ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a critical examination of the colonial and patriarchal potentials of recent radical environmentalisms and feminisms. It examines the recent history of political alliances between environmentalists and women's groups and Aborigines. The chapter focuses on a specific example of one such political alliance, which formed around the struggle by the Arrernte people of central Australia to stop the flooding of women's sacred sites for the purpose of creating a recreational lake/flood mitigation dam for the residents of Alice Springs. Recent developments in environmentalism and feminism have intensified Western desires to affiliate with 'indigenous people and to call upon their knowledges and experiences. Environmentalism has long depended upon Western rational thought, and in particular upon scientific thought, to argue its case against the ongoing exploitation of the environment. At the hands of Knudson and Suzuki, indigenous knowledges are drawn into more contemporaneous global discourses of environmentalism that seek the preservation of the planet.
