 Hello, everybody, and welcome to the last session of Kopoff. It's been an amazing three days and I'm very happy that this final session will be on a very important topic and that is destroying the gender hierarchy and the possible feminist ecology. And I think without this topic, in my humble opinion, we cannot talk about the end of destruction of nature and the planet. And in this sense, it is a very great honor to have with me tonight Sabrina Fernandez, an eco-socialist activist from Brazil. She's been doing a lot of things and among all her work that she's been working on, she has been promoting synthesis of fragmented Brazilian left, which I think is very important. Welcome Sabrina and thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you. It's good to be here. We've closed the day for Kopoff. Thanks for having me. Yes, we're closing with this session and I'm really happy about it. And I'm happy that we have this topic on tonight. And so because of course, Kopoff wouldn't be, we wouldn't have it if we didn't have Kop26 that recently we had and you're of course very active in the concrete activist struggle in Brazil, Brazil also being under great attack because of the deforestation of the Amazon Bolsonaro's regime, which we know is clearly anti-ecological. And so now at the end of Kop26, with all the empty promises, the lack of progress on the rich and poor country agenda, the global south and the global north, if we can call it, and also the lack of really reaching some important gender issues during Kop26, they may be mentioned a little bit about women being threatened by climate change and the problems with reproductive health, but not the real feminist agendas. So what is your opinion on Kop26? And also on this topic of, if we can call it, ecofeminism? Yes. So like, yeah, I actually got back from Glasgow a couple of days ago. So there was a lot of tension actually related to gender issues because even though in Kop26 they had a gender day and we were supposed to be discussing that and put it that in the forefront, that was even some attempts by some delegations to say, well, it's not really important to put gender in the middle because if we put just like human rights, then that's enough, right? So like, it's not, it's not that necessary to put the focus on women. But of course, the UN has come out and has said that, you know, like 80% of, you know, migration related to climate change is coming from women and children. So like children normally connected to these women. And so this is something that was kind of important to get the conversation going. Some of the countries promise a little bit more funding for women's empowerment, for education and leadership connected to fighting climate change. But we know that's quite not enough because if we're looking from a perspective of a feminist ecology, there are other things that need to be at the center of their conversation, right? So when we mean feminist ecology, we're talking not just about the gender hierarchy in a sense of patriarchy and the fact there's a lot of oppression of women in society, but what are the mechanisms of this oppression? So then we're required to talk about time, we're required to talk about care and how value is actually distributed in society, right? So like what kind of work that is valued economically of kind of work is seen as well, this is not worth anything or just because it's invisible at home. And this is really connected to ecological issues because, for example, when we take into consideration how in some countries when a community doesn't have proper access to water, it is women who are responsible for actually walking for miles to get water for the family. This is about time, this is about food because there are estimates of women sometimes spending 27% of their calorie intake for the day just carrying this nutrient home. And so it's about health, it's about time, it's about care, having their responsibility and their responsibility is not shared equally in the gender perspective. And it's about how this is the type of work that's absolutely necessary to sustain life, but it's not really taken into consideration when people are talking about the growth of the economy or how important that country or the community is for the economical system, right? So the gender disparity is quite present there as well. And then this brings us to the consideration of the impacts, right? So what are the impacts not just in terms of migration, but what if water scarcity gets worse? As we know, it will get worse in many places. What happens when we're talking about extreme weather events? So Carbon Brief came out with a publication a while back showing a literature review of many studies and these studies actually pointed out that like the majority of the studies pointed out that extreme weather events affect women a lot more than men. That's not to say that it won't affect men, that's not what it means at all, but we do see the disparity here. So it has to do with who has access to proper shelter, it has to do with, for example, when we're considering women farmers who are very connected to subsistence farming in parts of the global South while they're working under extreme heat, so they will be more affected. And if they don't work, how are they going to feed their families? So there are many things connected to this or when we're talking about poverty and how we have data that women are more likely to suffer from poverty in the world. What does it mean, for example, when we have a hurricane and we're talking about families, they are led by headed by single women and their children and if they can't find shelter. So these extreme weather events is something that we really have to take into consideration. So when we're talking about, for example, something that's pretty big at cost, at least like should be bigger, but it's something that we discussed a lot during the past week, loss of damage. The climate change is already something that's going on. So we already have loss and damage. And some of the countries, they really refuse to create a proper fund for loss and damage, saying that humanitarian aid is enough. But if we have proper negotiations where we can talk about loss and damage and how this impact, loss and damage is very gendered as well, then we could perhaps come up with a different approach on how to protect women who are affected from even worse outcomes. And which countries were against it? You just mentioned there were some