The climate crisis has many faces, but perhaps none so overlooked as its distinctly masculine profile. While we’ve grown accustomed to discussing the Anthropocene—our current geological epoch defined by human impact on Earth—a growing chorus of scholars suggests we’re missing half the story. What if the environmental crisis isn’t just about humanity’s dominance over nature, but specifically about male-dominated systems of power that have shaped how we relate to the planet?
French economist and politician Sandrine Rousseau provocatively reframes our current era as the “Androcene”—not merely the age of humans, but the age of men.¹ This isn’t simply wordplay. By examining how patriarchal structures intersect with environmental destruction, we uncover patterns that traditional environmentalism has long overlooked: the overrepresentation of men in extractive industries, the exclusion of women from environmental decision-making, and the disturbing parallels between the domination of women and the domination of nature.
The Twin Tyrannies: Anthropocentrism and Androcentrism
At the heart of our environmental predicament lie two interconnected worldviews that have shaped Western thought for millennia. Anthropocentrism places humans at the center of moral consideration, viewing nature as a resource existing primarily for human use. This perspective, deeply embedded in Judeo-Christian traditions and Enlightenment philosophy, creates a hierarchy with humans at the apex and the natural world relegated to instrumental value.²
Androcentrism operates through a similar logic of domination, but along gender lines. It positions male experience as the universal norm, rendering women’s perspectives invisible or inferior. As historian Gerda Lerner demonstrated in her groundbreaking work, this male-centered worldview didn’t emerge naturally but was constructed through specific historical processes that systematically excluded women from positions of power and knowledge production.³
What makes these twin tyrannies so destructive is how they reinforce each other. The same dualistic thinking that separates culture from nature, mind from body, and reason from emotion also associates men with the superior terms and women with the inferior ones. Women, like nature, become something to be controlled, managed, and exploited for the benefit of those deemed truly rational and worthy of moral consideration—namely, men.
The Androcene: Where Patriarchy Pollutes
Rousseau’s concept of the Androcene illuminates three key ways that male dominance drives environmental destruction:
First, men overwhelmingly occupy the boardrooms and government offices where environmental policies are crafted. A 2019 study found that women held only 15% of ministerial positions in environmental sectors globally.⁴ This gender imbalance means that policies often reflect masculine values of conquest and control rather than feminine-associated values of care and connection.
Second, the gendered division of labor concentrates men in the most environmentally destructive industries. Men dominate fossil fuel extraction, industrial agriculture, and manufacturing—sectors responsible for the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, women are overrepresented in care work and service industries with lighter environmental footprints. This isn’t coincidence but consequence: patriarchal systems have historically directed men toward roles that emphasize domination over nature.
Third, the Androcene reveals itself through the sexualization and feminization of nature itself. From “virgin” forests awaiting penetration to Mother Earth requiring man’s rational management, our language betrays a worldview that conflates the subjugation of women with the exploitation of nature. This symbolic violence translates into material consequences: studies show that environmental degradation and violence against women often increase in tandem, particularly in regions experiencing rapid resource extraction.⁵
Ecofeminist Insights: Connecting the Dots
Ecofeminism, emerging in the 1970s through the work of scholars like Carolyn Merchant and Vandana Shiva, first drew these connections between the oppression of women and the destruction of nature.⁶ Merchant’s “The Death of Nature” traced how the Scientific Revolution replaced an organic worldview—where nature was seen as a living, nurturing mother—with a mechanistic one that justified unlimited exploitation. This shift, she argued, coincided with the witch hunts and the exclusion of women from emerging scientific institutions.
But ecofeminism offers more than critique; it points toward alternatives. By elevating traditionally feminine values of care, reciprocity, and interdependence, ecofeminist thinkers challenge the masculine logic of domination that underlies both patriarchy and environmental destruction. Vandana Shiva’s work with women’s movements in India demonstrates how women’s knowledge and practices, often dismissed as “backward,” frequently embody more sustainable relationships with nature than Western industrial approaches.⁷
Deep Ecology: Beyond the Human
While ecofeminism focuses on the patriarchal roots of environmental crisis, deep ecology challenges anthropocentrism itself. Developed by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, deep ecology calls for recognizing the intrinsic value of all life forms, independent of their usefulness to humans.⁸ This biocentric worldview seeks to dethrone humanity from its self-appointed position as master of nature.
Yet deep ecology has faced criticism from ecofeminists for sometimes ignoring how the “universal” human it seeks to dethrone is implicitly male. When deep ecologists call for a less anthropocentric worldview without addressing androcentrism, they risk perpetuating the very hierarchies they claim to oppose. The challenge is to decenter both humanity and masculinity simultaneously.
New Materialism: Matter Matters
Recent philosophical movements like new materialism, associated with scholars like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, push even further by questioning the nature/culture divide itself.⁹ These thinkers argue that the separation between human subjects and natural objects—a separation that enables both anthropocentrism and androcentrism—is an illusion. Instead, they propose understanding the world as composed of “naturecultures” and “material-discursive” entanglements where human and more-than-human actors constantly shape each other.
This perspective offers profound implications for environmental thinking. If we recognize that we are not separate from nature but always already entangled with it, the masculine fantasy of control and domination becomes not just ethically problematic but ontologically impossible. Climate change itself demonstrates this: our attempts to dominate nature return to haunt us in the form of rising seas, extreme weather, and ecological collapse.
Toward Feminist Environmental Futures
Recognizing the Androcene doesn’t mean blaming all men or essentializing gender differences. Rather, it means acknowledging how patriarchal systems—which harm many men too—have shaped our environmental crisis. The path forward requires not just technological fixes or policy tweaks but a fundamental transformation in how we relate to each other and the more-than-human world.
This transformation might begin with elevating women’s voices in environmental governance, but it can’t end there. We need to cultivate what Rousseau calls a “feminist ecological transition”—one that redistributes power, transforms our economies, and recognizes the intrinsic value of all life.¹⁰ This means moving from an ethic of domination to one of partnership, from extraction to regeneration, from competition to collaboration.
The climate crisis is also a crisis of imagination. For too long, our visions of the future have been constrained by anthropocentric and androcentric assumptions. By bringing together insights from ecofeminism, deep ecology, and new materialism, we can begin to imagine and create different worlds—worlds where neither women nor nature are subordinated to masculine will, where human flourishing doesn’t require planetary devastation, where care rather than control guides our relationships with the Earth.
The Androcene names our present predicament, but it need not define our future. As we face the mounting consequences of centuries of patriarchal anthropocentrism, the question isn’t whether we’ll change—the collapsing climate ensures we must. The question is whether we’ll transform in time, and whether that transformation will be deep enough to address not just the symptoms but the masculine roots of our planetary crisis.
Notes
- Sandrine Rousseau, Manuel de résistance féministe (Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021), 89-112.
- Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203-1207.
- Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 15-48.
- UN Women, “Gender and Climate Change: An Analysis of Global Environmental Leadership,” 2019, accessed January 15, 2025.
- Nicole Detraz, Gender and the Environment (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 45-67.
- Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).
- Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed Books, 1988).
- Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry 16, no. 1 (1973): 95-100.
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
- Rousseau, Manuel de résistance féministe, 145-178.