Dr. Brittany Bloodhart is an Associate Professor of Psychology at California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB). She received a dual Ph.D. in Psychology and Women’s Studies from Penn State in 2013.
Bloodhart’s work explores how people think about social and environmental issues and what prompts people to act. Her extensive research has utilized the ecofeminist approach to understand the cultural impacts of climate change.
According to Bloodhart, ecofeminism states that the reason humans tend to harm the earth is related to the reason that racism and sexism persist in society. It considers the idea of hegemony, which involves leadership or dominance, especially by one social group over another.
She explains that if people view the world as hierarchical, that belief may translate into racist or sexist behaviors. Ecofeminism combines these concerns with ecological ones to analyze the relationship between humans and the natural world.
Bloodhart believes that “to reach ecological harmony, that is, humans living in equilibrium with plants and animals, we have to change this kind of [hierarchical] structure of seeing the world.”
She continues by noting that women are disproportionately affected by climate change. The United Nations reports that females represent most of the world’s poor and are proportionally more dependent on threatened natural resources.
Her essential work broadly asks two questions: (1) how can we recognize discrimination towards others? And (2) how can we get people from not caring to caring about these issues and their relation to climate change?
Check out Bloodhart’s most recent publications here.
