Like any political movement, feminism is prone to schisms. There have always been arguments about priorities and tactics, including whether men can be feminists. What has been constant, until very recently, is a mainstream acceptance of the fact that there are two biologically fixed sexes; none of us who lived through the Seventies ever expected to be told that men can choose to become women. At first sight, Natasha Walter’s new book is not about this disagreement, but more of that in a moment. Her stated purpose is to wake us up to a world threatened by imminent environmental catastrophe.

Feminism for a World on Fire is full of stories about the asymmetric impact of unrestrained development on women in the Global South – such as Malawi, where female farmers are struggling to survive the impact of climate change. Walter references hundreds of studies, including one from 2007 showing that women are much more likely than men to die in natural disasters: they might be ‘unable to escape to safety because they have children or elderly people to care for, or disadvantaged because they had never learned to swim … or are overlooked by rescuers who put more value on men’s lives’. There were twice as many female casualties in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for instance. At the same time, there is an upsurge of violence against women in the UK. In 2024, the National Police Chiefs’ Council declared it a national emergency, revealing that three thousand offences against women are recorded every day in England and Wales.

Working in this sector is exhausting and never-ending. There have been successes, such as the campaign to have non-fatal strangulation recognised as a stand-alone criminal offence, but not all women have the capacity to take on further challenges. That, however, is not good enough for Walter. ‘Environmentalism without feminism is