1

“Your Home is Your Biosphere”: Legacies of Gender and Race in the Domesticity of

Alternative Technology”

Emma Schroeder

Toxic Goodness Panel, 4S 2021

October 6, 2021

In 1977, architect Sean Wellesley-Miller decried the “growing dependence of American

homes on centralized, technological infrastructures for the provision of food, fuel, water and

building materials."1 Like other Appropriate Technology (AT) advocates, Wellesley-Miller

contended that homes – centers of energy and food consumption – could be sites of social and

technological revolution. As he wrote, "the home is distinctive as being a microcosm of the

macrocosm it is set in. It reflects, on the level of the biological unit, the same needs that society

as a whole exists to provide. By changing the houses we inevitably change society ... What

cannot be changed from the top may perhaps be changed from the bottom. Your home is your

biosphere."2

Wellesley-Miller’s remarks represent the centrality of homes and domestic practices to

the Appropriate Technology movement in the 1970s, a grassroots social movement that aimed to

create technologies that would provide equitable political relationships, social justice, ecological

stability, and sustainable economies.3 According to the historian Samuel Hays, AT focused on

1 Sean Wellesley-Miller, “Towards a Symbiotic Architecture,” in Earth’s Answer: Explorations of Planetary

Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences, ed. Michael Katz, William P. Marsh, and Gail Gordon Thompson (New

York: Lindisfarne Books/Harper and Row, 1977), 84. 2 Wellesley-Miller, “Towards a Symbiotic Architecture,” 86. 3 For just some of the literature related to AT, see Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The “Whole Earth Catalog”

and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Carroll Pursell, “The Rise and Fall

of the Appropriate Technology Movement in the United States, 1965-1985,” Technology and Culture 34, no. 3

(1993); Carroll Pursell, “Sim Van Der Ryn and the Architecture of the Appropriate Technology Movement,”

Australasian Journal of American Studies 28, no. 2 (2009); Witold Rybczynski, Paper Heroes: A Review of

Appropriate Technology (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1980); Langdon Winner, “The Political

Philosophy of Alternative Technology: Historical Roots and Present Prospects,” Technology in Society 1, no. 1

(1979); Knut H. Sørensen, “From ‘Alternative’ to ‘Advanced’: Mainstreaming of Sustainable Technologies,”

Science and Technology Studies 28, no. 1 (2015).

2

“household activities around solar energy, composting to utilize waste, and organic gardening.”4

And as the environmental historian Andrew Kirk argues, AT “fit perfectly with American

traditions of property rights and cultural assumptions about individual control over the home …

The ability to move ATs into the world of the American home was of critical importance in the

1960s and remains so in the first decade of the twenty-first century.”5

If homes stood as an organizing concept for AT advocates, early proponents of

sustainable development and design, we must deal with the ways race and gender structured their

concepts of home. As feminist scholars have shown, material and metaphorical domesticity

underlies the public-private divide and accompanying devaluation of women’s labor.

Domesticity also supports colonial projects through logics of cleanliness, civilization, and correct

gender roles.6 AT and its technological legacies – ecological design, green architecture, passive

solar, composting, windmills, holistic living – have not been seen as carrying within them the

toxic legacies of raced and gendered domesticity. However, just as science studies scholar Myles

Lennon has shown that today’s infrastructure justice proponents may reify racial social orders,

alternative technology constructed sustainable spaces not for any body, but for specifically raced

and gendered bodies.7

Imagining homes as biospheres inscribed white, heteronormative, middle-class

hegemonic domestic practices into ecological-technological systems intended to preserve a

threatened earth (Figure 1). Understanding the ways domesticity became a site of biopolitical

4 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 261. 5 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 87-88. 6 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2002); Patricia Hill Collins, “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race,

and Nation,” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (Summer 1998). 7 Myles Lennon, “Postcarbon Amnesia: Toward a Recognition of Racial Grief in Renewable Energy Futures,”

Science, Technology, and Human Values 45, no. 5 (2020).

3

control adds to feminist science and technology studies research that shows the ways state

policies governed women’s reproduction in service to national economies and global ecologies.8

Just as women’s reproduction became an object of planetary concern, so too did women’s social

reproduction. White, heteronormative, middle-class domestic practices became the correct way

to perform care for a threatened earth.

