The Changing Nature of Eco/Feminism: Telling Stories from Clayoquot Sound

In the summer of 1993, activists set up a peace camp blocking a logging road into an extensive area of temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The Clayoquot Peace Camp was said to be based on feminist or eco/feminist principles at a time when many were calling into question the value of feminism. Twenty-odd years later, Clayoquot holds a prominent place in environmental discourse, yet it is not generally associated with feminist or eco/feminist movements.

In The Changing Nature of Eco/Feminism, Niamh Moore describes her own recollections of the Clayoquot protests and interviews thirty people who were involved in the campaign. She argues that Clayoquot offers a potent site for examining a whole range of feminist issues. Through a careful study of eco/feminist activism against clear-cut logging practices, the book explores how a transnational eco/feminist practice insisted on an account of clear-cut logging situated in histories of colonialism, holding the Canadian state to account for its deforestation practices and refusing any easy blame for deforestation on the developing world. Moore demonstrates that the sheer vitality of eco/feminist politics at the Peace Camp in the summer of 1993 confounded dominant narratives of contemporary feminism and has re-imagined eco/feminist politics for new times.

This book will be of interest to feminist, ecofeminist, environmental, social movement, and cultural studies scholars and social activists, as well as to all those who followed the Clayoquot campaign.