countries that were against giving funds to the loss and damage fund. Yeah, a lot of the discussions coming from like a loss and damage fund were coming from the least developing countries, then like they really wanted to establish this, but the countries that normally say like the richer countries and normally say that, well, we already give a lot of humanitarian aid, so this is enough. So there was a lot of tension in some of these negotiations around it. In the end, in the final text, actually, like the Glasgow Climate Pact, a few things were included. So like from the beginning, like the first part of the Pact, they talk about like how they acknowledge that climate change is a common thing, but it has like different impacts. And, you know, we need to have a certain sense of obligation to indigenous communities, to people with disabilities, to migrants, to children, to women, so taking those things into account. But we do understand that even though this language of gender is there or like the gender of like the language around empowerment of women is there in the ACE, which is the Action for Climate Empowerment, which was part of the negotiations as well. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's taken into account the principles of a feminist ecology. And because in the matter of climate finance, for example, one of the biggest concerns is that we still came out of this COP26 without a proper agreement between all of the parties on what climate finance actually means. Because, well, for underdeveloped countries, countries are already very much in debt. If climate finance just means more loans, this is not a good thing, right? So like maybe it should be grants. But then other countries, like richer countries or like more connected to major financial institutions, think that, well, loans should count towards climate finance as well. So this was a big discussion over the past few weeks. Yeah, and when you're saying this, I'm also thinking about the whole eco-feminism story because a lot of people, when I sometimes mention eco-feminism, ask me, what is eco-feminism? And then I'm like, okay, so it's a very long story. It has a long history, but it is a way in which we show how there is a relation between nature exploitation and gender inequality. But then the biggest problem with eco-feminism is that eco-feminists were, in a way, had a problem of lacking to talk about the race, class and the geography where you are born. And I think what you were just mentioning is the issue that we cannot even talk about. This eco-feminist issue with not talking about this global capitalist exploitation issue with where the world is divided between the North and the South, the richer and the poorer countries. So because you were there, I'm very interested if you were among these people that were in the feminist groups discussing about these issues and did you have any kinds of discussions like with women from developed countries and did you have some arguments with them how this eco-feminism should be approached in the future to make it more eco-feministic, if we could say. Yeah, well, this was despite having about 40,000 people in Glasgow coming for the COP, this was the most exclusionary COP because it actually, because of the pandemic, vaccine apartheid and situations even related to really ridiculous visa problems and things that the UK really made it complicated for a lot of countries. Well, delegations were not able to join from many places from the global South. So this is one of the main areas of concern. I was within the blue zone for the first week because during the second week, I was more involved with the People Summit with the COP26 coalition. But we could see like even from the inside, there were a lot of organizations headed by women and trying to make sure that this conversation was end. In fact, like this tension around ACE, the action for climate empowerment, making sure that the language around gender would still be there. This was part of the battle by some of these women's groups, right? So like for example, GenderCC did a really good job with that. And ecofeminism is important in the sense because maybe I'll just like go back a little, right? Like when we started talking about ecofeminism, like Francoise de Bonne was talking about it, like I really liked the approach that Vandana Shiva has over it because she talks about making sure that you put life at the center of the conversation, right? So like when you're talking about the organization of like social organization, political organization, economic organization, life is at the center. So how do you sustain life, not profit? And this is something that we can talk about. This is not just about women, but because in many societies, women are responsible, like the major players in making sure that people stay alive, primarily children, it is like really huge concern for women, right? So women end up having this test because these tests are left over for them. So like maintenance of life is something that's sort of like an afterthought in many societies, especially recapitalism. And ecofeminism is not just ecofeminism, it's ecofeminisms, it's plural. There are a lot of debates around it, the concept of gender changes, the relationship to animals, for example, that changes as well. So for example, there's a whole discussion around like ecofeminism and animal liberation and I don't understand here at Karpov, we've had a debate discussing these things as well. So when we're talking about ecofeminisms, now it's really about making sure that the voices that were excluded from the conversation they're at the forefront. So like where are the indigenous women, the campesino women, the black women living in the marginal areas of the cities and suffering from like improper access to healthcare. And these are issues that are all connected to the climate crisis and they're all connected to the ecological crisis in general. So when we're talking about how we don't have proper, still we don't have proper waste management in our society, we produce way too much garbage and it's not just plastic, it's for example, the fashion industry and the fashion industry is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. It produces a lot of like useless waste that goes to landfills and then a lot of women are going to be working in formal jobs in those areas when you have waste management, formal jobs, men are more likely to take up on those jobs. So it would affect