Val Plumwood memorial site

Val Plumwood was a world-renowned environmental philosopher and a tireless campaigner against social injustice and eco-vandalism. The best known of her many writings was her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), which became a classic study of the ethical consequences of the divisions between humanity and the natural world.

Val Morrell was born in 1939 into a poor family living on a small land grant on the edge of Sydney. Excelling at school, she received a scholarship to study at Sydney University where she majored in philosophy. After graduating with a first in 1965 she travelled abroad, returning to Australia in the turbulent late 1960s.

During the following decade she and her husband Richard Routley (who later changed his name to Sylvan) published a series of important articles targeting what they termed “human chauvinism”. This view implies that only human beings were worthy of moral consideration, whereas everything else in the world held value only in relation to human needs and interests. Challenging this homocentric view, they argued for a new, ecocentric ethic that would radically transform our relationship with non-human others.

In her own independent work of the 1980s she developed a critique of what she called the “standpoint of mastery”, which creates blind spots towards the potentially resistant agency of nonhuman others, leading to a dangerous over-assessment of human autonomy and control.

In part Plumwood had become attuned to the pitfalls of the standpoint of mastery in the context of human gender relations, as she reflected on the extent to which her contribution to the work she did with Routley went unrecognised. Within a male-dominated society, the agency of women, she discovered, was systematically undervalued, just as the agency of nature is persistently overlooked in the context of human chauvinism.

When her marriage ended in 1981 she adopted the name Plumwood - after the mountain near Braidwood in New South Wales where she and Routley had built themselves a house - and focused on exploring the relationships between various forms of social injustice and the human chauvinist project of the “mastery of nature”. Her rigorous analysis of the historical origins, conceptual structure and practical implications of these interconnected relationships of domination brought her to international prominence as a leading “ecofeminist” thinker towards the end of the 1980s.

Another personal experience that contributed to Plumwood's perspective on environmental philosophy occurred in February 1985. While kayaking solo in Kakadu National Park she was attacked and severely injured by a saltwater crocodile, which dragged her into the water and whirled her around three times in a terrifying “death roll”. She was made viscerally aware of how modern human beings have forgotten their status as potential prey for larger carnivores. The significance of her life-or-death struggle with this crocodile, whose own right to life she vigorously defended, was still emerging in Plumwood's late work, as she neared the completion of her long-awaited third book, provisionally entitled The Eye of the Crocodile.

In addition to Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002), Plumwood published more than 100 articles. She sat on the editorial boards of several journals and held visiting professorships at several universities in Australia and abroad. At the time of her death she held an honorary research position in the Fenner School for Environment and Society at the ANU, and she was preparing for a lecture tour to the US and Canada this year.

Plumwood was no armchair ecophilosopher, however. She was actively involved in several environmental campaigns, including the continuing fight for the forests, which prompted her first co-authored book (The Fight for the Forests, 1973).

She carried her environmental ethics into every detail of her everyday life. While she was critical of those who sought to deny, or retreat from, the itinerant nature of modern existence, her own point of return remained the small octagonal stone house on Plumwood Mountain, surrounded by a glorious garden that she cultivated to provide beauty and nourishment for herself and a rich array of wildlife, close to the remarkable grove of ancient trees from which she and the local mountain took their name.

Although she lived without many of the comforts and distractions of modern life, she abounded in an infectious delight in existence. And all around her, in addition to a multitude of living creatures, some of whom she welcomed as companions while others she respected from a wary distance, there were images of crocodiles, reminding her of her greatest teacher.

Val Plumwood, philosopher and environmentalist, was born on August 11, 1939. She died after a stroke on February 29, 2008, aged 68