Abstract
There are several respects in which the dominant cultural paradigm of modern civilization can be described as life-denying. Ecofeminist analysis reformulates the environmental crisis as an expression of human/nature dualism, a key part of the network of culture/nature, spirit/matter, mind/body and reason/nature dualisms of Western culture, which distort and hyper-separate both sides of what they split apart. A focus on human/nature dualism provides a fuller, more integrated and coherent conception of the environmental problematic, broadening a narrow focus on non-human and wilderness issues to represent more closely the full range of issues and concerns in real-life environmental struggles. The environmental problematic is double-sided because denial of our own embodiment, animality, and ecological vulnerability is the other side of our instrumentalization and devaluation of the natural order. Surviving the environmental crisis thus presents the dominant culture with two historic projects of cultural transformation: the task of situating the human in ecological terms and the task of situating the more-than-human in ethical and cultural terms. The first task especially pertains to our contemporary dangerous state of ecological denial.
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Notes
- 1.
On bio-information, see Alfred W. Crosby. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 2.
Although these can have a role to play in limited contexts.
- 3.
The mindset that concern with the effect of environmental degradation on humans is ‘shallow’ and peripheral has been rightly rejected by writers such as Andrew Dobson, who have unfortunately gone on to see this as a reason for rejecting the entire critique of anthropocentrism along with it. See Dobson, Andrew. 1990. Green Political Thought. London: Routledge.
- 4.
Another problematic aspect is the insistence of deep ecology on a contextually insensitive prioritizing of non-human versus human issues.
- 5.
The final sentence of this conference paper reads: So I will be much looking forward, during this conference, to learning more about the outlook of my hosts, Korean people and Korean culture.
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Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.
———. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1975. New Woman New Earth. Minneapolis, MN: Seabury.
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This chapter was written as a conference paper that Val Plumwood delivered at the ‘World Life-Culture Forum: The Transformation of the 21st Century and Life-Culture Sallim’ held in Suwon in South Korea from 18 to 21 December 2003, under the auspices of the Kyonggi Cultural Foundation and the World Life-Culture Institute. It is printed here with kind permission from the Val Plumwood archive at the Australian National University and her literary executors, and was not intended by Plumwood to be a final draft. Some of her handwritten notes on the paper have been included in the text. Others, which were deemed by the editors as prompts to her oration, have not been included, but might have suggested further directions in which she wished to develop the work.
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Plumwood, V. (2018). Ecofeminist Analysis and the Culture of Ecological Denial. In: Stevens, L., Tait, P., Varney, D. (eds) Feminist Ecologies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64385-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64385-4_6
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