Val Plumwood
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Val Plumwood (born 1939), formerly Val Routley, is an Australian ecofeminist intellectual and activist, who has been prominent in the development of radical ecosophy since the early 1970s.
Plumwood is presently Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University, and in the past has held positions at North Carolina State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Sydney.
Plumwood has been active in movements to preserve biodiversity and halt deforestation since the 1960s, and recently helped establish the trans-discipline known as ecological humanities. She was married to philosopher Richard Sylvan until his death in 1996.
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[edit] Views
Plumwood's major theoretical works are her 1993 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and her 2002 Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason. She has elaborated her views in four books and over one hundred papers.
Plumwood critiques what she describes as "the standpoint of mastery," a set of views of the self and its relationship to the other associated with sexism, racism, capitalism, colonialism, and the domination of nature. She draws on feminist theory to analyze this standpoint, which she argues involves "seeing the other as radically separate and inferior, the background to the self as foreground, as one whose existence is secondary, derivative or peripheral to that of the self or center, and whose agency is denied or minimized." She identifies the human/nature dualism as part of a series of problematic, gendered dualisms, including "human/animal, mind/body... male/female, reason/emotion, [and] civilized/primitive." She argues for abandoning these dualisms, and correspondingly the traditional Western notion of a rational, unitary, Cartesian self, in favor of an ecological ethic based on empathy for the other. In doing so, she rejects not only the "hyperseparation" between the self and the other, and between humanity and nature, involved in the hegemonic view, but also postmodern alternatives based on a respect for absolute difference and deep ecological alternatives based on a merging of the self and the world, in favor of a view that recognizes and grounds ethical responsibility in both the continuities and the divisions between the subject and the object, and between people and the environment.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ↑ Mathews, Freya (1999). "Ecophilosophy in Oz". Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Nature 3 (2).
- ↑ Australian National University faculty bio.
- ↑ Palmer, Joyce (2001). 50 Key Thinkers on the Environment. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-14699-2. pp. 283-8.
[edit] External links
- Prey to a Crocodile: an autobiographical account of an incident that, according to Plumwood, changed her life.
- Reply to Janis Birkeland: Plumwood defends her credentials as an ecofeminist.
- Feminism, Nature, and Discursive Ecologies: Review of Feminism and the Mastery of Nature by Stacy Alaimo.
- Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason: Review by Chris Cuomo.
[edit] Further reading
- Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993.
- Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason. Routledge, 2002.
