Growing up my playgrounds were the fields and streams surrounding our old farmhouse in the hills of rural Wisconsin. I learned the rhythms of insects and birds, the song of the frogs lining our creek…
Year by year, though, my family and I began to detect unsettling changes. Our breathtaking constellation of stars faded as lights from the suburban sprawl encroached, and birdcalls no longer lulled me to sleep on summer nights. One day I found our stream stagnant and rotten, choked with yellow foam. It had become contaminated from chemical run-off from the neighboring farms.
When I began reporting around the world, I recognized a mourning similar to my own in the eyes of women in the Amazon whose sacred lands had been coated in oil spills. The animals they relied on for nourishment had vanished, and their children had become sick with unexplainable rashes, boils, and stomach cancers. In Burma and neighboring Thailand, I met families who had been forced from their homes by military troops to make way for a natural gas pipeline. Many had been forced into slave labor for oil companies. They had been gang-raped and tortured into submission.
Everywhere women are on the frontlines of ecological destruction. As the primary caregivers, providers of sustenance, and agricultural producers, they work most closely with the natural environment and are most impacted by its degradation. Mothers hold contaminated water to their children’s mouths and care for family members with birth defects, cancers, and illnesses due to toxic pollution. Young girls spend their days scouring for firewood that has become scarce. Women farmers find their land eroded by thinning topsoil, baked dry or washed away due to climate change. Just as rape plagues womankind, the rape of the Earth strikes a double punch.
Yet with the most at stake, women have become increasingly motivated to protect the Earth. Millions of modern-day Rachel Carsons are stepping out from the shadow of mining pits, blasted mountains, dumping grounds, and scorched forests to mobilize their communities.
These women leaders are a potent immune system for the Earth. They, and the solutions they bring, are poised to lead the environmental movement into its most formidable chapter yet.
Now it is our job to crank up the volume on these often-unheard voices so that they can become an unstoppable, vibrant force for ecological restoration: quiet no more, loudly roaring and gushing with life.
As a young freelance journalist covering indigenous movements and ethnic cleansing in South America and Southeast Asia, Jensine (Yen-See Nah) Larsen had a vision—to use the power of media to unleash the creative human potential of women across the globe. “Through new media we have the power to connect and build a bold global community, to support each other’s dreams, restore our earth, heal society, and care for our children,” Larsen explains. A few years later, at age 28, Larsen began publishing her flagship project—World Pulse Magazine. Today, with her eye on the future of communications technology in the developing world, Larsen is now building an interactive global media company designed to connect women worldwide.
This post originally appeared at Worldpulse.org
If Corporations rule– and Social Responsibility can be vetoed by a shareholder — and top corporations have officers who have controlling stock in each other’s corps. and with 1% of the population in the U.S. holding 80% of the wealth – and women still earn 70 cents for every dollar a man earns, please explain how we women can change things — which I am all for. I hear of many many stories of women who, once they get in corporations (non-profits too), just go along. I see a vast disconnect between the generations of women– and not yet the respect of elder’s wisdom and their stories that elders deserve. All Women need to be the bridges not the ladders for select individual’s fame or fortune… too many elder women are being cast aside.