Karen J. Warren: Her Work in The Making of Ecofeminism

Karen J. Warren:Her Work in The Making of Ecofeminism Tricia Glazebrook (bio) Karen J. Warren was born on Long Island, New York, on September 10, 1947. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 1970, and a Master's degree (1974) and Doctorate (1978) from the University of Massachusetts—Amherst. Her dissertation was one of the first on environmental ethics. In the early years of her career, she taught at St. Olaf College in Northfield Minnesota, until 1985 when she joined the Philosophy department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1995, she was the second Ecofeminist Scholar-in-Residence at Murdoch University in Australia. In 2002, she was a Round Table Scholar at Oxford University. In 2004, she held the Women's Chair in Humanistic Studies at Marquette. Throughout these achievements, Warren was a dynamic thinker committed to 'real world' issues and strongly committed to public engagement. She took philosophy to be a democratic practice and was committed to the social impacts of philosophy. In her outreach, she taught prison inmates and developed award-winning environmental curricula for schoolchildren, for which she received awards. She was an international scholar who faced issues in peace studies, feminism, and environmental ethics, and is known for bringing those areas of research together. In feminism, her Unconventional History of Philosophy: Conversations Between Men and Women Philosophers (2009), a fifteen-chapter book that pairs female and male philosophers throughout the centuries, is a fascinating book that breaks down the gender bias in philosophy that has rarely recognized women's contributions to the discipline, and seems to be continuing that practice. She is most known for her work as an ecofeminist, that is the focal topic of this paper. [End Page 1] The first time I met Karen was in 1995 when I invited her to Colgate University in upstate New York to celebrate its twenty-fifth year since it began accepting female students. She changed everything—epistemology, ontology, ethics … I learned from her what, beyond contemporary science-based definitions of knowledge, is another kind of knowing from generations of experience built in long-standing cultures. For quite some time, ethics was not considered in philosophy really to be philosophy that, like science, was expected to be grounded on logic. Contemporary 'science,' a generalization that actually covers a wide range of disciplines—e.g., biology, physics, actuarial science, computer science, etc.—is logical in so far as it is more or less based on quantitative assessment using numerical data and mathematics. Ethics, that is inherently qualitative, is not taken to carry the neutrality of mathematics and science. Warren rejected that view and instead, as I will show in more detail below, argued for a different logic based on care. She also argued that understanding what knowledge is is unique to culture, and on this basis, she has advocated for listening to indigenous voices and voices in the global South that are outside Eurocentric knowledge systems despite the impacts of colonialism. Before taking on these issues, however, Warren's role in ecofeminism, that emerged during her higher education in philosophy, and her development in consequence of her ecofeminist thinking, must first be addressed. Practically speaking, the crucially impactful thing that Warren did for ecofeminism was to sustain it. In the 1970s, ecofeminism was emerging with a vision of women's power that was challenged by the women's connection to nature as her reproductive capacity, hence re-awakening an essentialist inscription of biologism for women that once again implied mothers' natural confinement to domesticity. Ecofeminists responded to this challenge. Ortner (1974) argued that women are not closer to nature than men, just constructed to appear so, thereby making change possible only if achieved in both cultural assumptions and social institutions. Amongst such debates, new medical technologies were appropriating the birthing process. Ecofeminist writers, such as Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology (Daly 1978) and Susan Griffin in Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (Griffin 1978), both published in 1978, wanted to take that power back from patriarchy through the "Great Goddess" as a "symbol of life and death powers and waxing and waning energies in the universe and in...