ABSTRACT
As the Anthropocene takes root, it necessitates profound reflection on how humanity has arrived at a position of simultaneous power and peril. Power, in that our actions shape the world at a global level. Peril, in that human activities have ended the Holocene stability that has enabled our species to flourish. Fully grasping the deeply embedded structural roots and nature of this predicament and developing responses to it requires critical thinking. This chapter deploys ecofeminism as one lens that may serve in this cause. Ecofeminism's focus on the shared problematic impacts of dualistic and hierarchical thinking, and the ‘othering’ that is consequent upon them, on both inter-human and human–environment relationships has much to offer here. The attitudes and assumptions that have shaped our societies and their institutions and praxis – international law among them – have always been problematic but are now untenable. It is now the vanguard of the Anthropocene, and it is already apparent that truly grasping and acting on the entwined inter-human and human–environment relationships will determine the future of our species. Ecofeminism posits that an alternative, sustainable, basis for inter-human and human–environment interactions, and the social ordering that embodies them, exists and is fundamentally relational in nature.
