Ursula K. Le Guin AND Susan Griffin (!?!) on the oppression of women and wilderness.
from Le Guin's essay
"Woman/Wilderness" in her book "Dancing at the Edge of the
World":
Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest
is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I
explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is
what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and the wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
To this, Civilized Woman (in the voice of Susan Griffin) replies as follows:
"We say there is no way to see his dying as separate from her living,
or what he had done to her, or what part of her he had used. We say if
you change the course of this river you change the shape of the whole
place.
"And we say that what she did then could not be separated
from what she held sacred in herself, what she had felt when he did that
to her, what we hold sacred to ourselves, what we feel we could not go
on without, and we say if this river leaves this place, nothing will
grow and the mountain will crumble away, and we say what he did to her
could not be separated from the way that he looked at her, and what he
felt was right to do to her, and what they do to us, we say, shapes how
they see us.
"That once the trees are cut down, the water will
wash the mountain away and the river be heavy with mud, and there will
be a flood. And we say that what he did to her he did to all of us. And
that one fact cannot be separated from another.
"And had he seen
more clearly, we say, he might have predicted his own death. How if the
trees grew on that hillside there would be no flood. And you cannot
divert this river.
"We say look how the water flows from this
place and returns as rainfall, everything returns, we say, and one thing
follows another, there are limits, we say, on what can be done and
everything moves.
"We are all a part of this motion, we say, and
the way of the river is sacred, and this grove of trees is sacred, and
we ourselves, we tell you, are sacred."
(reminds me so much of this poem of mine: http://alexceberg.blogspot.com/2014/07/dear-mountain-love-river-part-2.html)