What do you think?
Rate this book
The Eye of the Crocodile
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.
99 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
15 people are currently reading
471 people want to read
About the author
Val Plumwood
12 books42 followersVal Plumwood, formerly Val Routley, was an Australian ecofeminist intellectual and activist, who was prominent in the development of radical ecosophy from the early 1970s through the remainder of the 20th century.
Plumwood was active in movements to preserve biodiversity and halt deforestation from the 1960s on, and helped establish the trans-discipline known as ecological humanities.
At the time of her death, Plumwood was Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University, and in the past had held positions at North Carolina State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Sydney.
In her 2000 essay "Being Prey", Val described her near-death experience that occurred during a solo canoe trip she took in 1985 in Australia's rugged bush territory. She was alone on the river and saw what appeared to be a "floating stick" that she soon realized was a crocodile. Before she could get ashore the crocodile attacked her canoe and in her attempt to leap ashore to avoid being capsized, Val was seized by the crocodile. The essay describes the "death rolls" the croc put her through several times, though miraculously she escaped to crawl nearly two miles to a rescue point. From this experience, Val gained a perspective that humans are part of the food chain as well, and that our culture's human-centric view is disconnected from the reality that we also are food for animals.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_Plum...)
Plumwood was active in movements to preserve biodiversity and halt deforestation from the 1960s on, and helped establish the trans-discipline known as ecological humanities.
At the time of her death, Plumwood was Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University, and in the past had held positions at North Carolina State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Sydney.
In her 2000 essay "Being Prey", Val described her near-death experience that occurred during a solo canoe trip she took in 1985 in Australia's rugged bush territory. She was alone on the river and saw what appeared to be a "floating stick" that she soon realized was a crocodile. Before she could get ashore the crocodile attacked her canoe and in her attempt to leap ashore to avoid being capsized, Val was seized by the crocodile. The essay describes the "death rolls" the croc put her through several times, though miraculously she escaped to crawl nearly two miles to a rescue point. From this experience, Val gained a perspective that humans are part of the food chain as well, and that our culture's human-centric view is disconnected from the reality that we also are food for animals.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_Plum...)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
February 23, 2024
ugly cover sexy book
June 8, 2015
In February 1985, Val Plumwood was having a lovely time canoeing by herself in Australia’s Kakadu National Park. The ranger had assured her that the saltwater crocodiles, notorious man-eaters, never attacked canoes. It was a perfect day, gliding across the water in a beautiful land, no worries.
She was a scholar and writer who focused on feminism and environmental philosophy. The Earth Crisis was pounding the planet, and it was obvious to eco-thinkers that this was caused by a severely dysfunctional philosophy. Her book, The Eye of the Crocodile, is a fascinating voyage into the realm of ethics, values, and beliefs.
Plumwood understood that the ancient culture of the Aborigines was the opposite of insane, and she had tremendous respect for it. It presented a time-proven example of an ethic that had enabled a healthy and stable way of life for more than 12,000 years. Australia was blessed with a bipolar climate that often swung between drought and deluge, making low-tech agriculture impractical. The land escaped the curse of cities until you-know-who washed up on shore. (As her canoe gently drifted, a floating stick slowly moved closer.)
Plumwood grew up in a rural area. She was home schooled, and enjoyed a fairy tale childhood outdoors, delighted by the “sensuous richness” of the forest. She was unlike most of her generation, because “I acquired an unquenchable thirst for life, for the wisdom of the land.” Thus, her appreciation of the Aboriginal culture was not merely intellectual — it was real and deep. Unlike most of her generation, she enjoyed a spiritual connection to the land. (The floating stick had two beautiful eyes.)
The stick with two eyes was a crocodile, nearly as big as the canoe, and it was five minutes to lunchtime. Suddenly, the reptile began ramming her canoe. She rushed toward shore, but the crocodile leaped and grabbed her between the legs. Three times it pulled her underwater, trying to drown her. Miraculously, she managed to escape, severely injured, and survived.
