Wilma A. Dunaway.

Womens Labor and Nature: The 21st Century World-

System from a Radical Ecofeminist Perspective. Pp. 183-202 in New Theoretical

Directions for the 21st Century World-System, edited by W.A. Dunaway (Praeger

Press, 2003).

The crisis of survival and the threat to sustenance arises from ecological
disruption that is rooted in the arrogance of the west and those that ape it. This
arrogance is grounded in a blindness towards the quiet work and the invisible
wealth created by nature and women. (Shiva 1988: 44)

RETHINKING THE IDEOLOGICAL PILLARS OF CAPITALISM

Immanuel Wallerstein (1983) identifies four underlying cultural pillars that legitimate

world-wide expansion of capitalism. The "ideological arch" has been universalism, the

civilizational myth that there are general explanations that are universally and permanently true.

Western scientists have assumed that once such laws are perceived, they can deduce applications

at the level of world-wide policy and intervene to alter the operation of these laws (Wallerstein

1984: 177). Linked closely to this universal model of scientific thinking is the second ideological

pillar: the myth of developmentalism. The twin ideologies of a universal capitalist development

model and of a universal scientific culture have held out to the world the promises of progress,

modernization, democracy, and a higher standard of living (Wallerstein 1983: 83). The hope

offered up by that ideology has been the false promise that "the underdeveloped too would cross

the river Jordan and come into a land flowing with milk and honey" (Wallerstein, 1979: 133).

Consequently, the universalistic drive for progress, as measured by the western core, has been

the central mission of the capitalist world-system.

 Because universalism and developmentalism have served to facilitate the accumulation of

capital at the core, scientific culture has become the "fraternal code of the world's accumulators

of capital" (Wallerstein 1983: 83-84). Western scientism may have been "offered to the world as

a gift of the powerful to the weak," but this seemingly-beneficial ethic harbored "an ideological

framework of oppressive humiliation which had never previously existed" (Wallerstein 1983: 85,

102). Thus, historical capitalism has been grounded in two other ideological pillars: racism and

sexism. Devaluation of women and ethnic minorities are at the foundation of "the hierarchization

of the work-force and its highly unequal distributions of reward" (Wallerstein 1983: 80).

Sexism was the relegation of women to the realm of non-productive labor, doubly

humiliating in that the actual labor required of them was if anything intensified,

and in that productive labor became in the capitalist world-economy, for the first

time in human history, the basis for the legitimation of privilege. . . . Racism was

the stratification of the work-force inside the historical system, whose object was

to keep the oppressed groups inside the system, not expel them. It created the

justification of low reward for productive labor (Wallerstein 1983: 103).

Consequently, institutional racism and sexism have made possible reproduction of the

work-force at the most profitable levels for capitalists. Gender and ethnic discrimination have

provided an in-built training mechanism for the work-force, ensuring that a large part of the

socialization in occupational tasks would be done within the framework of households and not at

the expense of employers.

Scientific universalism, developmentalism, racism, and sexism are not the only

ideological pillars of the capitalist world-system. However, we must turn to radical ecofeminists

to find insight into the fifth ideological pillar of capitalism. 1 The world-system could not exist if
it were not a parasite upon the natural geosphere in which it seeks to grow. Western scientism

and developmentalism are grounded in an environmental ethic of conquest, without which

capitalism could not justify its deconstruction and reorganization of the planet (Worster 1993). In

addition to political and economic domination (Wallerstein, 1983), capitalism relies upon an

imperialistic relation of people to their ecosystems. The "commodification of everything"

(Wallerstein 1983) has been ideologically redefined to be the "natural order" of things to justify

the realignment of economy and environment into a single profit-making system (Merchant

1992). Like capitalists, most western social scientists have stressed 'producing' and

'constructing' rather than adapting to nature." This "mastery of nature" assumption is the

ideological keystone of western developmentalism, and it is reflected in a sociology influenced

by the growth agendas of the core nations after World War II (Murphy 1997: 15-16).

RETHINKING CAPITALIST INCORPORATION

World-system analysts have viewed "incorporation" as the global process by which zones

"outside" the capitalist world-system are brought "inside" (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987;

Wallerstein 1991). Incorporation is the long-range civilizational project of capitalist colonizers

(Dunaway 1996b) which creates "a fundamental break in the history of the peoples concerned"

(Martin 1987: 854). 2 Effective incorporation is said to have begun when real changes occur to

stimulate restructuring of the economy and productive processes of the external arena. In this

phase, the traditional production patterns of the external arena are "modified in some

fundamental way and integrated in a wider, world network dominated by capitalist relations of

production" (Arrighi 1979: 161-62). As it has been previously conceived, incorporation involves

four concurrent macrostructural changes: (a) transformation of the indigenous economy; (b)

political reorientation (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987); (c) creation of mechanisms that
maximize exploitation of human laborers (Phillips 1987); and (d) assaults upon the local culture

so that capitalist ideologies intrude, incur resistance, and gradually dominate (Dunaway 1996b,

1997; Wallerstein 1991).

