Sophie Mariam is a Colorado-based policy advocate, yogi, and outdoor enthusiast who believes deeply in the healing power of movement, nature, and community. Follow her Telluride Mountain Run adventure fundraiser and support her mission to get more women and girls into nature!
I truly believe that giving more women the space for outdoor adventure (and giving all of us permission to simply take a walk in the woods) could be one of the first steps toward changing the world. Maybe even saving us from our own climate-crisis, doom-scrolling, late-stage-capitalism apocalypse.
Stay with me. It starts with a wild idea (literally): embracing ecofeminism—not just as a political framework, but as a personal practice.
I first learned about ecofeminism in graduate school. Before I encountered the concept, I compartmentalized climate and environmental activism and gender justice into separate camps. I also saw my love of outdoor adventure as a purely personal pastime—something that brought me joy but had little to do with my work on environmental or social justice.
I was completely wrong.
Wondering what the heck ecofeminism actually is? Here’s the two-minute explanation.
Just as our economic system has long treated forests, rivers, and the earth as resources to be extracted for profit, it has often treated women’s bodies in much the same way. Rather than valuing women as whole people, our culture has commodified them—reducing them to bodies to be judged, marketed to, ogled, and controlled.
Entire industries profit from convincing women they’re perpetually in need of fixing: not beautiful enough, not young enough, not thin enough, not successful enough. We become projects to perfect instead of people who are already worthy.
Ecofeminism invites us to reject both forms of exploitation. It asks us to imagine a world where neither nature nor women are valued primarily for what can be extracted from them, but instead are respected as living, interconnected beings worthy of care, dignity, and flourishing. Needless to say, I became a little obsessed with this idea.
Even as I was struggling with the burnout of academic overload, searching for my first job, and the pressure I put on myself to show up perfectly in my early career, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel that this could be a form of liberation from the boxes I was contorting myself to try to fit. That ecofeminism was not just some pie in the sky theory for the Greta Thunbergs of the world to proselytize, but maybe it was an embodied ritual I could actually integrate into my life one day. Maybe it was not just my new espoused theory of change at the macro level, but had lessons for me in my personal life.
Ecofeminism asks us to imagine policies—and cultures—that value both people and the natural world rather than extracting from them (Warren, 2015).
This applies at the 1000 foot level. Climate change is not an equal-opportunity crisis. Extreme weather disproportionately harms women, especially women of color and those living in poverty.
Extreme-weather disasters are associated with higher mortality rates for women, increased risks of gender-based violence, and poorer maternal and neonatal health outcomes. As climate change accelerates, these disparities are expected to deepen.
During the 2021 Texas freeze, for example, majority-Black neighborhoods were far more likely to lose power, domestic violence rates increased, and shelters for women and children were overwhelmed (Hart, 2021; Carvallo et al., 2021; Dellinger, 2021). Globally, women and children are far more likely to die during disasters, and women make up the majority of people displaced by climate change (UNFPA, 2021; Nellemann et al., 2011).
These outcomes aren’t inevitable—they reflect the social, political, and economic systems we’ve built.
My day job building movements for affordable childcare reminds me daily that our economy still undervalues caregiving and places a disproportionate share of unpaid labor on women. It’s no surprise this leaves many women with fewer financial resources when disaster strikes. We celebrate “essential workers,” yet too often fail to enact the policies that support them, from paid family leave to living wages for childcare providers.
Climate policy and gender equity can’t be separated because the problems themselves aren’t separate. Gender-blind policies often reinforce existing inequities rather than addressing them. An intersectional, ecofeminist approach recognizes that environmental justice and gender justice are deeply intertwined, and challenges us to build a more equitable and resilient future.
As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe writes in All We Can Save, “This isn’t about saving the planet—the planet will survive. The real question is: what will happen to the rest of us who live here?” (Johnson et al., 2021).
Women will continue to face disproportionate risks as the climate changes. Unless we address the social and economic systems that create those vulnerabilities, our climate response will never be fully equitable.
But here’s where my relationship with ecofeminism changed.
At some point, it stopped being just a policy framework and became something deeply personal.
What does any of this have to do with an ordinary Tuesday afternoon hike?
More than I ever expected.
Over time, ecofeminism has become more than a policy framework for me. It’s become deeply personal. Nature is one of the few places where I feel free from many of the expectations placed on women.
Out on a trail, I’m not thinking about whether my body is attractive enough, whether my clothes are fashionable enough, whether I’m productive enough, whether I’m meeting everyone else’s expectations, or whether I’m performing womanhood correctly.
I’m thinking about how strong my legs feel climbing a mountain. I’m paying attention to the birds, the wildflowers, my breath, and the way sunlight filters through the trees.
Out there, my body isn’t something to be evaluated, advertised to, or commodified. It’s something that allows me to move, explore, and experience awe.
In many ways, stepping outside, unplugging, and turning inward feels like a quiet act of ecofeminist rebellion in today’s hyperconnected world.
Yes, we need more equitable, feminist policies. We need systems that value caregivers, protect vulnerable communities, and address climate change with justice at the center.
But we also need people who are well enough to build those systems.
For those of us working in advocacy, organizing, education, or social justice, burnout is real. I’ve experienced it. I’ve convinced myself that every spare moment needed to be spent working toward change. Eventually, I realized that disconnecting from nature meant disconnecting from one of the very things that made me capable of doing the work in the first place.
Nature restores us. It reminds us that we belong to something bigger than ourselves. It gives us perspective, resilience, and joy.
If we’re going to be trailblazing, badass women who build a more just future for our daughters, maybe it begins by remembering that we are not machines. We are living beings, inseparable from the living world around us. ChatGPT and Claude don’t get to experience nature and transform their curiosity, their breath, their bodies into movement and adventures in the great outdoors- only humans can do this.
Maybe changing the world starts with changing our relationship to it.
Maybe it starts with taking a walk in the woods.
Because caring for our world begins with remembering that we are part of it, and that women and girls, too, have always been inherently worthy of care.
On that note, this August, I’ll be running the Telluride Mountain Run in support of The Cairn Project, an organization helping more women and girls access transformative outdoor experiences. Please consider donating any amount to my adventure fundraiser — it would mean the world to have you join me in this rebellion.
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