It was a mind-blowing life changing experience. Intellectually, she had understood food chains, predators, and prey. But this was the first time in her life that she was nothing more than a big juicy meatball — impossible! She was far more than food! The crocodile strongly disagreed. Its sharp teeth drove home the message that she was not outside of nature. She was a part of the ecosystem, an animal, and nourishing meat — no more significant than a moth or mouse.
She wrote, “In the vivid intensity of those last moments, when great, toothed jaws descend upon you, it can hit you like a thunderclap that you were completely wrong about it all — not only about what your own personal life meant, but about what life and death themselves actually mean.”
She was blindsided by the realization that an entire highly educated civilization could be wrong about subjects so basic — animality, food, and the dance of life and death. The crocodile painfully drove home the point that the entire modern culture was living in a fantasy. Our highly contagious culture was ravaging the planet, and we didn’t understand why. Each new generation was trained to live and think like imperial space aliens.
Plumwood was educated by the space alien culture, but the crocodile was a powerful teacher from the real world, the ecosystem. Darwin revealed that humans are animals, but this essential truth harmlessly bounced off a long tradition of human supremacist illusions. It was easy to see that those who were demolishing the planet were radicalized space aliens who believed that human society was completely outside of nature, and far above it.
The Aboriginal people inhabited the real world. They were wild two-legged animals who had learned the wisdom of voluntary self-restraint. For them, the entire land was alive, intelligent, and sacred; even the plants, streams, and rocks — everything. Nobody owned it. Mindfully inhabiting a sacred place required a profound sense of respect.
Space aliens drove them crazy. Colonists in spandex jogged mindlessly across sacred land, listening to electronic pop music. Reverence was absent. They did not belong to the land, and were unaware of its incredible power. Some of the traditional folks wanted to ban these disrespectful intrusions. The colonial era had been a disaster.
The colonial worldview had many layers of hierarchy. At the summit were the elites. Below them were women, peasants, slaves, and the colonized. Beneath the humans were animals. Some critters, like dogs, cats, and horses, had special status. If they obediently submitted to human domination, they were not meat. Below them were meat class animals that had no consciousness. Especially despised were man-eating animals, and critters that molested human property. They were mercilessly exterminated. Beneath animals was the plant world, a far older realm.
The foundation of the dominant worldview was human supremacy, and this mode of thinking had been the driving force behind a growing tsunami of ecological devastation. Plumwood saw two alternatives to supremacist thinking.
(1) Ecological animalism was the realm of crocodiles, Aborigines, our wild ancestors, and the rest of the natural world. All life was food, including humans. In an ecosystem, “we live the other’s death, die the other’s life.” Our bodies belonged to the ecosystem, not to ourselves. The spirits of animate and inanimate beings had equal significance.
(2) Ontological veganism did not believe in using animals or eating animal foods. This ethic was an offshoot of human supremacy. It did not condemn the dogma of human/nature dualism. It denied that humans were meat, despite the fact that a number of large predators have been dining on us for countless centuries. It believed that animals were worthy of moral consideration, but the plant people were not.
Ontological veganism was queasy about predation; it would prefer a predator-free world. It believed that human hunting was cultural (animal abuse), while animal predation was natural (instinctive). But every newborn human has a body carefully designed by evolution for a life of hunting. We are capable of smoothly running for hours on two legs, and we have hands, arms, and shoulders that are fine-tuned for accurately throwing projectiles in a forceful manner. What you see in the mirror is a hunter.
Plumwood was a vegetarian because she believed that the production of meat on factory farms was ethically wrong. She had no problems with Aborigines hunting for dinner. All of the world’s sustainable wild cultures consumed animal foods. She was well aware that her plant food diet was not ecologically harmless.
Cultures rooted in human supremacy have achieved remarkable success at rubbishing entire ecosystems. This is not about flawed genes. It’s about a bunch of screwy ideas that we’ve been taught. Sustainable cultures perceive reality in a radically different way. Luckily, software is editable. Plumwood recommended that creative communicators bring new ideas to our dying culture; stories that help us find our way home to the family of life. This is an enormous challenge.
Plumwood also wrote an essay, Prey to a Crocodile, which is not in the book. It provides a detailed discussion of the attack. The rangers wanted to go back the next day, and kill the crocodile. She strongly objected. The crocodile had done nothing wrong. Predation is normal and healthy. She had been an intruder.
