Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to celebrate the life and contribution to this nation of the great ecophilosopher and feminist, Val Plumwood. I am indebted to have with me the obituary from her friend Joan Staples, who said:

She is a giant of a thinker, who wrote the seminal book in 1973 which opened all our eyes to what was happening to Australia’s forests. I attended the same school, sent her to Kakadu where she was attacked by a croc, and fought many environmental battles with her. But she is of ENORMOUS significance to Australian intellectual thinking on the environment.

I draw from Joan’s words now. We have lost a great creative thinker, an activist and a fun musician with the sudden death of Dr Val Plumwood, who died from a massive stroke alone at her forest property, Plumwood Mountain, near Braidwood last weekend. Val Plumwood was an independent, uncompromising, original thinker. She was a founder of the international study of environmental philosophy, producing one of its major classics, Feminism and the mastery of nature in 1993. As both an ecofeminist and ecophilosopher, she played a key role in putting Australian scholarship in these areas onto the international stage. As a speaker and writer, she has been much in demand internationally, and her works have been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese and Turkish. In 2002, her book Environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason cemented her international reputation.

Yet Val Plumwood’s scholarship was only a small part of her passion, as she put her environmental beliefs into practice with multiple campaigns to save the forests of her beloved Clyde River catchment, as well as environments much further afield throughout Australia. In 1973, as Val Routley, she and her former husband, Richard Routley, who was later Richard Sylvan, wrote the seminal environmental book on Australian forestry, The fight for the forests. The book was an important catalyst for the ensuing Australian environmental forestry battles of the late seventies, and into the eighties, the nineties and beyond. Attempts by forestry interests associated with the Australian National University to have the book banned at the time of its publication were indicative of the controversy often swirling around this rigorously honest writer. Val received popular notoriety when attacked by a crocodile in Kakadu National Park in 1985. Although taken in a death roll—if I recollect correctly, it was three death rolls—she managed to escape, and the story was later recreated in a film. She requested that the offending crocodile not be killed—a reflection of the philosophical analysis she was developing, which attempts to integrate the role of humans and nature.

Val Plumwood published over 100 papers and four books. One reviewer of her ecofeminist classic Feminism and the mastery of nature described it as ‘shaking philosophy to its foundations’. Her work drew on modern and ancient philosophy, as well as modern feminist scholarship, in revising our conceptions of human identity and interspecies relations. In her latest book, Environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason, she challenged the separation between humans and nature found in the dominant traditions of the west, and argued that tackling the environmental crisis requires deep change in our dominant culture. A measure of Val’s intellectual contribution is that she features in the Routledge study Fifty key thinkers on the environment, edited by Joy Palmer. This volume moves chronologically through 25 centuries, beginning with the Buddha and including philosophers such as Bacon, Spinoza, and Rousseau, as well as more modern scientists such as Darwin, and Rachel Carson. Val Plumwood appears towards the end of the list as it moves into key thinkers of the modem age who have made significant contributions to international environmental thought.

At the time of her death, she was the visiting fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. Amongst her many international appointments, she has held visiting professorships at the University of California-Berkeley in the US, McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, the University of Lancaster in the UK and the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Val Plumwood was due to go on a lecture tour of Canada later this year and was close to completing a new book, entitled The eye of the crocodile. According to her colleague Deborah Bird Rose, The eye of the crocodile is:

…an explanation of the philosophical implications of being prey and thus being a participant in ecological relationships that expose human vulnerability.

As a determined independent thinker, Val Plumwood was often uncompromising, but as a complex woman struggling to express her intellectual, creative, feminine energy, she represents much that is admirable in human endeavour. Her personal life held much tragedy in relation to her two children. Her relationship with them, and their loss, meant that she carried great pain known only to those who got close to her. Val Plumwood was a regular fun-loving attendee at folk festivals and never missed an opportunity to join with fellow folk music fans in making music. Her beautiful hand-built stone home, which she and Richard built at Plumwood Mountain near Braidwood, is surrounded by environmentally valuable cool temperate rainforest and includes a rare collection of all the varieties of Australian waratahs. Her relationship with that place expressed her nurturing love of nature. Her spirit will live there with her beloved wombats and lyrebirds.

I conclude by saying that in Val Plumwood, we had a magnificent Australian thinker, a great feminist and ecological philosopher of the age on the global stage. We can but celebrate her contribution to human thinking in an age of environmental crisis, when the whole of the human world has to come back to grips with the truth of the matter, which is that we depend totally on the living fabric of this planet. I personally thank Val Plumwood for the remarkable contribution she has made to world ecological thinking and to giving us a lead to that rapprochement with the natural planet which is so essential for our own survival.