Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room.

I’ve just started reading philosopher Val Plumwood’s Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, a 2002 follow-up to her 1993 work Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. I’m barely past the introduction and I’m already amazed. It feels like every other sentence or two is a “Holy shit!” moment, where she either puts things into a perspective I’ve never thought of before, or encapsulates ideas that have been rattling around in my own head for quite some time. If Feminism and the Mastery of Nature was an examination of the origins of our current crisis in the foundations of Western thought, this book looks to be an even more detailed look at the path we’ve travelled since, and a proposal as to how to get through and out of the multiple crises we’ve triggered. The latter is a tall order indeed: she’s proposing the re-examination and uprooting of several millennia of ingrained thought and its distortion of our understanding of our relationship with the rest of the living world and the material and energetic cycles that sustain it. Here’s how she outlines the problem in the introduction to Environmental Culture:

The deterioration of the global ecological context of human life demands from our species a clear and adequate response, but we are seemingly immobilised, even though it is clear that at the technological level we already have the means to accomplish the changes needed to live sustainably on and with the earth. The problem is not primarily about more knowledge or technology: it is about developing an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the non-human sphere and our dependency on it, and is able to make good decisions about how we live and impact on the non-human world. For the dominant global cultures of the west, the response to the crisis must be either about democratic cultural change of this kind or it must be about top-down solutions imposed on a supposedly recalcitrant citizenry….

You can read the Introduction and some of the first chapter here.

Having enjoyed Feminism and the Mastery of Nature I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this book.