Environment

DRAFT: A feminist internet respects life in all its forms; it does not consume it. Our proposal for a feminist internet principle in relation to the environment resignifies care towards an ethics of collective care in choices around design, extraction, production, consumption and disposal of the technologies involved.

Background

We have a draft Feminist Principle of the internet on Environment! Thanks to Sursiendo who hosted an FPI Convening on the environment where participants drafted this text for us to collectively and collaboratively comment on, expand, imagine and dream into this principle.

We will be organising online convenings throughout 2023 as well as asking folx to discuss wherever you meet and send feedback and input.

We are also curious about the language of 'naming' "environment". Does your community use a different term, such as "earth justice"? What language do you use?

To send your responses or if you want to know more about our upcoming processes (read more below!), write here: ftx@apcwomen.org

An FPI on the environment will provide a framework for women's movements to articulate and explore issues related to technology, digital rights and the environment. Linked to this, there will be a way forward mapped to bring this text to life through engaging in spaces where we can influence policy, donor advocacy, public awareness and build momentum for collective action to actively shift the devastating impacts of the technology industry on the earth. The astounding and devastating impact on the Earth is yet another form of extractive colonialism.

APC WRP is rooting its work on environmental justice in APC's Environmental Sustainability initiative and in collaboration with APC members, allies and partners. Our work centres the importance of the feminist politics and practice of the internet and ICTs in feminist movement building, our focus in feminist environmental and earth justice work, is on the internet and digital rights. In recent years it has become clear that the work with the internet and technology is having a massive impact on people, through gendered disinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting climate justice activists, to fake news from climate denialists, to attacks on territorial defenders{ digital and physical bodies. Here, digital devices and the internet are clearly implicated as massively contributing to violence on people’s bodies and on the Earth. Lack of access to the internet and related news and resources about the climate emergency mirrors those who have no or insufficient internet connectivity. At the front lines of resisting extractive industries and defending territories are women and girls with all their diverse identities as well as gender non-conforming and non-binary people. These diverse identities exacerbate the threats they face.

At the same time, we want to work with ways of building and imagining alternative infrastructures which respect people and the Earth and which see an internet which is not extractive, breaks with the capitalist extractive model in technology and createa and enhances systems which centre the inter-connectedness of people and the Earth. As feminists, we aim to centre care, play and pleasure at the core of our work. So while resisting patriarchal, colonial and capitalist systems, we are simultaneously imagining and building alternative systems of connection and communication which, as far as possible, care for the Earth and acknowledge the connectedness of all life.

2023 for APC WRP on FPI on Environment:

(1.) Gather feminists, digital rights activists and organisations working on land and environmental justice, the internet and extractives to give input on the FPI on the environment and explore ways of integrating this into wider environmental justice discussions and actions. This will happen at various events, both regional and global, such as Digital Rights Asia-Pacific 2023 in late May 2023, a pre-event at RightsCon on infrastructures of care and the environment in early June 2023

(2.) In partnership with members and allies, we will develop a facilitated process and online convenings, where we will present the draft FPI and create space for engagement with this, see what is missing and finalise the text. These online convenings will be designed as an adapted open space where topics related to the environment are identified, prioritised, and discussed collectively.

(3.) Working with allies and partners, use small grants for local convenings on environment/Earth Justice in order to hold space for cross-movement building locally between feminist movement, digital rights activists, environmental defenders to build collaboration and resilience and to imagine a way forward together.

Gato.Earth

Gato.Earth https://gato.earth/ is an epistolary project created by two friends separated by an ocean. Each month we will send letters with selected readings that fall at the intersection of technology and the current climate emergency.

They've been working for a while around the topic of digital justice and consider that the recent technological developments have significantly contributed to the awful environmental crisis we’re facing right now. They want to explore this intersection but at the same time want to promote an approach in which non-conforming perspectives on tech will be unleashed as an emancipatory energy that will cntribute to climate justice.

IGF discussion: environmental justice and an anti-extractive internet

At the global Internet Governance Forum in November 2020, APC and Sursiendo co-organised a pre-event discussion, “Environmental justice and an anti-extractive internet: impacting policy through developing a feminist principle”, which explored ways to create a feminist principle for an anti-extractive internet and what this means for policy advocacy in internet governance spaces. The event included speakers from gato.earth, and the South African Climate Justice Charter, connecting with IGF participants to discuss and expand the core feminist principles of ethics of care into the conversations that focuses on the environment.

Interconnection of feminist care practices and climate activism

How do feminism, care practices and climate activism connect? A Conversation between three climate justice activists who are involved in the creation, curation, and coordination of the Young Feminist for Climate Justice Storytelling Project. This conversation reflects upon the themes of this project, and the intersectional, eco-feminist, and young feminist organizing, particularly in Latin America.https://youngfeministfund.org/how-do-feminism-care-practices-and-climate-activism-connect/