A free PDF of the entire contents of The Eye of the Crocodile is available online. It’s just 111 pages. A paperback edition is still in print.
She was a scholar and writer who focused on feminism and environmental philosophy. The Earth Crisis was pounding the planet, and it was obvious to eco-thinkers that this was caused by a severely dysfunctional philosophy. Her book, The Eye of the Crocodile, is a fascinating voyage into the realm of ethics, values, and beliefs.
Plumwood understood that the ancient culture of the Aborigines was the opposite of insane, and she had tremendous respect for it. It presented a time-proven example of an ethic that had enabled a healthy and stable way of life for more than 12,000 years. Australia was blessed with a bipolar climate that often swung between drought and deluge, making low-tech agriculture impractical. The land escaped the curse of cities until you-know-who washed up on shore. (As her canoe gently drifted, a floating stick slowly moved closer.)
Plumwood grew up in a rural area. She was home schooled, and enjoyed a fairy tale childhood outdoors, delighted by the “sensuous richness” of the forest. She was unlike most of her generation, because “I acquired an unquenchable thirst for life, for the wisdom of the land.” Thus, her appreciation of the Aboriginal culture was not merely intellectual — it was real and deep. Unlike most of her generation, she enjoyed a spiritual connection to the land. (The floating stick had two beautiful eyes.)
The stick with two eyes was a crocodile, nearly as big as the canoe, and it was five minutes to lunchtime. Suddenly, the reptile began ramming her canoe. She rushed toward shore, but the crocodile leaped and grabbed her between the legs. Three times it pulled her underwater, trying to drown her. Miraculously, she managed to escape, severely injured, and survived.
It was a mind-blowing life changing experience. Intellectually, she had understood food chains, predators, and prey. But this was the first time in her life that she was nothing more than a big juicy meatball — impossible! She was far more than food! The crocodile strongly disagreed. Its sharp teeth drove home the message that she was not outside of nature. She was a part of the ecosystem, an animal, and nourishing meat — no more significant than a moth or mouse.
She wrote, “In the vivid intensity of those last moments, when great, toothed jaws descend upon you, it can hit you like a thunderclap that you were completely wrong about it all — not only about what your own personal life meant, but about what life and death themselves actually mean.”
She was blindsided by the realization that an entire highly educated civilization could be wrong about subjects so basic — animality, food, and the dance of life and death. The crocodile painfully drove home the point that the entire modern culture was living in a fantasy. Our highly contagious culture was ravaging the planet, and we didn’t understand why. Each new generation was trained to live and think like imperial space aliens.
Plumwood was educated by the space alien culture, but the crocodile was a powerful teacher from the real world, the ecosystem. Darwin revealed that humans are animals, but this essential truth harmlessly bounced off a long tradition of human supremacist illusions. It was easy to see that those who were demolishing the planet were radicalized space aliens who believed that human society was completely outside of nature, and far above it.
The Aboriginal people inhabited the real world. They were wild two-legged animals who had learned the wisdom of voluntary self-restraint. For them, the entire land was alive, intelligent, and sacred; even the plants, streams, and rocks — everything. Nobody owned it. Mindfully inhabiting a sacred place required a profound sense of respect.
Space aliens drove them crazy. Colonists in spandex jogged mindlessly across sacred land, listening to electronic pop music. Reverence was absent. They did not belong to the land, and were unaware of its incredible power. Some of the traditional folks wanted to ban these disrespectful intrusions. The colonial era had been a disaster.
The colonial worldview had many layers of hierarchy. At the summit were the elites. Below them were women, peasants, slaves, and the colonized. Beneath the humans were animals. Some critters, like dogs, cats, and horses, had special status. If they obediently submitted to human domination, they were not meat. Below them were meat class animals that had no consciousness. Especially despised were man-eating animals, and critters that molested human property. They were mercilessly exterminated. Beneath animals was the plant world, a far older realm.
The foundation of the dominant worldview was human supremacy, and this mode of thinking had been the driving force behind a growing tsunami of ecological devastation. Plumwood saw two alternatives to supremacist thinking.
