Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher's Zone. I'm Alan Saunders.

As you may have heard by now, the philosopher and environmentalist Dr Val Plumwood was found dead on her land near Braidwood in New South Wales on 1st March. She was 68 years old and it was a stroke that killed her, not, as early reports had it, a snake bite or an insect bite.

She was the author of many articles and books, including Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, and Environmental Culture: The ecological crisis of reason.

Here's Val Plumwood discussing these issues in a lecture she delivered at the 2006 Melbourne Writers' Festival as part of the History of Philosophy in Australasia Project now under way at Monash University.

Val Plumwood: Human centredness, I would say, is a complex syndrome which includes the reduction of non-humans to their usefulness to humans, which is what I'd call instrumentalism. I think this is one of many places were insights drawn from feminist theory can be helpful. Male centredness, which I think is a good parallel in some ways to human centredness, can be damaging to men, as well as to women. It makes men insensitive to dependences in interconnections, as well as devaluing women. It has to be tackled from both sides, by changing men, and by changing women, and by changing individuals and by changing institutions.

So I think human centredness is similarly double-sided, and we have to see its denial of our own embodiment, animality, and inclusion in the natural order, as the other side of our distancing from that order and devaluing it.

Alan Saunders: Possibly the best-known event of Val Plumwood's life occurred in 1985 when she was visiting Kakadu. A crocodile pushed her out of her canoe and death-rolled her three times. Obviously for an environmentalist, the experience of being prey cannot be anything but formative. Let's put the event in perspective, though. Here's a friend of Val's, Joan Staples, a political scientist and Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales.

Joan Staples: Although we were, our lives weren't touching back at the high school, we actually went to the same high school, St George Girls' High in Kogarah, in Sydney, which was a selective girls' high. In the '50s when we were both there, the sort of women who taught there were the sort of women who today would be in the wide range of professions at the top of those professions. But back in the '50s women taught, if they couldn't do other things. And so we had the privilege of women who were inspired by their own intellectual endeavours and certainly were, I think, really instrumental in passing that on to us. For Val, and me too, I think Val lived at Loftus, came in by the train from Sutherland every day, it opened a whole new world of academic endeavour, and not only that, she was the Dux of the school. And to be Dux at St George Girls' High School was really something.

Alan Saunders: So you knew her when she was at the Philosophy Department in the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU, is that right?

Joan Staples: Val and I met in the early 1980s when she was working on her PhD.

Alan Saunders: And working on her PhD but also being an activist at the time?

Joan Staples: Very much so, yes. She was one of those regulars who appeared at my door to impose her great concern about particular issues on this. A number of people always did, of course, and it was always a pleasure to talk to her, and she always had of course, a very respectable technical and scientific knowledge that she brought with any issue that she was bringing.

Alan Saunders: Well you've said in something you sent to me, you said you sent her up to Kakadu to stay with friends living in the Park, and that was where the most famous episode in her life occurred.

Joan Staples: Well actually the background to that is more interesting. Val was becoming very interested in the role of Indigenous thinking of the relationship to the environment, and I think a lot of that came from Judith Wright, because Judith was another one who used to appear at my door to talk about issues, and it was inevitable when Judith moved to the local region that the two of them would become close. And the relationship from Val's point of view was one of loving respect that she had for Judith. And during the 1980s Judith became very disillusioned with the environment movement not paying sufficient attention to Indigenous issues or Indigenous perspectives. And I had good friends working in Kakadu who were living and actually working with traditional owners there, people like Bill Gudnadjee, and so it was a good place for her to go, and that was what she was actually wanting to follow up. And so what I was doing was putting her in touch with a place and people where she could actually do some work in trying to understand that sort of thing on the ground.

Alan Saunders: But her encounter with the crocodile, who I think rolled her three times underwater, it does seem to have been I suppose not surprisingly, it does seem to have been a very formative experience in terms of her relationship with nature.

