Val Plumwood is an Australian ecofeminist philosopher and activist who participated in movements to preserve biodiversity and to stop deforestation from the 1960s until her death in 2008. Prominent in the development of radical ecosophy (a contraction of the phrase ecological philosophy, frequently used to refer to different and often conflictual concepts espoused by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess and French post-Marxist philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari), she helped establish the interdisciplinary field of ecological humanities, which aims to bridge gaps between the sciences and the humanities, as well as Western, Eastern, and indigenous ways of knowing nature.

Plumwood was born in 1939 and was married for a time to Richard Routley, also a philosopher and a proponent of deep ecology (a branch of ecological philosophy ...