Women don’t want a world without men. Women don’t want to rid the earth of mankind, even though the world itself alienates us completely. It’s not something we believed even necessary to spell out, until we saw the absolute pandemonium afoot ever since actor and environmentalist Dia Mirza made a remark linking patriarchal structures — business, war, and hoarding of wealth — to the steady annihilation of “Mother Nature”.

On June 5, Mirza and Arati Kumar Rao, an ecofeminist as well as photographer, appeared on Soha Ali Khan’s YouTube podcast titled All About Her (@SohaAliKhanP). Mirza recalls a 2023 interview in which “I had said that patriarchy is the cause of climate change, it’s men who have driven climate change in this world, and they are entirely responsible for the chaos that has been unleashed on our world today, and the misery that people have been experiencing everywhere,” she says.