December 17, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Roots
by Mary Daly
from Quintessence, Realizing the Archaic Future, A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto (Beacon Press, 1998)
Mary Daly is one of the great foremothers of the feminist movement that took flight in the middle of the 20th century. She is the author of seven books in which, beginning with Beyond God the Father, have taken apart patriarchal theology, exposing its assumptions and replacing them with language of the "archaic future" to express generic meanings stripped of the patriarchal overlay. Mary Daly has fun with language and with her brilliant theasophical deliberations, each becoming more elemental and liberated than the one before. Quintessence, her most recent book, is also the most playful to date, depicting how women in the middle of the 21st century might comment and reflect on Daly's work by creating an imaginary Intergalactic scenario in which Daly's presence is invoked fifty years after the publication of the book. It's a wonderful heartening romp full of Daly's incisive dissection of some of the 20th century's most glaring contradictions as well as the encouraging vision of a feminist future.
Daly is now at work on her eighth book, Amazon Grace. She lives in Boston.
Elemental Women surviving the apparent isolation inflicted upon us in the state of diaspora commonly find that as we become more in Touch with our roots we are more profoundly Present to each other. Our Be-Witching powers of communication are enhanced by our connectedness with our Roots. Many women express a sense of identity and/or communication with trees.*
The intuition that women are like trees in our Rootedness was inspired by a letter from Io Ax, in which she commented that trees communicate with each other from root to root. They are Radical! So also women radically communicate with each other.
The closeness between women and trees becomes more evident when we consider other aspects of Rootedness. It has commonly been observed that trees are difficult to uproot when their roots are deeply and widely intertwined with those of other trees. That is, the trees, like Radical Women, are most strongly bonded to each other in their roots. The "hold on to each other."
Another important aspect of Radicalness is manifested in certain trees, whose roots -- even after the trees have been cut down -- continue to grow/travel. From these traveling roots new trees can continue to sprout. Similarly, Feminist Foresisters who have been cut down by the patriarchs continue to be Radically Here with us -- in their writings, in the recorded examples of their personal and political Feminist Acts, and through the exercise of their Elemental Presentiating Powers.
Yet another key aspect of Rootedness is enhanced ability to overcome obstacles. The roots of trees produce lateral branches on all sides and these in turn branch themselves, so that a considerable area of soil may be penetrated by the root system. If a stone or other obstacle checks the onward growth of a root, the tip of the root grows around it and then resumes its former course.
Likewise, every Wanderlusting Woman Expanding Here produces roots whose complex lateral branches extend through a considerable area of ground. In do doing she overcomes the obstacles placed in her way by the patriarchs, managing not merely to resume her former course, but also to widen and deepen it. Hence our underground networking continues its Canny/Uncanny Course. Since by creative containment and overcoming of obstacles Wild Women continue to expand our territory, we can triumph over the blockers/blockheads. This is the hidden work of Elemental Feminist Genius, unperceived and unacknowledged by men "pretending that we do not exist."
Clearly, the more Radical/Rooted women are, the more adeptly we can stand our ground, expand our ground. It becomes more and more obvious to those who choose to move in this direction that we can never become "too Radical."
In contrast to this Radical Rootedness, the direction of patriarchal politics remains forever unradical: it can never confront the roots of problems. This is exemplified every hour of the every day. A specific example was the apparently self-contradictory position of President Clinton on global warming. In his address to the United Nations environmental conference on July 26, 1996, he stated that "we humans" are changing the global climate. He continued:
Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are at their highest levels in more than 200,000 years and climbing sharply. If the trend does not change, scientists expect the seas to rise two feet or more over the next century. (Cited in NY Times, June 27, 1997)
Despite this admission, he stopped short of the commitment to cutting greenhouse gases that allies have been urging. As John H. Cushman Jr., writing in The New York Times, described the situation:
He [Clinton] satisfied the environmentalists in his constituency on the issue of smog and soot, but deeply disappointed many of them today on the question of climate change. It was a striking disparity, given that the two environmental problems have some important common roots. Soot and smog, like greenhouse gases, come mainly from burning fossil fuels. (NY Times, January 29, 1997)
As Radical Hags know, politicians are unlikely to see "common roots." They are pulled by conflicting deadlines and constituencies. To fight off the mean-spirited greed of industrialists would require transcendent vision and extraordinary Biophilic [meaning "life-loving" in the sense of "the Original Lust for Life that is at the core of all Elemental E-motion" - Editor] Will. This implies Radical Rootedness. Wild Women know better than to expect this of patriarchal leaders, but we can and must cultivate it in ourSelves. Our deepest Hope lies in expanding our own Roots.
