ABSTRACT
All moves towards degrowth futures are strengthened by attention to gender systems, which organise and give meaning to the production and reproduction of socialised humans, relationships and environments in every known society. This chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) draws on select feminist approaches to gender–environment dynamics to nourish efforts to reorient human energies and societies around care and regeneration of life. Amid biodiversity collapse, climate change and eco-social degradation, feminist movements mobilise practices of hope towards positive futures, including regenerative care for self, other humans and other nature. Possibilities for a transition from fossil-fuelled societal metabolisms operating through unequal ecological exchange to bio-based metabolisms onshored in the Global North depend on shifts away from the imperial way of life towards cultural forms centred around regenerative earth-care and commoning. Such forms are advanced by Indigenous and communitarian feminisms, and caring masculinities observed across the Americas in collective struggles for dignity, territory and intergenerational continuity. Political economic analyses of gendered historical processes that support expanding market production via structural subordination of social reproduction are met with feminist initiatives to reclaim and revalue subsistence as the core purpose of human organisation.
