Natasha Walter on Ecofeminism in new book

Natasha Walter’s new book, Feminism for a World on Fire, was reviewed in August 2026. The book critiques the commodification of feminism and promotes ecofeminism, drawing on Walter’s 15-year leadership of Women for Refugee Women.

Critique of Aspirational Feminism

Walter’s earlier work, The New Feminism (1998), celebrated Margaret Thatcher as a trailblazer. In her latest book she attacks the “glossy language of aspiration feminism”, which claims that an individual woman can achieve anything with enough courage. That rhetoric, she argues, fuels a flood of books and films about pioneers and heroines, turning the feminist story into isolated campaigns led by outsize individuals. Walter calls this a “hero-centric” narrative that ignores the collective struggle.

Ecofeminism and Solidarity

Instead, Walter advocates for ecofeminism and for solidarity and sisterhood. She stresses narratives that focus less on “I win on my own” and more on how “we thrive together”. Her conviction is grounded in stories from across the globe. In 2006 she founded Women for Refugee Women, directing it for fifteen years. During that time she heard women complain of environmental degradation, describing “heaps of toxic waste that had grown up behind their homes”. She also witnessed feminism being commodified by companies such as Missoni, which sold pink pussy hats knitted by feminist protesters for £140 each, and Dove, which promised “real beauty” while producing single-use plastic shampoo sachets that Greenpeace says clog sewers and contribute to floods in places like the Philippines. Dove claims it has made an “agenda-setting commitment to tackle the global beauty industry’s plastic waste issue”.

Walter notes that some feminists who supported the charity shifted their focus to protecting British women from migrants, a move that illustrates how the movement can become exclusionary. She invokes indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen’s belief that political journeys must start with grief, and she draws hope from Holly Archer (not her real name), a victim of grooming, gang-rape and abuse who has set up a project in Shropshire supporting survivors and refuses to let her story be exploited to drive hatred and division.

Global Case Studies

The book takes readers to places where women suffer first from environmental collapse. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels force women to travel miles further to fetch fresh drinking water. In north-east Syria, the radical women of Rojava-who fought off the extreme misogynist forces of Islamic State and resist authoritarianism from the new Syrian government and attacks from Turkey-struggle to feed their families because of water scarcity and food shortages. Yet they are “building something new”. Walter travels there to interview them and finds “the most determined feminists I have ever met”.

A highlight is a conversation with Bahiya Mourad, who set up a mala jin (women’s house) in 2011. For a while she and her comrades evaded authorities because they appeared as harmless old women, but when the government tried to close them down, they beat them off with sticks. Mourad’s work includes helping women who want to marry against their parents’ wishes, and she says they “often end up dancing at their weddings”. Walter describes this as a vital reminder that feminist joy is not about buying a £140 pink pussy hat, but about helping other women-and, maybe one day, celebrating with them when the seemingly impossible has been achieved.

Hope Amid Dystopia

Walter also reminds readers that the slide into dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale starts with climate change. In real life, women suffer first and most from environmental collapse. The book’s themes echo the solidarity seen in the squad of women activists worldwide and the shifting standings of feminist movements as they confront new ecological and political challenges. The narrative is both a warning and a call to action, urging readers to move beyond individual triumphs toward collective resilience.