If the Earth Is Not Your Mother, Are You from Mars? Ecospirituality, Gender, and Environmental Activism

Abstract

Ecospirituality in anglophone contexts is strikingly gendered, which creates a range of consequences for spiritually motivated eco-activism. Activists frame Earth as a mother, and nature as female. They speak about the current ecological crisis as a sickness of the Earth. Based on ethnographic, interview, and survey data from the US and UK, I discuss how ecospirituality is conceptually undergirded with specific articulations of gender that draw meaning from kin relations. This discussion provides examples of the different activist outcomes produced by various expressions of ecospirituality. I explore the significance of the central gendered essentialism of the divine feminine and divine masculine in order to offer an account of how nature is gendered in the ecospiritual networks discussed. The gendering of nature affects how the ecological crisis is conceptualised, which in turn impacts responses to the crisis.