In the course of Territorial Expansion it is vital to consider other characteristics that Radical Elemental Women share with trees and other plants. Through our roots in our own rich Gynocentric tradition that has been transmitted by our Foresisters we absorb the nutrients that we need to become stronger and more creative. Our roots, like those of trees, are reservoirs storing materials for future use, enabling us again and again to make a fresh start.
It is not possible to speak realistically about communication between women and trees without facing the horror of what is being done to trees in these times. Trees, like women, are being massacred. In 1996 Worldwatch Institute reported that between 1980 and 1990 the world lost an average of 9.95 million hectares of net forest annually -- roughly the size of South Korea. Kenton Miller and Laura Tangley write movingly of the fact that many of the world's remaining forests are virtually under a death sentence:
One fifth of the 12.5 billion acres of forest that once blanketed Earth are already gone. Each second, more than one acre of tropical forest disappears. Scientific theory suggests that at this rate of forest loss, one species of plant or animal dies out every 15 minutes. If current deforestation rates continue, most accessible tropical forests and up to one-quarter of the earth's species could vanish within the lifetime of today's children. [Trees of Life, page 2]
During the past decade most of the world's deforestation has been concentrated in tropical forests, including rainforests. Logging has increased in all three tropical regions -- Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is 18 percent destroyed. The problems suffered by temperate forests are different but can be equally severe. There has been a major degradation in the quality of these forests, which no longer support a high level of biodiversity.
Forests play an essential role in regulating the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The forests of the world are our Goddess-sent benefactors because they absorb carbon released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion. Therefore, of course, the necrophilic nothing lovers are perversely killing the forests. Their cutting of tropical forests has resulted in sending into the atmosphere 1.5 billion tons of carbon each year. Their killing of temperate and boreal forests can cause billions more tons of carbon to be released. This devastating worldwide deforestation adds immeasurably to the lethal process of global warming, also known as "enhanced greenhouse effect," which results from the introduction into the atmosphere of "greenhouse gases," including carbon dioxide.
What men do to trees mirrors what they do to women. Just as male violence stalks women worldwide, so also it stalks trees. Many Wild Women have understood this intuitively for centuries. An inspiring example of such Female Knowing as source of action is the Chipko Movement of women villagers in India, who were fiercely determined to save their forests from loggers. The Chipko movement gained worldwide attention in the 1970s when peasant women lay down in front of bulldozers and hugged trees to prevent them from being destroyed. As Vandana Shiva explains:
Basically their lives were at stake. . . . Some of the actions were triggered by enormous landslides after logging operations. In other places, the streams were drying up, and the women were walking longer to collect fuel wood and fodder. Some were disaster situations like villages getting wiped out by floods, and some were ecological disasters. [Cited by Barbara Letterman in Ms. Magazine, May/June 1997.]
These protests continued from the 1970s until 1981, when logging was banned from the Himalayas. However, environmental action by women in India has been going on for centuries. Shiva writes:
Women's environmental action in India preceded the UN Women's Decade as well as the 1972 Stockholm Environmental conference.Three hundred years ago more than 300 members of the Bishnoi Community in Rajasthan, led by a woman called Amrita Devi, sacrificed their lives to save their sacred khejri trees by clinging to them. With that event begins the recorded history of Chipko. [Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, p. 67]
The same author tells us that in 1977 the Chipko movement became explicitly an ecological and feminist movement. She explains that it did not matter to the women whether the forest was destroyed by outsiders or their own men:
The most dramatic turn in this new confrontation took place when Bachni Devi of Adwani led a resistance against her own husband who had obtained a local contract to fell the forest. The forest officials arrived to browbeat and intimidate the women and Chipko activists; but found the women holding up lighted lanterns in broad daylight. Puzzled, a forester asked them their intention. The women replied, "We have come to teach you forestry." He retorted, "You foolish women, how can you who prevent felling know the value of the forest? Do you know what forests bear? They produce profit and resin and timber." And the women immediately sang back in chorus:What do the forest bear?
Soil, water and pure air.
Soil, water and pure air
Sustain the earth and all she bears.
[Staying Alive, 76-77]
Quintessence may be ordered from Powell's.
Selection republished by permission of the
author.