Figure 1. Nancy Willis at home in the PEI Ark. “A Most Prudent Ark,” Fisheries and

Environment Canada, 1977.

8 For instance, see Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and

Technoscience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Michelle Murphy, “Economization of Life: Calculative

Infrastructures of Population and Economy,” in Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and

Subjectivity, ed. Peg Rawes (New York: Routledge, 2013).

4

“Home is your biosphere”: Constructing Radical Technology

AT arose from the development discourse of the 1960s: E.F. Schumacher coined the term

“Intermediate Technology” to represent an alternative to the high modernism of megadams,

chemical agriculture, and other high-capital, large-scale national development projects. His

Intermediate Technology Development Group promoted “intermediate” technologies as tools

that would provide economic expansion without threatening cultural, social, or ecological

diversity. While originally formulated for “underdeveloped” nations, the emergence of a global

counterculture that critiqued the West’s “overdevelopment” soon embraced technological

alternatives that could stand against wasteful consumption practices and the techno-eco-human

violence of the Vietnam War.9

AT enthusiasts aimed to overturn conventional technoscientific knowledge production.

They wanted to create technologies that replicated and protected ecological processes, and in

doing so undo the nature-culture divide. They wanted to make the production of scientific

knowledge the purview of all people – they began citizen science programs and insisted that the

construction of science and technology did not have to be separated from daily life. In this

formulation, homes could be places for technological innovation. If they made “the search for

useful knowledge less sacrosanct,”10 they believed they could democratize science and undo the

political power of centralized, institutionalized technoscience. Finally, AT advocates resisted the

primacy of western knowledge, insisting that science needed to come out of particular

ecosystems and cultures, rather than from disembodied and displaced objectivity.

9 Kelvin W Willoughby, Technology Choice: A Critique of the Appropriate Technology Movement (Boulder:

Westview Press, 1990); Jordan Kleiman, “The Appropriate Technology Movement in American Political Culture”

(Dissertation, University of Rochester, 2000). 10 John Todd, “The New Alchemists,” The CoEvolution Quarterly (Spring 1976): 62.

5

AT groups, like most countercultural groups, used the undoing and upending of gendered

social norms to mark their technologies and science as socially transformative. Men sported long

hair and played with children, while bare-chested women worked in shops (Figures 2 and 3). The

overturning of gender roles was not only metaphorical but also material. AT organizations

provided “a chance to develop ourselves,”11 as one woman put it, by giving women employment

opportunities beyond those usually open to women; by adhering to non-hierarchical decision

making; and by providing equal wages to all employees regardless of education or sex. As I will

discuss later, women engaged in feminist activism and they made gender equity central to their

eco-technical activism.

Figure 2. Men and children at NAI. Journal of the New Alchemists 2 (1974), p. 5.

11 Hilde Maingay, interview by author, August 11, 2017.

6

Figure 3. Women at work in Appropriate Technology. Radical Technology, “Vision 5:

Community Workshop,” pp.200-201.

And just as with other countercultural activists, mainstream culture depicted the

movement as socially transgressive by painting them as sexually transgressive. In an interview,

one person recalled that “people said it was hippies in the hills, some people said that it was

dirty, some people said it was people doing drugs and having communal sex all of the time some

newspapers tried to push that image onto us quite clearly.”12 Those working at an AT center in

Wales played on these fears by writing a satirical pamphlet claiming that their goal was to “help

to conserve the world’s resources by loving less wastefully” and that they “believe[ed] orgies are

a good way of helping the staff get to know one another.”13

12 Peter Raine, National Centre for Alternative Technology interviews, National Library of Wales. 13 “Alternative Visitor’s Guide,” nd, 7/4, NCAT collection, National Library of Wales.

7

Brave New Home

Several geopolitical events of the 1970s made renewable energy and energy conservation

politically salient and buoyed AT groups looking to expand the audiences for their technologies.

The 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the 1972 publication of Limits to

Growth, the 1973 publication of Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, the 1973 oil crisis, and the

1976 UN Conference on Human Settlements all played a role in constructing earthly

vulnerability and the need for solutions to technological harm.14 In the 1970s as now, planetary

vulnerability played a pivotal role connecting national governance to grassroots social

movements. AT proponents were well situated to capitalize on the politicized earth, supported by

domestic metaphors that allowed them to move from countercultural networks into mainstream

support.15

While within AT groups gendered imagery marked technologies as socially

transformative, gendered imagery in mainstream publications assured readers that living within

energy limits would not overturn existing social hierarchies. Men would remain in control of

their property and therefore their independence, while women would care for the earth through

care of the home.

