Celebrating Women in Environmental History

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Throughout human history, people have had environmentalist responses to new technologies and practices as they’ve emerged. Even before the Industrial Revolution and its iconic billowing smokestacks, societies have polluted the earth, and some of their citizens have worked to combat this pollution. Despite societal barriers to education and public advocacy work, women have been involved in environmentalism since the movement’s beginning. 

Early female environmentalists were often social reformers, first. Their concerns for human livelihood, especially in crowded, impoverished urban areas, were often inseparable from concern for the environmental conditions within these communities.

For example, in the 1880s, England’s Octavia Hill was instrumental to preserving undeveloped land surrounding suburban London. Her desire for conservation was intertwined with her belief that urban poor people’s wellbeing would improve with access to open wild spaces. In the U.S., Jane Addams was active around the same time as Hill. Her social activism led to the discovery that many people living in low-income communities were being exposed to lead and other industrial poisons. She was an early advocate for environmental equality, especially as it related to human health.

Women’s suffrage movements were also entangled with conservationism. Access to higher education and changing societal attitudes about gender roles opened doors for women to become scientists, journalists, and even pilots, which in turn exposed them to the natural world. Suffragette Marjory Stoneman Douglas began researching the Everglades while working as a freelance writer, and she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee in the 1920s. Celia M. Hunter served as a pilot during World War II, and her aviation adventures eventually brought her to Alaska, where she became increasingly involved in conservation work. 

By the 1960s, American women like Rachel Carson, Margaret Murie, and Lady Bird Johnson acted on issues such as harmful pesticide side effects, wilderness preservation, and habitat and species loss, respectively. On the global stage, women in countries all over the world were becoming more involved in politics and activism, and conservation was of increasing importance. The subsequent women’s liberation movement introduced ecofeminist thinking in the 1970s. Ecofeminism analyzes the connections between women and nature, equating the oppression of nature with the oppression of women. Through an ecofeminist lens, environmentalism became an inherently feminist issue, and future generations of women have acted accordingly.   

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Women who made history

Although The New Yorker once described Rosalie Edge as “the only honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation,” plenty of other women have also fit this description. Here are a few of them: 

Rosalie Edge (1877-1962): New York suffragist and amateur birdwatcher Rosalie Edge became a fierce environmentalist in the 1920s. In 1929, she founded the Emergency Conservation Committee, a group whose viewpoints contrasted sharply with the general conservationist thinking. The ECC wanted to protect all birds and animals before they became rare, even if they had no obvious economic value. Edge used her wealth and influence to purchase land for the world’s first preserve for birds of prey, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. Her involvement with grassroots movements led to the creation of both Olympic and Kings Canyon National Parks.

Margaret “Mardy” Murie (1902-2003): The Sierra Club called Mardy Murie “The Grandmother of the Conservation Movement.” She and her husband Olaus studied elk and caribou populations for Olaus’ work with the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, later using their research to promote federal protection of wildlands. Mardy’s activism fueled the Wilderness Act of 1964, a piece of legislation that legally defined “wilderness” in the United States and officially protected 9.1 million acres of federal land. She was also a key player in establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest national wildlife refuge in the U.S.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964): Marine biologist and author Rachel Carson began researching synthetic pesticides in the wake of World War II when military scientists used federal funding to develop them. Her research culminated in the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, a book about pesticides and how they harm the environment and human health, including the correlation between DDT and cancer. Silent Spring reached a large audience, eventually bringing about a ban on DDT and other pesticides within the United States, despite vehement opposition from the chemical industry. Carson’s work is also credited with inspiring the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Wangari Maathai (1940-2011): Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977. This organization uses tree-planting and community education to help lift Kenyan women out of poverty by using sustainable farming practices. Over the past four decades, the Green Belt Movement has trained over 30,000 women and planted more than 51 million trees. In 2004, Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.” The Green Belt Movement is now an international organization that advocates for environmental policy across the African continent.

