Many of the ideas that go into her animism had been implicit in her earlier work, but unfortunately no article or essay specifically addresses philosophical animism. My main focus is the philosophical animism she was working with at the time of her death. I begin with a brief account of Val Plumwood's life and thought. We saw before us the intentionality of other creatures-always mysterious, but never mindless-and we experienced ourselves as creatures who are attentive to others and who are participants in the life of the world. This awesome moment was expressive of much of Val's philosophy. We were awed by the connection between Val, the butterfly and the forest, and many of us felt re-inspired to continue her work in the world.
Then it took wing and disappeared into the forest. It stayed there long enough for us to feel that the moment was truly significant. As we stood around the open cardboard coffin a large butterfly flew amongst us and settled on Val's body.
Val died in 2008, and we gave her a green burial at home on her beloved Plumwood Mountain. One of the chief aims was to stimulate and sustain the great humanities' project of imagining and working out “new ways to live with the earth.” 1 Our commitment was to nurture the environmental humanities as an emerging interdisciplinary field that works across the great binaries of western thought, rethreading the fabric of knowledge across arts and sciences, and across dominant and excluded knowledges. I treasured Val Plumwood's life and thought, and during the years when we worked together at the Australian National University in the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (now part of the Fenner School), we became good colleagues as well as friends. I take a country or place based perspective, engaging with life on the inside of the webs and patterns of connection.Īn earlier version of this paper was presented as the Val Plumwood Memorial Lecture at the Minding Animals Conference, held in Newcastle, Australia in July 2009. More specifically, I focus on developing an enlarged account of active listening, considering it as the work participants engage in as they inter-act with other sentient creatures. In the spirit of open-ended encounter, I aim to bring her work into dialogue with some of my Australian Aboriginal teachers. Her beautiful definition of philosophical animism is that it “opens the door to a world in which we can begin to negotiate life membership of an ecological community of kindred beings.” Thus, her animism, like indigenous animisms, was not a doctrine or orthodoxy, but rather a path, a way of life, a mode of encounter.
As I understand her term, she was making connections with animism as a worldview, but rather than mimic or appropriate indigenous animisms she was developing a foundation that could be argued from within western philosophy. At the same time, she was defining herself as a philosophical animist.
Towards the end of her eventful and productive life, Val Plumwood was turning toward Indigenous people and cultures as a way of encountering the lived experience of ideas she was working with theoretically.
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