In this paper, I examine how grassroots women in third-world contexts organize to protect their natural resources through a comparison of the Indian Chipko movement and the Kenyan Green Belt Movement. Both movements are concerned with combating deforestation and were informed by the experiences of the women, the primary caretakers and resource-gatherers in their communities. The author contends that while the two groups had vastly different roots and strategies, they made significant strides in combating deforestation and reestablishing a culture of reforestation and ecological support within their communities while also creating strong networks of women activist. The research finds that the two groups took different approaches because of the stage of deforestation at which their advocacy occurred, whether it be before or after the clear-cutting of trees, as well as their relationship with the government. The Chipko movement acted quickly and in a disorderly fashion because they faced an immediate threat of forest destruction, while the Green Belt Movement was able to organize more centrally and with great organization because they were working with the government to solve the problems that were a result of the deforestation that had already occurred.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the multi-million dollar reality television show, follows the lives of the members of the Kardashian family, chronicling their daily lives, including everything from their world travels to their weekly spray-tans. Perhaps the most popular of the three Kardashian sisters, Kim Kardashian, became engaged to NBA basketball player Kris Humphries in May 2011. Their courtship, engagement, marriage, and subsequent divorce is all documented by the show. Through the lens of feminist criticism, I will examine the depictions of modern marital expectations on working women through the arguments of Kim’s friends and family as to how she should operate within her marriage. Their suggestions and opinions indicate that successful modern women are still expected to perform as servant-like and submissive, sacrificing their professions and personal opportunities to carry out marital “duties.” Kim Kardashian is idolized as a god-like figure in popular culture, so the situations which she must manage on the show give an example to millions of viewers on how women should be treated in a marriage, sustaining patriarchal norms that are already in place and making progression more difficult. I will focus on episodes 14 and 15 of Season 6, which focus on the planning and executing of their wedding, as well as episodes 8 and 9 of the show’s spinoff, Kourtney and Kim Take Miami, in which the married couple experiences difficulty navigating the gender dynamics of their marriage. By using such a popular entertainment outlet, I hope to point out the shortcomings of the modern model which provides further harmful examples of what a woman is still expected to do in her marriage, despite her apparent “equality” to man.

Camille Dungy, in her memoir Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, traces her experience of traveling as a poet-lecturer with her young daughter, reflecting on the ways that blackness and motherhood deeply inform her impressions of place. Through investigations of both ecological and built spaces, Dungy reconsiders the boundaries of her own body and explores how collective memories of place influence her feeling of security. Similarly, bell hooks searches for her sense of personal belonging through memory in her memoir Bone Black: Memories of a Girlhood. Through the construction of generational memory from fragments of experience, hooks documents her search for belonging within herself. I argue that these two women, writing about landscapes littered with legacies of both trauma and healing, craft their memories in vastly different ways, yet both share tales of creating a sense of place in these frequently hostile environments. Dungy and hooks, through their brilliant explorations of place and constructions of memory, revise the dominant narrative of ecological life writing and inscribe new veins of cultural memory in a field that often excludes their voices. By examining these together, I hope to include these women’s experiences more prominently within ecocriticism and explore how these ecofeminist texts fight against the ecological othering of black women.