women from being paid very, very cheaply to produce this cheap clothing for the fast fashion industry and that's producing a lot of greenhouse gases and then it's polluting all the ways and women being affected again. So the class issue is right there and the way that this is still approached when they say, well, gender day at the COP26 from the UNFCCC perspective, it is about just making sure that like, we are locating some funds when in fact we need to talk about the structure of society. Yeah, of course. And you just mentioned also the animal liberation and the connection between women as being a vulnerable part of society. So I'm also interested because you're from Brazil and now after this global methane pledge which they had at the COP26 where they said they would reduce methane by 30% I think till 2030. And they didn't mention the animal agriculture in this and the reducing meat consumption which is one of the most responsible for the emission. And also they were talking about the end and the reverse of deforestation by 2030 but they said that also in 2014. And again, they did not mention the animal agriculture that is responsible for 91% of deforestation of the Amazon. So what is your take on that on the animal agriculture and do you think that also this eco feminist struggle should include the animal liberation front also? Yeah, this silence is quite expected because when we're talking about animals here, it means connecting not just to the industry level things but also food sovereignty in general. Like what kind of options that people have to eat or not. So Brazil, so like this pledge is a pledge that is actually quite convenient for the United States for example that is easier for the United States to abide by the pledge because a lot of the methane emissions coming from the US are connected to these leaks in the oil production process. And those are like easier techno fixes, right? When we're talking about Brazil and if we want to actually reduce methane emissions in Brazil, we need to talk about agrarian reform because we need to contest agribusiness and the role of agribusiness in animal exploitation in the destruction of the many ecosystems not just the Amazon, but also say how the Pantanal all of the ecosystems really in the country. And also how this connects to the violence against indigenous communities and the violence against campesinos. And there are also women at the forefront of these struggles, right? Some of our biggest environmental leaders in Latin America, it's women. It's women involved, it's women fighting and being murdered as well. So this is a huge matter of concern. And ecofeminism, because it brings this conversation around care and food constantly. For us, this is quite important because Brazil is going through a state of really deep food insecurity right now. And a lot of people actually going like hungry every day but about half of the population is not quite sure if they can access three meals a day. Like we have a lot of inflation connected to food prices, but also because the structure of agribusiness is towards commodities, it's towards exporting. And right now we actually have like one of the biggest candles is that agribusiness got permission to store meat in containers at the port waiting to see if China will want to import this meat rather than using this meat there to actually feed people who are going hungry. So it shows that they're not really concerned about feeding the population at all. And that's why family agriculture is so important. But the majority of the exploitation of animals is coming from industrial agriculture in Brazil. And we even have like this whole situation that when they start taking out forests they just put more cattle over the land to say, well, now this is ours. So we're occupying this with cattle. Like it's a situation in the country where we have like more bull vines than we have people in Brazil. And yet we're going through this state of hunger. So we have a lot of women pushing a conversation around food sovereignty that it's about understanding how we eat, what kind of food is made available to us. And this food is actually helping because agribusiness is also pushing for a lot of agrochemicals that are not even allowed in the European Union. And in Brazil this means like intoxication really and like poisoning of people and seeds, right? And like fighting these certain like this certain framework that we have for like industrial food today where like a lot of what we eat is controlled by about like 10 megacorporations in the world. So bringing this conversation around food sovereignty from the eco-feminist perspective helps to bridge the conversation around care and how we could perhaps extend our consideration of care to non-humans, to other species and what kind of cruelty is involved in that. So like there's like a huge aerial like on eco-feminism that's connected to like animalist discussions that I think it's quite powerful too. And does it from a perspective that's not at all the perspective of like this capitalist veganism that's just about putting like industrial substitutes in some grocery stores and coming from the same industries. There are polluting, there are emitting greenhouse gas emissions. There are also producing methane because they're also exploiting animals in that sense. So it's quite powerful but I do see it as still very marginal even in the alternative approaches. So like absolutely essentially when walking around the pavilions at COP26 even when they're talking about the methane pavilion they talked about animal agriculture but it was mostly about managing the methane from it rather than thinking about the role of animals itself and this. And but even in the outside part when we're talking about the movements this is still quite marginal. We still have a lot of ways to go with this. And can you tell us something about these women movements that you just mentioned that are against these land exploitation of the Amazon and also the indigenous lands? Are there some powerful women struggle movements and also are they in a way connected to the left in Brazil and is there a chance that they can maybe influence something in the near future? Because I think it's a very important thing for the world also because it's like the Amazon. When you say the Amazon it's not just like a part of Brazil but it's also the forest of the whole world with it going down I think it will be one of the worst climate changes in the world. There