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When environmental issues are women’s issues

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WEN, what's feminism got to do with the environment?, panel discussionWhat’s feminism got to do with the environment?

The Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) works directly with women in the UK, providing information, training and workshops on matters of local food growing, health, and climate change, to encourage and inspire women to make change in their lives, families and wider networks.

WEN was founded in 1988 by pioneers of the environmental justice movement, women who recognised that saving the planet is about social justice and human rights.

WEN’s founders saw that women’s perspectives were often overlooked and undervalued, and that the environmental movement as a whole neglected to take gender-sensitive approaches to all environmental issues – and sought to address this absence of gender-specific research and activism.

They called for a different way of thinking about and acting on environmental issues, and their voices echo down the decades to WEN’s work today.

WEN’s first campaign in 1989 centred around preventing chlorine bleaching in sanitary pads and babies’ nappies.

The use of chlorine to whiten these products and many others meant that women and babies were coming into direct contact with cancer-causing dioxins.

This initial pioneering campaign would lead to work on breast cancer prevention, treating breast cancer as an environmental, and preventable, disease.

The Women’s Environmental Network’s mission is to make the connections between women’s health and well-being and environmental issues.

WEN works as part of the global food sovereignty movement to encourage small-scale local food growing in London, for example.

WEN’s briefings on health and harmful chemicals aim to help you make informed decisions about what to buy. WEN also encourages you to try making your own healthy, natural and sustainable alternatives to commercial products, from growing your own vegetables to making your own deodorant.

And in the past decade WEN has led the movement in the UK to recognise that climate change affects marginalised groups, including women, in different ways. Until social inequality is addressed, climate change will only get worse.

WEN also supports the use of healthier and more sustainable alternatives to conventional sanitary products, from reusable menstrual cups to organic cotton tampons. WEN educates and informs people about menstrual health, and has successfully campaigned to change the way conventional products are made and sold in the UK.

WEN’s vision is an environmentally sustainable world in which we have achieved gender equality.

And the WEN FORUM, a quarterly symposium, will feature key note speakers discussing topics of the moment. These collaborative sessions aim to be inspiring, topical and – sometimes – controversial.

WEN is excited to be launching a new series of events and seminars in 2017.

On 26 January 2017, from 6.30pm-9.30pm, at the London School of Economics, the WEN Forum and oikos LSE society present: What’s Feminism got to do with the Environment?

An evening seeking to address how the feminist and environmental movements can work more closely together, and why feminism is central to ensuring environmental sustainability.

Keynote speaker: Natalie Bennett, former party leader of The Green Party of England and Wales;

Panel: Craig Bennett, CEO, Friends of the Earth (FoE); Lucy Bushill-Matthews, CEO, Muslim Action for Development and Environment (MADE); Marylyn Haines Evans, Public Affairs Chair, The National Federation of Women’s Institute (NFWI); Kate Metcalf, co-director, Women’s Environmental Network; Belinda Phipps, chair of The Fawcett Society; and Judy Ling Wong, president of the Black Environment Network (BEN).

The event is to be chaired by Maria Adebowale-Schwarte, WEN Ambassador and Director, Living Space Project and Clore Social Leadership Environment Fellow, and Anouk Patel-Campillo, Assistant Professor of Gender, Development and Globalisation at the Gender Institute, LSE.

Join in.

To buy your ticket, click here.

And follow WEN and the WEN FORUM on Facebook.

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