However, there is a significant element missing from this history of the making of the

modern world-system. 3 This entity is more than an interstate system of stratified

political-economic zones (Wallerstein, 1983); it is simultaneously a world-wide network of

interconnected, diverse ecozones. This capitalist world-ecosystem is constructed upon the

premise that the environment can be rationally subjugated until there are no external natural

arenas "left open for spontaneous, unattended developments" (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984: 2).

Thus, historical capitalism has been a colonizing force in four ways. First, ecozones have been

incorporated because they provided profitable markets and cheap labor for core economic

activities (Wallerstein, 1979). 4 Newly-incorporated ecozones were treated as "inexhaustible

mines of nature" so that capitalism devoured resources at a level that was twenty times greater

per capita than the environmental degradation caused by precapitalist modes of production

(Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 1993). Second, the core has engaged in "ecological imperialism"

by disseminating alien diseases, plants and animals to colonized areas, in order to depopulate

indigenous human and nonhuman species (Crosby, 1986). Subsequently, entropic degradation

was maximized (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984), so that the global distribution of environmental

waste and resource depletion is the third form of core imperialism. Fourth, the captured ecozones

have been systematically polarized around the accumulation of wealth at the core and the

colonizing of resource depletion, environmental pollution, species endangerment, and habitat

destruction at the periphery (Foster, 1992).

Because of the extensive ecological change that occurs, the historical legacy of a
country's incorporation has a critical impact on future avenues of development open to it

(Roberts and Grimes 1997). As they are articulated with the capitalist world-system,

newly-incorporated ecozones experience five types of environmental reorganization. First,

capitalists engage in ecocide and genocide to depopulate indigenous natural species, peoples and

cultures and to interrupt existing economic relationships with nature (Crosby, 1986). Second,

capitalism transformed all of nature into forms of capital meant to serve the world-system

(O'Connor, 1994: 143-44). Land and natural resources were contractualized (Hopkins and

Wallerstein 1987), transforming them into commodities that could be owned and traded in the

marketplace (Dunaway 1996a, 1996c). 5 In newly-incorporated ecozones, capitalism imposes an

artificial ownership of nature so that land and natural resources are inequitably redistributed.

Absentee speculators and local comprador bourgeoisies increasingly monopolize soil, forests,

minerals and waterways, causing the emergence of a large population of landless laborers

(McMichael 1980; Dunaway 1996a).

Subsequently, the ecozone is reorganized around export production and transport

systems. Capitalism is driven by rationalization, homogenization, and a radical simplification of

the natural environment. "At first, space is conquered extensively; subsequently, it is capitalized

intensively" (O'Connor 1994: 88). The "capitalist production of space" culminates in three types

of export ecozones: agroecosystems, extractive enclaves, and urban-manufacturing complexes

(Dunaway 1996c). Nature evolved into a set of specialized instruments of production.

Newly-incorporated zones place "an exaggerated value" upon the agricultural species or the

extracted raw materials "which first furnished the surplus by which exchange with the outside

world was established" (Merchant, 1989: 131). As a result of agrarian capitalism, previously

complex ecosystems are transformed into monocultures in which nature "has been reconstituted
to the point that it yields a single species, which is growing on the land only because somewhere

there is a strong market for it" (Worster, 1993: 58-59).

Fourth, capitalism causes entropy by transforming relatively self-sufficient natural

communities into capitalist ecosystems that cannot survive without energy inputs from other

distant ecozones. Loss of biodiversity and resource depletion transform nature into depauperate

environments that have undergone rigorous simplification of their indigenous genetic and energy

complexity (Crosby 1986). In ecological terms, capitalist ecosystems are populations of parasites

or pathogens that drain the vitality of other living communities and kill off indigenous species

(Worster 1993). Capitalist industrialization and expansion hinge upon resource imperialism and

monoexport agriculture, leading to economic marginalization and ecological degradation in the

periphery and the semiperiphery (Smith 1994). Because of its inequitable redistribution of land

and natural resources, capitalism implements a dramatic reversal in the food chain. In

grain-livestock agroecosystems, domesticated animals consume higher levels of energy from the

environment and from the labor of human producers than they contribute in caloric nutrients.

Consequently, capitalist ecosystems are short-term maximization strategies because production

will eventually decline without massive inputs of technology, labor, and capital from distant

zones (Worster 1993). As the ecozone becomes increasingly articulated with and dominated by

the capitalist world-ecosystem, the fifth type of ecological change ensues. As capitalist

enterprises generate high levels of environmental waste and pollution, entropic degradation

escalates, stimulating ecological lability, the pronounced inclination of an ecosystem to change

irreversibly (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Dunaway 1996c).

