Q&A with Rebecca Kormos, Author of Intertwined
In time for Earth Day and World Book Day, we interviewed Rebecca Kormos—wildlife biologist, primatologist, filmmaker, author and Planet Women Ripple Member— about her world-changing new book, Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice.
Rebecca interviewed over 50 women from around the globe for this book, which blends data and storytelling to show why gender equity is essential to solving climate change and biodiversity loss. In this blog post, Rebecca generously shares about her path to writing the book, what was most surprising, and what gave her hope for our planet’s future.
Left: Rebecca Kormos with one of her dogs, Kobe. © Rebecca Kormos. Right: A copy of Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice. © Planet Women.
1. How would you describe what Intertwined is about to someone new to conservation and gender equity issues?
Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice is about the interwoven relationship between women and nature. It is about how climate change and the destruction of nature impact women disproportionately, with women sometimes making up to 90 percent of casualties from extreme weather events. The book also focuses on how and why women hold special knowledge about nature yet are not included equally in forums making decisions about nature. This is despite the fact that spectacular results for nature and our planet ensue when women lead.
To research the book, I interviewed over 50 women from around the world who are working to protect our planet. Their stories are both moving and inspiring and are interwoven throughout the book. Ultimately, I hope that the book makes a strong case for the need to address gender equality simultaneously with climate change. Protecting the environment requires advancing women’s rights because the degradation of nature and social injustices toward women are inextricably linked.
2. How did your professional and/or personal path lead you to writing this book?
I am a wildlife biologist. For most of my life, I have worked towards the conservation of our closest living ancestors—the great apes: gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans. The seed for this book was planted during a rather dark time when fires were raging in California and COVID was spreading across the world with no promise of a vaccine. I was working to decrease the threat of extractive industries on great apes, and I became overwhelmed by the magnitude of threats facing our planet. I knew that I needed to find something that gave me hope. Where I found hope was in learning about the incredible work women are doing across the planet to protect nature and support each other.
The more I learned, the more hope I had, but it generated questions too. What is this special knowledge that women hold about biodiversity and nature? Do women lead differently than men? Are there different results when women lead? The more I researched, the more it became apparent that empowering women is singularly one of the most important solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss—and that fact is not being talked about enough. This was incredibly exciting! The evidence was out there already, but it was fairly dispersed. I therefore wanted to pull together this information to make a strong case for gender equality as a crucial part of the climate change solutions.
3. Is there a section of the book you find particularly interesting or that you think readers will find surprising?
I got so excited when I was conducting the research for this book because I found so much of the material fascinating and important. It is therefore hard for me to highlight just one section! I was learning about women around the world facing incredible difficulties in their lives and work, but I was also learning about myself and understanding my own challenges better. I believe that no matter where we are in the world, as women, we all experience the negative forces of patriarchy to some degree.
I found statistics about the division of labor within a household shocking. Although there is a lot of variation within and between regions, women worldwide, on average, do three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men. No wonder women often have to take part-time jobs when they are trying to hold so many responsibilities at once. But part-time jobs often have less security, less pay, little security, and few benefits, if any. This, and other factors, made it clear to me why patriarchal systems lock women into situations of poverty. Understanding these roots of poverty helped me better understand women’s vulnerability to climate change.
Something else I personally found surprising was learning that so many of the narratives that we have been told about what it means to be a woman and about our relationship with the earth are untrue. Some of these false narratives are about differences between men and women—when there are, in fact, very few. Other false narratives about who is responsible for climate change, what we need as a society to thrive and how we should protect nature also surprised me. When these narratives were turned on their head, it opened up a whole new way of seeing the world for me.
Another exciting moment for me was learning about girls' education. Supporting the fundamental right for girls to attend school has incredible, exponential, and rippling benefits for not only for girls, but for their families, their communities, and also for nature.
Ultimately, for me, it was hearing from other women about their life trajectories, their struggles and their successes that I found most inspiring. Women hold so much wisdom that is often not recorded but rather passed on between generations. I was excited to be able to include quotes and stories from women for other women to hear. Their stories demonstrate tremendous resilience, positivity, and tenacity!
4. What do you hope readers take away from the book?
I hope that women look at each other with a deeper understanding of what we are all going through to some degree or another while living in patriarchal systems. I hope that, as a result, we increasingly support and lift each other up. I truly believe that it is through women’s alliances that we can change our social systems to become more just. For me the biggest lesson is that we can’t address gender inequality separately from climate change or biodiversity loss, but they must be addressed simultaneously as they are integrally connected and intertwined.
5. How did Planet Women support the publication of Intertwined?
Planet Women supported this book in so many ways and I will forever be so deeply grateful! Planet Women supported me with a small grant in 2021. Not only was this much-needed financial help as I was taking unpaid leave to research and write this book, but it boosted my confidence tremendously at a time when I really needed it! It was an indication that someone believed in me and the book enough to invest in it, and this gave me so much more energy to persevere!
In addition, in 2022, I took a course at Planet Women designed and led by Liza Williams on Regenerative Leadership. This course examined the roots of inequity and injustice and presented a transformative and more heart-centered way to lead. I found the course helpful in numerous ways – on a professional and personal level. It provided a space amongst colleagues where I could reflect on many of the ideas I was thinking about and Liza’s guidance helped me place these ideas within a broader historical and global context.
Finally, it was also through Planet Women webinars that I met some of the people I interviewed in the book, including Sara Inés Lara, Isabella Cortes Lara, Craig Leisher, Kristine Zeigler, Janet Nguyen, and Karl Morrison.
I can honestly say that this book exists and is what it is, in large part because of the belief, kindness, and support from everyone at Planet Women! Because I admire Planet Women’s mission and way of working, I decided to donate a percent of each book’s sale towards the organization to support those women whose work this book is about!
6. How do you see this book helping to transform the culture of conservation?
The culture of conservation is already transforming but the speed of change is too slow. I hope that this book will help to accelerate greater climate justice, by dispelling the myth that we have already reached gender equality in the conservation sector. Studies like those of Robyn James at the Nature Conservancy reveal that many challenges for women working in conservation still persist. Information from groups like Green 2.0 and SHE Changes Climate demonstrates that we have not yet reached gender parity in the leadership of NGOs or climate change negotiating bodies.
By bringing together previously dispersed information on gender inequality in the conservation sector, and by highlighting the tremendous outcomes for the planet as a result of women’s leadership, I hope this may result in greater effort within the conservation sector to create enabling environments for more women’s leadership and for greater focus on gender in all projects.
I also hope that the book can be used as a tool by women conservationists to support their work for a more sustainable, just, and equitable planet. I would love for us to embrace what has stereotypically been labeled as “female” leadership qualities but which I feel are critical in our leadership today. These include qualities of increased empathy, compassion, inclusiveness, cooperation, power sharing, and, yes emotions too – so that we lead with our hearts as well as our minds. Only with this kind of leadership will we stop looking at life as numbers to be counted, traded, and offset but instead look at nature holistically, where all species are integrally interconnected with each other and where every individual life has value.
Rebecca Kormos is a primatologist, wildlife biologist, conservationist, filmmaker, writer, National Geographic Explorer, and one of the co-founders of the Women in Nature Network. Rebecca is an Associate at Re:wild and a Board member of For the Good – an NGO that partners with communities in rural regions of Kenya to enable girls to stay in school and have agency to drive their own lives. Her book, Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice, will be released on April 30, 2024 and you can find links to order it HERE.