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

Australia used to lead the field when it came to environmental philosophy, though our speaker this week will argue that we're no longer out ahead.

Well, she certainly has a right to an opinion, because she's a pioneer in the subject: Val Plumwood from the Australian National University.

Here she is at last year's Melbourne Writers' Festival in a talk recorded as part of the History of Philosophy in Australasia Project now under way at Monash University. It's called Nature in the Active Voice and the question here is, will we face the ultimate challenge of human viability, will we join those peoples whose exploitation of the environment led to their demise as cultures. Here's Val Plumwood with a scenario.

Val Plumwood: The northern tribe of Easter Islanders never question the desperate religious cult that has devastated their section of the Island, as try to placate with tree sacrifice the angry gods who have withheld the rain. Instead, their leaders look around for new sources of trees, casting their eyes, perhaps on the still-forested lands of the smaller tribe to the south.

Meanwhile, their clever men, the scientists, are set to search for tree substitutes, but the need to consume the trees, given by the religion, is never questioned.

Well I think that most public discussion in our society is dominated by the tyranny of narrow focus and minimum re-think. A re-think deficit is a poor rational strategy in a situation where so many cracks are appearing in the empire, where multiple ecological problems are compounding and converging. Re-think deficit strategies don't encourage us to question the big framework narratives that underpin our extravagant demands or the associated commodity cult of economic growth. Or to question our right as masters of the universe, to lay waste the earth to maintain this cult's extreme lifestyle.

The islanders in my scenario obviously need people with the courage to look about them and speak up for change. Scientists and activists, you might call them - I'm not suggesting they're the same. They need ecological knowledge and memory to help them recognise how nature supports their lives. Most crucially, they also need people who can open their culture to self-criticism, make them think harder about their big assumptions, such as their high-consumption religion, and its suitability for their very limited support context.

In my scenario, science does what it's told by power, and scientists are not encouraged or intellectually equipped to address the bigger questions. So the islanders need more than science, and maybe they need a different kind of science. Perhaps what my islanders need is a college of philosophers, backed up by a full choir from the humanities.

Supposedly, philosophy is the subject area with the brief for a maximum full-tank re-think; the subject whose best traditions have claimed to hold everything open to question. As a feminist philosopher, I would say that philosophy doesn't always live up to these ideas, and itself has a significant self-reflection deficit. Well obviously philosophy with excessive respect for tradition won't help the islanders' re-think problem. They might get more help though from the more radical strand of philosophy that in Foucault's words 'endeavours to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known.'

Could the recent area of environmental philosophy help the islanders to think differently, about the dogmas that are ruining their island? Well, environmental philosophy, it first appeared in academia in the area of value theory in the early 1970s in Australia, and it's now made itself felt across the whole discipline of philosophy, taking in areas such as political philosophy, justice ethics, history of philosophy, moral epistemology and metaphysics. In all these areas, philosophers have exposed the dangerous logic of current frameworks that devalue and background the non-human world. Some have argued that our humancentredness weaves a dangerous set of illusions about the human condition right into the logic of our basic conceptual structures.

Well environmental philosophy is still marginal in philosophy I would say, and in academia. My overall assessment from over 30 years of involvement is that the discipline needs commitment and renewal and presently is not sufficiently addressing the crisis, or providing us with much clear guidance. I don't think it any longer holds the premier place that it held in the 1970s and '80s among the nine science disciplines, but I think the baton has been picked up by emerging stars like eco-politics, eco-anthropology, and eco-critique in literature, and these areas are certainly thriving at present.

Is this a race against time to re-make the culture? I'd say so, but you wouldn't think so from the low priority of these areas in the humanities and in philosophy programs in discussion.

Well perhaps one reason the Easter Islanders might not get much guidance from environmental philosophy as it stands, is because the college has been conventionally divided since the early 1970s into the shallow and deep sections, depending on whether their concern is with humans or non-humans. Now these two sides don't communicate very well: after four decades of debate, they've formed up into something like opposing militias. Anyway, Australian environmental philosophers have contributed in a major way on both sides, John Passmore arguing in 1974 for the adequacy of a humans-only tradition, but that was balanced by local theorists from the same period, on the deep side.

Deep ecology and deep green theory were major brand names that emerged in the 1970s. Themes of respect for nature, critiques of human arrogance and human-centredness, debates about intrinsic and instrumental value appeared in 1970s papers. Deeps focus on a better deal for non-humans with other human-oriented ecological issues counted as shallow. Many argued for an expansion of the ethical community to non-humans, for the inclusion of non-humans in a larger ethical community, but with very different views about how to constitute that community. People like Peter Singer, also 1974, wanted to extend the ethical community minimally to those most like humans, certain animals; others, including myself, wanting a much larger boundaryless community with an ethic of respect and attention needing no stopping point.

