A Feminist in the Forest

Like many others this past year, my children and I sought refuge from the pandemic in the great outdoors. Instead of traveling far from home, we became tourists in our home state of South Carolina. Like the U.S. National Park system that reported a massive uptick in visitors, the South Carolina State Parks system saw significantly increased usage from people like me seeking safe, outdoor activities.

The state of South Carolina has an Ultimate Outsider challenge to visit all 47 of its State Parks – yes 47 – so last summer, my kids and I got our State Park passport books and vowed to finish the challenge before our park pass expired a year later. Our camping skills blossomed: my two daughters (ages 9 and 12 by the time we finished) and I can now set up camp and cook dinner in an hour flat! 

As a feminist philosopher on the road, I learned more than how to tie slipknots for my clothesline, or identify a creepy but colorful species of wingless wasps. I learned that feminists should expand our reach into the great outdoors. Most contemporary feminist writing in philosophy focuses on women’s experiences at work, discrimination in the legal system, the inequality of women’s work in the home, and sexism in pop culture. I want to turn feminist theorizing to existing power structures as we experience them ‘in the wild.’

While there is recent feminist philosophical work on climate change, we haven’t adequately applied the tools of intersectionality, social critique, and solidarity and empowerment to nature and the wilderness. The goal of this post, then, is to briefly outline three areas of fruitful theorizing on nature and the environment.

1: Patriarchy, Memorializing, and Naming

One of the key insights of feminist philosophy in the last two decades is that many of our ideas and experiences are the intended or unintended product of social practice. Sally Haslanger’s work in this area has been influential in showing that many of our experiences – and even some of our basic concepts – are the result of social practices that are normative and value-laden, but invisible. Practices such as naming and memorializing are rooted in ideologies and values that give us reasons for action.

This means that our experience of the natural world and wilderness is managed, curated, and made possible because powerful people decided that certain wild spaces or cultural artifacts are beautiful, worth preserving, or worth opening to the public. Our National Parks, our State Parks, and other natural recreation areas are constructed as the zones of the natural by laws and policies. And in the South Carolina State Parks system, the racist, classist, hetero-patriarchy is clearly evident in what “beautiful spaces and places” have been deemed worthy of preservation.  

Several of these historic sites are former slave-owning plantations that have been donated to the State Park system. That’s magnanimous on the part of the benefactors, right? Not exactly. These are no doubt architecturally lovely plantation homes with beautifully manicured grounds. And the park displays prominently bring attention to the slaves who labored under horrific conditions for their masters. And yet, these places can inadvertently memorialize a racist and destructive past.

Perhaps the most egregious example of memorializing a terrible person and place is Redcliffe Plantation, home of a former Governor of South Carolina, James Henry Hammond. Born without wealth, he married Catherine Fitzsimmons, who owned thousands of acres and 150 slaves. She bore him eight children, and yet he still managed to sexually assault four of his own teenage nieces (his wife’s sister’s daughters), and worse, engaged in classic victim-blaming, claiming that the girls were at fault for being seductive and extremely affectionate. To top it off, as Governor, he stated: “I firmly believe that American slavery is not only not a sin, but especially commanded by God through Moses, and approved by Christ through his apostles.” One wonders how many park visitors even know Hammond’s despicable past.

The Park’s narrative does its shallow best to valorize Fitzsimmons, who left Hammond for two years, although she was unable to divorce her husband because divorce laws would have left her with nothing. A poster mentions how strong she was, and what a revolutionary she was at the time for leaving her husband. But what is left unmentioned is that his four nieces’ lives were destroyed after their reputations were sullied: none of the four ever married, which, at the time, was both an expectation and an honor. What I want to see when I arrive at Redcliffe Plantation is a sign in front of the mansion saying, “Home of a Rapist Who Destroyed At Least Five Women’s Lives.”

This is not the only villain memorialized. Andrew Jackson State Park, located in a lovely forest in South Carolina, commemorates the boyhood home of an unrepentant slave-owning tyrant, nick-named “Indian Killer” for his genocide of indigenous people.  To go boating or swimming another day, you can visit Strom Thurmond Lake, named after the Senator who holds the record for the longest filibuster: 24 hours, AGAINST THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT.

None of this would be so appalling if there were places that honored the contributions of Native Americans or Black Americans as stand-alone stories. Dr. Drew Lanham, the great wildlife biologist, is from Edgefield, South Carolina, and walking through his shoes there to understand his childhood experience, would be extremely enlightening. While cultural icon Dizzy Gillespie is indeed honored in South Carolina, he does not get the official state recognition bestowed upon white men.

2: Intersectionality and Nature Privilege

I’m hardly the first feminist to point out that patriarchy has its definite opinions about nature. Early ecofeminist Karen Warren emphasized the similarities between the patriarchal treatment of nature and the patriarchal treatment of women; she argues that patriarchal modes of thinking encourage the exploitation and colonization not just of women, but of animals and nature.  Patriarchy’s “logic of domination” includes hierarchical thinking, and conceptualizing the world in ways that are typical of male-chauvinism and anthropocentrism.

