Val Plumwood

Val Plumwood
Plumwood in 1990
Born	Val Morell (1939-08-11)11 August 1939 Terrey Hills, Australia
Died	29 February 2008(2008-02-29) (aged 68) Braidwood, Australia
Other names	Val Routley
Education	BA (Hons), philosophy, University of Sydney (1965)[1] MA, logic, University of New England (c. 1966)[2] PhD, philosophy, Australian National University (1991)[3]
Thesis	Women of the Mysterious Forest: Women, Nature, and Philosophy, an Exploration of Self and Gender in Relation to Traditional Dualisms in Western Culture[3]
Known for	Ecofeminism
Notable work	Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993)[4]
Movement	Ecological humanities, ecosophy
Spouse(s)	John Macrae Richard Sylvan

Val Plumwood (11 August 1939 – 29 February 2008) was an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist known for her work on anthropocentrism. From the 1970s, she played a central role in the development of radical ecosophy. Working mostly as an independent scholar, she held positions at the University of Tasmania, North Carolina State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Sydney, and at the time of her death was Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University.^[5] She is included in Routledge's Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment (2001).^[6]

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.^[7][8]

Between 1972 and 2012, she authored or co-authored four books and over 100 papers on logic, metaphysics, the environment, and ecofeminism.^[9] 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".^[10] The Fight for the Forests (1973), co-authored with the philosopher Richard Sylvan, Plumwood's second husband, was described in 2014 as the most comprehensive analysis of Australian forestry to date.^[11]

Plumwood's posthumously published The Eye of the Crocodile (2012) emerged from her survival of a saltwater crocodile attack in 1985, first described in her essay "Being Prey" (1996).^[12] The experience offered her a glimpse of the world "from the outside", a "Heraclitean 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".^[13]