are a lot of indigenous associations that are finally getting some headlines which is good but it needs to be more about more than just getting press headlines. It's about making sure that these concerns translate into policy they translate into changes in the structure. So one of the worries actually and I was following some of the work coming from example the indigenous environmental network in the United States and indigenous climate action in Canada that got together with some of the organizations in Latin America from indigenous communities and they were outside of the blue zone I call denouncing how carbon pricing mechanisms are actually going to allow for false solutions around that zero. And from this it's actually not really about understanding nature as something that has value in itself which is something that's quite important to indigenous communities but just sticking a price to it and saying that we were going to protect this for now just because we can trade these offsets. So this was one of the concerns this was quite present there as well. But Latin America and you know like parts of Africa like we have like a very interesting network of movements connected to agrarian like small campesinos, small peasant movements really and indigenous communities they're connected to La Vie Campesina and it's a huge network nowadays that helps to organize these struggles and to connect these movements together powers food sovereignty, powers proper rights to the land and territory and with a huge health concern so making sure that we can do this in agroecological ways and in Brazil perhaps the most famous movement connected to La Vie Campesina is the Languished Workers Movement and so the MST but and the women there are part of these many peasant movements in Brazil they do it, they do a march called Machadas Margaritas which is really powerful. So if you see like these women farmers and they're reclaiming the land and showing how we have to sow the land in a particular way and we need to feed people because that's a priority and they take it to the forefront and then I hope that this serves as inspiration to other parts of the world as well making sure that we understand the connection to land and territory as something that should be about life first and that's what Vendana Shiva connects to the issue of seed freedom as well so when corporations come and they come with GMOs trying to patent access to certain types of food and certain seeds so you can grow it any other way or you have seed invasion and this affects the infrastructure of even the cuisine of a place where like you're not allowed to eat these things anymore because you have these institutions and corporations telling the country like what should be actually be grown in that area then you need to talk about seed freedom and seed freedom is a huge concept that's quite at the core of eco-feminism too. And do these struggles sometimes have a concrete impact? Like did they have some situations where they actually could push some kind of legacies and policies because we know that Bolsonaro's regime has a different way of dealing with it so I'm interested is there a chance maybe if not now in the near future that something concrete can happen in this sense? Yes, under Bolsonaro's has been quite complicated it's mostly in the sense of stalling things making sure that things don't get worse even though we are definitely losing at the front of fighting every chemicals right now like they're just issuing more and more licenses for agrochemicals but these struggles have been responsible for showing solidarity which I think is quite powerful so like during the pandemic a lot of people going hungry and the land-based workers movement actually it was like growing food and not just to sell but also to donate food to people who are going hungry and we're talking about tons of food here and we're talking about some of the indigenous leaders that have been resisting against Bolsonaro's attempts to change legislation concerning territorial claims by indigenous communities and they've been doing this for years and we could talk about even centuries so it comes in many forms but in Latin America we see it on our perspectives as well so the right to water so like the fight coming from rural communities and feminist groups in Chile to like depravatize water rights this is quite powerful and when we had water wars in Bolivia in Cochabamba women were quite powerful there as well like making sure that no you can't you can't steal our water because at that point even collecting water from the rain was considered illegal so that was a victory right there in Cochabamba too and because you consider yourself an eco-socialist so what would be the like real eco-socialist revolution but in an international sense because you also I read some of your interviews and you're very much into an international revolution because without this internationality we cannot talk about any kind of real change and of course I think the climate crisis and ecology showed us that by solving things in your own backyard we will not make the planet not go completely into devastation so what would be this it's maybe a hard question but if you could imagine a real socialist eco-socialist revolution we can say eco-socialist feminist revolution how would it look like? Yeah one of the things about like fixing things in your backyard is that sometimes to get materials to fix things in your backyard you're going to take it from someone else's backyard and this is part of this dynamic that we have between Global North and Global South rich and poor countries developed and underdeveloped countries and this is one of the main things that we need to fight against right now because some of the discussions even around just transition that happened in the Global North don't take into consideration that when we're talking about renewables and we're talking about changing the energy matrix in Europe perhaps where are these minerals coming from? They're coming from what we call sacrifice zones areas in the Global South that have been marginalized and destroyed for a really long time and a lot of people don't care about it because while we've been mining these places for so long why can't we just mine it for longer? And then we're not going to have much left for those communities to work on their own transition or even to have the chance to say no, you can't do this in our backyard because this is poisoning our water or something