Mollie Beattie (1947-1996): As the first female director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mollie Beattie established fifteen new wildlife refuges and over 100 new habitat conservation plans. During her three-year term, Beattie also supervised the successful reintroduction of the gray wolf into the northern Rocky Mountains. She worked tirelessly to protect the Endangered Species and Clean Water Acts from congressional attempts to weaken them. She was a passionate spokesperson for less obvious environmental issues, including the loss of biodiversity and rapidly increasing human populations.

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Women changing the world today

Environmentalism can feel intimidating in today’s world. We have more information than ever before about how much humans have damaged our planet, and our global economy relies on systems that create increasingly more waste and pollution. In the face of this daunting challenge, these five women (among countless others!) refuse to be overwhelmed. They are leading the charge against climate change, and, like their female predecessors, they’re not backing down.

Sunita Narain (b. 1961): Sunita Narain has worked for the Indian Centre of Science and Environment (CSE), a research-based environmental advocacy group in New Delhi, since 1982. Narain is now the director of both the CSE and the Society for Environmental Communication. She also edits Down To Earth, a political magazine focused on development and the environment. As leader of the CSE, Narain oversaw research that discovered and exposed high levels of pesticides in American soft drinks, including Coke and Pepsi. Her work emphasizes the ways that climate change disproportionately affects people with low socioeconomic status. Narain is also a tireless opponent of air pollution, a serious problem in India’s densely populated cities.

Isatou Ceesay (b. 1972): Isatou Ceesay is known as “the Queen of Recycling” in her home country of The Gambia, where single-use plastic bags are a major source of pollution. Her recycling movement, the Njau Recycling and Income Generating Group (also known as “One Plastic Bag”), empowers women to collect and recycle plastic waste. The movement’s members knit and sew discarded plastic bags into purses, wallets, and children’s toys that they can sell for supplemental income, which is extremely helpful for families living in a rural area that relies solely on agriculture. Ceesay’s movement has been so successful in her hometown that its over 2000 members now have to collect plastic bags from neighboring villages. 

Lauren Singer (b. 1991): Environmental activist, entrepreneur, and blogger Lauren Singer is famous for her shockingly successful zero-waste lifestyle. Since 2012, all of Singer’s landfill-bound waste has fit into a single 16oz mason jar. If that’s not impressive enough, she has also started two zero-waste companies, Package Free Shop and The Simply Co., both of which sell sustainable household goods and personal care products. Singer’s blog, Trash is for Tossers, offers guidance for others trying to live sustainably, claiming “Zero Waste Living is Simple, Cost-Effective, and Fun.” Since Package Free Shop opened in 2017, it has prevented hundreds of millions of pieces of trash from arriving in landfills.

Vanessa Nakate (b. 1996): Vanessa Nakate became a climate activist after learning how much temperatures had recently increased in her native Uganda. She followed Greta Thunberg’s example (see below) and started striking outside the Ugandan Parliament to criticize the government’s inaction regarding climate change. As more African youth began joining her protests, Nakate founded the Rise Up Movement, a platform for sharing African environmental activists’ stories and their work. Nakate is also active on the international level, teaming up with young people from across the world to pressure global economic leaders to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.

Greta Thunberg (b. 2003): It would be an oversight to write this article without mentioning Greta Thunberg, the unapologetic eighteen-year-old Swedish environmental activist who regularly demands climate action from world leaders. At age fifteen, Thunberg began protesting outside the Swedish Parliament, starting an international movement now known as Fridays for Future, in which students skip school on Fridays to demonstrate for political action to prevent climate change and cease reliance on fossil fuels. Despite her youth, Thunberg has spoken at international climate conferences, and she is widely critical of world leaders whose climate policies are less aggressive than she thinks they should be. At the core of Greta’s work is an impassioned cry for officials to recognize the urgency of our current climate crisis, and she’s inspiring an entire generation to act.

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Join them!

According to the United Nations, women and girls currently make up 80% of people displaced by climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement even has a special provision recognizing that women are more likely than men to be negatively affected by climate change. Armed with this knowledge, we need more women and girls to join the environmentalist movement.

Here in 2021, women have more access to education and information than ever before, which means we also have more power than we’ve had throughout history. The women who paved the way and the women who continue to work for environmental justice are waiting for our help.