(1) Ecological animalism was the realm of crocodiles, Aborigines, our wild ancestors, and the rest of the natural world. All life was food, including humans. In an ecosystem, “we live the other’s death, die the other’s life.” Our bodies belonged to the ecosystem, not to ourselves. The spirits of animate and inanimate beings had equal significance.
(2) Ontological veganism did not believe in using animals or eating animal foods. This ethic was an offshoot of human supremacy. It did not condemn the dogma of human/nature dualism. It denied that humans were meat, despite the fact that a number of large predators have been dining on us for countless centuries. It believed that animals were worthy of moral consideration, but the plant people were not.
Ontological veganism was queasy about predation; it would prefer a predator-free world. It believed that human hunting was cultural (animal abuse), while animal predation was natural (instinctive). But every newborn human has a body carefully designed by evolution for a life of hunting. We are capable of smoothly running for hours on two legs, and we have hands, arms, and shoulders that are fine-tuned for accurately throwing projectiles in a forceful manner. What you see in the mirror is a hunter.
Plumwood was a vegetarian because she believed that the production of meat on factory farms was ethically wrong. She had no problems with Aborigines hunting for dinner. All of the world’s sustainable wild cultures consumed animal foods. She was well aware that her plant food diet was not ecologically harmless.
Cultures rooted in human supremacy have achieved remarkable success at rubbishing entire ecosystems. This is not about flawed genes. It’s about a bunch of screwy ideas that we’ve been taught. Sustainable cultures perceive reality in a radically different way. Luckily, software is editable. Plumwood recommended that creative communicators bring new ideas to our dying culture; stories that help us find our way home to the family of life. This is an enormous challenge.
Plumwood also wrote an essay, Prey to a Crocodile, which is not in the book. It provides a detailed discussion of the attack. The rangers wanted to go back the next day, and kill the crocodile. She strongly objected. The crocodile had done nothing wrong. Predation is normal and healthy. She had been an intruder.
A free PDF of the entire contents of The Eye of the Crocodile is available online. It’s just 111 pages. A paperback edition is still in print.
January 8, 2022
I discovered this book on the Knowing Animals podcast. I was so drawn to it because Val Plumwood, an established academic at the time, was kayaking in a lake, when she was attacked by a crocodile and death rolled three times. This experience made Plumwood well-equipped to discuss predation, food and death in her later works.
One of the more controversial points she makes in the book, is that humans are food (for predators) though we try to deny it. We eat other animals, but we cannot be eaten. We justify this because we have minds and are rational, and non-human animals are not. But they do have minds, intentions, feelings and culture, just like us.
This refusal to believe that we are food, can be evidenced in our burial processes. We are buried in a coffin so that we cannot go back into the earth and be eaten by others. We do not allow our decaying bodies to nourish the land and worms that gave us life in the first place.
In the second section of her book she describes, Birubi, an orphaned wombat she adopted, who grew to live both inside and outside her home, in the wild, at his choosing, for twelve years before his death. He knew how to open the sliding doors into her kitchen, he loved to play and fall asleep in front of the fire, and he would demand to sleep next to her. This reminded me of my relationship with my companion animal, Lola, and that, although we don’t share the same language, we communicate. That humans and non-human animals can create intricate and meaning relationships with one another. She then discusses the movie, ‘Babe’ and how Babe the pig, shows that non-human animals are communicative beings. To call them “meat” is to deny them this status and enables us to eat them. Instead indigenous cultures don’t deny animals abilities, cognition or feelings, in order to eat them. They recognise the conflict.
Though I don’t agree with her postulation that we can respectfully use animals for food, I do take home the above points. It’s an eye-opening book, written by an author well placed to discuss the idea of being food, death and predation!
One of the more controversial points she makes in the book, is that humans are food (for predators) though we try to deny it. We eat other animals, but we cannot be eaten. We justify this because we have minds and are rational, and non-human animals are not. But they do have minds, intentions, feelings and culture, just like us.
