Page 26 RAIN April/May 1983 Even the soft path requires more than alternative fuels and technological fixes. Separations between our homes, workplaces, and town centers — we live in separate residences, work in the cities, commute from the country — create environmental and energy problems. Classic American design, suburban sprawl and single family dwellings, reinforces a centralized living environment that is not only energy inefficient, polluting, and prohibitively expensive, but also keeps women at home, isolated, away from each other. In this sense, even the solar alternative is nuclear: without a movement toward decentralized living communities, solar cannot solve the energy problem, and instead it reinforces the myth of the nuclear family, with all its problems of sex role stereotyping and child care. For women who want careers and families, for women who singly support families, for families who want to share home, working, and child-rearing responsibilities, for those who want to redefine "family,” even solar — by itself — is no solution. The key to energy and environmental problems is not the escapism of individual self-reliance or single family independence: a windmill in every backyard, an electric car in every garage. People could as easily fight wars over solar access as over Iranian oil wells. But the village model, rational community-scale development with facilities for collective child care, laundry, cooking, and dining, frees all members of the community for equal participation in its activities as well as being the most environmentally stable and efficient design. Some recently planned solar villages incorporate this communal reorganization. A truly "ecological” (remembering that "ecology” derives from the Greek word for "house”) perspective would be both energy-efficient and feminist, emphasizing village and global cooperation (rather than national) and integrating not only people with nature but people with themselves, allowing new alternatives for lifestyles. It means that women share — and maybe even abandon — our individual kitchens. Imagine: a community living space, with kitchenless apartments connected to a central kitchen, dining room, and daycare center. Each resident has a private living space, but eating facilities are shared, and children are tended on the premises as a rotating chore. Shopping, gardening, and laundry are collective tasks assigned to other rotating teams. Every evening one team cooks for all the residents. In some cases social solutions may not be possible, and in some cases a technological solution may be best — heat sensors and simple computer technology could regulate passive solar homes, freeing everyone of this task. Technology is a tool. We need to integrate social and technological solutions. The control of technology Technology alone, even alternative technology, will not significantly change our culture. A change of values will change our culture. For all the problems, the values — the potential — of appropriate technology are closer than those of high tech to the values of feminism. Do we have a choice, though, between AT and high tech? At the Women in Solar Energy (WISE) conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, in October, 1980, Ynestra King pointed out that when Margaret Mead heard of the research being done at the New Alchemy Institute on "passive” solar, she asked the researchers if they could not change the name — men would simply never support anything named "passive.” King pointed out that Mead’s "capitulation” showed who sets the terms of discussion on technology, what the values are/will be. Associations with the female are denigrated even if the name is accurate, on the misogynist social assumption that "it is not good to be female.” "What is the significance for women,” King asked, echoing Susan Griffin, "of being identified with nature in a culture which devalues nature?” Should women accept that identification or not? T-shirts from the conference proclaimed "Passive solar/Active women” — what ambivalence/complication lies here?) Will a technology labelled "soft” and "natural” ever succeed? Not without the help of women. The founder of "ecology” was a woman, Ellen Swallow, in 1892. She was the first woman student allowed into MIT, and the first woman to graduate with a science degree. She combined the study of nutrition, air and water pollution, transportation, architecture, waste disposal, and industrial safety and health. Her interdisciplinary environmental science was gradually eroded into now-scomed home economics courses while men carried on the "science.” Not only have her contributions been devalued, but so have many traditionally female skills. Yet women have always been technologists; must of what women have traditionally done enacts the principles of AT — small-scale, labor-intensive, using local resources, conserving resources. Think of organic gardening, canning and preserving, weaving, quilting, midwifery. Women developed the survival technologies — food, clothing, shelter, healing. Appropriate technologists often refuse to recognize women’s contributions and skills just as their ancestors devalued women’s work. Pottery and basketweaving are not considered as "important” as sculpture or painting, engineering or construction. AT cannot afford to make this mistake. What if technology was assessed on the basis of its impact on women? Judy Smith and the Women’s Resource Center have been working on a feminist impact statement, to be applied like environmental impact statements. These women ask us to consider whether a technology reinforces restricted options or creates expanded options for women. They are designing a "feminist cost/benefit analysis,” assuming that what expands women’s options is the "best” technology. They analyze the impact of technology on all levels (individuals, institutions, communities, women as a class, and society as a whole), identify the significant effects of a technology, then evaluate the social impacts. Meanwhile, women are "on the edge” as Meu-ge Piercy says. We must imagine our future if we are to have any control over it. When women think about our future, we tend to think of it in terms of social change. Technology is a tool. Technology could implement feminism. If women are going to transform the world, we have to transform all of it — we have to take on technology. Our future is a place where technology empowers women and is ecologically sound, where women can do everything — and anything. What if. .. Lisa Yost is a lesbian feminist poet who works as a staff scientist on environmental and occupational health for a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. She worked with the National Women’s Health Network. Patricia Logan earns her living writing about cooperatives for a public interest group in Washington, D.C. She is a member of the Washington Women’s Self-Help collective and is writing a section on environmental health for the current revision of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
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