Eco-parenting and women's work?

[wastingaway]

Some interesting points came up on this thread, about whether eco-parenting and green living in general tended to create more work for women?

It was also suggested that in fact modern conveniences act to disguise the inequality in relationships.

As I sit contemplating the bucket of shitty nappies that I will be putting in the washing machine, I am wondering about this a lot.

What do you think?

Other point - why does living in a community mean that you don't contribute to the upkeep of society? The community members that I know (inc plumber, care worker, agricultural labourer, shop worker, mechanic, sawmill operator) may work fewer hours at paid work, but are at least as useful as, for example, management consultants, computer programmers, investment bankers, finance directors, air hostesses etc even leaving aside time spent growing food/managing woodland etc not for money.

Takver: OK my opinions are a bit coloured by the fact that most of the people I have actually met who are keen on all this back-to-the-land stuff have been wankers. I'm sure there are people happily getting on with it and making it work.
I would just personally rather drown in a lake of spiders than live in a smelly shed with a lot of farting vegans, knitting clothes out of my own discarded pubes. I like city life, good public transport, interesting buildings, having a microwave and a washing machine and decent plumbing.

But each to their own.

If you want to be a city dweller fair play to you - though your far more likely to have to suffer the vegans there - 99% of the vegans I have met have been city people - most country people IME are far more realistic about where food comes from in this climate. Its a bit like me saying 'all morris dancers are 70 year old bearded men' on the basis of having seen a troupe dancing once . . .

Anyway getting off topic here.

Mind you, I bet you'd rather not have to hit your dinner over the head & then gut & skin it before cooking, too

I'm sure I've read that city dwellers usually have lower carbon footprints due to walking and public transport, smaller more modern energy efficient flats etc.
Compared with average rural dwellers.

I think there are different ways of becoming more green to fit into your own life.

Yes I must say that our carbon footprint is actually pretty low - car-free household and I haven't been on a plane in 10 years.

I wouldn't mind hitting my dinner on the head overmuch though. As long as someone held it still for me (have rotten co-ordination and divergent eyes so would starve if I actually had to chase my food...)

Very very true - was actually thinking this over last night, and wondered how we'd diverged into eco-living = countryside.

I guess (from the OP) it comes down to the questions:

1. What is an environmentally sustainable lifestyle?
2. Does this involve more domestic work? And more other work?
3. Is this work typically done by women? and then a sub-question:
4. Does living an environmentally sustainable lifestyle imply living in the countryside

My feeling is that if you take 1) as saying living in a way that is accessible to all the world's population without damaging the earth for future generations, then the answer to 4) has to include city dwellers, given how many people live in cities. It also needs to include radically lower levels of consumption in countries like Britain.

So I guess this does tend towards more domestic work (fewer convenience meals & washable nappies ) though there's no reason not to have some kind of collective way of doing this work in the city either (plenty of co-ops & communities in the cities).

My feeling is that people who are living by this agenda at the moment are more likely than the average to divide domestic work equally, but that won't necessarily be the case if it widens out.

So do you think that changing the nuclear family and mass consumerism should take precedence over the specifics of time spent making yoghurt sourcing organic felt?

Yes to mass consumerism - qualified yes to nuclear family (have spent rather too many hours reaching consensus in a group of 12 as to whether it is better to plant an apple or a pear tree in site X ).

In fact I think atm a lot of the advantages of co-operative living are to do with having support in moving away from modern consumerist lifestyle. Not just adults, but for children, much easier for them to deal with potentially not having the latest X Y & Z if they have a group of peers who are living the same way. (Now I sound like that Swedish film, and the single wooden lego block, but hopefully better than that.) And for adults - again much easier to make the decision that no, I won't fly to X's wedding even though it is going to be personally difficult if you are living with a bunch of others who would make the same choice.

I think going back again, slouchingtowardswaitrose's point about the distinction between work & leisure is a very important one.

Cunningly, even cooking has been commodified so that 'cooking for pleasure' is one thing, involving buying lots of Jamie Oliver books, wooden carved lemon squeezers etc, and 'cooking for eating' has been identified as tedious 'shitwork' to use SGB's phrase that we can buy our way out of by using convenience foods.

I happened to click past 'Create and Craft' channel and was gobsmacked at the crap you can buy for hobbies. I couldn't work out what half of it was for.

Good thread.