This refusal to believe that we are food, can be evidenced in our burial processes. We are buried in a coffin so that we cannot go back into the earth and be eaten by others. We do not allow our decaying bodies to nourish the land and worms that gave us life in the first place.
In the second section of her book she describes, Birubi, an orphaned wombat she adopted, who grew to live both inside and outside her home, in the wild, at his choosing, for twelve years before his death. He knew how to open the sliding doors into her kitchen, he loved to play and fall asleep in front of the fire, and he would demand to sleep next to her. This reminded me of my relationship with my companion animal, Lola, and that, although we don’t share the same language, we communicate. That humans and non-human animals can create intricate and meaning relationships with one another. She then discusses the movie, ‘Babe’ and how Babe the pig, shows that non-human animals are communicative beings. To call them “meat” is to deny them this status and enables us to eat them. Instead indigenous cultures don’t deny animals abilities, cognition or feelings, in order to eat them. They recognise the conflict.
Though I don’t agree with her postulation that we can respectfully use animals for food, I do take home the above points. It’s an eye-opening book, written by an author well placed to discuss the idea of being food, death and predation!
September 26, 2025
Here's where I try to prove that my interest in stories of animal "attacks" on humans is not entirely morbid.
I don't know why I particularly found myself drawn to that this year, but I learned about Val Plumwood's story of survival after being death-rolled by a saltwater crocodile three times in Australia—and of her refusal to hunt down the croc, and what the encounter taught her.
The Eye of the Crocodile (free to download at ANU Press) was meant to be a book about crocodiles, but unfortunately remained unfinished by the time of Plumwood's death. The first three essays were the first three chapters intended for this book. The first one is the one that most directly addresses the attack, but it's not a detailed account of it; if you're looking for that, you can read her essay "Prey to a crocodile".
Following that is Plumwood's touching eulogy to a wombat she cared after. Then, there's a two-part essay that forces you to see the children's movie Babe under a new light, that of the "speaking meat". The third and final section proposes a better integration between humans and animals, and our place in ecology, confronting ontological veganism with her Indigenous-inspired theory of ecological animalism, and making us rethink our approaches to food, death, existentialism, utilitarianism and spirituality through the question: who gets to be food?
The writing was a bit academically dense and took me some time to finish, but... oof. So many good, inspiring, challenging ideas. While I still find the concept of death and loss of my conscious self scary, I feel more at peace with the idea of what we "leave behind", what our mark is, where we go after. What we can leave is everything, so that it lives on in every living thing, and on, and on.
I don't know why I particularly found myself drawn to that this year, but I learned about Val Plumwood's story of survival after being death-rolled by a saltwater crocodile three times in Australia—and of her refusal to hunt down the croc, and what the encounter taught her.
The Eye of the Crocodile (free to download at ANU Press) was meant to be a book about crocodiles, but unfortunately remained unfinished by the time of Plumwood's death. The first three essays were the first three chapters intended for this book. The first one is the one that most directly addresses the attack, but it's not a detailed account of it; if you're looking for that, you can read her essay "Prey to a crocodile".
Following that is Plumwood's touching eulogy to a wombat she cared after. Then, there's a two-part essay that forces you to see the children's movie Babe under a new light, that of the "speaking meat". The third and final section proposes a better integration between humans and animals, and our place in ecology, confronting ontological veganism with her Indigenous-inspired theory of ecological animalism, and making us rethink our approaches to food, death, existentialism, utilitarianism and spirituality through the question: who gets to be food?
The writing was a bit academically dense and took me some time to finish, but... oof. So many good, inspiring, challenging ideas. While I still find the concept of death and loss of my conscious self scary, I feel more at peace with the idea of what we "leave behind", what our mark is, where we go after. What we can leave is everything, so that it lives on in every living thing, and on, and on.
December 22, 2024
Visionary
Must-read!
Must-read!
November 23, 2025
wooooow - ‘it is not a minor or inessential feature of our human nature that we are food’
April 18, 2016
Awesome book. Really enjoyed reading a feminist's view on topics such as vegetarianism and veganism. She went through a near-death experience with a crocodile, and thankfully she shared her reflections with us, on how we have distanced ourselves from this "other" world which is the real world, a world in which not only animals are food, but we humans are food too. I guess facing a crocodile and surviving three attacks gives her all the credentials she needs to talk about these things!
