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. 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.
Between 1972 and 2012, she authored or co-authored four books and over 100 papers on logic, metaphysics, the environment, and ecofeminism. 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". 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.
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). 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".
Early life and education
Plumwood was born Val Morell to parents whose home was a shack with walls made of hessian sacks dipped in cement. After obtaining a land grant, her parents had set up home in the Terrey Hills, near the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, north of Sydney. Her father worked at first as a hod carrier, then started a small poultry farm. According to Martin Mulligan and Stuart Hill, the beauty of the area made up for Plumwood's lack of toys.
The poultry farm failed, and when she was ten the family moved to Collaroy, another northern Sydney suburb, where her father found work in the civil service. They moved again to Kogarah in southern Sydney. Plumwood attended St George Girls High School in Kogarah, where she was dux of the school. Offered a Commonwealth Scholarship to attend the University of Sydney, she turned it down for a Teacher's Scholarship instead, also at Sydney—her parents wanted her to do something practical—although she soon became interested in philosophy.
Plumwood's studies were interrupted in 1958 by her brief marriage to a fellow student, John Macrae, when she was 18 and pregnant, a marriage that had ended in divorce by the time Plumwood was 21. The couple had two children, both of whom died young. Their son, John Macrae, was born when Plumwood was 19 and died in 1988 after an illness. Their daughter, Caitlin Macrae, born in 1960 and given up for adoption when she was 18 months old, was murdered in her teens. Plumwood resumed her studies at Sydney in 1962, this time with a Commonwealth Scholarship to study philosophy, and graduated with first-class honours in 1964.
Personal life and activism
Soon after commencing postgraduate studies in Logic at UNE in Armidale, Plumwood married the philosopher Richard Sylvan (then known as Richard Routley), whom she had met while in Sydney, and changed her name to Val Routley. They spent time travelling in the Middle East and UK, which included living near a beech forest in Scotland for a year. Returning to Australia, they became active in movements to preserve biodiversity and halt deforestation, and helped establish the trans-discipline known as ecological humanities. Referred to as Routley and Routley, from 1973 to 1982 they co-authored several notable papers on logic and the environment, becoming central figures in the debate about anthropocentrism or "human chauvinism". Together they wrote the influential book The Fight for the Forests (1973), which analysed the damaging policies of the forestry industry in Australia. The demand for the book saw three editions published in three years.