Introduction: In Honor of Val Plumwood, 1939–2008

Credit: Kumi Kato

On the memorial site honoring Val Plumwood (valplumwood.com), she is described as an environmentalist-philosopher-feminist-author-activist-botanist-ecologist-naturalist-friend-conservationist-survivor-musician. However, those of us who had the pleasure to know her both professionally and personally will immediately realize that these words cannot capture the force that was Val. Val wrote, spoke, and acted upon what she believed with a vigor that was and still is immediately touching. Her theoretical work focused primarily upon looking at how anthropocentrism rests upon the problematic assumption that there is a significant moral division between humans and the rest of nature, and her work provided a systematic analysis of how this division has been historically constructed in the dominant western tradition. She argued that a fundamental reason/nature dualism underlies this tradition, in which whatever is associated with nature (including colonized people, indigenous people, and women in general) is seen as inferior to whatever is associated with reason—dominant white men. Hence she argued that issues of social justice for humans and nonhumans are conceptually and historically intertwined.

Plumwood is the author of three books: The Fight for Forests (1973) with her late husband Richard Routly, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), and Environmental Culture (2002).¹ She also authored over one hundred articles. In her obituary honoring Val,² theorist/activist Freya Mathews says the following, which I believe truly captures Val's integrity and courage both as a theorist and an activist: "Caring little for convention, she unapologetically and energetically lived the life she theorized and never failed to speak out on behalf of nonhuman others who came into her path…. In this way she showed how philosophy could not only diagnose the world's ills but become something more than a charade of words—a way of life." Indeed, Val was truly a force of nature. It is in this spirit that Chris Cuomo and I offer a special issue of Ethics and the Environment in her honor.