RETHINKING COMMODITY CHAINS ECOLOGICALLY

Once we understand that capitalist incorporation is rooted in nature, we can quickly see
that ecozones are absorbed into the capitalist world-system through those complex networks of

exports and imports that we call commodity chains. Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986: 159)

envisioned a commodity chain to be "a network of labor and production processes whose end

result is a finished commodity," every box or node in the chain representing "a particular, quite

specific production process." World-system analysts have identified input acquisition,

manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and consumption as the sequential stages of a

commodity chain (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994: 51, 2). When they conceptualized the notion,

Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986: 159) advised that: "In building this chain we start with the final

production operation and move sequentially backward. . . until one reaches primarily raw

material inputs." Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986: 162) stress that there are four properties for

each node of a commodity chain: (a) the relations of production within the node, (b) organization

of production, (c) the node's geographical location within the chain, and (d) flows between the

node, other nodes of the chain, and with other commodity chains. According to Hopkins and

Wallerstein (1986: 162), a commodity chain "depicts the division of labor in the production of

the commodity in question" (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986: 162). A single commodity chain

usually combines in the various stages of production several forms of waged labor and four types

of nonwaged labor, including sharecroppers, slaves, serfs, and other coerced laborers (Hopkins

and Wallerstein 1986: 166). At the world-market level, "the uneven exchange of these

commodities between nations. . . constitutes the very essences of global inequality." Within a

commodity chain, therefore, "a relatively greater share of wealth generally accrues to core-like

nodes than to peripheral ones" (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994: 2, 83).

Personally, I believe the commodity chain concept to be one of the most effective tools of

world-system analysis. It is through the analysis of commodity chains that we can do the kind of
"history pushed to its outer limits" that is advocated by the Annales tradition (Wallerstein 1978:

6). By examining commodity chains, we can do the type of research that Braudel (1981: 28)

loved; we can simultaneously overlay the "double register" of history: the global and the local.

For Braudel (1981: 559, 29), history was the unveiling of "a succession of landscapes" consisting

of two major levels of human existence: (a) the realm of major historical events and (b) "the

ground floor and the first storey" of history that lay in "images of daily life." Braudel (1979:

28-29, 16) believed that the task of the historian is to reveal the dialectical interplay between the

upper and lower levels. But he complained that the lower level is too often ignored, so that

everyday life has been "the great absentee in history" (Braudel 1979: 16).

Everyday life especially the ecological aspects of womens lives-- is also the "great

absentee" from commodity chain analysis, for the geographical foci have been regional, national

and global; and the analysis has been relatively technical. In some ways, our mechanistic

applications of the model have done the work of mainstream economists better than they do it

themselves. When a commodity chain is delineated in terms of "the production process itself"

(Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986), it documents the construction or creation of a market product,

ignoring far too many human and ecological aspects. In other words, it becomes an analysis that

emphasizes things rather than human beings, exactly opposite to the historical approach urged by

Braudel.6 What do we miss when we turn the analytic lens upon the commodity itself? First, the

focus upon a particular export commodity may unintentionally hide from view those laborers and

ecological resources in the interconnected local and distant commodity chains that supply the

foodstuffs, raw materials and consumer goods to subsidize (i.e., provision) the export production

process (Dunaway 1996a). Second, a narrow emphasis upon those waged and nonwaged laborers

who are involved directly in manufacture of the commodity can ignore four types of laborer
inputs. Women make direct and indirect ecological contributions to the production process from

subsistence sectors, from the informal economy and from illegal sectors (Dunaway 1995). More

importantly, commodity chain analysts have paid little or no attention to theoretical analysis of

households as the lowest units of commodity chains. 7 Consequently, they have ignored the

strategic inputs and externalized costs associated with the women/labor/nature nexus that typifies

the everyday lives of a majority of the worlds females.

Third, the commodity chain approach has not yet been utilized to grapple with the

production process or with unequal exchange in ecological terms. Economic dependency and

unequal exchange should be explained "not only in the undervaluation of the labor force of the

poor of the world, nor merely in the secular deterioration of the terms of trade," but also in terms

of an unequal exchange between under-valued natural resources and consumable, over-valued,

throw-away commodities (Rudy 1994: 105-106). In every commodity chain, "not only are

workers exploited, but also resources are destroyed. If you will, nature is impoverished through

the destruction of resources; a part of the natural resource is used without being restored, without

an equal quantity of wealth being returned to nature" (Skirbekk 1994: 99). In more scientific

terms, natural energy is extracted and entropy is visited upon the ecosystem (Bunker 1985;

Prigogine and Stengers 1984). At the global level, the widening gap between core and Third

World must be measured in ecological as well as economic terms. In the view of radical

ecofeminists, the core has colonized the peripheral regions, nature, and the world's women to be

exploited as raw materials for the ongoing process of capital accumulation (Mies and Shiva

1993). This unequal exchange has caused the amassing of wealth and control over natural

resources at the core and the accumulation of conditions of resource depletion and entropic

degradation at the periphery (Foster 1992: 78-79; Burkett 1995: 97).

 In addition to these crucial oversights, there is another fundamental conceptual problem.

Commodity chains have largely been constructed around "the acquisition and/or organization of

inputs" (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994: 2), a methodological decision which ignores the

tendency of capitalists to externalize costs as much as possible. 8 To maximize profits, capitalists

must "use all available 'costless' social and natural conditions of the production process." To put

it differently, in a capitalist mode of production "the costs criterion leads to a selection of the

technology that minimizes costs by allowing extensive use of external conditions" (Rohwer,

Kuenzel, and Ipsen 1984: 30). Thus, capitalists shift to society, to the culture, and to human

laborers much of the real ecological and eco-cultural costs of commodity production (Dunaway

2001: Figures 1 and 2). 9 On the one hand, capitalists engage in "ideological production of

nature" such that ecological resources are redefined to be marketable commodities (O'Connor

1988: 23). On the other hand, capitalists externalize the costs of ameliorating the negative

side-effects of their enterprises. Consequently, the external ecological costs of production and

consumption are massive and long-range, for they represent allocations of waste and diminished

resources (a) to local communities, (b) to other parts of the world, and (b) to future generations

(Skirbekk 1994). Such unpaid costs represent transfers of value that are embodied in

commodities but do not show up in prices. Thus, they are unseen and unpaid bills that are

additional components of unequal exchange. They are part and parcel of normal capitalism, and

they are to be found at every node/link of every commodity chain.

