ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine the different perspectives on the issues held by environmental scientists and environmental activists on the one hand, and women’s health researchers and feminist activists on the other. It discusses the dissonance between mainstream environmentalists from the North and women’s health researchers and activists from both North and South. The chapter seeks to identify the positions taken by these two broad groupings within the larger discourses on development and on population and to propose a possible basis for greater mutual understanding. Economic theories of fertility are closely associated with the “new” household economics. Both feminist researchers and activists within women’s health movements have been attempting to change the terms of the debate and to expand its scope. During the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, the principal debate in the field of population policy centered on the impact of poverty on population growth.
