeminism offers, and the wisdom the Lisbon sisters carried in their refusal to turn destruction into inevitability.

    “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them… and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time.”

    After the sisters’ deaths, the neighborhood boys turn them into myth, stitching together fragments and half-memories.

    This is how collapse is so often met: we romanticize what is gone rather than fight for what remains. We write elegies for species we failed to save. Memory becomes a poor substitute for justice.

    The Lisbon girls did not need elegy; they needed to be heard. The same is true of our burning forests, our poisoned rivers, our sisters who are having their rights revoked and our neighbors who are treated as disposable by systems of profit and control.

    The tragedy of The Virgin Suicides is not only the girls’ deaths but the silence that surrounded them—the refusal to recognize despair until it was too late. The greater tragedy would be to repeat that mistake now—to ignore grief, to dismiss the calls for change—until it is too late.

  • 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.