As you can see from what I'm saying that Australia led the world at one stage of environmental philosophy. I don't think that's true any more though. On the other wing, philosophers like Passmore argue that a shallow position considering only human interests would be enough to get us by. But it was dangerous to question human supremacy, and advocating minimum re-think, a clever instrumentalism was what was needed. So non-human heart matters just when humans suffer too.

I would argue against this kind of minimising rationality and I'd argue that genuinely sustainable systems can't be ones that allocate merely minimum resources for providers' survival; we have to do better than that. They must encourage greater levels of consideration for providers' wellbeing, and I think this rules out instrumental servant or slave-like relations, as well I think as competitive market relations that cut costs at the providers' expense.

What I want to really say about this though is that a rigid, deep-shallow division that makes us choose between human and non-human sides, defeats good consideration of the problem of the Easter Islanders. It assumes a fallacious choice of self or other, that is, an us-versus-them approach, in which a concern is contaminated by self interest unless it's purely concern for the other.

Now most issues and motivations of course are mixed. They combine self and other, human and non-human interests, and it's not only possible but essential to take account of both. Global warming is a case in point. Humans will lose and so will non-humans. So I think philosophy has to understand humans as immersed in a medium that is deep and shallow. I think a more promising approach is to redefine what is deep as what challenges human centredness, then we can address both kinds of issues, human and non-human in a deeper way. 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. Many have claimed this as the only prudent, rational or possible course. There's been a big debate about that in philosophy.

I argue contrary to this that human-centredness is not in the interest of either humans or non-humans. My argument is that one of its results is a failure to understand our embeddedness in, and dependency on nature, that it distorts our perceptions and enframings, in ways that makes us insensitive to limits, dependencies and interconnections of a non-human kind.

So I think a major problem for us is the inability to see ourselves as part of ecosystems and to realise how nature supports our lives. This is something we have in common with the Easter Islanders perhaps.

When we hyper-separate ourselves from nature, an exaggerated separation, and reduce it conceptually we not only lose the ability to empathise and see the non-human in ethical terms, we also get a false sense of our own character and location, that includes an illusory sense of agency and autonomy. I think this is one of many places where 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 dependencies and 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. And it's a failure that lies behind many environmental catastrophes, both human and non-human.

Well, the refusal to recognise the way non-humans contribute to or support our lives encourages us to starve them of resources. It also has justice aspects because we refuse to give other species their share of the earth, and it has ethical aspects because we fail them in care, consideration and attention. So this means that our human-centred ethical failures and our credential failures are closely and interactively linked.

So I want to say a deep analysis can have a lot to say to human sustainability. The deep aspects come from the need to see ourselves as more limited beings, constrained by the ecological needs of the larger biospheric community. There's definitely a deep side to the energy issue, although we don't hear much about it. A classic example here is nuclear power. I think the illusion of ecological invulnerability appears in the way its advocates fail to imagine or take seriously its enormous ecological risks and costs. Nuclear advocates would inflict the horrendous burden of waste disposal and other risks on many future generations of humans and non-humans, none of whom will benefit or be consulted. Why? So we can put off the inevitable re-think for another 50 years, and continue the energy extravaganza that derives from seeing ourselves as masters of the universe.

So, can environment philosophy help us understand how we got into this situation? I think it can. I think we need to understand the history and the logic of these concepts to see how the trap we're in has been put together; then we might be able to work out how to get out of it.

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, might or consciousness, set apart from the lower order that comprises the body, the woman, the animal, and the pre-human; women of course, not fully human in this set of ideas. Human-nature dualism conceives the human as not only superior, but as different 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 the cell, 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 as 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 trace 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 and so-called primitive cultures with less constraint, but it also inherits the dangerous illusions of 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.

Well of course that's not a coincidence. I do think we have to understand philosophy in social terms, not as a collection of individual philosophical ideas. So it's not a coincidence and of course it's not just Descartes; as Carolyn Merchant showed in some of her remarkable work, there's a whole gang of people around Descartes' time use similar imagery of Nature as female slave.

So, the role of science in all this. I think it's quite crucial in consolidating the empire of man over mere things. In the scientific fantasy of mastery, the new human task becomes that of re-moulding nature to conform to the dictates of reason to achieve salvation here on earth, rather than as it is in heaven, as freedom from death and bodily limitation.

So of course this idea of human apartness was shockingly challenged by Darwin, but his arguments I think have not really been taken to heart. Ideas of kinship and continuity of other life forms are very superficially absorbed I think in the dominant culture, even by scientists.