Jon Krakauer’s bestselling novel Into Thin Air recounting his disastrous attempt to climb Mt. Everest is a textbook example of the attitudes and practices Warren had in mind. Krakauer’s account of 15 fellow-climbers who died attempting the summit strongly suggests that most people climbing Mt. Everest are engaged in the domination of nature, on top of having chauvinistic attitudes towards women and the Sherpas who aid in their summit.

Warren’s own experience rock climbing is vastly different:

“I rappelled down about 200 feet from the top of the Palisades at Lake Superior … I looked all around me – really looked – and listened. I heard a cacophony of voices – birds, trickles of water on the rock before me, waves lapping against the rocks below. I closed my eyes and began to feel the rock with my hands…At that moment I was bathed in serenity. I began to talk to the rock….as if the rock were my friend. I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for what it offered me, a chance to know myself and the rock differently…”

Though I appreciate Warren’s experience and the approach ecofeminists take to nature, when I had moments of serenity in the wilderness, I inevitably came back to the fact that I was incredibly lucky and privileged, and that my experience was possible because of my social and economic location. My experience was predicated on the fact that I had a car to access nature, a job with flexible hours, leisure time to go, gas money to get there, equipment to use in my adventures, physical ability to climb rocks and waterfalls, and knowledge of what to do (skills that I gained over the course of years). Though many families without resources go camping because it’s a cheap vacation, the perception of camping as a privilege perhaps explains why tent encampments are broken up in big cities because of housing crises.

As a single white woman traveling in South Carolina with children, it became evident to me that nature is racialized as a cultural experience – the vast majority of people at the State Parks in South Carolina are white. Carolyn Finney’s wonderful book Black Faces, White Spaces argues that the lack of visual and textual representation of African Americans in the National Parks perpetuates the invisibility of African Americans in conversations about the environmental movement. After the publication of her book, organizations were created to encourage Black folks to explore the outdoors. Recently, the US Forest Service partnered with Outdoor Afro to celebrate and inspire Black connections to nature.

Cis-het privilege also rears its head in our experiences of nature. There were precious few LGBTQ+ folks in the State Parks. Dr. Kiona’s How Not to Travel Like a Basic Bitch blog, podcast, and advocacy, highlights the way that most international travel is undertaken by cisgendered (and usually heterosexual) people who do not suffer social stigma when traveling abroad. Thus, she offers inclusivity trips to Cuba for LGBTQ+, Fat-astic, and Black folks. People can donate their flight miles so that others can travel.

Ability privilege is a key aspect of nature experiences. One of the worst parts about our National Park and State Park systems is that they are not nearly as accessible as they should be for people with disabilities. While there are handicap accessible parking spots and bathrooms, that’s about it; hiking trails, waterfalls, and fishing spots are often inaccessible. But in recent years, disability advocates have organized to advocate for disability justice in the outdoors, and to transform the lives of disabled people through outdoors education and experience.

3: Women’s Empowerment

Feminism has always been about empowering women, but a poignant reason for women to reclaim nature and the great outdoors, and make it more inclusive for others, is what Rebecca Walker critically defined as Third Wave Feminism’s commitment: to heal trauma.

Being in nature has a proven capacity to heal trauma: it is a remedy for the human spirit. Japanese scientists recently showed, through rigorous research, that nature is therapeutic and that immersive experiences in nature (also known as shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing), have measurable benefits to the body. These include lowering blood pressure, increasing awe (which has pro-social behavioral benefits), promoting cancer-fighting cells, and ameliorating symptoms of depression, anxiety, and ADHD.

In this regard, children have the most to gain from being in nature. The book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder presents research showing that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development. Disconnecting from our tech-infused world is critical to all children’s well-being. Spending a year unplugged from gendered TikTok and mind-numbing Youtube videos gave my girls the opportunity to develop skills that I hope will last a lifetime. They developed bravery as they paddled kayaks in varying conditions, and gained confidence as they tried things they were afraid of, like catching frogs and spiders, or jumping off a rock into a lake. They weathered the discomfort of long hikes, hot tents, and sometimes doing everything in the rain.

This kind of empowerment is not merely what Carol Hay calls “Girl Power Feminism” which amounts to saying, “Girls can do anything and be anything!” without challenging the status quo in any meaningful way. Rather, the experience I’m describing is for everyone, and it is disruptive. My kids witnessed me and the other solo mom we often traveled with be role models for women’s independence in the outdoors—neither of us observed any other single women, much less moms with kids, camping for an entire year—and tried to normalize this to everyone we met, especially those who asked where the men were.

While living through the pandemic presented many challenges, the opportunity to explore the outdoors showed me that feminist liberation must include all environments. Dismantling oppression requires critically examining why people who have been historically marginalized don’t always feel comfortable in our parks and in the wild, and involves disrupting the social norms that keep women away from a source of healing. Together, feminists can change even “the outdoors” to be more inclusive and welcoming to all.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.