In mainstream publications, two forms of masculinity pervaded AT designs: men as

scientific innovators, saving the planet through technological design, and male independence

14 Many scholars have looked to explain the rise of global imaginaries including Alison Bashford, Global

Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Denis

Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” Annals of the

Association of American Geographers 84, no. 2 (1994); Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, the Globalization of the

World Picture,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011); Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global

Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Sabine

Höhler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015). 15 Henry Trim also argues that AT moved easily between counterculture and mainstream. Henry Trim, “A Quest for

Permanence: The Ecological Visioneering of John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute,” in Groovy Science:

Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture, ed. David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2016).

8

threatened by energy limits. Magazine accounts focused on do-it-yourself aura of the AT

technologies and the rationality of their scientific endeavors. The Smithsonian Magazine assured

readers that one group, the New Alchemy Institute (NAI) was, “despite the sound of its name, …

not a band of well-meaning, mystical communards in flight from the realities of science and

society …[but rather] a group of thoroughly rational professionals seeking to apply the insights

of science on a smaller, human scale.”16 Lest we forget just who those scientists were, the New

York Times told readers that NAI was founded by “a group of oceanographers from nearby

Woods Hole and wives and friends, all profoundly disturbed by the cancer of pollution.”17

Articles reported that anyone who could “tinker with an automobile engine” or who owned a

“basement shop”18 could construct their ecological technologies.19 Rather than the promise of

reversed gender roles, depictions scientists at work suggested the masculinity of the research and

reaffirmed men as the correct conduits for scientific rationality.

Masculine technoscience promised a salve to the dangers energy limits posed to men’s

independence. “You’re sitting in your home, cold, hungry, and helpless,” began a Canadian

Magazine article on AT solutions to the energy crisis. “Staggered by the realization that you

can’t provide food and warmth for yourself and your family. You’d worked hard, you’d made

good money, and you thought you were self-sufficient. But now that you can’t buy what you

need you’re a total loss.”20 The “homeowner” in these articles was encouraged to adopt

technologies of “self-sufficiency” to combat the possibility of energy scarcity and the resulting

16 James K. Page, Jr. and Wilson Clark, “The New Alchemy: How to Survive in Your Spare Time,” Smithsonian 5,

no. 11 (1975): 82. 17 This article focused on the aesthetics of NAI’s farmed fish, asking “Can a family grow a year’s supply of fish in

its back yard at negligible cost? Will the fish be good to eat?” John L. Hess, “Farm-Grown Fish: A Triumph for the

Ecologist and the Sensualist,” New York Times September 6, 1973: 32. 18 Both quotes are from the Smithsonian article. Page and Clark, “The New Alchemy,” 84. 19 Steven M. Gelber, “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity,” American

Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1997). 20 Barry Conn Hughes, “The World the Feeds Itself,” The Canadian Magazine, February 9 1974: 2.

9

threat to his economic, familial, and political power. Historian Trish Kahle demonstrates the

ways energy production shaped citizenship for white coalminers. However, access to energy also

constructed white male citizenship, and energy shortages threatened the masculine prerogative of

independence as enacted through control of the home.21

While mainstreaming AT relied on masculinity as embodied in property ownership,

energy independence, and scientific acumen, it also drew on an idealized femininity of care for

the private sphere and everything that inhabited it. For instance, magazine articles of one

prominent AT house, the New Alchemy Institute’s Prince Edward Island “Ark,” depicted Nancy

Willis, a horticulturalist who moved into the Ark with her then-partner, David Bergmark, and her

two children from a previous marriage, as a carefree domestic woman, one whose lifestyle

allowed her time to lie down for a tan while tending the Ark’s garden beds, and as a purveyor of

“bikini diplomacy” through her practice of shoveling compost in her swimsuit.22 “Her” kitchen

stood above the “family-sized” greenhouse; she put children to bed while making a “a quick

inventory [before a storm]: solar panels, water storage, fish ponds, greenhouse temperature and

glazing, windmill, Clivus system.”23 An article by Constance Mungall in Chatelaine, a Canadian

women’s magazine, assured readers that that the Ark had “a washer and a dryer, an electric

21 Matthew Huber argues that the oil crisis directly called into question the “American way of life” based on fossil

fuel social reproduction. The many examples in his book reflect the gendered aspects of oil-as-life. Matthew T.

Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). The

rhetoric of independence through home ownership resonates with long-standing cultural narratives in the United

States, as we could connect homeownership and self-sufficiency back to Jeffersonian agrarianism and the promise of

democratic politics through yeoman farmer’s independence. Trish Kahle, “The Front Lines of Energy Policy: The

Coal Mining Workplace and the Politics of Security in the American Century,” American Quarterly 72, no. 3

(2020). 22 David Lees, “Aboard the Good Ship Ark: Sailing the Rough Seas of Politics, Weather and an Expectant Society,”

Harrowsmith, September/October 1977; Constance Mungall, “Space-Age Ark, Brave New Home,” Chatelaine 50,

no. 11 (Nov. 1977). 23 Mungall, “Space-Age Ark, Brave New Home,” 52.

10

stove in the kitchen, a refrigerator and all the usual small appliances: vacuum cleaner, iron, hair

dryer, TV, radio and record player, and of course power tools.”24 Mungall told readers that

The house itself is more efficient than most, and Nancy [Willis] has not fewer

labor-saving devices. Without her commercial greenhouse chores, and her role of

hostess to scientists, politicians and the public who visit the Ark, Nancy says the

living quarters would take no more housework than a normal bungalow. With the

1,900-foot-square greenhouse and the 30 fish tanks producing cash crops, it

would be a full-time job -- but one many women would enjoy -- at home with the

kids but producing and earning. The self-composting Clivus system is easier than

operating a compost pile of kitchen wastes, as many conservation-conscious

housewives do these days.25

The Canadian government publication, A Most Prudent Ark: Living Lightly on the Earth,

highlighted scenes of the Ark’s kitchen, including a group gathered for a meal and Willis leaning

over a child in a kitchen.26 According to the architectural historian Steven Mannell, “the heart of

the Ark’s family life was a big farmhouse table in the kitchen-dining area,” and the “connection

of kitchen and table to food production remains the most compelling poetic vision of the Ark”27

(Figure 4).

24 Mungall, “Space-Age Ark, Brave New Home,”106. 25 Mungall, “Space-Age Ark, Brave New Home,”108. 26 A Most Prudent Ark, (Canada: Fisheries and Environment, 1977). 27Steven Mannell, “Living Lightly on the Earth”: Building an Ark for Prince Edward Island, 1974-1976 (Halifax,

Nova Scotia: Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2018), 29.

11

Figure 4. The Ark’s kitchen. “A Most Prudent Ark,” Fisheries and Environment Canada, 1977.

Steven Mannell suggests that domesticity enacted for ecological salvation could have

been the grounds for a more liberating form of feminism. “By the 1980s, consumerism would co-

opt feminism in a very different solution to the isolation of the suburban housewife,” writes

Mannell, “holding down a second job in a two-income family, with an accompanying explosion

of consumerism. From a present-day perspective, the Ark life seems a more fully liberating route

for both families and the planet.”28 In suggesting that care for the Ark could provide women’s

independence, Mannell avoids grappling with the ways including care for the earth in domestic

practices may have only added to the care work women undertake.29 The view that one can care

for the earth, enter capitalist production, and maintain the reproduction of social life – “at home

28 Mannell, Living Lightly on the Earth, 73. 29 Michelle Murphy, “Unsettling Care: Troubling Transnational Itineraries of Care in Feminist Health Practices,”

Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5 (2015).

12

with the kids but producing and earning” – returns women to the private sphere of the home and

its unpaid labor.