REPRODUCTION: THE DEEPEST CONTRADICTION OF CAPITALISM

Radical ecofeminists argue that "capitalism appears as a modern form of patriarchal

relations, in which women experience a social reality very different from their brothers in capital

or labor" (Salleh 1994: 108-109). 10 Out of their conquest ideology, capitalists have redefined
women and nature as "subordinate others," whose exploitation is not morally reprehensible.

"Living things are expendable for capitalist patriarchy, which does not value what it does not

itself produce" (Salleh 1994: 111). By separating production from reproduction and from nature,

"patriarchal capitalism has created a sphere of 'false' freedom that ignores biological and

ecological parameters" (Mellor 1992: 51). Women's traditional positioning between men and

nature may well be "the deepest, most fundamental contradiction" of capitalism (Salleh 1994:

112). Males may engage in the labor that culminates in market commodities, but women

reproduce those male laborers and generate most of their survival requirements. "It is this work

of producing the means of life and of survival that ecofeminists argue establishes the close

relations between women and the planet" (Mellor 1992: 52). However, women's

ecologically-based work has been externalized from the "material world" of capitalism. "By

introducing the nature-woman-labor nexus as a fundamental contradiction, ecofeminism affirms

the primacy of an exploitative, gender-based division of labor and simultaneously shifts analysis

of all oppressions toward an ecological problematic" (Salleh 1994: 110).

What are the hidden inputs of women and nature into capitalist commodity chains? First,

the biological reality of women's lives is sexual and reproductive; thus, mothers make their first

unrewarded subsidy to capitalism through the bearing and raising of successive generations of

laborers. Despite its dependency upon this natural female contribution, however, capitalism has

externalized laborer reproduction outside the realm of the economic. Thus, capitalism alters the

nexus of women/labor/nature by devaluing women's childrearing as "a nuisance to the

production unit" (Sen 1980: 82). 11 Second, the household is the site in which women undertake

unpaid labor for those members who are waged laborers. To generate family survival

requirements, women engage in "shadow work" outside those formal capitalist structures in
which labor is remunerated (von Werlhof 1985). Women's work is dominant in food production

and processing, in responsibility for fuel, water, health care, child-rearing, sanitation and the

entire range of so-called basic needs (Sen 1980). To accomplish that labor, most of the world's

women draw heavily upon natural resources. In this way, the economic contributions of women

remain structurally invisible so that the capitalist can shift to the worker's household and to the

ecosystem the actual costs of labor subsistence (Dunaway 2001).

HOW CAPITALISM EXTERNALIZES ECOLOGICAL COSTS TO HOUSEHOLDS

As it incorporates new zones of the globe, capitalism embraces two antithetical labor

recruitment mechanisms: (1) some household members are proletarianized into wage laborers

who produce capitalist commodities, but (2) women's labor is concentrated into activities that are

never fully integrated economic sectors that are remunerated (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987).

Thus, a society undergoing the transition to capitalism experiences a realignment of labor so that

the economic contributions of women are devalued. Women are transformed into "the last link in

a chain of exploitation, permitting by their unpaid labour the reproduction" of the work force and

the unrewarded subsidization of male-dominated labor (Mies, Bennhold-Thomsen, and von

Werholf 1988: 29). A society undergoing incorporation realigns labor around three objectives:

export production, subsistence production, and biological reproduction of the labor force

(Phillips 1987). Destruction of precapitalist modes of production leads to a new sexual division

of labor organized by households (Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers 1984).

In order to keep the waged labor force at a relatively low level of pay (by the

existing standards of the world-economy), they had to be located in household

structures in which the work on this new "export-oriented activity" formed only a

small part of the lifetime revenues. . . . In this case, other household activities
 which brought in revenues in multiple forms could "subsidize" the remuneration

for the "export-oriented activity," thereby keeping the labor costs very low

(Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987: 777).

One of the consequences of incorporation is the evolution of a semiproletariat-- a

sizeable segment of the world labor force that exists outside the capitalist wage economy a large

part of its life (Wallerstein 1983). It is essential that we learn to think ecologically about how

this impoverished semiproletariat subsidizes the capitalist commodity chain. To do that, we must

rethink a key world-system notion: the household as an income pooling unit (Smith, Wallerstein,

and Evers 1984). The first conceptual problem lies in how we have unintentionally

misrepresented the ecological boundaries of households. Our image has been far too Western

and too historically-bound in 20th-century capitalism. If we are to rethink ecologically, we need

to be careful not to perceive the household as people located in the same physical setting. We

must select methods and research questions that will not conceal inter-household and

inter-community transfers between members located at several different geographical sites

(Taylor and Wyatt 1996). From the perspective of nonwestern cultures, we must recognize that

the household is not necessarily the fundamental unit of economic sharing (Mukras, Oucho and

Bemberger 1985). Indeed, natural resources are more often pooled at the level of ethnic groups,

clans, villages, or their equivalents (Dunaway 1997).

