ABSTRACT
Val Plumwood began her work on environmental philosophy in collaboration with her then husband Richard Routley in the early 1970s when the ecological crisis of the modern West was becoming more obvious. For Plumwood, however, value was too narrow a focus for explanation and activism. Plumwood identified human/nature dualism as a key part of the system of gendered dualisms that have helped to shape Western world-views. For Plumwood, dualism has deeply marked both concepts of nature and concepts of reason. Equally problematic for Plumwood is the sort of environmental ethic that extends moral consideration only to some 'higher' animals on the basis of their similarity to the human in the fashion of some animal rights positions. In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature Plumwood delineated a position in environmental ethics that, on the one hand, is distinct from the conventional neo-Cartesianism that would extend moral consideration just to conscious beings, and, on the other hand, from deep ecology.
