Page 14 RAIN December 1979 any man with whom I had a relationship. My CR group made possible my dawning awareness of those political realities that I, as had so many women, ignored, avoided, or felt helpless to deal with. CR enabled me to confront myself and challenge the way I lived my life. I left New York then, eventually came to Washington, was one of the founders of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly. I still work with Quest. I still am a women's movement activist and organizer. I haven't burned out . .. yet. But something has shifted in my priorities since I began working with NCAT more than two years ago. I am also a part of the a.t. movement, a part of the environmental movement. I'm an organizer of the Feminist Anti-Nuclear Task Force. We wrote a paper prior to the May 6th March on Washington on why nuclear power is a feminist issue. Nuclear power, solar, conservation ... all arc feminist issues. I come from a position that feminism is a world view, a world view that embraces ideas from other movements but is not limited to those ideas. I see myself as a global feminist and have been working the last couple of years to develop a theory of feminist politics that is global. Much of my energy these days has gone towards talking and writing and working towards pulling our movements together, looking at what we share politically rather than looking at what appears to divide us. It goes without saying that all of us- as tcminists, as solar practitioners, as appropriate technologists- struggle against the oppression and exploitation of the many by the few, of the public by the private. I believe that we are convinced that we exist against a culture more in love with death than life. In her recent book, Gyn/Ecology, Mary Daly makes the shattering observation that the English language has a word for death-love-necrophilia-but none for life-love. She recommends biophilia. Our means for expressing biophilia arc different, fortunately, because we all need to attack on many fronts. But all of our movements know that people arc linked to each other and to our environment in a delicate, two-way balance, and that our survival depends on nurturing it. I also believe that we agree that it is vital for us to reverse the deadly competitive ethic in which we live. We recognize, maybe intuitively at this point, that our thought and social processes are dominated by a two-sided view of things- me/ you, flesh/spirit, body/mind, female/male, human/earth, rich/poor, black/white. We have begun to sense that these dichotomies are misleading, and to realize that they are essential in a competitive, exploitative ethic. They are essential to see things in a zero/sum way, where your loss is my gain. Finally, I believe that each of our movements recognizes that our health depends on control over our own lives, on reclaiming our capacities to observe, think, theorize and act. We recognize that expropriating this control is the single most important reason that we face global annihilation. Many of these ideas were expressed by a fellow Quest worker, Sidney Oliver, in a presentation she made at ACT '79. To her, the bottom line is that the opposite of exploitation and domination is empowerment. We've been conditioned to think of power in just one way-'-as power-over, as a limited commodity, where more for you means less for me, and where the more I have, the better off I am. The object of power-over is to control and to exploit. Power-to, on the other hand, is giving power as we use it. Empowerment is basic to life-love. Women, who've been the caretakers for centuries, know that the basic ingredient in nurturing is enriching rather than depleting. We know that the more we regenerate and recycle, the less there'll be to clean up. Empowerment is pretty scarce in a competitive culture. In fact, it contradicts the competitive ideal that makes more of differences than it does of similarities: it is hard to give power to the other. Appropriate technologists stress technologies that regenerate energy as they employ it, and that empower through fostering local self-reliance. Environmentalists stress our need to empower earth by caring for her, and to give power to ourselves by pooling rather than opposing our energies. Feminists stress that replacing the dominating, competitive and dichotomous point of view with power-to, is really the only viable act. The issue is not whether to have technology or not. The issue is not whether to have solar or not. The issue is the [ •. TR /\"'{T. EL ] places to go (then they wouldn't be the ..L:l..V best places anymore), but it does give =..:=;;.:=============:II you hints as to how to sniff out your low cost, with wise use of resources, and on a more rewardingly personal basis. 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