If we are to rethink the household as an ecological unit, we must also reconsider our

language. Wallerstein and Smith (1992: 15) have defined a household as "a unit that pools

income for purposes of reproduction," and they have linked this notion to the

semiproletarianization of women.

The household with the least flexibility, as total income goes down, is the
 household most dependent on wage income. . . . A household can most readily

affect its total income by investing its labor power in activities it can

autonomously launch. . . . Stagnations in the world-economy create pressures on

small household structures to enlarge boundaries and to self-exploit more. . . . For

a wage worker in a semi-proletarian household is more able to accept a low real

wage since this worker may be able to assume that, via self-exploitation, other

compensating forms of income will be available (Wallerstein and Smith 1992:

15-16).

To subsidize the low and unstable wages of its members, the household pools four other types of

nonwage income: market sales, rent, transfer payments, and subsistence. 12

Certainly, I am not at odds with the spirit of this approach. Indeed I consider the

semiproletarianized household to be one of the most valuable insights offered by world-system

analysis (Dunaway 2001) . Because this approach allows us to investigate Braudel's (1981: 29)

"first storey of history," I have utilized this idea extensively to document how forgotten peoples

live out their daily lives in the face of world-level structural constraints (Dunaway 1995, 1996a,

1997, 2001). However, our intellectual rhetoric is politically and ecologically crucial. As

feminist scholars have pointed out: "our choices reflect what we count as worth knowing and

telling" (Bulbeck 1992: 330). We have recognized in world-system analysis that capitalism has

ideologically redefined male-dominated "wage income" to be the rewarded norm while women's

work has been socially and economically devalued (Wallerstein 1983). It is imperative, then, that

we select terminology that reflects our knowledge of that historical fact. While that is not the

intent of the writers, the term "income" is eco-sexist. Seen through the lens of radical

ecofeminism, we need a term that emphasizes nonwage labor, the pivotal point of the
world-system model of households (Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers 1984; Wallerstein and Smith

1992). "Income" pooling implies the aggregation of money and of items to which a price has

been assigned. To shift our lens from a radical ecofeminist direction, I suggest we think of

households as resource pooling units, in order to shift our attention toward all sorts of nature-

based activities that provide part of household subsistence but are not priced in the marketplace.

For example, the first resource that a woman brings to her household is her own body which

naturally reproduces human life, feeds infants, and is the object of sexual gratification. A focus

on resource pooling also allows us to take into account other unusual ecological inputs of women

and children. For example, the list of five categories of "income" offered by Wallerstein and

Smith (1992) cannot adequately take into account the garbage-picking or other invisible

ecological labor of children (Stephens 1994); and it does not sufficiently allow room for less

obvious resources brought to households, such as the specialized eco-medical knowledge of

women in many nonwestern cultures (Instituto del Tercer Mundo 1994).

There is another eco-sexist weakness in the notion of "pooling," for it masks the internal

conflicts and inequities within households. I am convinced that we lose the conceptual power of

the commodity chain and the semiproletarianized household, unless we turn the conceptual lens

a different direction. A commodity chain is more than a long string of spatial points at which

mechanical processes occur to generate a marketable product. In my mind, we must think of the

commodity chain first and foremost as an interconnected network of nodes at which human

laborers and natural resources are (a) exploited and/or (b) pushed out of the productive chain (c)

to permit surplus extraction by a few. Hopkins and Wallerstein (1994: 50) have emphasized that

commodity chains "reproduce a basic order that permits the endless accumulation of capital. If

one thinks of the entire chain as having a total amount of surplus value that has been
appropriated, what is the division of this surplus value among the boxes of the chain?" What is

missing? Unintentional or not, there is no focus upon the inequitable division of surplus within

each node or within the separate households that comprise each node of the commodity chain.

A commodity chain is a much more powerful conceptual tool when it is viewed as successive

layers of unequal exchanges. Indeed, every exchange within a commodity chain is unequal, for

there is a polarized distribution of the means of production (including natural resources) within

every single node. If we turn our theoretical lens this direction, we can utilize the commodity

chain to make visible "the basic inequality of partners that underlies the capitalistic process" and

that permeates every aspect of social life (Braudel 1979: 62-63).

World-system analyses have not only failed to integrate the labor and ecological

contributions of households. They have also ignored the unequal exchanges that occur within

households themselves. Used more effectively, the commodity chain approach can demonstrate

that every node of the production process-- and every household that contributes labor and

resources to that node-- are microcosms of the structural inequities of the capitalist

world-system. "Men are simultaneously agents for capital and for themselves, keeping women

intimidated and pliable" (Salleh 1994: 114). Consequently, women and children contribute more

labor power to household survival than males; but they receive an inequitable share of the total

pool of resources (Mies, Bennhold-Thomsen, and von Werlhof 1988). Moreover, we would be

able to see resistance against capitalist oppression as a process that is not monolithic. Within

nonwestern households, there is frequently conflict over the allocation of ecological resources.

