A “lifeline out of the COVID-19 crisis”? An ecofeminist critique of the European Green Deal

Abstract

In early 2020, the world was rocked by a highly contagious, acute respiratory virus. Within a few months, many countries had gone into lockdown and were issuing mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing in what came to be known as the COVID-19 pandemic.¹ Many theories quickly developed as to how and where COVID-19 emerged, although the definitive answer is still not available. Scientists do agree, however, that it is a zoonotic virus—meaning it is an infectious diseases transferred from animals to humans or vice-versa—and that the Wuhan market in China was a major, initial spreading location (Maxmen, 2022; Pigenet, 2020; WHO, 2021b). For some time now, the scientific community has been warning of the potential for increases in zoonotic diseases with the intensification of climate change and the rise of global warming as by-products of anthropogenic activities that have pushed animals and humans into closer contact (see, e.g., Schrag & Weiner, 1995). A joint-report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Livestock Research Institute (, 2020, p. 11) recently recalled that, “While pandemics such as [COVID-19] are sometimes seen as a ‘black swan’—an extremely rare event—they are actually a widely predicted consequence of how people source food, trade animals, and alter environments.” That report warns that, “the rising trend in zoonotic diseases is driven by the degradation of our natural environment” and results from anthropogenic activities, including agricultural intensification and conversion of land, wildlife exploitation, resource extraction, increased demand for animal protein and climate change. Despite the world being taken by surprise in early 2020, COVID-19 was in fact a foreseeable event.

In Europe, the EU's response to the climate crisis came just weeks before COVID-19 erupted onto the global stage. Ursula von der Leyen, Head of the European Commission, presented the European Green Deal (EGD) to the world in December 2019. In early 2020, the EU was quick to acknowledge the connection between the climate crisis and the pandemic and doubled down on the EGD as its main policy framework for tackling both crises, hailing it as a “lifeline out of the COVID-19 crisis” (European Commission, n.d.). This article seeks to evaluate that claim by applying an ecofeminist perspective to question the prevailing orthodoxy upheld by the EGD. Ecofeminism is an umbrella term, as Karen Warren (1994) has suggested: one that captures a multitude of perspectives on the nature of connections within social systems of domination and is premised on the intersections and interconnectedness of people, nature, and the environment. As a theoretical framework, it is a way to frame the analysis of power within structures of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, and the role of institutions and policies in reproducing that power with an explicitly social, gender⁴ –understood as a social construct and not reduced to the male/female binary, and climate justice perspective.⁵ Ecofeminists argue for care-sensitive approaches to climate policy and see the current crises as a catalyst for changing the distribution of care work upon which our society is built. What has become clear is that we cannot tackle the current social and climate crises without recognizing how they are interlinked: climate, COVID-19, capitalism, and care (MacGregor, 2021).

The first section explores ecofeminism as a useful theoretical framework with which to analyze the EGD. It expands upon how the interconnected and intersecting sites of oppression and domination that include patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism are intimately linked to the destruction and pillage of the environment. Section 2 addresses the issue of structural inequalities and the global challenge of climate change and zoonotic diseases by providing a critical analysis of the regulatory framework of the EGD. As studies have shown, policies intended to respond to the climate crisis have rather exacerbated existing inequalities (Beck, 2010; Harlan et al., 2015; World Bank, 2020). Furthermore, climate justice is all but void in the EGD's framework, with a glaring absence of the consideration of the “…intersection between climate change and the way social inequalities are experienced as structural violence” (Porter et al., 2020, p. 293). Section 3 builds upon ecofeminist perspectives and proposals on how reorganizing our economies around care work can reduce carbon emissions, but also lead to the systemic and structural changes that are needed to confront the climate crisis. The article concludes with a summary of its evaluation of the EGD as a “lifeline” out of the pandemic.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1953) declared that in the logic of patriarchy both women and nature appear as “other.” This idea was taken up by Françoise d'Eaubonne who connected the logic of patriarchy to the oppression of marginalized groups and the domination of nature in what she called “ecological feminism” in her 1974 book Le féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death). A decade earlier, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Carson, 1962) had launched the mainstream ecological movement in the Global North by sounding the alarm on the use of agricultural chemicals and the destruction of the environment. She accused the industry of disinformation and lying to the public about the toxicity and harm of its products and opposed veiled discourses of “progress” and “development.”⁶ Carson was critical of the domination of nature for capital gain, observing that, “We still talk in terms of conquest. […] Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself” (quoted in Lear, 2009, p. 450).⁷ d'Eaubonne and Carson's works contributed to mainstreaming scrutiny of the conceptual and material links between the exploitation and domination of certain groups of people and the destruction of the environment. Their work resonated with feminists at a time when concern for the environment was also gaining traction. Ecofeminism emerged as a movement in the 1980s, coinciding with growing scientific and grassroots concerns about the link between global warming, climate change and anthropocentric activities.⁸