like that. So we need a concept around transitioning this very international list. I've been working mostly with this idea that yes, we absolutely need to mobilize towards a green new deal sort of transition might not have that name everywhere because it will have different meanings how you think about transitioning how you think about a big plan as to do with the history of a place, right? So it might have different names but in the process that it's about transitioning from a certain way of producing things that it's very carbon heavy to actually eliminating these over reliance on fossil fuels and animal agriculture that we have in society in changing the way that we produce our food the way they'll produce our clothes the way that we produce our technologies as well that's very wasteful there's a lot of pain of so lessons that comes with the structure of capitalism and the profit that has to be generated throughout. So this is a conversation about class consciousness in my perspective. So we need to have workers groups involved and these coming many forms not just the workers in the traditional industry but also workers at the land sites and informal workers who are organizing who are also demanding their rights and they also want climate justice. So making this conversation about how we can shift power back into the people in not just these big institutions because one of the main challenges that we have actually when we're talking about transition is that especially in the field of renewables when we're talking about like solar and wind like the production of solar panels for example there are more jobs being created there because there's this push for solar but when these jobs are being created in the private sector they're not good jobs. It's like people are overworked and they don't pay as well. So sometimes there might be a rejection from people thinking well I don't want to work in the area because those are bad jobs. So if we take this back to the public sector we make the state responsible and a big believer that in this process of transition we do have to reclaim the state as complicated as that is. By making the state responsible we will have more of infrastructure to make sure that workers' rights are respected and implemented and through this we change the structure around property. And in my perspective especially when we're considering Latin America like where come from for us it is talking about the property of land and territory. So we absolutely need to tackle this because a lot of these violations that come from the mining industry that come from agribusiness the destruction of our biomes this is connected to very unequal access to territory and this constant colonization of land and the violence against the traditional and indigenous communities. So if we're talking about eco-socialism in an internationalist sense I say that we have to fix these problems from the margins so we actually have a proper foundation and then we'll know how much of these resources we can allocate in our transition everywhere else. Yeah, and that's very interesting what you just said because I come from Serbia and I'm from Europe but I'm in a non-EU country and our country is also in a similar way used in a contemporary colonial way as a place where you can do things without EU regulations. So now we just had a yesterday or two days ago they opened earlier a big Chinese factory called Linglong it's a tire factory without of course any kind of ecological regulations and it is going to poison the environment and everything but yesterday they discovered because they said that they would open new working places for Serbian people of course and this was the commercial of our government but yesterday they found out they brought these slaves you know that they were treating these workers they brought them from China or from Singapore and then they kept them as slaves and closed without any passports and everything and then they just covered that two days ago and now of course all the media is trying to cover this up because we don't have free media in Serbia at all and now of course some media that are free are trying to talk about this but I think all this colonialism that you're talking about is happening everywhere in all the countries that are not in the way regulated but then you have like all Soryo Tinto coming to Serbia the mining of lithium and then you see yourself in a position where you as a country that is so small and doesn't have any kind of ability to do anything we of course had all these protests and demonstrations and everything against all of this but nothing at the end happens so do you think that protests in this classical sense can make any kind of a resistance or do we have to do something much more radical than that because in Serbia with all of these protests we haven't done anything at the end against this kind of things that happened with the contemporary colonization Yes, absolutely. In the sense that when we're talking about the margins I like this concept because you can have margins everywhere and we have the margins of Europe as well so it's where you place things that you don't want in the pristine areas and Serbia is not Germany like it's very different in terms of socio-economic power and geopolitical power and we need to be quite aware of this one we're discussing global north and global south that these dynamics are not that geographical just it's not simply hemispheres we're talking about dynamics of capital it's political economy here and in that sense protests are useful but they might not really to where we want to go so we need to tackle here and in the sense like this ecosystem of tactics they may involve some direct action and we are aware of people closing off roads and bridges and making sure that you can't sometimes if you're producing things at a factory and you don't want that place there just make sure that one thing that's being produced there can't be carried forward can't be transported somewhere else so when we have that kind of disruption that actually disrupts the profit that they that makes a difference that's why when we're talking for example about general strikes they're quite powerful because they actually put a stop to like the overall normal functioning of the system where like as long as a general strike less so like this is an option as well and we need to build alliances right so what are the alliances between the people who are purchasing it in one country and