Plumwood, Property, Selfhood and Sustainability

In her final book, Environmental Culture as well as elsewhere, Val Plumwood advances the view that sustainability should properly be seen as emergent from an ecofeminist partnership ethic of nourishment and support between humans and nonhuman nature, and that such an ethic must replace the characteristic institutional structures and dominant conceptions of rationality found in capitalist modernity. In making this case, Plumwood impressively charts the impact and significance of the expansionist, exclusionary models of the disembodied but appropriative self found in Cartesian and Lockean thought along with the impact of private property doctrines derived from this source. However, whilst making reference to ecosocialist alternatives at the broader political level, Plumwood offers no systematic account of property that might dovetail with her wider philosophical concerns. In this paper I attempt to generate the start of such an account, drawing on Plumwood's own canon and bringing it into relationship with (1) reflections on ideas of belonging and culture drawn from a range of thinkers including Erazim Kohák, Erich Fromm, and William James, and (2) the contemporary debate over the relationship between green political thought and the liberal democratic tradition.