Dear Land,
I’m writing to you not as something separate from you, but as someone shaped by you. By the air I breathe without thinking, the food that keeps me going, the ground I move across every day. For a long time, I was taught to see you as a backdrop to my life, something to use, manage, and take from. It took time for me to realize how familiar that way of thinking is, how closely it resembles the ways certain bodies, especially women’s bodies and the bodies of marginalized people, have been treated too.
You are taken from, claimed, controlled, and exhausted in the name of progress. And so are many of the people who live closest to you. The same systems that justify your harm depend on the belief that some lives matter less than others, that care is a weakness, and that domination is simply the way things are. I’m beginning to see that this isn’t a coincidence.
In so many places, it is women, particularly Indigenous women, racialized women, and women in the Global South, who feel the impacts of environmental destruction first and most deeply. When water is contaminated, when land is stolen, when ecosystems fail, their work becomes heavier, their bodies bear the risk, and their knowledge is pushed aside. Your suffering and theirs are woven together. They are not separate stories.
I was taught to prioritize reason over feeling, culture over nature, productivity over care. Through ecofeminism, I’ve started to understand that these divisions aren’t neutral. They support a worldview that values control and profit while dismissing interdependence and vulnerability. Within this logic, you become something to conquer, just as some people are expected to serve, endure, or quietly disappear.
But I am also learning other ways of being in relation with you. Ways based on care instead of extraction, responsibility instead of ownership, reciprocity instead of domination. These ways don’t place humans above nature, but within it. They ask what it might mean to live alongside you, rather than against you.
This letter isn’t an apology, and it isn’t a claim to innocence. It’s an attempt to listen more carefully, to understand that justice for you cannot exist without justice for those whose lives are most deeply tied to yours. Ecofeminism reminds me that healing is something we do together, or not at all.
With care,
Alba
