This gap between what is and what is seen exists across cultures and domains and it is also present in sectors such as sustainable forestry management (Elias et al. 2017) and health research. Karen Messing, a trailblazer of gender studies in occupational health, a field that largely considered women’s work as “light” and therefore without risk, wrote a book entitled “One-eyed Science” (1998) in which she lays bare the untold stories of women’s suffering at work and the structural issues that blind us to their suffering. More recently, Caroline Criado Perez (2019) exposes the gender data gap and reveals an invisible bias toward the male body. Her book is a startling litany of examples in which using “male” as default harms women: diagnosis of heart attacks, protective gear, and male-biased disaster warning systems. She calls this “male-unless-otherwise-indicated thinking.”

Numerous scholars and movements have also pointed out that women’s labor is widely unrecognized. They draw attention to women’s invisible role in housework, as caretaker, as food provider. To cite an Amazonian example, Susanna Hecht (2007) noted that in the Amazonian Rubber Boom context “the quotidian presence of toiling women in households was viewed as unremarkable, and so remained unremarked.” (p.324)

The powerful ‘#metoo’ movement has exposed the pervasiveness of violence against women. Violence most often occurs in private spaces – homes, hotel rooms, dark alleyways – out of view. The fear of reprisal and shame prevents women from calling out their aggressors, perpetuating a cycle of voluntary blindness on the part of some and fearful silence on the part of others. Research by the World Health Organization shows that the lifetime prevalence of violence against women in rural Peru is 61% (WHO, 2005). In the Ecuadorian Amazon, researcher Isabel Goicolea (2001) found that the single most commonly cited women’s health problem was ‘husband beats wife,’ cited by 84% of respondents.

Ecosystems’ invisibility

The corollaries between women’s invisibility and ecosystems’ invisibility are striking. Ecosystems do not have representatives in governments or advocates on boards of directors. Their streams burble and the wind rustles through their leaves all over the world, but there is a generalized hush about them in parliaments and board rooms in those very same places. Ecosystems are largely absent from public discourse, planning, and decision making. When and where the environment is present, it is mostly viewed as a natural resource to be exploited in production processes, not as an entity with inherent value. In this sense, women and ecosystems can also be perversely conspicuous in the some of the same ways. While women’s bodies are objectified, landscapes are eyed for their resources. While women are prized for their reproductive services, ecosystems are valued when they are ‘productive.’

In some few instances and localities, people and systems are seeking ways in which the earth’s voice can be heard. For example, in 2008, Ecuador was the first country to enshrine the “rights of nature” in the constitution. Bolivia soon followed suit and since several countries, including New Zealand, Australia and India, have given legal rights to specific rivers (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018). For years, the Ecuadorian edict remained quiet, until a series of court cases, including one brought to trial by the community of Sinangoe in 2018 against illegal mining, “activated” it. Nonetheless, Environmental Impact Assessments – the tool used by governments to evaluate the impacts of development projects on the health of the ecosystem – are too often done hastily, willfully turning a blind eye to the very factors that might impede the project.