Joan Staples: It was a very formative experience as everybody who experiences that possibility of losing their life in an accident or with an illness, it can change one's perspective. I think some people can make too much of the fact of it changing her perspective. She was on a trajectory I think that she would have gone on anyway, certainly it gave her a platform to discuss, it gave her an issue that she could concretely elaborate her ideas, but I don't know whether this has been written anywhere, but I remember her ringing me from the hospital in Darwin and telling me that before she had left home to go to Darwin, she had actually pulled out a poem and she'd been reading -- I think it was a poem -- she was reading some piece about a tiger, and being prey, and that was before she'd gone to Kakadu. She was already even at that level, looking at that issue, so I think that one can play it up too much as having, as being the thing which shaped her thinking.

Alan Saunders: And has your own thinking been affected by hers?

Joan Staples: I would say Val is one of many people in my life who have helped to develop my ideas, but the way I look at Val is as a political scientist. For me, I look back through the sweep of ideas and history, and if I look back at the Industrial Revolution, the response to the Industrial Revolution to the Welfare State, the response to that with neo-Liberalism to where we are today, and where we are today it seems to me there is a need for a new paradigm, with global warming and the shrinking of the world, and the inter-relationship of that world, I mean what Val was doing was what we absolutely need philosophers to do, and is to try and articulate the philosophical background that is appropriate for that new paradigm, and she was doing it. She did it very early, and I think that's something that we should all be very grateful for.

Alan Saunders: Joan Staples, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Joan Staples: You're very welcome, thank you.

Alan Saunders: Joan Staples, from the University of New South Wales, a friend of Val Plumwood.

The focus of much of Val Plumwood's work was the dualism that she saw at the centre of Western thought. We separate ourselves from nature, for example, and we separate the male from the female.

Val Plumwood: The exaggerated opposition between humans and the non-human order, I call human nature dualism, in the West at any rate, it's a cultural formation going back thousands of years that sees the essentially human as part of a radically separate order of reason, mind or consciousness, set apart from the lower order that comprises the body, the woman, the animal and the pre-human. Women of course are not fully human in this set of ideas. Human nature dualism concedes the human as not only superior, but as differing in kind to the non-human, which is conceived as a lower non-conscious and non-communicative, purely physical sphere that exists as a mere resource or instrument for the higher human one. The human essence is not the ecologically embodied animal side of self, which is best neglected, but the higher disembodied element of mind, reason, culture and soul or spirit.

Now the other side of this is the reduction of nature that's part of the dualist formation. The idea of nature is dead matter to which some separate driver has to add life, organisation, intelligence and design, is still very much with us. This ideology of dualism and human apartness, we can case it down through Western culture, through Christianity and modern science. With the Enlightenment, human apartness is consolidated, or augmented by a very strong form of reductionist materialism to achieve the 'empire of man over mere things', to quote Descartes.

Modernist reductionism is highly relevant to the ecological crisis. This ideology has been functional for Western culture, in enabling it to colonise and exploit the non-human world in so-called primitive cultures with less constraint. But it also inherits the dangerous illusions in denying human embededness in and dependency on nature. By consolidating and creating narratives of empire of man over mere things, reductionist rationality removes key constraints at the dawn of commoditisation and capitalism.

Alan Saunders: The man who normally gets blamed for launching the dualism boat is the great 17th century French philosopher, Rene Descartes. To talk about that dualist heritage, here's Dr Linda Williams, Senior Lecturer in Cultural History and Theory at RMIT University.

Linda Williams: It's not only Descartes who participates in that long tradition of Western dualism, but he's certainly one of the more significant figures in it. But this was the tradition that goes back a very long way, and I guess Val's focus was on the anthropocentric aspects of that tradition.

I think you could say that the anthropocentric position goes back to the Greeks. It gets reconfigured in the late Middle Ages, because like Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, but picked up again by Descartes in the 17th century and again by Hegel. I mean there are a number of figures in the Western tradition who emphasise that dualist position. I think one of the things that Val Plumwood brought to this discussion was a particularly in the period we're talking about, the '80s, when she published a number of papers and I guess her 1992 book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, came out of a re-thinking of a lot of that received tradition.

I guess her originality was focused on the way she brought or combined things or ideas from feminist theory, ecological critique, with post-colonial theory, and looking at the way the subordinate part of that dualist tradition, which could be equated with women, with nature, in some writing of the working class, in post-colonial theory with the colonised others, how that part of the dualist structure led to the subordination and in Val's phrase, 'the backgrounding' of those in less powerful positions.