how they pressure the governments there and problems that we have somewhere else a concern that we've had like of like these conclusions around COP26 is that a lot of people were blaming for example India for not being that radical when it came to like phasing out coal right because they were talking more about phasing down coal rather than phasing out coal and that was very convenient for places like the US or the UK to just like see India they were so problematic right yeah and yes of course we have a huge problem with Modi in India and absolutely we need to carry the Modi and this is a struggle that comes from the people of India and we need to be solidaristic in the sense that we need to make sure that you know that we have some level system change in that scenario but we can't use that to deflect from the responsibility of these other countries that come like they got to Glasgow and they're claiming to be so so great and really looking towards the future and making bold promises but in the fact they want to keep things about the same so then they just deflect and that's why we need these alliances between you know communities of people who are affected who are oppressed and like being exploited in these different areas putting pressure in that sense for us in Brazil it means that well it's fine that everyone wants to save the Amazon and that people think that Bolsonaro is a problem but well the other places are still purchasing stuff from this agribusiness so how do you stop that from happening so when we're talking about you know building a new pipeline in southern Africa you can just say we don't want that pipeline but like well but the corporate headquarters they're in Europe right so how are we going to pressure that how are we going to make sure that you can't do that and in the sense it was very limited pledge but it was interesting to see how some countries got together saying that we will stop financing new investments abroad in non-abated fossil fuels right not at home and the old ones continue and things like that like some pressure to make sure that they don't come after it so if Bolsonaro is trying to privatize the national oil company in Brazil which is really bad news for climate change because if it goes private then they're really going to go forward with extracting all of the pre-salt layer they're not going to transfer these companies to a national energy company towers renewables if it goes forward with that it means that there are shareholders like from other countries with big capital purchasing so we need to have solidarity campaigns in these other places to make sure that these deals implode and this is really important we can't just think of struggles as absolutely localized I completely agree with you and I think it's also a problem because also when we talk in Serbia about all the renewable energies and we should also get rid of coal because it's of course a major polluter in Serbia because you still have a lot of houses that heat in this way but then how can you tell somebody that has an average paycheck of 200 euros to go on electricity if he has 200 euros a monthly salary or pension or whatever so I think it's very easy to say it from a position of developed countries to say to another underdeveloped country you know you should get rid of coal or you should do this and you're the bad guys and you're polluting the environment so I think it's a very very important question to as you said to raise the solidarity between the developing and the not developing countries and also whenever I think of this I also think about the civil disobedience or is there a way that all of us can away be disobedient and not do things in the way that the system is used to and can we buy civil disobedience maybe change some things also with ecology and I always think of this Melville's novel about to be the scrivener where he completely destroyed the system by saying I would prefer not to so what would you prefer not to do today in terms of like in terms of action in terms of yeah in terms of if you would prefer not to do something that could actually if a lot of people would not do this maybe we could change the system by not doing it not by doing it but by not doing it yeah so like the power of refusal right so yeah the power of disobedience somebody tells you this way and you say no I'm doing it another yeah these of course takes us back to the discussion around material conditions right not a lot of people have the power to say no so like if you're going hungry and the only food that's available to you is X you're going to eat that right so well what we need to understand is like the more we structure our society and we get more rights and these rights would allow us to have a little bit more material conditions should be able to say no to other things so like for example I say no to eating meat but I'm an individual and if more people said no to eating meat I think that would be powerful but I also need to couple that with a discussion around food sovereignty because I need people to have other alternatives for food that that don't involve that don't involve animal exploitation so saying no I think it's important it's quite powerful it's it starts a conversation and it is into action and you do get something out of it but it has to be coupled with saying yes to other things as well so like what are the things that you're actually proposing as an alternative because we can't just like a system is not just about rejecting it like we can cannot be anti-capitalist and like criticizing capitalism is actually quite easy capitalism is like feeding us every day with reasons to criticize it so like to be anti-capitalist is quite easy but to talk about what comes after capitalism that's much much more complicated and that's sometimes even uncomfortable so we need to be able to reject things but also to be able to propose things in a way that if we're going to get out of this system it's not just about replacing this system with something else it's making sure that the system is so terrible and we have come up with alternatives they are so powerful that the system is not just rejected anymore it's obsolete it doesn't even make any sense anymore and why would we want to go back to it and this is part of our challenge when we're talking about it so like this work around agroecology coming from like feminist like eco-feminist campesinos, peasants, groups it's so powerful because it shows that well we're not just saying