Val Plumwood Seminar Series

When Val Plumwood canoed down the East Alligator River in Kakau, Australia and met the crocodile who death rolled her, she experienced both a near death experience and the ontological experience of being edible. This second aspect shocked her, bringing into high relief the illusions present in Western culture and our human place in the world. This animal encounter provides a thrilling introduction into the work of Australian eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood and the heart of her philosophical project. Touching on the separation of mind from body, the debate of animal consciousness, factory farming, ‘woman as nature’, deep ecology versus eco-feminism, and more in the cannon of environmental philosophy. Plumwood charts a new path through quagmires towards a political feminist and ecological position. Over five talks I intent to demystify Plumwood’s wider philosophical project through her most digestible work, The Eye of the Crocodile. Readings each week are chapters from the short book and discussed in context of her other works. (The work is available in chapter form through Jstor). By the end of talks, you will have been introduced to Plumwood and how her project fits within and deals with issues present in environmental philosophy.

The 1995 film ‘Babe’ by Chris Noonan, based on Dick King-Smith’s book The Sheep-Pig, inspired Plumwood to address the mass-market success that created an empathetic connection with the factory farmed pig, a group of animals largely silenced. This chapter introduces her understanding of radical reduction of animal to product – pig to bacon – as a salient example of her wider criticism of Western societies’ capacity to hyper-separate categories, leading to a distortion in our conceptual schemes. Particularly, in this instance, of process/produce, mind/body, us/them, where the pig becomes a product, just a body, and one of them, something outside of human ethics. Thus enabling us to subject meat animals to the conditions present in factory farming. By creating an empathetic connection to the pig in the film, the audience is asked to confront this radical ethical reduction and the conceptual schemes and hyper-separations which bring its limited existence about.

The ethical choices we make about the consumption, use and death of animals is a serious choice, with many in environmental philosophy providing conflicting solutions. This talk explores the solutions given in animal ethics (in particular Tom Regan and Peter Singer), deep ecology (in particular Arne Naess and Farwick Fox) and veganism. This brings together a broad base of deontology, utilitarianism and virtue-based ideas to ethical relations, demonstrating the difficulty in extending ethical theories of culture out into the natural world. Is there ethical consumption? Are mammals conscious? Can we identify with nature to better protect it? The answer to these questions brings into relief the difficulty in finding universal solutions to the ethical question of consumption, use and death. Plumwood provides insights into how hyper-separations have distorted what solutions are given to environmental problems, suggesting her own alternatives.

Having explored Val Plumwood’s solutions compared to other giants in environmental philosophy, this talk explores her ecological animalism which accepts that all consumption and use of animals is more than flesh and blood, and has ethical implications. These implications are political in nature, in the sense it is the group domination of the large ‘O’ Others, synonymous with other liberation movements. Understanding anthropocentrism as humans seeing themselves as separate and superior, dominating the contrast category nature. Inspired by the liberatory framework of feminism and anti-colonialism, Plumwood sees the need to escape the centric logic of anthropo-centrism, finding new, non-hegemonic ethical relations with the non-human world.

A solution in environmental philosophy should only be as strong as its capacity to be lived. Val Plumwood’s written encounter with ‘Birubi’, an orphaned wombat, explores how somebody can live an environmental life. Having built a home on, and named herself after, Plumwood mountain, she lets us into her own life and how she lived her philosophy. Tying this into her thought experiment of married couple Ann and Bruce, from Environmental Culture, I will argue that Plumwood’s eco-feminist philosophy is akin to a new experience of the world, not just a set of practiced actions. Birubi and Plumwood’s musings of his boundary crossing, from outside to inside, from nature to culture shows how a long-term relationship of care can impact upon one’s ethics. Returning to the beginning, in the context of her near-death experience with a crocodile, Plumwood demonstrates the complicated relationship humans have with an environment we do not dominate, but exist within, in consumption, use and death.