This paper presents reflections on the author's death aspirations as they are informed by a set of earth-connection stories, environmental concepts, and modernist burial practices. This weave is meant to inspire further consideration on what is coming to be known as 'green burial'. More precisely, this means an exploration of the author's earth-centred burial musings in association with the following themes: the meanings and historical trajectory of prevailing death and burial practices; 'narratives' of the human-earth life-cycle; relevant environmental ethics and (...) place literature concepts; and lastly, some sense of the newly emerging practices and appeals to green burial - i.e. the normative and practical grounds for rethinking and working toward more environmentally sensitive burial practices. This weave of themes is instructive for posing green burial as evocative of a more comprehensive and spiritual ethos of connection, continuity, and responsibility. In this sense, rather than being seen as contrary or contentious, green burial may actually enable us to dispel some of the growing angst, uncertainty, and insensitivity often underlying prevailing burial practices, while contributing to an emerging environmental consciousness. (shrink)

This paper examines Nancy Chodorow's theory of feminine connection and masculine separation in The Reproduction of Mothering. First it demonstrates that, contrary to many feminists' interpretations, Chodorow's theory does not portray masculine separation as a social problem to which feminine connection is the solution. Then it shows that Chodorow's apparently intended theory is incoherent. Finally, it argues that Chodorow's claims imply another theory that is coherent and that deserves feminists' attention.

In this article I discuss how some women activists experience their citizenship locally and around the world through their work for the environment and resistance to systems which threaten world existence. By looking at the oikos-polis distinction in Aristotle as the genesis of environmental pathologies which give rise to newly complementary categories of citizenship and ecofeminism, I consider moral pluralism and agonistic liberalism as non-hierarchical theoretical frameworks for thinking about citizenship.

Ecology and constructivism are motivated by broadly shared political aspirations and subscribe to similar critiques of technocratism, patriarchy. and "instrumental rational ity." But they diverge considerably in respect to the discourses they offer on "nature." By staging an encounter between ecological argument and feminist comtructivist theory, this article seeks to illuminate, and to indicate the means of resolving, the ontological tensions between these respective critiques of modernity. It recognizes that the constructivist emphasis on the "discursivity" of nature offers an important (...) corrective to the more simplistic, and potentially reactionary, aspects of ecological rhetoric but defends a realist perspective as essential to the coherence of any gender theory and politics. (shrink)