This project aims to make an intervention into narratives of feminism, specifically those narratives which have proclaimed the death or end of feminism, and which emerged in the early 1990s. In much of the feminist literature ecofeminism has largely functioned as feminism’s abject and disavowed other, because of its alleged essentialism, frequently read through maternalism. The project draws on fieldwork with women environmental activists campaigning against clear-cut logging in Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Canada, when in summer 1993 over 900 people were arrested. Drawing on the strengths of ethnographic research, oral history, narrative analysis and genealogical critique, this project opens up debates about ‘women and nature’ beyond essentialism (or even antiessentialism). My readings of interviews with these women, specifically around those moments of women’s lives which are most frequently naturalized, motherhood, childhood, and women’s association with ‘home’, suggest that readings other than the reinscription and reproduction of essentialist discourses are possible.