When capitalist incorporation creates new wage and trade opportunities for males, those

economic activities quite often threaten the ecological resources from which women produce

household sustenance and trade commodities (Dunaway 1997; Shiva 1988).

HOW CAPITALISM EXTERNALIZES GREATER ECOLOGICAL RISK TO WOMEN

Capitalism not only shifts to women the costs of reproducing the labor force and of

subsidizing wage-earners in their households. Capitalism also externalizes to women and their

children five categories of ecological risk. Global ecological stresses pose different crises for the

core, the semiperiphery, and the periphery and are experienced differently by people according

to their ethnic group, social class, sex, or age (Merchant 1992; Stephens 1994). Worldwide,

resource scarcities impact women much more severely than men.

The ideology of development is in large part based on a vision of bringing all natural

resources into the market economy for commodity production. When these resources are already

being used by nature to maintain her production of renewable resources and by women for

sustenance and livelihood, their diversion to the market economy generates a scarcity condition

for ecological stability and creates new forms of poverty for women (Shiva 1988: 9). Global

trends toward resource depletion are directly linked to the expansion of agrarian capitalism and

extractive enclaves and to the global warming that results from core dumping of chemical

pollutants (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). Water scarcity, desertification, deforestation, land

degradation, and coastal pollution are five forms of resource depletion that pose special

hardships for women.

Today 26 countries populated by 230 million people are classified as water scarce, and

the worst water scarcities occur where world population is most concentrated. At present, more

than one-quarter of the people on the planet do not have access to safe drinking water. In the 21st

century, water will a be a scarcer resource than food in many Third World countries. Water

shortages are being exacerbated by the expansion of the world's deserts over the last two

decades. Since 1980, the earth's surface has been turning to desert at the rate of 15 million acres
per year; and the size of the world's deserts have doubled in only one decade. In 1990, deserts

had encroached onto 35 to 40 percent of the planet's land area. By the early 21st century, deserts

will encompass half the globe. At present, 80 percent of the world's agricultural land is eroded;

and capitalist agriculture annually destroys one inch of the earth's topsoil, a resource that

requires nature 200 to 1,000 years to replenish. Less than one-third of the earth's surface is still

covered with forests, but half the world's population collects natural biomass from forests.

Tropical forests are being exploited to supply more than half the world's timber exports, so there

will be no rainforests left within 50 years. By 2000, half the population of the Third World were

short of fuel wood; and there is already an acute shortage in Africa (Hauchler and Kennedy

1994). It is women and girls who must walk further and further to find water and fuelwood,

livestock fodder, and the raw materials to produce foods and handicrafts. Scrounging for water

and fuelwood already requires 100 to 300 days of walking time per family per year (Shiva 1988).

Global warming, rises in sea level, and ocean pollution from international shipping have

endangered another ecosystem upon which women depend. World-wide, 60 percent of the

world's population relies on food derived from the marine habitats along seacoasts. However,

half of all coastal ecosystems are at risk: two-thirds of Asia's coasts, one-half of Africa's coasts,

and one-half of Latin American coasts (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994).

World hunger is the most fundamental act of environmental sexism that is inflicted by the

capitalist world-system upon women. The Western agenda of Third World population control

"holds women responsible for overpopulating the world," and thereby causing world hunger.

However, "it is the North's overconsumption coupled with the globally unjust distribution of

wealth, resources, and power, which is causing world hunger and environmental degradation"

(Gaard and Gruen 1993: 19). More than one-third of all Third World children are malnourished
and chronically hungry (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). However, the expansion of capitalist

agribusiness is actually causing a decline in per capita food production in peripheral nations

(Friedmann 1991). Consequently, capitalism produces "appalling hardship where women are

exploited as workers and as women, to the point of 'super-exploitation' where even their basic

subsistence is denied" (Mellor 1992: 52).

There is a deadly world-wide paradox here. Women depend upon their ecosystems to do

two-thirds of the world's work; but there is a dramatic gender inequity in the control and

ownership of natural resources. Female farmers grow three-fifths of the world's food and supply

one-third to one-half of the world's agricultural labor (Instituto del Tercer Mundo 1994).

However, eighty percent of Third World land is concentrated into the hands of the richest decile

of families (Instituto del Tercer Mundo 1994). Thus, women own less than 1 percent of the land

and natural resources upon which household survival depends (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). In

the face of world hunger, core capitalism reallocates natural resources to the production of

commodities for core consumption. Agribusiness and extractive industries consume and pollute

the world's dwindling agricultural acreage to produce inedible staples, luxury foods, timber, and

minerals that benefit core economies. Capitalist agriculture uses the world's declining grain

output to feed animals that will add unneeded calories to the diet of overfed core citizens

(Escudero 1991). The world's poorest women derive two-thirds of household sustenance from

rainforests that are being consumed to support the wasteful core lifestyle (Hauchler and Kennedy

1994). For example, McDonald's squanders one-fifth acre of the Amazon to produce the

Brazilian beef for every hamburger consumed by the Japanese (Rodda 1994: 20).

