Back to the future? The common ground for women’s liberation and the preservation of life on earth is to be found in the activities of those women who have become the victims of the development process and who struggle to conserve their subsistence base. (1993:12)

Given the various elements which make up the theoretical approach of Ecofeminism, it is hardly surprising that the vision it holds out as inspiration for the future is one which is based on a return to nature and to a society based not on accumulation/ growth but on production for subsistence. The governing principles of this society are participatory democracy, ‘de-linking’ from the world economy and ‘ethical decolonisation’, this latter concept inspired by Shiva’s extraordinary claim that ‘most non-Western cultures have been based on the democracy of all life’ (Shiva, 1989: 265).20 Once again a simple inversion is deployed in which real problems are wished away in favour of a series of clichés.21 The ecofeminist Utopia is one where there is no capitalism, no market, no state, no poverty, no science and no patriarchy (yet is still heterosexual). Whatever the attractions of some of these super-ordinate goals, the routes of transformation surely cannot come from a recovery of an imaginary past. Mies and Shiva assume that because subsistence economies are quintessentially ‘nonmodern’ they must ‘therefore’ be non-oppressive, hence there is no need for states, laws or for regulation; all will be achieved through co-operation and grass-roots participation. Quite how upwards of 6 billion people will manage to survive on the basis of subsistence production does not detain the authors of Ecofeminism, any more than such difficult questions as how we might reach this Utopian state do. Again, Mies and Shiva refrain from both acknowledging complexities and engaging in substantive consideration of social relations and processes of survival and democratization.