What's really interesting I think to think about here is the place of contemporary creationism in all this. Creationists say things like 'I'm not just a mere accident, I'm not a fluke of nature; I'm a product of unnatural, not natural, selection, of a designer, a creator.' In this impoverished creation narrative, creationists are endorsing the reductionist debased 'mere matter' concept of nature supplied by reductive science following in the Platonic footsteps. They're distancing from the meaningless mere things they see science as revealing as well as expressing the faith that the missing meaning will be supplied by an all powerful creator in the future paradise. They buy the very same framework as reductive materialism with regard to nature. Both are guilty of the same fault of denying and suppressing nature's own mindfulness and creativity. The real alternatives, I think, are not creationism versus reductionism, but creationism, reductionism and animism as an enriched materialism. Where animism can spread mind and creativity out much more widely, I think that opportunity is available philosophically via openness to the intentionality of the world - this is the intentional stance Dennett talks about, but extended to the non-human world.

So I think an animist materialism has quite a different answer to creationism from reductive materialism. It advises science to re-envisage materiality in richer terms that escape the spirit matter and mind matter dualisms involved in creationism. Forget the passive machine model and tell us more about the self-inventive and self-elaborative capacity of nature, about the intentionality of the non-human world. If the other-than-human world has such capacities, we don't need an external designer, it's its own designer.

Of course recent work in eco-anthropology supports this possibility for thinking differently, I think, very well. It finds that many indigenous cultures have much more animated, agentic and intentional views of the world of nature than western culture. Work by Graham Hardy, Deborah Byrd-Rose, Tim Ingold, has shown that our concepts of rationality have got indigenous animism completely wrong. Colonial ethno-centrism had it that all animism held humanoid, often demonic spirits, to inhabit and animate material objects as separate drivers which could be welcomed or evicted, courted.

This ploy enabled them to read our own dualisms back into other cultures, and to present a major alternative to reductionism as primitive and anti-rational, thus heading off the possibility of anyone thinking differently. So the big question now is, can we think differently? Can what has been stripped out of our conception of material world be put back and if so, how?

Can we entertain the hypothesis that the world of nature around us may have the same intelligent and creative powers that the splitters hive off to the designer? Suppose that instead of splitting and denigrating the intelligence of the world around us, we began to try to see creativity and agency in the other-than-human world. Although it helps to reveal the wondrous creativity of life, science has not been doing a very good in conveying this message of evolutionary theory. Why can't we see evolution as a form of testing and learning, like trial and error is: a form of wisdom? Why can't we consider evolution as a demonstration of mind and nature, of the intelligence involved in species differentiation and elaboration? The intelligence of forms, 'the wisdom in the ring', as Dan Dennett says.

So in terms of dispersing creativity and agency, we can think the possibility of creative mindful matter. We don't need a choice between materiality and creativity. So, these philosophical alternatives discerning wisdom and order in the world, can help move us, I think, from the monological to the dialogical, from domination to negotiation with our ecological context, as ways to combat the regime of anonymous commodities and they have an important role to play in reducing over-consumption. In disrupting the commodity regimes that produce anonymity, by erasing narratives of material origins and labour, including human labour, and replacing them by ways of consuming desire and endless consequenceless consumption.

Now I think writers are among the foremost of those who can help us to think differently. Of course artistic integrity, honesty and truthfulness to experience are crucial in rediscovering the tongues in the trees, making space in our culture for an animist sensibility. Here I think though, there are certain critical concepts that are used to stop us thinking differently. The concept of anthropomorphism of presenting non-humans illegitimately as more like humans than they really are has a major role here. It's covert assumption is usually the Cartesian one that mentalistic qualities are confined to the human and that no mentalistic terms can properly be used for the non-human.

A good example was the recent review of the film on the Emperor penguins, The March of the Penguins. Many critics took particular exception to the intentional description in that movie, to the idea that the Emperor penguins could be said to love one another for example, despite their incredible sacrifices. In terms of the cluster - I was brought on Wittgenstein myself so I tend to think in terms some would think of as behaviourist. In terms of the cluster of behaviourial criteria for love, it seems to me that the application of the term to the penguins was very well-warranted, being willing to suffer in a major way for the other, for example. So maybe they didn't have permanence; that strikes me as a high redefinition of love as lasting forever. I think that would rule out most human loves.

Of course this charge of anthropomorphism I think also completely begs the question on non-human minds. It's a wholly-abused concept, one used uncritically and carelessly. If you're not prepared to do the hard work involved in using it, I think you should drop the term completely; stop hiding behind that wall of Greek and try saying what you mean in simple, direct language. If then the thesis is to be stated as: this film or book presents non-humans as much more like humans than they really are, be prepared then to be asked, In what respect? If the reply is: Only humans can have minds or the capacity to love, be prepared to defend this crude and dubious claim.

Otherwise, my advice would be, free up your mind and make your own contributions to the project of disrupting reductionism and mechanism. Help us re-imagine the world in richer terms that will allow us to see ourselves as in dialogue with and limited by other species' needs, and other kinds of minds.

The struggle to think differently, the re-make reductionist culture, is a basic survival project in our present context - and I hope you'll join it.

Alan Saunders: Val Plumwood from the Australian National University speaking at last year's Melbourne Writers' Festival, and that talk was part of the History of Philosophy in Australasia Project, conducted by Monash University.