As the science around climate change gained currency in the political sphere, climate scientists became more vocal about the dangers of climate change and global warming. One outcome was the increase and spread of zoonotic diseases, which began to be seriously discussed in the scientific literature. In one analysis, Slingenbergh et al. (2004, p. 467), noted that the evolution of person-to-person pathogens of zoonotic origin were possibly triggered or facilitated by external factors, which they summarize as: “Disease emergence may thus be depicted as an evolutionary response to changes in the environment, including anthropogenic factors such as new agricultural practices, urbanisation, or globalisation, as well as climate change.” The dramatic evolution of climate change and global warming since the mid-20th century has alarmed scientists for decades, and despite powerful pockets of climate-deniers, it is now generally accepted that we have reached a tipping point. New research is suggesting that due to human activities, five of the nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorous and nitrogen), and most recently novel entities, in particular stemming from plastic pollution (Persson et al., 2022).⁹ Novel statistical analysis is also showing that the Amazon rainforest, the “lungs” of the earth, is at imminent risk of reaching a critical threshold of rainforest dieback, the point at which the rainforest begins to change to grasslands, savannah, or other less biodiverse landscapes (Boulton et al., 2022). Climate scientists have been muzzled for years, and although it is now no longer controversial, some politicians—with the support and investment of private libertarian thinktanks such as the Heartland and Cato Institutes, and powerful libertarians, such as the Koch Brothers—continue to question the urgency and therefore the policies with which to confront climate change.¹⁰

While the effects of extractive capitalism, in particular, have long been decried and resisted by Indigenous communities and their allies, it has only been with the real-time consequences of climate change in the Global North and the threat to capitalist global powers that governments are now adopting policies in consequence. Indigenous populations have forever been protecting nature and for generations have struggled against the destruction and pillage of their ancestral lands. Comprising less than 5% of the world's population, Indigenous peoples protect 80% of global biodiversity (Raygorodetsky, 2018). Demands for climate justice have swept across the globe, with Indigenous peoples and young people, often girls and young women leading the charge. The “revival” of ecofeminism in recent years coincides with growing criticisms of policy frameworks aimed at tackling the climate crisis, but which continue to ignore the structural and systemic issues that underpin it. Ecofeminists are now explicit about their intersectional approach (Kings, 2017),¹¹ and are intentional about lifting the veil on the gender dimensions of climate change in a way that links struggles to dismantle patriarchy with struggles to dismantle capitalism and colonialism. Intersectionality plays a pivotal role in how to respond to the climate crisis since the dimensions of our identities impact upon and are impacted upon by climate change (see Amorim-Maia et al., 2022; Kaijser & Kronsell, 2014); yet, as MacGregor (2010, p. 223) astutely points out, that “there remains a curious silence on gender relations in the mainstream literature and policy discourse” on climate change; gender perspectives remain largely at the margins of climate politics.

Sherilyn MacGregor (2010) compellingly argues that where gender analyses exist in climate debates, they relate to development issues rather than the gender differentiated causes and consequences of climate change. She (MacGregor, 2010, 224; italics in original) observes that when gender is discussed, it is only with respect to the material impacts of climate change with discourses focused upon the vulnerability of women as victims, but with disregard to gendered power relations and what she refers to as the “discursive framings that shape climate politics.” The consequences of which further impacts upon the disregard of life-sustaining work, or social reproduction, and the construction of feminized spheres of activity. Social reproduction has become just another source of profit-making (Nadasen, 2021) and the commodification of nature has led to new markets embedded in greening capitalism, a discussion we return to below. Women are furthermore vastly underrepresented in decision-making in general, and environmental decision- and policymaking, in particular, with estimates that women hold approximately 12% of top ministerial positions in environment-related sectors worldwide (IUCN, 2020). Comparable underrepresentation in the top positions of environmental science also exist. MacGregor (2010, pp. 230–232) offers an analysis of what she calls the “masculinization of environmental politics” calling attention to how the institutionalization of the green agenda has resulted in the alienation and obscuring of lived experiences of climate change. Climate politics, she argues, is shrouded in masculinized discourses; first, economic modernization with its focus upon climate change as a techno-scientific problem requiring techno-scientific solutions—we return to analyze the EGD in this context examining its solution to climate change through economically lucrative proposals such as carbon capture in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), renewable energies, electric cars, genetically modified crops. Second, environmental security, upon which we will not expand here; briefly and at the risk of oversimplifying, it is the argument that a scarcity of resources due to climate change and global warming will lead to more conflicts. These discourses offer little in terms of analysis and solutions for the social implications of climate change.