I order to completely throw in something which may seem to be counter-intutive

i believe that the answer to the household/individual level eco things is to improve the technology and products that we use. Problem is people are intrinsically pretty selfish and lazy (enormous generalisation!) but most people won't start doing something that is harder and dirtier and takes 10x longer simply for the sake of teh planet. Some will, yes, and maybe more women than men, but still, not enough to divert the course that we are on. OTOH, reduce people's energy consumption through technology, and things they can do once and forget about like insulation, and you're in. Present them with cost effective products that do the job and are green, and they will use them.

Big business/industry is another and much larger problem though, and the difficulties there more intractable.

The conversation about eco living etc - SGBs point about not everybody being able to have enough land to buy their own food vs the idea that small-holdings are more productive than conventional farms. I think that both of those points are correct. However you'd have to get rid of minor things like London, and probably cut the population down in order to give everyone their piece of land I think. At the moment we import a lot of our food AFAIK, I don;t think that we have enough land to sustain our population at the moment whichever farming method you employ. So that complicates matters.

SGB's point about not having enough land to grow food obv

Well and plus the fact that most people don't actually want to be farmers, that is a minor thing as well

The No MOney Man is an interesting chap. He lived for a year without spending any money at all.

In my personal situation DP does more of the cooking and all of the bins in the house. I do all of the cleaning.

When we switched to local delivered organic veg, DP picked up more work in terms of washing and preparing the veg (and thinking up things to do with kale!). He also, because of the bin duty, picked up the bulk of the work in terms of taking the recycling out (we have comunal bins, not kerbside).

Now i wil probably end up on nappy duty when the time comes, but in terms of cleaning i don't actually do any more.. though i suppose i could.. i use ecover products and sweep instead of hoovering and hang the laundry up.. but i'm not sure any of that results in more work.

[we both work full-time outside the house for now]

there was a woman as well who lived on 1p a day or something for a year wasn't there.

Then there's freegans.

All sorts of intersting things going on. I just thinkk that the majority will only buy into something if it affects their lifestyle miniminally/not at all.

I wouldn't mind living off the earth.　there are women-led movements in Japan too. One lady runs a 'macrobiotic' homestead and is fully self sufficient. Women, usually young mothers, go and stay with her and she teaches them recipes and how to live more sustainably.

I'd hate it! I love gardening and do grow my own veg but the thought of being dependent on it terrifies me, and I love doing other sorts of work.

It's an each to their own thing isn't it - fair play to those who want to, but there needs to be an acceptance that for things to change for the majority, a full-on "the good life" situation is not going to work.

Well, I've just been and bought some disposables.
But this is because I line dry and it's been difficult to get things dry of late.
And I walked to the supermarket and brought them home in my shopping trolley. [eco]

I very much like the idea of Radical Homemakers.
That's how I see what I do in a way.
I want to reclaim the home as the place where living is done and not merely a space to watch tv and sleep.

ISNT - re the question of can Britain grow enough food to feed itself - this article (pdf) is well worth a read. The answer is quite possibly a qualified yes, so long as we all eat less meat, but not necessarily all becoming vegans (and also depending on various other changes such as reintegrating livestock/arable farming). This is not of course suggesting that everyone individually should be growing their own food - though it does imply (pace Cuba) a large increase in the number employed in farming.

The other issue has to be about reclaiming low impact living as better than the alternative, not something that we do in a hair shirt kind of way. I've had this discussion with a lot of friends (much easier this kind of conversation down the pub rather than on a computer) and with one big exception most of us couldn't think of anything that we do 'to be green' that we wouldn't also do just because it is a more enjoyable way to live.

(The one major exception, btw, being flying. I don't really regret it, as I'm not one for travelling much, though even so I'd like to take dd back to see where she was born & am put off by the journey overland.)

Interesting thanks takver. I still think you'd have trouble convincing the UK population to become vegetarians, unless there was a pretty extreme reason IYSWIM

Takver I like this "with one big exception most of us couldn't think of anything that we do 'to be green' that we wouldn't also do just because it is a more enjoyable way to live" and I would apply it to myself as well. the thing being that the things people choose to do to be green, are the things that are relatively easy for them and they like to do. Most people don't choose to do things that are too much like hard work or a PITA

Well, yes, that is true - but to be fair the conversation was with people that lots of the population might consider at the extreme end of the spectrum.

I think the point with meat is not to convince people to become vegetarian, but to eat meat less frequently. Its a much disputed point, I guess, but I'm still unconvinced about the possibilities of a significant proportion of land moving over to stockless organic farming in the UK, which implies a fair amount of meat/milk production alongside arable, plus of course if meat (and wool) prices rise then sheep on upland farms will pay better.

Again, the way to get people to eat less frequently, is to make it expensive, or limit access.

Unfortunately the human race rarely acts in its own best interests unless forced to