When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is
past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.
--The final entry in Dian Fossey's journal

AMERICAN WOMEN'S most significant contributions
to nature study, conservation, and the environmental movement have oc-
curred during the same period as critical developments in feminist activism. In
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries American women have waged politi-
cal campaigns for such rights as suffrage, equal education, employment and
pay, and reproductive choice. Although a few naturalists and environmental-
ists over the past 150 years have been involved in the women's rights battles
of their time, feminist activism has rarely combined with environmental poli-
tics. ¹ The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the latest period in which fears about the
pollution of the earth coincided with anger at the oppression of women. In
contrast to earlier periods, during these decades a cohesive group of American
women merged these concerns.

Ecological feminists, or ecofeminists, identify disturbing connections be-
tween the domination of women and the domination of nature, and they
argue that these associations explain the violent attitudes toward both nature
and women pervading Western culture. Arising in part out of feminist spiritu-
ality, women's peace initiatives, and a growing genre of women's speculative
fiction, ecological feminism works to cross boundaries by injecting ecologi-
cal goals into the women's movement and by including the feminist critique

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