that you need to reject these food that's coming from agro-business full of agrochemicals because it's bad for your health we're saying that this other thing here is way better because it allows you to have more options to what you put on your table and you're going to have like fresher food and it can be it can be cheaper as well so yes we reject something and then we bring something else forward so when you know the women from like La Via Campesina in Brazil got involved and like they went into this sort of like this industrial site where they were like manipulating agrochemicals and things like that and they caused a huge havoc around it they did that but it's not just about doing that that direct action was really important but it's also showing that we're destroying this because we already have an alternative that's viable but it's not being obsessed by everyone because the political economic structure of the country is privileging those guys and not was actually healthy for everyone else yes i i completely agree with you and also when we are talking about this in a way a production of goods and overproduction of goods in the world we also could talk about also reproduction and the rights to the women's rights to reproduce and there are many people that choose not to bring children into this kind of a world as a choice but i think that even in developed countries women if they choose not to reproduce or being in this kind of patriarchal system treated as they're not worthy enough so we have this this kind of oppression of women in even developed countries and of course women in underdeveloped countries have to reproduce it's just like a must and what is your take on on the reproduction today and on reproductive rights in a way and to women's access to knowledge what they can and can't do and also women's disobedience in this sense that they can choose not to reproduce maybe today and i think it's a very tricky question but i think we should we should pose it sometimes yeah a reproductive justice is absolutely a huge part of this conversation and when we're dealing with ecological crisis it's actually quite important because every now and then one of the false bases around climate change that people talk about is level it's overpopulation too many people and we have a lot of people on the planet so like this is not like when it was like Malthus talking about it a while back we have a lot of people on the planet we need to have like proper planning on how to feed everyone and for that we need a very own form we need to tackle every business like all these things that we have talked about so far but we need to talk about reproductive justice otherwise it's usually about facing the blame on you know poor women and racialized women saying they have way too many children see and we have seen the danger of these equal fascist discourses the far right in europe has mobilized this in the united states as well saying well it's the you know the immigrant women immigrant women have way too many children so they're taking our resources and how are we going to actually have like you know proper life and transition to like a more climate-friendly scenario if we're bringing all these migrants in so this is very dangerous like this equal fascist conversation because it does not take into account first of all like the idea that this is not about people it's about profit like what's actually causing the problem today is how private property is distributed and used to make sure that the rich can consume a lot and they can control and exploit a lot whereas the majority of society is really living at the margins this is what we're dealing with and this is why they would rather talk about this rather than about getting rid of like private jets or private yachts because you know it's a huge distraction in a sense so it's important to talk about reproductive reproductive justice because in the majority of the countries of the world this is absent we don't have that women have access to proper contraceptions they won't have access to abortion rights either and they will have pressure from society to become a mother to be defined by that and then women who do have the means to access contraception perhaps or even countries where abortion is illegal but women with means are able to get safe abortions and not die they could be judged because this role of what being like playing this maternal role is still very much part of the patriarchal system of most societies so the expectation is there and then the expectation is there and then when women do have children sometimes they've even excluded from leftist spaces because you know children make noise and that's not good for our meetings or for our assemblies or something like that or well you know that woman she's not participating in the organization enough and so that you might not be interested but in fact it's because she's left at home doing you know the care work and perhaps the male partner is not doing that care work because there's still a lot of gender imbalances around this even in households they are considered to be feminist we know this is part of it so we need to be quite aware of this problem and fighting for reproductive justice is important because also fighting for reproductive justice is fighting for healthcare it's fighting for children's rights as well making sure that when women do have children this is not seen just as a responsibility of that women like that woman but also the community around her and this is a quite a strongly eco feminist principle actually like understanding that like it takes a village to raise a child so it's not just about like privatizing care work inside the household to the mother or perhaps to the mother and father or to the mother and the mother the mother and the grandmother however is that like whatever is the dynamic of that household and the family structure but understanding that these like we know children are the responsibility of society and we need to provide the means for this so like reproductive reproductive justice is like quite a powerful framework because it can lead us into like many other conversations too yes and it can tell us that we cannot see the end of capitalism without the end of patriarchy and this hierarchical system of binary oppositions where one gender does one thing and the other does the other and we have also a question from the audience so can we talk about feminist ecology and stay in the context of