Viewpoint: When Nature Needs Nurture - The role of women in the environment

Abstract

To the disinterested observer, the distinctive links between the environment, and women’s experience of it, are not immediately obvious. Particularly in developing countries, however, this interface is both intimate and immediate. After a brief survey of the importance of reproductive rights for containing population growth, and the international environmental policy context vis-à-vis gender, this article explores a few aspects of women’s relationship with the environment. Women are seen as critical to environmental education in that they tend to exercise a formative influence over the attitudes of the very young. Women’s relationship with the land they work is compromised by their poorly institutionalised property rights throughout much of the Third World, and where ‘environmental injustice’ is   concerned, it tends to be the poorer women who experience the fallout most tangibly. Development practitioners, bureaucrats and policy makers need to be sensitised to this state of affairs.