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Thursday, June 08, 2000
By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
It's not easy being green, especially for women.
Women are more affected than men by environmental issues like polluted air and water, pesticides, waste dumping, irradiated food products, population and development.
They are the primary caretakers for the vast majority of the children who lost 14 million schooldays to asthma last year in the United States.
They have elevated levels of breast cancer in polluted areas of China.
Their reproductive systems are altered by pesticides, nuclear waste and water degradation.
They make up the majority of the elderly population in southwestern Pennsylvania, which is adversely affected by high levels of ozone, the primary component of unhealthy smog.
They have a small role worldwide in the decisions setting environmental policy and are rarely trained as professional resource managers.
"Women fill the role of caretakers, but they haven't been able to take care of themselves when it comes to environmental issues," said Jean Clark, a spokeswoman for the statewide environmental group Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future. "A lot of these environmental issues ... haven't been studied in a gender-specific way."
Environmental issues and the role of women in them are one of 12 topics under discussion at this week's United Nations special General Assembly session in New York to assess the progress of women worldwide five years after a groundbreaking conference in Beijing.
At that gathering in China, 189 nations agreed to end laws that discriminate against women and to open education to girls. They also supported closing income gaps between women and men, and sustainable development policies.
According to the women's conference platform statement on the environment, awareness of resource depletion, the degradation of natural systems and the dangers of polluting substances have all increased in the past decade. And the worsening global conditions are destroying fragile ecosystems and displacing communities, especially women, from productive activities.
And by that, the platform doesn't mean childbearing.
"Most environmental groups understand that population questions are at the root of a lot of environmental problems, but in this country when it comes time to do something about it, a lot of groups back off," said Pat Waak, a former Peace Corps volunteer and senior adviser on population issues for the National Audubon Society.
"But a lot of studies show that conservation and population issues are linked. One on human-dominated ecosystems looks at what happens to ecosystems because of human population growth and consumption and found we are changing ecosystems dramatically and quickly, and that species extinction is accelerated."
A fundamental environmental issue around the world is clean water.
"In many parts of the developing world, women spend a portion of every day getting and carrying water because there is no supply to their homes," Waak said. "If I see a woman in a village who needs to free up her life, the first issue is controlling fertility and the second is clean water."
There have been some recent environmental successes for women. Waak points to planned declines in birth rates in some developing countries, women's training programs in environmental management in Africa, and gender specific research in Mexico and Zimbabwe.
In Jamaica, a government project trained 3,700 women farmers in conservation techniques suitable for rugged terrain. And in Iceland, gender analysis of a proposed hydroelectric dam and aluminum plant construction project found that it would not improve the economic situation of women.
But despite a near universal push for sustainable development, a core recommendation of the Beijing conference, it isn't even on the radar screen for most developing countries, Waak said.
"Economics takes the first seat," she said. "Despite all the discussion about sustainable development, we haven't come up with a way to promote economic development without great environmental consequences."
US Women Connect, a network of national and grass-roots women's and girls' groups, has issued a report card grading the United States progress on implementing the platform produced in Beijing.
On the environment, the United States got a "D." The group said that despite the appointment of Carol Browner as the first female director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, neither the Clinton administration nor Congress has effectively pursued sustainable development policies.
The report card went on to say that it's unknown whether women are adequately represented in agencies responsible for environmental policy because such data aren't kept. And although women and girls are disproportionately affected by environmental hazards, studies on pesticides, toxins and genetically engineered or irradiated food products have not reported data based on gender or their impact on the female life cycle.
"Research on the effects of pesticides and water degradation on the reproductive system of women and breast cancer are issues that are getting a lot of discussion on feminist Web sites now," Clark said. "As far as whether women are well-represented in environmental agencies, the fact that most agencies don't keep that kind of data says something. It's not an evil intent. They just don't think about it. I don't think the Ridge administration has made any breakthrough."
In Pennsylvania, the state Department of Environmental Protection doesn't keep records on the number of women in policy-making and supervisory positions.
Spokeswoman April Hutchinson said two of eight DEP deputy secretaries are women, as are the DEP's personnel director, director of policy, environmental education director, press secretary, director of the Growing Greener Grant Center, Environmental Equity coordinator and Citizens Advisory Council director. After scanning an employee roster she estimated 20 of the 140 employees in supervisory positions above the division director level are women.
"When you take a look at women in environmental agencies, it's not as much a function of glass ceilings as it is who's going into the field in the first place," Hutchinson said. "We are probably very representative of what is out there right now."
Waak said five years isn't enough time to fully realize environmental goals set in Beijing or even accurately evaluate progress toward them.
"But this conference serves the purpose of reminding government that certain promises were made. That is its value," she said. "If we just let 10 or 20 years pass before revisiting these issues there's no prod to keep people moving in the right direction."
Environment PG Graphic: Women & the environment