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Val Plumwood was an eminent environmental philosopher and activist who was prominent in the development of radical ecophilosophy from the early 1970s

AbstractAustralian settler philosophy needs to create the basis for two important cultural dialogues, with the philosophy of Aboriginal people on the one hand, and with the land the settler way of life is destroying on the other. Through these interconnected dialogues we might begin the process of resolving in a positive way the unhappy anxieties surrounding Australian identity. Mainstream Australian academic philosophy has certainly not provided fertile ground for such dialogues, and its dominant forms could hardly be further away from Australian indigenous philosophies or from land-sensitive forms of environmental philosophy. It is a paradox that in a continent where Australian Aboriginal people have given land spirituality what is perhaps the world's most powerful and integrated development, settler philosophy contrives to provide what is probably the world's strongest dismissal of other ways to think about the land than those legitimated by western reductionism and rationalism. This paradox, I suggest, can be explained through understanding the ascendancy of ex-colonial masculinity in Australian culture and academic philosophy.

Rationalism is the key to the connected oppressions of women and nature in the West. Deep ecology has failed to provide an adequate historical perspective or an adequate challenge to human/nature dualism. A relational account of self enables us to reject an instrumental view of nature and develop an alternative based on respect without denying that nature is distinct from the self. This shift of focus links feminist, environmentalist, and certain forms of socialist critiques. The critique of anthropocentrism is not sacrificed, as deep ecologists argue, but enriched.

L'auteure répond aux critiques adressées par les philosophes féministes à la philosophie environnementale. Le problème viendrait du fait que celle-ci ait repris des hypothèses issues d'analyses, rationalistes et ethnocentrées, biaisées par un préjugé de genre, concevant la raison comme radicalement distincte du corps et des émotions et appelée à exercer un contrôle sur celles-ci, les femmes, le corps et la nature. Au contraire de la thèse identifiée comme celle du moi divisé, l'auteure développe l'idée que ce qui nous est proche ou personnel ( nos arbres, nos rivières) joue un rôle central dans l'acquisition d'une vie morale et d'une sensibilité à l'environnement, en consonance avec les approches féministes d'un moi-en-relation. Rejetant la deep ecology qui poserait le problème d'une métaphysique de l'indifférenciation, l'auteure propose une conceptualisation des relations intrinsèques à l'humain, invitant à dépasser la théorie de la 'séparation' masculine et les théories traditionnellement féminines de la 'fusion'.