representation are more female leaders enough or do we still want to avoid platforming women like Thatcher or Clinton how we absolutely need to avoid Thatcher and Clinton absolutely right because it's not eco-feminism is also about intersectionality so it's understanding that it's not enough to be a woman it's like what do you stand for because like any woman can be out there and say they represent other women because they are women but that's just symbolic like what is like how like what is the substantive representation here like what do you stand for like do you stand for just like the rights of like very powerful old men or other women who are already very powerful and they're going to get more powerful even so or it's about creating democratic spaces and making sure that other women have access like to proper work and proper healthcare and a fed and children taken care of and how do we restructure society in that sense so like these conservative women or women who are just standing for the interests of big capital they don't represent women at all actually I wouldn't even say that like there's any representation there but they do take advantage of this if they can do so right so and in terms of like Clinton this was a huge debate in the US when it was the whole discussion about like Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders right and a lot of you know these like capitalist liberal feminists like claiming that like how could you support Sanders instead of supporting Clinton because we need a woman I'm with her and things like that well like it was enough for you to look at the program and see like who's actually going to fight for women there and here Hillary Clinton obviously not and especially for us like at the margin of the system like Hillary Clinton usually means also like faces being bombed like bombing all other women so like not a not a good idea at all and we need to stay very far away from this kind of approach of representation Yes I completely agree with you on this topic and if you could now at this point propose some policy measures which could be implemented now concerning concrete climate change action maybe we can say even eco-feminist climate change action like at this moment and that would function in all parts of the world not just in one part what would it be Oh yes we could have like very direct incentives for agroecological food growth this could come like taking out the subsidies from agribusiness and putting the subsidies within peasantry and family agriculture that's actually very easy to do and we would have like a direct effect in terms of like raising food sovereignty in these places and stopping the degradation of pasture and stopping deforestation so like when these countries were signing this deal to end deforestation if they do this one thing that would be a lot more effective than what they're actually claiming that they want to do which is about just like making forests into offsets that's the plan that they have we do have to have like a proper like policy conversation around loss and damage fund and like defining climate finance in the sense as grants as something that you award so you can deal with these women and women and men and children that are very marginal already affected and this is something that's actually quite easy to do we can bring in some conversations around just like abortion rights I think that would also make things very simple you don't need a lot in terms of infrastructure beforehand to be able to legalize abortion right it is mostly a moral issue in society than a material issue because we know that in many places like when we're considering like Uruguay for example talking about other places in South America once abortion is legalized there's like a tendency for actually abortions to go down because you have like a more open conversation society about reproductive rights and contraception so this is important too other policy related to this is actually about education on climate change because when we're talking about fighting climate denialism it's not just about fighting Bolsonaro or Trump it's about making sure that we we get the science of this around society and that people understand what the risks are and this is more common in our everyday in our everyday lives than just when COP happens every November it can't just be around this this COP calendar that the UNFCCC has it has to be a really constant thing so like the conversations around like empowerment around climate change education this is very very much like this is very important and I think you could go a long way as well because it's not just about showing the numbers that while we need to you know not go beyond 1.5 but it's also about fighting false solutions and understanding that we don't want for us to be to be commodified and we want to make sure that people have proper access to food and if we do ourselves like we do suffer as we are already from extreme weather events we need to make sure that people have shelter and we need to make sure that the vulnerable communities are taken care of so if we have like proper policies around education on climate change on this it's much easier to pressure into you know other climate financing like other types of like funding schemes and also better decisions and much more advanced than what we saw with the Glasgow Climate Act. Thank you so so much Sabrina for being our guest tonight you really opened a lot and a lot of issues and the topics and for all the people Sabrina also has a very interesting YouTube channel where you can learn a lot about about all of these topics and much more that we talked about tonight thank you so much for being our guest thank you so much that the conversation was great I love the questions thank you thanks for watching thank you and at the end because this is our final session our final discussion at the COP-Off I want to thank all the speakers and moderators and organizers it's a very long list of names so I won't mention all of them but they know who they are and the people that watch that know who they are so thank you so much for organizing the COP-Off and after the COP-Off we are going to transform these lessons learned into policy demands I hope so join DM and help us adjust our program to save the Europe through the COP-Off talks in people's gatherings so join DM and help us make this transition and help us of course fight climate change and help us make an eco-socialist feminist future thank you all