News
‘At a Breaking Point’
UN Women: 90% of surveyed women’s organisations are being pushed to a breaking point.
19 May 2025
This article first appeared in our World Environment Day 2025 issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
This year’s World Environment Day comes exactly two months before countries meet again to continue negotiating a global treaty to end plastic pollution.
It occurs to me that there is something to say about why women should be the ones to lead such an effort.
In many countries women are still the growers – the ones responsible for sowing and harvesting, who know only too well what happens when crops are devastated by sudden weather changes.
Environmental change is pivotal to their ability to feed their families.
Women know about change. Everywhere in the world, women feel their bodies alter radically as they grow up.
They are obliged to come to terms with profound changes in themselves in ways that men do not, for example to deal with menstruation and blood at a young age – and for decades thereafter.
Giving birth and then caring for a helpless human being are huge tasks of nature and enable women to experience just how fragile – and how precious – life is.
And when it comes to debris and clearing up, it is often women who do the job.
They often have to attend to the consequences of war – searching for the dead, laying out the bodies, dealing with death and burial.
Women know about mess and waste.
These are some of the reasons why, when it comes to World Environment Day, women could play a leading part in bringing about change.
In agricultural areas women know all about recycling; how crops become straw that becomes compost that nourishes the next crop.
In urban areas, through schools, mothers could take part in a global plan to alert their children to just how much plastic they throw away every day, and exactly what this plastic does to destroy the environment.
This could begin with the simple act of showing their children how they are personally changing their shopping habits to avoid plastic at all costs.
Even walking the kids home from school presents an opportunity for learning; mothers could point out how a tree sheds its leaves – leaves that collect on the ground and then, with rain, make a mulch that will nourish the tree and its offspring. And explain that those trees do this every year for decades.
Here’s what happened in my village during Covid-19 when the local primary school was shut down.
The kids were getting a bit bored at home and missing their friends. I asked Jack, aged six: ‘Would you like to learn to grow your very own beanstalk?’
Jack said yes, he very much would – and it so happened that he told his friends.
The instruction went out to meet on Zoom at 2pm, with a plastic pot and some compost.
Jack’s mum rushed around distributing bean seeds. At 2pm the following Monday, 16 children were glued to screens in their homes with their parents, some compost, a bean seed and a plant pot.
The elderly gardener gave solemn instructions, stressing most particularly that each child must talk to their bean as they planted it, and then every day for a week, to encourage it to grow. This they did.
And here’s the evidence. At 2pm the Monday after, they were jumping up and down at the sight of tiny shoots peeking through the compost.
The following week they planted cress, and the following week they planted tomato seeds.
In no time their parents had been badgered into digging up the back yard.
Gardens, not to mention tottering towers of runner beans began to flourish all over the village.
Back to World Environment Day. It’s worth asking: if women worldwide had the time, the exposure and the media access that men have had, what would we do about waste, about pollution?
To answer this question, we need to choose the women who would be most articulate and original in the build-up to World Environment Day.
Christiana Figueres immediately springs to mind, she who assumed responsibility for the international climate change negotiations after the failed Copenhagen conference of 2009.
Over the next five years Christiana Figueres led the progress to a universally agreed regulatory framework, culminating in the historic Paris Agreement of 2015.
This is a woman who, we can see, knows the issues inside out – who knows how international campaigns work, who can reach a massive global network and who has an impeccable track record in fixing tough problems.
ABOUT DR SCILLA ELWORTHY
Triple-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with Oxford Research Group to develop effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics, Scilla founded Peace Direct in 2002 to fund, promote and learn from local peace-builders in conflict areas.
She was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in 2003, the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2020, the GOI Peace Award in 2023 and advised Peter Gabriel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sir Richard Branson in setting up The Elders.
Her TED talk on nonviolence has been viewed by over 1,500,000 people. She founded The Business Plan for Peace to help prevent destructive conflict and build sustainable peace throughout the world, based on her latest books The Business Plan for Peace: Building a World Without War (2017), The Mighty Heart: how to transform conflict (2020) and The Mighty Heart in Action (2022).
UN Women: 90% of surveyed women’s organisations are being pushed to a breaking point.
Dr Scilla Elworthy explores the power of the heart as we navigate turbulent times.
Kathleen Rogers, president of EARTHDAY.ORG, reveals how collective action can change the world.
Subscribe to our newsletter
Weekly ethical news, offers, comps and a free digital mag (quarterly) – what’s not to love?