Alan Saunders: Does it go even deeper than that? Let's just get back to Descartes. He's sitting there in a room, and he's asking himself, what can I know? And he decides that he cannot trust his senses, because they might be deceiving him. They might be deceiving him even about his own body, perhaps his leg isn't real, and he knows about the phantom limb phenomenon where people who've had a limb amputated and nonetheless still feel it, so he isn't prepared to believe anything about what he can see or feel, and the consequence of this is that he concentrates on his own mind, his own consciousness, and he knows that he cannot doubt his own existence because he knows that in order to doubt, you need to have an existence, you need to have a mind.

And so that leads to treating the mind as the most important thing, and mind therefore is more important than body, and potentially, I suppose, more important than nature. This seems to be a fairly innocent beginning to what presumably Val Plumwood would have thought of as rather dire consequences.

Linda Williams: First, as I tried to suggest earlier, I don't think it is merely a beginning. The questioning 'I', it doesn't just fall out of the sky, I mean it's part of a long legacy, a stream if you like, of human knowledge and of language and society and history. It doesn't just arrive, as it were, as part of a cargo cult.

Descartes himself, the sophisticated questioner, is part of that long legacy and history; he's historically specific. And as part of that history, the idea that somehow human culture, human language, human thought, can exist independently of the non-human world on which it is ultimately dependent, seems to me to be the kind of error in Cartesian thinking and indeed in the long dualist tradition before Descartes, that Val Plumwood would have identified as a kind of wrong way of thinking about things.

Alan Saunders: How does the world look different then, if you try to see it from the point of view that Val Plumwood was urging upon us?

Linda Williams: Well one of the things that I'm interested in is human-animal relations, and how we've somehow rendered that invisible, and this obscures, I think, our sense of how we're constituted, and we continue to have enormous contradictions I think in our views of the relations between humans and animals, and my thinking -- that may owe considerable debt to people like Val Plumwood -- would focus more on those sorts of questions.

Alan Saunders: When it came to being an environmentally aware philosopher, it does strike me that she has a very different attitude to possibly Australia's best-known philosopher, Peter Singer. He could be Descartes in his distance from nature, he just has certain ethical views about how we should treat nature, but I don't really see him getting out into the bush very much.

Linda Williams: I don't know if Peter Singer would really thank you for that analogy, but I think Val's approach was very different from him, and also different from other perhaps more broadly influential thinkers in ecological critique. She would take issue with some of the American eco-feminists who emphasised an ethic of care towards nature, the sort of idea that we need to 'mother' nature. She would, I think, in her characteristically unsentimentalist way, regard that as rather patronising. For Val, the focus was on mutuality, mutual respect with nature, and I think her close death experience, the experience with the crocodile, probably gave her that sense of deep respect, and the need for mutuality with non-human animals.

Alan Saunders: But nonetheless, she doesn't see -- I was going to say eye-to-eye, you were talking about looking into the crocodile's eye -- but she doesn't see eye-to-eye with the deep ecologists. What exactly is her problem with them? Because until we had this conversation, if I were going to characterise her work, I would probably casually have said that she was a deep ecologist, but she's critical of deep ecology.

Linda Williams: Yes, I mean I think she would have some respect for their work, but she took a different position. I think rather than the deep ecological approach of identifying with becoming one with nature, she would want to recognise difference, human difference, human history, and emphasise that sense again of mutuality that we're not just part and parcel of the environment, and certainly in terms of the contemporary crisis, that approach is morally and practically problematic on a number of fronts, and I'm sure she would have recognised that. You know, we need to recognise aspects of our tradition and the impact that it's had, and indeed the tradition of our thinking.

Alan Saunders: So finally, Linda, what do you think her intellectual heritage is?

Linda Williams: I think she brought a special kind of rigour and lack of sentimentality to the discourse of ecological critique. So -- and I think with these posthumous publications as well -- this work will be continuing.

Alan Saunders: Linda Williams, thank you very much for joining us.