There are some comparable elements of how policymakers have addressed climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic: the techno-scientific responses to the climate change and the military-style emergency responses to the pandemic as countries announced they were at war with COVID-19. An ecofeminist approach with its emphasis on intersectionality rather highlights the interconnectedness of these crises to work toward a solution rooted in people for people and the other-than-human world, not markets or profits.

Despite overwhelming evidence over the past decades, governments have been slow in responding to the science and restrained in addressing and delivering upon the demands for action by climate activists. In 2015, a glimmer of hope shined when the EU and all of its Member States signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement agreeing upon three fundamental goals: (1) reduce global GHGs to avoid a global temperature increase over 2°C this century while pursuing efforts to limit the increase even further to 1.5°C; (2) review countries' commitments every 5 years, with a long-term emission reduction strategy due before 2020; (3) provide financing to “developing” countries to mitigate climate change, strengthen resilience and enhance abilities to adapt to climate impacts. The preamble of the Paris Agreement acknowledged gender equality and called for gender-responsive approaches.

The European emissions reduction strategy materialized in 2019 as the EGD. It is premised on making Europe the first climate neutral continent by 2050 by achieving zero-net emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), while continuing economic growth by decoupling from resource use, and providing a “just transition” for European citizens. Van der Leyen (2019) proclaimed it as “Europe's man-on-the-moon moment.” Achieving net-zero means that the number of GHGs emitted does not exceed the number removed from the atmosphere through what is known as carbon capture. The method to capture and store carbon is controversial, with scientists and climate activists still debating its potential as it relies heavily on still early-stage technology. That technology involves capturing the emissions from power plants and factories, condensing it, and storing the carbon monoxide underground. Activists have criticized the net-zero policy as a costly band-aid solution that does not reach the heart of the problem: rather than taking the bold and necessary steps to cut the use of fossil fuels entirely, carbon capture literally pushes the problem underground. It is a way for the EU to frame its policy-framework as building a social and economic relationship with nature through “climate-friendly” or “green” capitalism and a new kind of growth. Underpinning the EGD with a growth-objective has sparked criticism and has been rebuked as a plan for the preservation of capitalism, not the transformation to an alternative, sustainable system (Varoufakis & Adler, 2020). Moreover, the EGD has provided little more than lip service to a gender approach, which was recently criticized by its own Rapporteur for the Commission for the Environment, Climate Change and Energy (ENVE; see Tütö, 2022).

The European Commission states that the EGD should serve as “[…] a new growth strategy that aims to transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy, where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in 2050 and where economic growth is decoupled from resource use (European Commission, 2019a, p. 2, bold in original).” Following its announcement, the EU rapidly put into place several action plans targeting different policy areas including industry (March 10, 2020), circular economy (March 11, 2020), biodiversity (May 20, 2020), and energy transition (July 2020). The Commission also announced its ambitious “fit for 55” package which regroups Directives and Regulations that underpin its climate goals. In addition, the EU legally enshrined its climate goal for carbon neutrality in a Climate Law adopted in July 2021. The Climate Law applies collectively but not to each Member State individually; in other words, the EU is collectively committed to achieve net-zero, but individual states are not; practically, this collectively lowers the mark rather than set robust individual national targets with proportionate efforts to take into account varying starting points for each state. Furthermore, while the EU climate policies are aimed at adapting and reforming its industries to the current climate reality, its proposals to provide a stronger regulatory framework for carbon emissions is a thinly veiled plan to save capitalism from itself. Frank Pearce (1976) detailed how the capitalist state intervenes in the market or imposes regulations upon industry when the legitimacy of the capitalist state is at risk. There is a mystification of the process, which he called “the imaginary social order,” whereby the new regulations are viewed by the public as a general good; the public sees these regulations as the state responding to its demands, but Pearce demonstrated that it is rather an act of self-preservation.