In addition to the global inequities in resource control and depletion, capitalism

externalizes to women the economic and health costs of environmental change. Women are
disproportionately endangered by the ecological degradation that accompanies capitalist

development, and they are the household members who must contribute the labor needed to care

for those made ill by environmental risks or resource depletion (Warren 1997: 8-9). Worldwide,

women are the "hewers of wood and the drawers of water," and these activities put women and

girls at risks not faced by males. One in ten people in the world suffer from tropical diseases that

are transmitted through polluted water and raw sewage. While drawing water and doing outdoor

laundry each year, 600 million people-- predominantly females-- are infected with malaria, river

blindness, and several other deadly diseases. Women in poor countries endure the trauma of

watching half their children die before the age of ten-- primarily from diseases caused by

polluted water, poor sanitation, and air pollution (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994).

Global warming has intensified the frequency of natural disasters in tropical regions of

the planet, and there is a disproportionate impact upon poor women. Two-thirds of the refugees

from natural disasters, from environmental catastrophes caused by industries, and from the

ecological degradations of war are women and their children. Since 1970, fertilizer and pesticide

use has increased 800 percent in Third World countries; and exposure to these chemicals is now

a major cause of maternal deaths and birth defects (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994). Women of

color and of minority ethnic groups endure a double layer of ecological risk, for capitalists also

engage in patterns of environmental racism. Communities of color are disproportionately

threatened by chemical and industrial waste and by the storage of dangerous military weapons

(Bullard 1994).

HOW MNCS EXTERNALIZE ECOLOGICAL COSTS TO WOMEN

Articulation with capitalist commodity chains brings three destructive economic results

for women in poor countries: loss of artisan jobs, loss of local markets to imports, and the
negative side-effects of commercialized agriculture (Mies, Bennhold-Thomsen, and von Werlhof

1988). Multinational corporations (MNCs) control the commodity chains that are initiating these

economic changes, and these global conglomerates are externalizing four additional ecological

costs to peripheral women. When they are linked into the international commodity chains that

involve exports of agricultural produce or raw materials, Third World countries are caught in a

three-way-bind. First, capitalist agribusiness monopolizes the most fertile agricultural acreage

(Amin 1994: 341). Second, core-based corporations dominate international trade in agricultural

produce. Of the seventeen major export commodities from peripheral nations, twelve are

agricultural crops to which women contribute a disproportionate share of the labor. However,

core corporations rip off two-thirds to 90 percent of the profits from international trade in those

exports (Instituto del Tercer Mundo 1994). Core corporations also externalize the costs of

capitalism to women in poor countries through their "botanical imperialism" (Broswimmer

1991), the third level of the agricultural bind. In addition to core control over the international

trade in agricultural exports, twenty multinationals hold a global monopoly over the seeds, plant

hybrids, fertilizer, and pesticides that are imported by Third World countries (Instituto del Tercer

Mundo 1994). Core corporations are also increasingly taking ecological resources out of the

hands of indigenous women. Imported plant cultigens and livestock cause the extinction of

species that women need for household sustenance (Broswimmer 1991). In the search for cures

to AIDS, cancer and heart disease, multinational drug corporations are collecting and patenting

women's indigenous knowledge about medical uses of the rainforests. The bitter irony is that

these profitable discoveries will be marketed in the core and not filter down to meet medical

needs of the Third World countries from which they were co-opted (Instituto del Tercer Mundo

1994; Hauchler and Kennedy 1994).

 Second, women and children are entering the labor forces of multinational corporations

faster than adult males, and this is a trend expected to continue into the 21st century. To keep

production costs low, multinationals are breaking the bodies of young women at an alarming

rate. By eliminating safety equipment and sanitary working conditions, corporations externalize

to women and children the health costs of industrial injuries and disabilities, work-related

diseases, and the higher incidence of birth defects and mother mortality due to exposure to

chemicals and industrial waste. Yet most of these women live in countries with grossly

inadequate medical systems (Hauchler and Kennedy 1994).

Third, the West has not only shifted to women in poor countries the responsibility for

population control; peripheral nations have been the testing ground for birth control methods and

the dumping place for devices outlawed in the core. While European and American doctors

rarely prescribe intrauterine devices, these comprise the second-most-used import in Third

World population control programs. Fourth, Third World debt rests heavily upon the backs of

women and nature (Mies and Shiva 1993; Rodda 1994). To pay international debts, countries

initiate the types of mega-development projects that cause ecological devastation and destroy the

natural resources from which women have drawn subsistence resources (Harvey and Schwartz

1987). Debt-for-nature swaps shift ecological control from indigenous women to core

corporations and nongovernmental organizations. Because of ecological conditions, Third World

infants die nine times more often than core babies; and Third World pregnant mothers die 100

times more often than women in rich industrialized nations. In addition, AIDS is escalating most

rapidly among women in poor countries. Good health and childhood survival are closely linked

to education, but women have the highest illiteracy rates in the world (Hauchler and Kennedy

1994). However, the structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund have pressured Third World countries to cut public education and

health care (Instituto del Tercer Mundo 1994; Mies and Shiva 1993).

