Plumwood, Val

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 that conceptualizes humankind as an integral part of its environment and that calls for major changes in our attitudes toward nature and the adoption of voluntary simplicity as a lifestyle). Formerly Val Routley, she changed her last name to Plumwood after their separation in the early 1980s. During her lifetime, she held positions at North Carolina State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Sydney. At the time of her death, she was an Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University.

The author of four books and over 100 papers, Plumwood draws upon feminist theory to critique what she calls the “standpoint of mastery,” a phrase that refers to a set of views about the Self and its relationships to the Other with respect to sexism, racism, capitalism, and the domination of nature. Her two major theoretical works are Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002). In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, she argues, following the eco-feminist line of reasoning, that the current environmental crisis originates in the West's dualistic ways of conceptualizing things. What she calls the “hyperseparation” of humans from nature is also part of the colonizing dynamic we see in the West's relationship with the rest of the world. She counsels us to abandon these dualisms in favor of an ecological ethic founded on empathy for the Other. Although she is not opposed to spirituality, she thinks that the predominant forms of Western spirituality have located the sacred above and beyond a fallen Earth, a notion she considers misguided.

In her last major theoretical work, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Plumwood argues that contemporary forms of ecological denial are dangerous and can be traced back to historical warpings of reason and culture. After documenting the profound effects of such distortions upon the fields of economics, politics, science, ethics, spirituality, and the current hegemonic form of globalization, she presents a radically different vision of how our [Page 1109]culture must change in order to develop a society that is ecologically rational.