The struggle of all people on earth is the inability to decipher “us” from “them.” We are all connected in this life, through nature. The interconnected web in which we all intersect is what makes up the ecosystem. The web of struggles which we all face, is also an example of intersectionality. Intersectionality, to me, is the crossroads of experiences which define us as individuals, but also as types of people. I am a white middle class educated woman. My little (step) brother comes from a poor family, and he identifies as gay. We live together and love one another, but our intersectionality of experiences has led us to live different lives, even after being raised together for many years after our parents were married. His experiences and mine will continue to define us as individuals. Intersectionality and ecofeminism is a fascinating study to me, best explained in a quote by Ynestra King; “Life on earth is an interconnected web, not a hierarchy. There is no natural hierarchy; human hierarchy is projected onto nature and then used to justify social domination. Therefore, ecofeminist theory seeks to show the connections between all forms of domination, including the domination of nonhuman nature, and ecofeminist practice is necessarily anti hierarchical” The Ecology of Feminist and the Feminism of Ecology (1989). I particularly enjoyed this week’s reading from Dorothy Allison and her in depth explanation of what led her to accepting herself as someone who truly believed she was “trash,” into the queer activist and survivor that she is today. She spoke of the different instances of intersectionality which she encountered as obstacles in her life as a poor lesbian woman from a broken and abusive home, and how she worked to combat these obstacles to create a new life for herself, one which would not let her be defined by societies ‘isms’. Allison writes,“What I know for sure is that class, gender, sexual preference, and prejudice—racial, ethnic, and religious—form an intricate lattice that restricts and shapes our lives, and that resistance to hatred is not a simple act. Claiming your identity in the cauldron of hatred and resistance to hatred is infinitely complicated, and worse, almost unexplainable” (Dorothy Allison, History is a Weapon, A Question of Class). The resistance to the common oppressors of women and nature is also not a simple act, and one that is also not so often blamed on one villain, but a result of centuries of idealism and intersecting notions which when examined closely, are a result of hiding ourselves, as Allison did for much of her life, and of human versus nature being “us” and “them,” the animals we consume and sexualize as a part of a normalized capitalism and overconsumption driven world. True change will take time and effort from us all, with cooperation from those who we would consider our oppressors. “Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history; we have infinitely more instances of submission to authority than we have examples of revolt. What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people faced with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit to it. Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience —Howard Zinn” (Dorothy Allison, History is a Weapon, A Question of Class). We must free ourselves from the oppression of ‘isms’ within intersectionality. Women and nature must rise above domination and strive to raise awareness and support for their interconnected cause. In one of the first ecofeminist books, New Woman/New Earth– Ruether, states: “Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination. They must unite the demands of the women’s movement with those of the ecological movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of this [modern industrial] society (204)” (Hopgood- Oster). Women and nature merge under oppression which in turn leads to damage on the ecosystem as well as the very ones who rely on it the most, “ecofeminist intersectionality recognizes that women are likely to be amongst those most affected by environmental degradation, with those at the margins of society often experiencing these effects earliest and to the harshest degree. The attempt to reconcile and improve upon the relationship between humankind and nature is central to ecological feminist thought, as is the belief (in some cases at least) that by applying the lens of intersectionality to analysis, one is better able to understand and assess the complex relationship between humans (specifically women) and the natural world. (AE Kings, 71). The web of interconnectedness does not only apply to societal norms such as class, race, sex, or sexual orientation-but arguably more dangerous between humans and nature since the degradation of either is a threat to the other. We must work together to heal nature but this can only be done by first healing society and freeing ourselves from oppression by others.