Women, the Environment and

Nations Conference on Environment and Development) and with growing academic and policy attention on women’s relationships with the environment, these two important books offer timely opportunities for synthesis and reflection. At first sight they are very different. Braidotti et al.’s is by four European feminist academics, strongly intellectual in tone and theoretical in orientation. It aims to provide a state-ofthe-art review of debates on women, the environment and sustainable development, linking theory to

epistemology and policy, and steps towards an alternative framework. By contrast, The Power to Change is by women from the South, and journalistic in focus. Centring on a compilation of fifty recent articles by female journalists in Africa, Asia and Latin America, it describes women and communities engaging in practical environmental struggles. But beneath the differences lie solid areas of common ground. Both books see the subordination of women and of environmental concerns as linked to multiple crises in dominant models of development. In challenging these, the Women’s Feature Service book helps illustrate the kind of political strategy which Braidotti et al. suggest.