DEGRADATION OF ENVIRONMENT HURTS POOR WOMEN

Sir,

As an environmentalist who also happens to care deeply about the status of women in the country, it hurts me to the core each time I see someone carelessly throwing trash outside the window of a moving vehicle. It baffles me each time having to figure out what could possibly be going on in the mind of that person at that moment for them to be that inconsiderate of the environment and the impacts their trash might have on it. But as a gender activist, I now understand that my concern does not end at the potential detrimental and non-aesthetic effects on the environment, but also at how the degradation of the environment hurts poor women the most.

Environment

While many of the people who do not care about the environment may live in town, women living in the rural areas tend to be natural resource managers as they use the environment to gather food, water and firewood. And from a young age, many of us assisted our mothers with this work. So this isn’t news, really. Again, this may be news for those living in town but as resources scarcen with the decline in the environment’s health, girls are attending less and less school to be able to dedicate more time to finding water, or simply because school fees are no longer available as crop cycles become less predictable. The literacy rate of women is already staggering way behind men, and anything that disturbs this even further will only widen the gap. You can imagine the cycle of poverty that this spawns.

Climate

As if that isn’t enough, due to traditional and patriarchal gender roles that devalue unpaid work like childcare and water retrieval, women’s specialised knowledge in smart and effective climate change adaptation is typically not respected or taken into consideration in most community decision- making processes. The money that government uses in communities for sanitation, is money that may be used for more important things such as education, community development, and in projects that can help fight crime and gender-based violence in order to create a safe and easy living environment. An unclean environment also has very bad effects on health, and the number of clinics and hospitals in the country, coupled with the state most of them are in, is just not enough to care for all of us.

Burden

So bearing in mind that low-income communities and poor women and young girls bear the greatest burden of environmental injustice, next time you feel the urge to throw trash through a car window, or use water carelessly, think about the number of people who could be affected by that one simple act. Climate change is not a myth, it is here and we have seen its effects already. What more evidence could we possibly need? I’ve made enemies stopping people from throwing trash out of car windows, but if they were curious enough they would take time to research on why, and if not, I hope this short piece of writing will make everyone understand. Don’t just worry about keeping your car clean, dig deeper!

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