That’s a photo of Kilimanjaro. The latest word on Africa’s highest peak is that all of its snow will be gone by 2030. New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculates, for the first time, the volume of ice lost from Kilimanjaro’s snow fields. Between 1912 and 2007, the mountain’s glaciers have decreased by some 85 percent. Since 2000, 26 percent of glaciers have melted away. The scientists are pretty sure that global warming is to blame. They point out that shrinking and thinning of the glaciers is “unique within an 11,700-year perspective.”
Reading news like this always makes my heart ache. There’s been so much of it over the past few years that I’ve had to start avoiding it. (Not a good solution, I know.) So it took me a few weeks to get to Guardian columnist Mary Fitzgerald’s take on global warming: that it’s a feminist issue and that, to conquer it, we simply need to give women all over the world control over their bodies. She writes: “Wherever women have adequate access to contraception, education, the right to work, equality before the law, the birth rate plummets.” Fitzgerald is peddling an extension of the population-control theory. Fewer babies equals no more droughts, no more floods and no more shrinking glaciers. “You don’t even have to call it feminism. You could call it calculated self-interest,” she adds.
In practice, I don’t disagree with her, obviously. (All women should have access to education, have control over their bodies and be granted equal rights, environmental destruction notwithstanding, obviously.) But in theory, I’m just a little dubious. Let’s try flipping Fitzgerald’s view: Global warming is worsening because women are having too many babies. By themselves? Where are the men? (Where’s the sperm?)
Thankfully, another Guardian columnist, Elizabeth Kirkwood, countered, few weeks later:
“One obvious danger lies in making the burden of tackling population control — and by implication climate change — the accepted and sole responsibility of the world’s female population. Have all these ‘uneducated’ women been single-handedly overpopulating the world via a process of amoeba-like fission of which I am unaware?”
She goes on to argue that eco-feminism “tends to divide rather than unite,” which isn’t going to help any of us repair the damage or find a workable solution (if there is one) to climate change. Kirkland’s directive: “We need to stop thinking about the environment as ‘mother nature’ being abused by men, which in turn will be saved by women exclusively.”
Take the genders out of global warming completely, I say. Also: Stay away from the crazies who insist that it’s feminism that’s destroying the planet. (Alright, they’re just being cheeky. But don’t miss the ridiculous graph showing CO2 emissions in relation to the ratio of girls-to-boys attending school in different countries.)
— Jacqueline Nunes