The EGD has been generally well-received by governments and civil society groups and has set out ambitious targets. However, a closer look at the framework reveals some fundamental gaps: First, the initial communication for the EGD was devoid of a gender perspective.¹³ Gender analyses remain weak in the EU's proposed green transition. Despite an attempt to respond to its failure to address gender through its Gender Equality Strategy (March 2021), and like many gender-sensitive policy frameworks, the EU has focused upon women's economic empowerment rather than tackling the burden of care that falls more heavily on women and gender minorities (MacGregor et al., 2022). In other words, there have yet to be any proposals to tackle the systemic and structural inequalities that underpin a gender-based division of labor resulting in paid and unpaid care work disproportionately falling upon women and girls. Or to recognize the inherent value and low-carbon potential of care work more generally. An integral part of Europe's strategy is the EU's emphasis on creating a market for its green transition, with local and sustainable jobs through the creation of employment in renewable energy sectors and construction for refitting buildings for energy efficiency.

A critique of the green market may be articulated on two fronts: first, jobs in renewable energy sectors face persistent gender inequalities. Multiple agencies confirm that women are underrepresented in energy sectors, with women's participation in STEM jobs far lower than in administrative jobs. Moreover, there are persistent and significant gender wage gaps (see IEA, 2022; IRENA, 2019). Year on year, women continue to be paid less and be given less prominent positions in the workforce at large, and particularly in the renewable energy sector. Second, the EGD has overlooked the importance of care work both in terms of sustainability and of its inherent value. There is a need to expand the definition of “green” work and what a “green” economy looks like, more on this in the last section. Moreover, the EU's delivery plan suggests that by investing in renewable green technologies and green mobility, the EU will also be helping its international partners and supporting its companies to serve this new, growing market. Achieving the goals of the EGD is thus premised upon maintaining growth by changing gears to “climate friendly industries…clean technologies…green financing” (Van der Leyen, 2019). So, while the EU has set out a strategic plan, it is one that is constructed in the same logic of growth and capitalist imperatives that led us to the climate crisis in the first place.

There has been a manifest shift in feminist discourses on the economy from using the term “reproductive” to “care” economy. The former is rooted in the important work of socialist and Marxist feminists who argued that capitalism is dependent upon reproductive, provisioning, and care work (life-giving and life-sustaining work, or social reproduction), which is disproportionately carried out by women and girls (Mies, 1986). Those feminists developed important critiques of traditional Marxist analyses for largely eschewing a gender perspective and only valuing wage labor (Federici, 2004; Mies, 1986). Silvia Federici (2019, p. 55) emphasizes that integrating a gender perspective that pays attention to the value of care means “… redefining the capitalist function of the wage as creator of labour hierarchies and an instrument serving to naturalise exploitative social relations and to delegate to wage-workers power over the unwaged.” This dynamic was overtly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic whereby not only were gendered caregiving roles and household duties amplified, but far-reaching impacts were also felt in the workplace with job loss, economic hardships, and a seeming disposability of the precarious workforce predominantly women and gender minorities (Sultana, 2021). Analyses of the reproductive economy are increasingly integrated into a more holistic analysis of the care economy. Definitions of the care economy are intersectional and move beyond focusing upon the material and economic aspects of non-waged labor to the wider categories that include caring for people but also for the natural world. This caring for human and other-than-human is a focal point for ecofeminists proposing a care-full economy as a central aspect of radically transforming our economies and our society and offering an actionable response to the climate crisis.

There has been no greater need than now to radically change how we live, produce, and consume, and how we take care of one another and the world we share. Ecofeminism offers a de-gendered understanding of care that is “… about looking after and providing for the needs of human and nonhuman others; it is about the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance and protection of humans and the more-than-human world” (Harcourt & Bauhardt, 2019, p. 3). In interpersonal relationships, care often means to give or provide for the well-being of those who cannot take care of themselves because of age or disability. This work is characterized by its time intensity, the continual requirements of the dependents and the inability of the carer to postpone the care needs. Empirically, and globally, social reproduction is mostly done by women, and it is too often socially considered to be “women's work” (Budlender, 2010). Recent studies are also showing a rise in gendered caregiving and household activities since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Ryan & El Ayadi, 2020). The hegemony of notions of masculinity and femininity results in the naturalization of an understanding of “women's work” in the care sector that is reflected in the feminisation of care work—women make up roughly 70% of the global health workforce, but only 25% of senior roles (WHO, 2021a). And while social reproduction is fundamental to our existence, it is hardly valued in capitalist and patriarchal societies which take care work for granted (Benerìa, 2003; Waring, 1988). Diallo et al. (2020, p. 2) note that “Although rarely accounted for in calculations of gross domestic product (GDP), unpaid care and domestic work has enormous economic value. Trying to value the invaluable, researchers have estimated that women's unpaid contributions to health care equate to 2.35 per cent of global GDP.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, with a spotlight on care, political discourses were forced to acknowledge the necessity of care work and the importance it has in bolstering the economy although little has be done since.