Linda Williams: It's a pleasure, thank you.

Alan Saunders: Linda Williams, from RMIT University.

Ultimately, what I think was valuable about Val Plumwood's work was her sensitivity to place. She wasn't an armchair theorist: she embraced the land in which she lived. Here she is at her beloved Braidwood, at the 2005 Two Fires Festival.

Val Plumwood: Well I started this poem by Judith Wright which is a very well known one called Sanctuary. The poem was written in the early '50s. Great expression of environmental concern from her. I'll just read the second verse:

'Sanctuary', the sign said, 'Sanctuary'.

Trees, not houses, flat skins pinned to the road

Of possum and native cat.

And here, the old tree stood for how many thousand years,

That old gnome tree that some axe new boy cut down,

'Sanctuary' it said. But only the road has meaning here.

It leads into the world's cities like a long, fuse laid.

Well I knew Judith quite well and I've always admired her. She was a great observer of nature and a great nature writer. But beyond this, as the poem illustrates, her work shows I think a true ecological consciousness. And I think she was one of the great pioneers and shapers of an ecological consciousness, in our time. And I'm going to argue that this form of consciousness involves a sense of place, but goes beyond it in a number of ways. So I think we've got to be a little careful in -- I'm afraid pouring cold water on things is one of my professional occupations -- of finding difficulties in them. I think there are some difficulties in our current enthusiasm for place. So I want to work out how we might take some evasive action on this becoming Nimbyism particularly, Not In My Backyard-ism.

One of the aspects I want to stress as the key to an ecological consciousness is the one we see in the last two lines of Judith's poem, grasping the relationship between places particularly, not just focusing on one face, your face of attachment. So she writes:

Only the road has meaning here,

It leads into the world's cities like a long fuse laid.

If you live in a place like this in Braidwood, then you come to realise that many of the things happening here are the result of what's going on in the city. So the 'long fuse laid' represents the destructive demands imposed on one place by another place, by the city, and on its hinterland by a privileged place on a less privileged place, and represents too the forces of growth and development that will inevitably, like the lit fuse, explode into the sanctuary environment and complete the destruction the poem shows us as just beginning.

So what I want to do is explore this relationship between places and the gap between the celebration or love of place, especially the home place, and ecological consciousness of place.

Place indeed gives meaning to our lives, but it's very easy for this to become a false meaning, a fake meaning. We might think about the Blue Mountains, for example, as a beautiful place many people love who live there, and it's a World Heritage place. But it doesn't support the lives of the people who live there. If it did support the lives, if it produced all the things that the people who live there need for their lives, if it produced their houses, the material for their houses, their energy, their food, if all that was produced in that place, it probably wouldn't be a World Heritage area, and you probably wouldn't find it so lovable. So I think there's a challenge here. The challenge I think is what we need for an ecological consciousness is not just a sense of place but it's got to be an ethics of place as well. So an ethics of place involves not just loving your place and respecting your place of attachment, but also being able to live in a way that doesn't degrade other places and other people's places and other species' places as well.

So that's an ethical challenge. So we have to go beyond a sense of place to an ethics of place and again, a sense of environmental justice I think is involved here as a crucial part of this.

Otherwise we get what I'd call a cosy corner, or an inside the belt way, if you think about the US context, account of place in which privileged places are more lovable than other places, so privileged people get more opportunity to love their places, because they're more lovable, because the degrading forms of production go on in other places. So our real places I think are our ecological footprint places.

Alan Saunders: The late Val Plumwood, recorded three years ago by Alexander de Blas.

The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production this week by Leila Schunnar. And I'm Alan Saunders.

Now here's a philosophical question for you. Could the universe have been other than what it is? From the humble carbon atom to the speed of light, everything seems tailor-made to bring us life as we know it. So, is cosmic bio friendliness just good luck? Or is there someone or something pulling the levers?

One man who has dared to tackle this question is the internationally acclaimed physicist and cosmologist, Dr Paul Davies, of Arizona State University. Davies is setting up a pioneering centre for the study of life, the universe and everything. And you can hear him on the subject on Big Ideas tomorrow at 5pm, here on Radio National.