Feminist critiques

However, while the toxic legacies of white domesticity provided crucial grounds to move

these eco-technological designs into the mainstream, the women who participated in such groups

began to assert various forms of political power that did not conform to existing structures. They

insisted on new forms of technoscientific citizenship (Kimura 2016) and shared public concern

for harms, providing a space of political openness rather than the closure of private domestic

acts.30 As Judy Smith, author of “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed,

Something Due: Women and Appropriate Technology,” asked, “What are we women going to do

in the sense of trade-offs between our power, our equity, and energy development?”31 Or, as Jan

Zimmerman, another feminist concerned with women’s relationship to technology, put it bluntly,

“Who’s being asked to do the giving up?”32

In AT and radical science publications, women laid claim to the right to direct

technological development, arguing that this would provide political power, while also indicating

the ways women were differentially impacted by technologies. They also described science and

technology as constructed by race and gender. As the Women and Science Collective put it in the

women’s issue of the UK-based Science for People, they were trying to understand the “position

(or rather the exclusion), of women in science, and the ways in which science adds ideologically

30 For ideas of citizenship and science, see Aya H. Kimura, Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The

Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 31 Judy Smith, “Women and Appropriate Technology: A Feminist Assessment,” in The Technological Woman:

Interfacing with Tomorrow, ed. Jan Zimmerman (New York: Praeger, 1983), 69. 32 Jan Zimmerman, “Women’s Need for High Technology,” in Conference Proceedings of Women and Technology:

Deciding What’s Appropriate, ed. Judy Smith (Missoula, Montana: Women’s Resource Center, 1979), 23.

13

and technologically to the oppression of women.”33 Science, for these women, was “sexist” in its

labor force and its production of knowledge. As the Collective continued, women scientists

“work in deeply hierarchical, class divided, racist and sexist institutions.”34

Women tied the discrimination they faced in technoscientific professions to their

continued domestic responsibilities, directly critiquing the ecological domesticity many AT

organizations promulgated when describing their technologies. They argued that AT too often

romanticized domestic labor. The women at the National Centre for Alternative Technology

asked, “Does A.T. mean more domestic labour? … Do women have as much choice of their type

of employment in an A.T. society as men?”35 An embrace of the home, they suggested, led to a

false embrace of women’s domesticity, which in its lack of state support (especially in the

drawdown of welfare during the rise of neoliberal policies) provided “a sobering contrast to the

utopian ‘women and AT’ vision of the reintegration of home, work and childcare … The wages

are derisory, the work environment often dangerous, … job and income security are non-

existent.”36 The celebration of domestic work, these women argued, was central to an economic

system that devalued women’s paid work. As the Women and Science collective asserted,

working outside the home made women victims of double the “labour and double [the]

33

“Statement by the Collective,” Science for People 29 (Spring 1975): 3. This included Anne Cooke, Zoe Fairburns,

Dot Griffiths, Brigid Hogan, Zoe Reed, Hilary Rose, Esther Saraga, Li Shen, Lesley Walker, Judith Walker, Nancy

Ann Worcester. 34

“Statement by the Collective,” Science for People 29 (Spring 1975): 3. Women involved in early science

publications went on to long careers in untangling the relationship between scientific and feminist epistemologies.

For instance, Hilary Rose was founder of British Society for the Social Responsibility of Science, part of women’s

collective issue in 1979, a year before the Brighton Women and Science Group. See Banu Subramaniam, “Moored

Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies,” Signs 34, no. 4 (2009): 955. For critiques of

women in the sciences, see “Equality for Women in Science,” Science for the People 2, no.2 (August 1970): 10-11.

http://science-for-the-people.org/history/sftp-magazine/. Accessed January 9, 2021. The British and American

radical science movements held similar goals. See David King and Les Levidow, “Introduction: Contesting Science

and Technology, from the 1970s to the Present,” Science as Culture 25, no. 3 (2016). 35 Jean Welstead, “Women’s Group,” Quarry News (Spring 1983): 12. 10/1, NCAT, National Library of Wales. 36 Ruth Elliot, “Bringing it All Back Home,” Undercurrents 29 (August-September 1978): 19.

14

oppression.”37 The “social significance” of domestic imagery, some argued, needed to be

“considered at a time when capital wishes to force part of its ‘reserve labour’ back into the

home.”38 Or, as another contended, devaluing women’s paid work continued to make women “an

expendable commodity.”39 Women argued that their subordination was the result of “patriarchal

capitalism,”40 something much of AT did not take into account. As Ruth Elliot argued, “the

critical end of the AT movement has moved from a concern with the nuts and bolts of

technology to a search for new strategies that could challenge the locus of economic power.”41

Thus, from the AT movement, which in its mainstream formulations reified women’s

care for the home to care for the earth, came feminist political analyses that directly confronted

economic systems of unpaid labor, political disempowerment, and questions of scientific

objectivity.

