Val Plumwood
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Val Plumwood
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Val Plumwood (right), 2007
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| Born |
Val Morell 11 August 1939 nr. Sydney, Australia |
| Died | 29 February 2008 (aged 68) nr. Braidwood, Australia |
| Cause of death | Stroke |
| Resting place | Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood |
| Other names | Val Routley |
| Education | B.A. (Hons), first class, philosophy (1965), University of Sydney; MA, logic, University of New England PhD (1991), Australian National University |
| Occupation | Philosopher, environmentalist |
| Known for | Ecofeminism |
| Notable work | Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) |
| Movement | Ecological humanities, ecosophy |
| Spouse(s) | John Macrae, Richard Sylvan (formerly Routley) |
| Website | valplumwood.com (archived 9 January 2014) |
Val Plumwood (11 August 1939 – 29 February 2008) was an Australian ecofeminist philosopher and activist known for her work on anthropocentrism. From the 1970s she played a central role in the development of radical ecosophy, along with her second husband, the philosopher Richard Sylvan. Working mostly as an independent scholar, she held posts at universities in Australia and the United States, and at the time of her death was Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University. She is included in Routledge's Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment (2001).
Plumwood spent her academic life arguing against the "hyperseparation" of humans from the rest of nature, and what she called the "standpoint of mastery": a reason/nature dualism in which the natural world (including women, indigenous people and non-humans) is subordinated to anything associated with reason.
Plumwood was the author or co-author of five books and over 100 papers on logic, metaphysics, the environment and ecofeminism.The Fight for the Forests (1973), co-authored with Sylvan, was described in 2014 as the most comprehensive analysis of Australian forestry to date. Her Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) is regarded as a classic, and her Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002) was said to have marked her as "one of the most brilliant environmental thinkers of our time."
Her posthumously published The Eye of the Crocodile (2012) emerged from her survival of a crocodile attack in 1985, first described in her essay "Being Prey" (1996). The experience offered her a glimpse of the world "from the outside," a "Heraclitiean universe" in which she was food like any other creature. It was a world that was indifferent to her and would continue without her, where "being in your body is ... like having a volume out from the library, a volume subject to more or less instant recall by other borrowers—who rewrite the whole story when they get it."
Plumwood was born Val Morell to parents whose home was a shack with walls made of hessian sacks dipped in cement. The parents had set up home in the Terrey Hills, near the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, north of Sydney, as a result of a land grant. Her father worked at first as a hod carrier, then started a small poultry farm. Martin Mulligan and Stuart Hill write that the natural beauty of the area made up for Plumwood's lack of toys.
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