Val Plumwood (1939 to 2008) was an Australian environmental philosopher and a founder of ecofeminism, who held that Western culture has split humans off from the rest of nature in a way that harms both. In 1985 she was seized by a saltwater crocodile in Kakadu National Park and survived, and what it taught her, she wrote, is that being food is not a minor or inessential feature of human life: we are animals in a food chain, part of the feast and not spectators of it. Her account of being prey, and of death as a return to the living land, sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on kinship and on what happens to the body when we die.
Who was Val Plumwood? #
She was born Val Morell in 1939, near Sydney, and studied philosophy at the University of Sydney.1 In the 1970s, working at the Australian National University with her then partner Richard Routley, she helped found environmental ethics in Australia, criticising what they called ‘human chauvinism’, the belief that only human beings matter morally.2 In the 1970s she and Routley built a stone house on Plumwood Mountain in New South Wales, and she later took her own name from the mountain and its plumwood trees.
Her best-known book, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), traced how Western thought has set reason against nature and placed women, animals, the body and colonised peoples on the ‘nature’ side, beneath reason. Environmental Culture (2002) carried the argument into the ecological crisis. She died of a stroke in February 2008, aged sixty-eight, and was buried on her own land.1
What happened to her in Kakadu? #
In February 1985, at the start of the wet season, she was canoeing alone where the East Alligator River leaves the stone country of the Arnhem Land plateau. A large saltwater crocodile seized her and pulled her under in a death roll three times. She broke free, climbed out of the river, and was rescued many hours later.3 She first wrote about it in an essay called “Being Prey” (1996), and was still working on a book about it when she died; its finished chapters, with some of her other essays, were published as The Eye of the Crocodile (2012).
What did being hunted by a crocodile teach her? #
That we are food. “It is not a minor or inessential feature of our human existence that we are food: juicy, nourishing bodies.”4 In the moment of being seized, her reaction was disbelief, and an outrage that felt almost moral, as if the crocodile were “utterly wrong to think I could be reduced to food.” Only much later did she turn this round. The illusion, she came to see, had been the other way about. The world of ‘normal experience’ was the illusion, and the world in which she was prey was the reality, or a crucial part of it. Both she and the culture that had shaped her had been “profoundly wrong” about embodiment, animality and the meaning of human life.5
From the eye of the crocodile, the human being stops looking like a spectator of the food chain and becomes part of it. “We are the feast.”6 The idea that humans eat others but are never eaten themselves is, for her, the dominant story about human identity in the West, a story of human ‘hyper-separation’ from nature, and one bound up with how the culture deals with death.7
What is human/nature dualism? #
Her name for the deep split in Western thought between the human, seen as mind and reason, and nature, seen as mindless body. It cuts both ways. Humans are imagined as disembodied and apart from the rest of nature, and nature and animals are imagined as mindless matter, outside ethics and culture. So, she wrote, there are two tasks that have to go together: “situating human life in ecological terms and situating non-human life in ethical terms”.8 Seeing ourselves as animals among animals, and seeing mind and culture in the rest of the living world, are the same healing approached from two sides.
What did she say about eating, death and burial? #
That the animals and plants we eat are more than food, and that we will be food in our turn. “We cannot ignore the fact that all our food is souls,” she wrote; the hard thing is to see others as food and as souls at the same time.9 She was flatly against factory farming, and made the case for what she called Ecological Animalism, “a context-sensitive semi-vegetarian position” that seeks great reductions in meat-eating in the rich world whilst respecting the different needs of different cultures and places.10
On death, she argued that the West offers a false choice. Either the true self is a spirit that leaves the earth for a heaven far away, or death is simply the end, nothing at all. Both, she thought, keep humans apart from the rest of life. The coffin and the concrete slab even stop the body from feeding the worms and the land that fed it. Against both she set the idea of life “in circulation”, so that death becomes “a flowing on into an ecological and ancestral community of origins”.11 She called her own view an “ecological, animist materialism”, in which what follows death is “not no story, but another, continuing story” carried on in the lives of other species.12 Her own burial, in a grave on her land, was made to fit that view.
The Aboriginal peoples of Arnhem Land whose stories she draws on are named in the book, but it says little about how they live, and when it speaks of Indigenous foraging peoples in general it does not say which ones it means.
How does Plumwood’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
On several points, and closely. In Therapeutic Shamanism the body is not just a vehicle we inhabit. It has its own consciousness, intelligence and wisdom, and it is made of the chemical elements, so it is part of the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer. Our bodies are us coming together with the Stone People and, for a while, dancing together; when we die, the body returns to them and the atoms that were part of us carry on their journey.13 Plumwood’s life “in circulation” reaches a similar place from philosophy.
Her refusal of human apartness meets the teaching on the myth of human supremacy and the spell that ‘up is good and down is bad’, which places humans above the other animals and spirit above the earth, and which shapes our language, our religions and our relationship with the natural world.14 Hunter-gatherers lived as one species in a community of species, part of the land rather than its owners.15 Killing was an everyday part of their lives, always done respectfully; most people now get someone else to do the killing for them, and so many have become detached from it and squeamish about it.16 See What is the myth of human supremacy? and What does animism say about killing and eating?
Shamanic practice also lets people meet the experience of being eaten in another way. In a dismembermentDismemberment. A transformation practice in which the Power Animal takes you apart (classically: eats, digests and regurgitates you), reformed and healed. A practice of trust, cleansing and death-and-rebirth. More about this journey a person is eaten, digested and re-formed by an Animal, usually their Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer; the point is not to suffer being eaten but to be absorbed into the Animal, to become part of it, and to come out transformed. Sky burial, in which the body is given to carrion birds, is a variation on it, and as a physical practice it seems likely to be very ancient.17 See What is shamanic initiation, and what part does dismemberment play?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Plumwood’s philosophy stays in this world. It has no shamanic realms, no journeying and no spirits worked with, though she writes about the spirit beings in Aboriginal stories with respect and does not explain them away. Her “continuing story” after death is carried by the body feeding other life and by the stories people tell. In the shamanic view there is more going on. The body returns to the Stone People, but the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer Spirit is outside time and so, in that sense, eternal; the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer, being made of stories, eventually fades; and the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul, like Spirit, always was, is and will be.18 See How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand death and what happens when we die?
She also argued for a position on diet, a semi-vegetarian one, and for collective action. Therapeutic Shamanism keeps the question of what to eat in physical life apart from the work of the Lower-World, and does not tell anyone what to eat.
Is her view of eating animals disputed? #
Plumwood set her view against two others. One was what she called Ontological Veganism, the position that neither humans nor animals should ever be thought of as edible or usable. The other was the argument of the feminist writer Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat. Adams holds that meat depends on making the living animal disappear from view behind the product, an ‘absent referent’, and that any use of animals, for food or anything else, turns them into instruments; on her account, seeing animals as edible at all is what opens the way to their degraded treatment as ‘meat’.19
Plumwood agreed with much of Adams’s account of how the meat industry reduces animals to products. Her reply was that the problem is not being edible, which is true of every living body, but the link between eating and human domination. To rule out all use of animals, in her view, still keeps humans “outside nature”, beyond ecology and beyond the food chain, which is the very dualism she wanted to undo.20
