Women As Custodians Of The Environment
By Azore Opio
In developing and really underdeveloped countries, women are increasingly being recognised for the contribution they have long made in upholding and protecting the Earth, let alone the family.
Inadvertently, women have held responsibility for the most profound task of life-sustaining families. Apart from the natural urge to reproduce their species, and care for their young, women are in possession of an enormous store of environmental wisdom. In most cases, they are responsible for providing food for the families, growing food crops, finding water for cooking and sanitation, farming and fuel gathering.
Women in rural Africa play a major role in managing natural resources (forests, water, soil, and energy). It will, therefore, be safe to agree that they are society’s most important resource managers, and conservators as well as bearers of the natural environment.
Their stores include knowledge about which food crops provide the most reliable and nutritious yields for the least effort; trees which give wood that makes a hot, slow-burning fire; which water sources are reliable, even in drought; which plants have medicinal properties, and so on.
It would automatically follow, therefore, that environmental degradation hits hardest the underprivileged poor who are mostly women; often forcing them into ways of living that are unfriendly to the environment, causing further destruction.
So, what is a woman’s perspective and role in the environment? What kind of world ought to be seen for women concerning gender and environment?
Firstly, women are directly involved in the daily practice of production, restoration and renewal of life. Consequently, they are direct and special victims of environmental degradation. Poor rural women, in case of deforestation and desertification, have to walk longer distances to fetch firewood and water before coming back to the kitchen and later in the night, even though worn out by the day’s hard toil, to the arduous matrimonial responsibility of coitus.
Secondly, women should be recognised more and more, and respected as natural managers of resources such as forests, water, fuel and soil, and active participants in agriculture. Their knowledge about the environment should also be acknowledged as part of possible solutions to everyday problems of water and energy. They are, in fact, resources themselves, although this seems to be an unnecessary addition to the burden of caring for the environment, to all their other caring roles.
Thirdly, women must be seen as protectors and defenders of the environment. Their commitment to environmental protection should be attributed to their need for resources to sustain livelihoods, and also as a deeper understanding by them of nature.
Fourthly, women should be viewed as being in more harmony with nature than most men appear to be. This will promote unity among women.
Lastly, and this is most important of all, many people and groups concerned with environment tend to overlook the fact that the vast majority of the over 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty in this world are women, and girls. These people and or groups assume that population exceeds resources thus leading to the degradation of the environment. But they ignore such causes of degradation as the distribution of resources, consumerism, war, growth policies, gender relationship to the environment in accordance to class, ethnic background; cultural and material context.
From the foregoing argument, women would seem to be the logical focus for efforts to encourage environmentally sensitive resource management. But unfortunately, this has rarely been the case. Women have not been allowed to have responsible roles in power structures. Their knowledge and experience have not been heard and acknowledged in environmental decision – making. They lack status, education, credit, land, property rights and political clout. They should be unconditionally given all of these.