Stevano et al. (2021, p. 2) remark that “The pandemic throws multiple failures of contemporary capitalism into sharp relief,” with the health crisis compounded by financial and social crises. The violence of neoliberal ideology and the market-led economy has rendered us less capable of providing care, even for those closest to us, and at the same time has encouraged that we restrict our care for strangers, both at the personal level as well as collectively (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). At the same time, the pandemic and its multiple lockdowns have reminded us that we are inherently social beings and our survival and well-being depend upon cooperation and closeness with one another and with nature. The extent of the tragic consequences on mental and physical health during the pandemic has been voiced by health professionals (Marconcin et al., 2022); and there are currently studies showing that contact or exposure to nature can reduce the impact of mental and physical health stressors due to confinement (Ribeiro et al., 2021). Humans need sustained contact with each other and with the natural world. At the height of the pandemic when the institutional care-deficit could no longer be ignored, the gap in care-work was filled largely by women and girls in underpaid and/or unpaid work. The worst effects were felt disproportionately by marginalized groups, and particularly Indigenous populations. The pandemic exposed and exacerbated preexisting structural inequalities and systemic racism, with particular risks for women (OHCHR, 2021). For its part, the EGD has failed to address how social and gender justice intersects with climate justice. And, as ecofeminists have argued, the narrow focus upon a green economy, with virtually no attention paid to transforming the care economy, reproduces the schema of privilege and oppression that works against valuing and sustaining life. As such, it cannot adequately make sense of the climate crisis because it does not confront the existence of power dynamics and patriarchal structures that enable the subordination of different groups of people and the domination nature.

The health emergency brought on by the pandemic exposed the consequences of years of dismantling the welfare state, massive privatizations, and the commodification of basic social welfare, together with the perils of making “care” another market to dominate. Healthcare has been sold off to private companies, where the central driver is profit, driving down the care imperative to market development. Decades of emphasis on individualism and particularly individualized, market-based competition has worked toward dismantling notions of solidarity, community, and collectivism. In its enthusiasm to green capitalism, the EU has ignored the potential for arguably the most transformative approach to the climate crisis: a care-full economy. This is not to say that a care economy can alone respond to climate change, but it can offer an alternative to the hegemony of individualisation and privatization that has so strongly contributed to social breakdown, profit-over-people, and the uncaring of our planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made it very clear that our window of opportunity to ensure a future on this planet is closing. Our world is indeed on fire; and, as Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN has said, “The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal. The world's biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” Meanwhile, the least responsible for pollution, consumption, and production are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and global warming. The EU has responded by committing to transition from brown capitalism to green capitalism; the EGD sets out the roadmap to confront the climate crisis and provide a lifeline out of the pandemic. We need radical change. COVID-19 is not a “black swan.” Yet, despite warnings from scientists that zoonotic diseases were on the rise and that the likelihood of this kind of pandemic was imminent given climate change and global warming (Quammen, 2020), governments were totally unprepared. The pandemic exposed the interconnectedness of the health emergency and the planetary crisis with the harmful practices and policies of neoliberal patriarchal capitalism.

However, the EGD has failed to give much needed attention to the gendered and racialized experiences of the climate crisis, indicating a disinterest to sincerely engage with climate justice. Women, low-income communities, Indigenous peoples, racialized people, LGBTQI+ people, people living with disabilities, and other marginalized groups experience the effects of pollution, extractivism, rising energy prices, access to healthcare and other aspects of life as they relate to climate change differently. Those groups are disproportionately affected by the consequences of global warming and the loss of biodiversity. The consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have mirrored these disproportionate suffering with those same populations and communities registering higher infection and death rates (Lopez et al., 2021). Neoliberal capitalism has created, sustained, and promoted a care deficit, a culture of “uncaring” for each other, and an unhinged exploitation of nature. The collapse or total absence of social protection systems over the years of austerity has been dramatic, and the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on certain groups and communities has further exposed the extreme polarization of our societies, underpinning in part the alarming rise of far-right extremism.

A truly trailblazing moment would require changing everything: rejecting growth imperatives, committing to non-hierarchical, democratic decision-making, protecting and nurturing Nature, acknowledging coloniality and committing to decolonising politics and practice. A moonshot policy framework must aim to restructure social reproduction, de-gender and collectivize care work, and radically transform production and consumption. Our eco- and interdependences are positive and transformative forces that we must harness to strive for a truly emancipatory future.