In the 1960s, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring (1962): one of the most influential works on environmental protection ever written. Her message went viral, long before that concept became popular. In 2018, Greta Thurnberg, at just 15 years old, challenged world leaders to take immediate action to act on the commitments that, three years earlier, Christiana Figueres had managed to negotiate and translate into the Paris Agreement.
Exemplary, strong and passionate women. Will superheroines like them save our planet from climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution? What role do other women, ordinary women, play in the search for a more sustainable world? Should the current political environment, hostile to sustainability, fostered by politicians like Trump, take away our momentum? What opportunities do women have to develop as leaders in this field?
Our ancestral relationship with nature
“Women are concerned about material and energy supplies, not because they particularly like this task or because of genetic predisposition, but because of a social role that determines it. If there is no water, if there is no fuel for cooking, women must look for the solution.” The quote is from an essay entitled Changing Glasses to Look at the World (2011) (only available in Spanish, Cambiar las gafas para mirar el mundo) which explores the role of women in the defense of nature.
According to this essay, women protect what directly allows them to survive: forests, water, community plots or human life, and they are aware that the deterioration of these resources means the deterioration of their lives and that of their loved ones. By caring for and being responsible for their children and their homes, they have developed knowledge related to health, community cohesion, education and the defense of the natural environment that allows life. Without nature there is no life and, consequently, there is no family, no community.
In a book entitled The Environmentalism of the Poor (2009), the Spanish economist Joan Martínez Alier offers an example of these links and tells of a group of women from the Peruvian community of Tapuc, who were opposed to the plots inherited from their grandparents being planted with eucalyptus because they could not feed their children with the leaves of that plant. They also pointed out that where eucalyptus grows, “the soil is impoverished and is not even suitable for planting onions.”
Women have always been and can be, even more, protagonists on the path to sustainability. This should not lead to adding the category “environment” to the list of tasks of caring for women, or to instrumentalizing them as the new “saviors of sustainability”. As Lyla Mehta and Melissa Leach state in relation to contemporary female roles, in the book Why Women Will Save the Planet (2015), it is necessary to “recognize and respect their knowledge, rights and capacities, as well as the integrity of their bodies, and to ensure that the role they play fits with the rights and control over resources and with their decision-making power.”
Our Sustainability Careers
On the other hand, how do women who work in sustainability deal with this negative context, in which a considerable sector of the political class often expresses total contempt for this issue? Are our careers and jobs still conducive spaces for women to put our interest in sustainability into practice?
According to a LinkedIn report from November last year, between 2023 and 2024 the demand for green talent had doubled globally. In addition, it indicated that this demand would continue, despite the measures that were envisioned after the beginning of the new Trump administration. It pointed out that, if this trend continued until 2030, one in five green positions would not have candidates with the right skills.
In other words, in principle, there will be excess work for men and women in terms of sustainability. Work for everyone. In Why Women Will Save the Planet, Christiana Figueres states, “I don’t think women are going to save the planet on their own. Women and men need to join forces and maximize our joint and collective potential to improve the world. I believe that the complementarity of the approaches that the two genders can bring is exactly what we need. We cannot make significant progress with a single approach. We need a balance. We need singularities, both male and female”.
Women have an ancestral relationship with nature. Clearly, we are not equal and we do not all feel the same passion for protecting the planet. However, despite the fact that these are difficult times, the context for those passionate about sustainability is favorable. Professionals in this area are increasingly needed and, to an even greater extent, people who are willing to listen, reach agreements and influence others to protect our only home. Our planet.