Introduction

This book introduces several ways that empowering women in climate-challenged regions of the developing world (aka the Global South) enables us to become part of a critical mass for social change. The common feature of these diverse ways is a determination to connect our own individual lives with a worthwhile collective purpose that can best be achieved by joining together with others who share our vision. My own story may serve to illustrate this point.

I now live in a village on the north fork of Long Island in New York state, yet I retain vivid childhood memories of a very different place several hundred miles to the south. My paternal grandparents’ farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was the gathering place for family reunions throughout my childhood and into early adulthood. Some forty years later, I still can clearly picture the rooms in my grandparents’ house and my grandmother’s vegetable garden, and I can hear the deep southern accents of my relatives’ voices as they exchanged stories and laughed together. I often wondered how members of my family made a living: Farming is an incredibly hard life! As it happens, my relatives (especially women in my generation and the one before me) graduated high school and attended college where they learned new farming techniques. However, down the lane from my grandparents’ farm, perching on their neighbor Mabel’s kitchen stool and straining to understand her Appalachian accent, I recognized early in life that many other farmers lacked the luxury of a formal education, and many struggled to make a living. Mabel and her husband rented the farm until he died. Visiting her before she died, I witnessed her gradually shrinking away. I am extremely grateful to my grandparents for encouraging me to keep in touch with Mabel whom I remember fondly.

Much later, in my professional career as a teacher and mentor, as weather-related disasters severely affecting the Global South increased, I wanted to know much more than I knew about how women farmers survived in these hard times. As caretakers of the home, bearing multiple responsibilities, how did they adapt to weather-related disasters? In this book, I provide some answers derived from field studies and oral histories conducted in Africa, Central America, and South and Southeast Asia.

My initial reading revealed a troublesome truth. I learned that all too often women’s opportunities to lead movements to change agricultural practices and adopt eco-friendly approaches are severely limited by patriarchal social structures and dominant cultural practices. I wanted to understand more about what “the world” was missing when women were denied a chance to contribute. From field work and oral histories, I became convinced that while rural women’s deep knowledge of natural resource management and indigenous oral traditions often were ignored, the women themselves were fully capable of becoming leaders in the pursuit of environmental social justice. In this book, I make the case for foregrounding both women’s potential and their achievements.

Between 2016 and 2022, my students, colleagues, and I conducted over a hundred oral history interviews to understand the dynamics of women’s empowerment and agency. We discovered many positive models, which included women farmers in the Global South who described their daily challenges – how they felt when their crops were ruined by droughts or floods, when moneylenders charged exorbitant interest rates to keep the farms going, and when, for weeks on end, they and their families did not have food to eat.

In Chapter one, I reframe the ways traditional societies can use a woman-centered approach to better address climate-related disasters. This chapter provides several examples to emphasize the importance of (1) continuing to advocate for integrating female perspectives; (2) confronting inevitable challenges with better communication skills; (3) breaking down binary (either/or) thinking by proposing multiple solutions; and (4) cultivating future generations of leaders.

To present a nuanced picture of women’s potential in which self-actualization is an integral part of contributing to the goal of bettering the world, Chapter Two provides an oral history of Trupti Jain, one of the founders of the Bhungroo irrigation technology program in India – and relates how she gained acceptance at state and local levels, recognized the value of women’s deep agricultural knowledge, and determined what women needed to regain a sense of dignity after enduring climate-related disasters. She describes how she found kindred spirits sharing a common purpose in international women’s organizations and elicited outside support to identify the types of expertise needed to transfer technical and cultural knowledge to other countries and regions.

Chapter Three discusses how oral histories elicited from rural women in local communities facilitate the accurate representation of women’s lives, nurtures trust, and builds support. It demonstrates that oral history interviewers, including both scholars and lay persons, play an important role in informing the outside world and thereby garnering support for community projects. An aggregation of oral histories from diverse rural settings constitutes an intricate mosaic of experiences that serves as a foundation for civil society and the work of women’s international and domestic non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Furthermore, the web of connections fostered by the dissemination of oral histories facilitates and energizes social change directed toward climate change adaptation and community survival in the face of new challenges. In essence, when stories constructed from oral histories enter the mainstream, they have the potential to influence public opinion and secure support from policymakers and power brokers.

