Val Plumwood

Val Plumwood was an eminent environmental philosopher and activist who was prominent in the development of radical ecophilosophy from the early 1970s until her death in 2008. Her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1992) has become a classic. In 1985 she was attacked by a crocodile while kayaking alone in the Kakadu national park in the Northern Territory. She was death rolled three times before being released from the crocodile’s jaws. She crawled for hours through swamp with appalling injuries before being rescued. The experience made her well placed to write about cultural responses to death and predation. The first section of The Eye of the Crocodile consists of chapters intended for a book on crocodiles that remained unfinished at the time of Val’s death. The remaining chapters are previously published papers brought together to form an overview of Val’s ideas on death, predation and nature.

The Eye of the Crocodile

Laurence Favre

 If the framework of normality was true, the lack of it could only be explained if this experience of being prey was an illusion, was a dream or nightmare. But if it wasn't, I had to face the possibility that the lack of fit was there because both I and the culture that shaped my consciousness were wrong, profoundly wrong things, but especially about human embodiment, animality and the meaning of human life.

The illusion revealed by the crocodile encounter was of a different, more philosophical kind, about the meaning of everyday experience. But in the same way it revealed that it was possible for people -as individuals, groups, perhaps whole cultures that subscribe to a particular dominant story-to be completely and systematically wrong about quite simple and basic thingsour relationship to food, to one another, the intertwining of life and death, the fleshly, embodied character of human existence-and be quite unaware of it. 

Inferior orders of humanity, such as women, slaves and ethnic Others (so-called 'barbarians'), partake of this lower sphere to a greater degree, through their supposedly lesser participation in reason and greater participation in lower 'animal' elements such as embodiment and emotionality. 

The Eye of the Crocodile quotes

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