CONCLUSION

For those of us who work in the World-system perspective, it is a daunting task to sort

through all the ecological and feminist writers to identify those few who share our ideological

standpoint. More than two-thirds of the environmental historians are critical of capitalist growth

policies. However, most of them believe that "sustainable development" can save the

environment, and they do not advocate the demise of capitalism (Worster 1993). My own

frustration has been that too many feminists are blinded by western ethnocentrism and by

middle-class American biases; so they situate the women of the world within the western

development paradigm and focus too narrowly upon gender equity within the industrial core

(Merchant 1990).

However, radical ecofeminists are not burdened by these theoretical biases, and they

share with world-system analysis two fundamental critiques of the capitalist world-system. First,

radical ecofeminists know that the western modernization project has failed the world miserably

and that core capitalism has victimized the Third World to fuel its own economic growth (Mies

and Shiva 1993: 56-58). Second, radical ecofeminists agree with Wallerstein that western

scientism is a driving force of capital accumulation. They believe that the "scientific standpoint"

(the view from the core) must be replaced by the "view from the bottom" so that we may hear the

voices of those who are dominated (Mies and Shiva 1988: 47-51). Because radical ecofeminists

share these important standpoints with world-system analysis, I feel comfortable listening to the

complex challenges that they bring to the perspective. I have proposed a theoretical synthesis of

ideas from radical ecofeminism with world-system analysis.

 Concepts like incorporation, commodity chain, unequal exchange, and the

semiproletarianized household lay an important foundation (Dunaway 2001). However, the

perspective has not yet integrated into its theoretical standpoint the women/labor/nature nexus,

especially in its conceptualization of households. Looking through the lens of radical

ecofeminism, I have called attention to issues about the state of the world's women that the

perspective has ignored in its theoretical explanations. We need to extend our theoretical notions

to take into account the ways in which capitalism is materially dependent upon the unique labor

nexus between women and nature.13 If we hope to capture the worst eco-structural contradictions

and immiseration of the modern world-system, we must address more adequately these crucial

questions.

# When deepening capitalism transforms an ecosystem, how are households and womens

work altered?

# What hidden ecological inputs do households and women make to capitalist commodity

chains?

# What is the ecological nature of the unequal exchanges that occur between commodity

chains, within a commodity chain, and within households? And to what extent are

women disproportionately impacted by those unequal exchanges?

# What ecological costs do capitalist commodity chains externalize to households and to

women?

# What new threats to the women/labor/nature nexus are being caused by the neoliberal

policies that characterize world capitalism at the opening of the 21st century?

NOTES

1. I am grateful to Donald Clelland for his critical comments and corrections and for his
bibliographic assistance. The 1997 Annual PEWS Conference focused upon environment

(Goldfrank, Goodman, and Szasz 1999). There are several schools of ecofeminism. Because

their ideas are more ideologically compatible with world-system analysis, I will focus upon the

ideas of neo-Marxist and socialist ecofeminists who critique capitalism as a failed project of

western colonialism (e.g., Mies and Shiva 1993; Merchant 1989). For discussion, see my

conclusion and Merchant (1990).

2. Some world-system analysts disagree with Hopkins and Wallerstein (1987) about the

historical point at which we may say that incorporation of an external arena has been initiated by

the core (Hall 1986) and about whether the degree of incorporation should be measured from the

perspective of the external arena or from the vantage point of the core (Dunaway 1996b).

3. Hopkins and Wallerstein (1987) ignore both culture and environment. However, Wallerstein

(1983, 1991) integrates culture into the model of incorporation.

4. Rival European nations sought to cement their world hegemony through "continued new

colonizations of the 'extensive margin'" -- the opening of new terrains of raw materials, markets,

and labor" to be managed according to the imperatives of the world-economy (O'Connor, 1994:

110; Bunker 1985).

5. Capitalism "created for the first time in history a general market in land" (Worster, 1993: 58).

6. Moreover, it tends to ignore the concreteness and humanity of Marx's "relations of

production," to which I would add the relations of exchange. According to Braudel (1972, vol. 1:

353), the correct subjects for historical materialism are "human beings, and not 'things.'"

7. Gereffi and Korzeniewicz (1994: 12) acknowledge this weakness.

8. Wallerstein (1997) calls attention to social and ecological externalities.

9. For a chart of social and cultural costs that are externalized by capitalism, see O'Connor
(1994: 102-103).

10. While there are many varieties of ecofeminism, all seem to agree on this fundamental

critique of western capitalism; see Salleh (1994) and Warren (1997).

11. "What women do 'gratis,' whether birthing labor or sustaining labor, is called 'reproduction'

as opposed to production. Yet the word reproduce here connotes a secondary or diminutive

activity, as distinct from the primary 'historical act' of production itself. And since reproduction

is not recognized as 'primary,' it cannot be seen to generate 'value'" (Salleh 1994: 115).

12. Each of these categories is complex and not as simple as the term may imply; see Wallerstein

and Smith (1992: 7-12) for explication.

13. Three world-system monographs (Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers, 1984; Smith and

Wallerstein 1992; and Ward 1990) address women and households; however, none of them

examines ecological issues from a radical feminist perspective or the ecological costs of

capitalism for women.

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