Chapter Four presents ten such oral histories as case studies:

1. A women-led project in the western highlands of Guatemala that involves the cultivation of mealworm farms to provide a source of protein for indigenous Mam communities.

2. The establishment of healthcare centers and midwife training in the protected rural areas of Guatemala among indigenous and non-indigenous people outside of the court system to address domestic violence.

3. A women-led community education initiative in Tunisia to help local communities influence decision makers to get rid of dangerous chemicals such as lead in paint, amalgam in dentistry, pesticides, and hazardous chemicals in makeup products.

4. The establishment of women’s collectives for recycling in Colombia to enable men and women to work alongside each other to protect the land.

5. A training program for local women to secure community recognition and receive monetary compensation to restore endangered coral reefs in Belize while gaining cooperation from male peers and integrating the achievements of women scientists of color.

6. The multiple strategies individual women activists use to gain acceptance and rally public opinion to address environmental degradation in the rural areas of Thailand, where spiritual and cultural centers have been affected by male migration to urban areas.

7. A social enterprise in Verona, Italy, which was established to recycle the waste created by the fashion industry to combat larger social problems like climate change and provide job opportunities for poor and disenfranchised women.

8. An initiative in Uganda that provides financial support for women farmers, who are uniformly marginalized, to implement innovative farming methods to reduce carbon emissions and enhance their social status.

9. A program that involves working with the women’s union in Vietnam to facilitate the dissemination and use of environmentally friendly cookstoves.

10. A project that produces solar batteries in Syrian refugee camps in Tűrkiye to provide women with jobs and prepare their children to take advantage of educational opportunities.

In the above case studies and throughout this book, I focus on women’s empowerment and climate change programs from the perspectives of the social entrepreneurs who worked with rural communities in the Global South. In Chapter Five, I present the voices of the “Mabels” in the Global South – that is, working farmers with limited opportunities whose lives could be vastly improved by properly addressing the problems of endemic poverty. This chapter profiles oral histories of 42 agriculturalists arising from the work of social entrepreneurs who introduced a new women-owned and operated irrigation technology, Bhungroo, to help farmers in Gujarat, India adapt to severe weather-related events. The farmers’ oral histories reveal that climate change has led to unstable family structures; and that, to make incremental changes that endure, intergenerational cooperation between females and males is required. Furthermore, while no single technological innovation can transform the male-dominated social hierarchy, innovations can serve as catalysts, expanding opportunities for females to work for changes that recognize and valorize their vital contributions to their families and communities.

Chapter Six answers a question that many sympathetic persons who want to contribute to a better world ask: “What can I do?” In a climate-changed world that appears to be beyond our control, it is difficult to figure out how best to contribute our time and talent (in the arts, business, computer science, education, health sciences, law, journalism, and so forth) to make a palpable difference. In this chapter, I demonstrate that visual arts and social media, which most of us are affected by and use to one degree or another, can help rural women and social entrepreneurs in the Global South deal with seemingly insurmountable problems of endemic poverty that are made worse by climate change.

In sum, I describe numerous ways by which we can learn to empathize with women farmers. Not only do they “hold up half the sky,” as a Chinese saying goes, but they also are indispensable in providing a broad spectrum of solutions that, taken together, can contribute substantially to a world concerned about the environment and our relation to it. Consider this book an extended invitation to embark on life journeys that will provide both meaning and personal satisfaction to the voyager undertaking the journey and contribute to the dual and connected causes of climate justice and female empowerment. I hope you will take to heart the stories and lessons in this book and think of how to include in your life at least one important element – one or more of the kinds of service activities or, perhaps, even the full-scale careers that I introduce in these pages.