BACKGROUND: WHY WOMEN'S ENERGY MATTERS

Starting around the time of the American Revolution, new forms of energy fueled an industrial revolution, first in England, then in America and Europe. Previously, energy was based on biology and natural processes. Human and animal energy (fueled by food from plants and animals) was assisted by burning wood and harnessing rivers and wind (for water pumping and sailing).

Newer energy forms were based primarily on “fossil fuels” from deep underground — coal and coke for steam, then oil, gas and eventually uranium for electricity. Extracting and burning fossil fuels caused unprecedented contamination and poured enormous amounts of "greenhouse gases" (carbon dioxide and methane) into the atmosphere, causing the global climate change we are experiencing today.

What WEM Does

WEM invites women and men to become aware of how energy is currently produced and used (in our homes, businesses, transportation and food system), and to understand how it affects our lives. WEM provides women-oriented information and encouragement for people who are working to remake the energy system in ways that will better serve and protect our families and communities and the environment.

The prospects for building an environmentally and socially-friendly energy system are rich with opportunities for personal enjoyment and learning, making new friends and building careers. Women’s Energy Matters (WEM) invites women especially to become involved in this project at any level, and provides assistance for women and men who undertake these efforts.

WEM starts with the basics — helping women become aware of the many ways we encounter energy in our daily lives and make countless small and large energy decisions as we prepare food, raise children, manage our households, run errands, purchase products, perform outside jobs and maintain our communities.

Next, WEM encourages local WEM members to learn more about energy, sponsor discussion groups, workshops and events — and take action on energy issues in their local communities and the wider world. WEM can help with networking and information to support these efforts. WEM also provides historical information on how women have accomplished social change.

Women, Energy, and the Environment

Hardly any women were involved in planning, building or operating industrial energy systems such as coal and uranium mines, oil and gas rigs, refineries, giant dams, power plants and transmission lines. Even today, few women are able to break into that club, or have even been tempted to try.

On the other hand, women all over the world have long been dealing with the mess the industrial energy system leaves behind — cleaning up soot in our houses and clothes, nursing family members sickened by pollution and industrial accidents, and coping with personal and societal changes in moving from farms and villages to urban settings. Women created some of the first environmental organizations, focusing on cleaning up polluted cities and waterways and protecting forests and wildlife. Women also took the lead in providing education, hospitals and other services for people displaced from their land by industrial agriculture and migrating to cities or other countries to find jobs to feed their families.

Women, Families and Food

To this day, many women grow food, as women have always done — gardening and raising chickens, goats and other animals in sustainable, organic ways. Many of today's organic farmers are women, and women are actively involved in Farmers Markets as founders, sellers and customers — and direct farm-to-home delivery. Locally based agriculture and marketing will become increasingly important as rising fuel costs reduce the viability of the oil-dependent corporate food system. Industrial agriculture depends on fossil fuel and electricity for big machinery, irrigation and animal confinement, and transporting food across great distances. Pesticides and fertilizer are also based primarily on natural gas.

Women and Markets

Anthropologists report that women probably created the first markets, however the Industrial Revolution brought forth the male-dominated "market economy" that blankets the globe in our day. Women are providing some of the most intelligent guidelines for sensible change.

For example, Dr. Marilyn Waring — economist, former Member of Parliament, and energy activist in New Zealand — points out that the market purports to run the world, but ignores the unpaid work of women, people in "subsistence" economies (2/5 of global population), and Mother Nature. The economic system itself promotes destruction — she notes that "the Exxon Valdez was the most profitable tanker voyage ever made." Waring proposes ways to reframe the economic system, recognizing that it is only one part of a much larger picture. See the video "Who's Counting: Sex, Lies and Global Economics."

The late Donella Meadows explains how current industrial energy and market systems tend to overshoot planetary limitations. She also charts a path to bring our civilization into balance. Read "Beyond the Limits" and online archives of her writing.

Women's Energy Matters celebrates all the ways women have used their energy to address energy issues and clean up after the old energy system. WEM encourages women to carry on this work. WEM provides education about the centrality of energy in our lives and invites women to take leading roles in designing and building a better system — one based on conservation and non-polluting “renewable” energy such as solar and wind. If more of us concentrate on the central problem of energy, we may be able to solve many other problems which stem from the existing energy system — air and water pollution; nuclear waste; urban sprawl; disconnected families; tasteless food with degraded nutritional value; and loss of jobs as corporations move overseas and ship back foreign-made products and food. We may even be able to begin to release the stranglehold of energy corporations over our economic and political life, and repair international relations damaged by the wars and other hurtful practices of first-world countries seeking to control foreign energy resources.