As the torchbearers of environmental activism, women from around the world have created profound changes that are helping to ensure a healthier planet for all living things. Whether it is Judi Bari, who was crippled by a car bomb because of her efforts to save California's ancient redwood forests; Dai Qing, who was imprisoned for her opposition to an environmentally destructive dam on China's Yangtze River; or Dr. Tatynana Artyomkina, who defied KGB threats and exposed health and environmental risks in the Soviet Union, women have put their lives on the line and persevered against daunting odds to restore and protect the environment. Mary Joy Breton provides absorbing sketches of these and other women activists in the Americas, Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, and Asia. Breton interweaves her accounts with narrative on the ecological hazards that drove these women to spearhead various environmental campaigns, examining why and how they challenged, and often defeated, the power structures of government and industry. Although these remarkable women come from various geographical regions and represent a wide range of economic, ethnic, and political backgrounds, they share insights, values, and a particular sensitivity to the Earth that led them to change the course of history. Their courageous efforts illuminate the crucial role of women in the environmental movement, and provide inspiration for a new generation of activists.

Compelling accounts from early champions of Louisiana's struggle to save natural resources

This book highlights the unique and complex role women have played in the shaping of the American environment from pre-Columbian Native Americans to present day environmental justice activists.

Includes a section on Maria Martin, a young woman from Charleston, who married Audubon's youngest son, John Woodhouse, and who "assisted in the artwork for volumes 2 and 4 of [Audubon's] The birds of America and acted as Bachman's amaneunsis during his collaboration with Audubon on The quadrupeds of North America."--Page 9.

At Home in the World examines the extraordinary and largely unheralded role women played in forging the modern environmental movement, specifically in California.

Written by one of the leading thinkers in environmentalism, Earthcare brings together Merchant's existing work on the topic of women and the environment as well as updated and new essays. Earthcare looks at age-old historical associations of women with nature, beginning with Eve and continuing through to environmental activists of today, women's commitment to environmental conservation, and the problematic assumptions of women as caregivers and men as dominating nature.

From pre-Columbian times to the environmental justice movements of the present, women and men frequently responded to the environment and environmental issues in profoundly different ways. Although both environmental history and women's history are flourishing fields, explorations of the synergy produced by the interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender are just beginning. Offering more than biographies of great women in environmental history, Beyond Nature's Housekeepers examines the intersections that shaped women's unique environmental concerns and activism and that framed the way the larger culture responded. Women featured include Native Americans, colonists, enslaved field workers, pioneers, homemakers, municipal housekeepers, immigrants, hunters, nature writers, soil conservationists, scientists, migrant laborers, nuclear protestors, and environmental justice activists. As women, they fared, thought, and acted in ways complicated by social, political, and economic norms, as well as issues of sexuality and childbearing. Nancy C. Unger reveals how women have played a unique role, for better and sometimes for worse, in the shaping of the American environment.