Conclusions

AT and ecological design gained prominence because these technologies did not disrupt

social orders, because the individual empowerment advocated by AT enthusiasts could so easily

fit into the emerging neoliberal order of personal responsibility and the withdrawal of state

support for citizen welfare. The focus of AT on individual empowerment and personal

responsibility for ecological care fit perfectly with the emerging logic of neoliberal economic

governance in the 1970s. Thus today, the radical potential of personal control of science as

imagined by AT has dissipated, replaced by people doing “their bit by conserving energy, taking

37 “Statement by the Collective,” Science for People 29 (Spring 1975): 3. 38 “Statement by the Collective,” Science for People 29 (Spring 1975): 3. 39 Susie Lobbenburg, “Farewell to Welfare,” Undercurrents 29 (August-September 1978): 19. 40 Judy Bartlett, “Que Sera SERA?,” Undercurrents 29 (August-September 1978): 10. David Elliot discusses the

attempt to join AT to workers movements and radical socialism of Socialist Environment and Resources

Association. David Elliott, “The Alternative Technology Movement: An Early Green Radical Challenge,” Science

as Culture 25, no. 3 (2016). 41 Elliot, “Bringing it All Back Home,” 18.

15

public transit, recycling waste, growing food, and foregoing flights.”42 As Aya Kimura contends,

“The good neoliberal citizen-subject is someone who is personally responsible and constructive,

and female citizens need to navigate carefully to be resourceful and scientifically enlightened.”43

Or, as feminist political theorist Sherilyn MacGregor argues, we live today in a world in which

environmentalist lifestyles are “primarily the private spheres of the market and household. It is

symptomatic of the triumph of the ultimate neoliberal subject - the citizen-consumer - that people

in the affluent world have internalized the idea that the best way to tackle climate change is

through lifestyle change.”44

AT enthusiasts unintentionally provided the basis for these current environmentalist

lifestyles. International development policies also directly transported these constructions of

biopolitical governance through domestic practices from the global North to the South. Indeed, a

review of the Ark project directly addressed whether, how, and if such architectural technologies

could be used in international development aid from the Canadian state. Here is the question I

still have, however: What social shaping occurred when AT moved into development projects?

Were ideologies of white, middle-class, heteronormative domesticity exported along with solar

energy technologies and new cookstoves? How did this occur, and why?

I believe that the green technologies carried gendered social norms with them as they

traveled from countercultural idealizations to international development projects. The promise of

ecological technologies carried with it the coloniality of white domesticity. Legacies of

domesticity moved through transnational and international development projects as forms of

42 Quotation is from Sherilyn MacGregor, “Only Resist: Feminist Ecological Citizenship and the Post-Politics of

Climate Change,” Hypatia 29, no. 3 (2014): 624. Carroll Pursell suggests that AT tools lost their ideological basis in

the 1980s. Pursell, “The Rise and Fall.” 43 Kimura, Radiation Brain Moms, 5-6. 44 MacGregor, “Only Resist,” 624.

16

state control in order to preserve ecologies and economies. As the socialist ecofeminist Maria

Mies argued in the 1980s, the construction of women’s relationship to capitalist production and

consumption in the global North and South is inextricably linked. As she wrote, "Whereas the

Western consumer-housewives are encouraged to consumer more and to breed more whites, the

colonial producer-'housewives' are encouraged to produce more and cheaper, and to stop

breeding more blacks.”45 This resonates with Michelle Murphy’s more recent claim that certain

people as less worthy of life, and Kathryn Yusoff’s argument that concepts of who is not

considered human constructs ideas of planetary geography, geology, and ideas of earth.46

Mies’ view contains the central argument of this paper: that domestic practices of

consumption and production, not only biological bodies and biological reproduction, form an

essential part of constructing technologies intended to care for the earth and further capitalist

production. Women are the central objects of state governance in both formulations.

Erasing the centrality of raced and gendered domesticity from the history of renewable

energy, organic gardening, bicycling, and composting means that we cannot see the ways these

practices bring with them specific social orders. I would rather we pay attention to the women

who critiqued such orders and, in doing so, may find alternative politics of earth for today.

45 Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

(London: Zed Books, 1986), 127. 46 Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion

Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).