June 7, 2024
A partir de una experiencia que le sucedió en 1985 mientras paseaba en canoa por Kakadu, Australia, Val Plumwood –activista ecofeminista– sobrevivió inexplicablemente a un ataque de cocodrilo de agua salada, uno de los depredadores más temibles del planeta. Este episodio la hizo reflexionar sobre su propio rol en la cadena alimentaria.
A partir de aquí, entonces, hace una crítica a cómo la sociedad occidental se ha desvinculado de la naturaleza y ha profundizado en la construcción cartesiana de dualidades opuestas tales como naturaleza/cultura, animal/humano, etc. En esta crítica toca temas como la muerte y el veganismo, el mundo y la visión indígena y el ecofeminismo.
Val Plumwood es una de las autoras ecofeministas de esas que deben ser leídas y esta es una obra póstuma que, paradójicamente, es la primera traducida al español, sin duda un acierto de Editorial Cactus.
Consíguelo aquí -> https://www.buscalibre.cl/libro-el-oj...
A partir de aquí, entonces, hace una crítica a cómo la sociedad occidental se ha desvinculado de la naturaleza y ha profundizado en la construcción cartesiana de dualidades opuestas tales como naturaleza/cultura, animal/humano, etc. En esta crítica toca temas como la muerte y el veganismo, el mundo y la visión indígena y el ecofeminismo.
Val Plumwood es una de las autoras ecofeministas de esas que deben ser leídas y esta es una obra póstuma que, paradójicamente, es la primera traducida al español, sin duda un acierto de Editorial Cactus.
Consíguelo aquí -> https://www.buscalibre.cl/libro-el-oj...
November 17, 2024
This book *really* challenged not the conclusion of my veganism, but the way I've been getting to that conclusion. While I have some reservations about her idea of reciprocality and everything being food, I admit that I agree the Singerian method of advocating animal rights is misguided. I do wish Plumwood addressed a) conditions of necessity (i.e. the choice to consume animals when we do not need to do so) and b) degrees of harm. The second point is especially difficult on her account since she denies the methodology of granting moral consideration based on consciousness. But surely we can say that plants feel while also saying that animals feel *more*, and draw some conclusions about what we ought to do when choosing between different foods (even while accepting her observation that everything is food, including us).
In any case, I haven't read anything in a long time that changed how I think so much, and I think Plumwood writes with radical perspective I could use more of. This book is an absolute gift.
In any case, I haven't read anything in a long time that changed how I think so much, and I think Plumwood writes with radical perspective I could use more of. This book is an absolute gift.
May 1, 2025
Recomiendo este libro a absolutamente cualquier persona, sea vegetariana, vegana o no tenga ninguna restricción alimentaria. Da un vuelco total a la autopercepción tanto individual como colectiva, exponiendo a nuevas realidades y a la relación que el grupo dominante tiene con ellas (sobre todo si, como yo, eres un hombre blanco cis del primer mundo), sin, por suerte, ser necesario enfrentarse a la muerte segura para replantear las concepciones asumidas desde el nacimiento. Este libro me hace replantearme mi relación con lo que como, con mis mascotas e incluso con otras personas, sin caer en absolutismos moralistas y universalistas, sino poniendo en el foco lo que se puede hacer, tanto personal como socialmente, por mejorar nuestra relación con el ecosistema a nuestro alrededor.
Empecé a leer este libro para inspirarme en algunos pasajes y secciones de la novela en la que estoy trabajando, y lo termino con una perspectiva mucho más ampliada de lo que esperaba al empezar.
Empecé a leer este libro para inspirarme en algunos pasajes y secciones de la novela en la que estoy trabajando, y lo termino con una perspectiva mucho más ampliada de lo que esperaba al empezar.
February 19, 2025
Ce livre est fait de plusieurs textes rédigés en différentes occasions, tous reliés à l’expérience de mort imminente vécue par l’autrice lorsqu’elle se fait attaquer par une crocodile. Le sentiment d’injustice qu’elle ressent lorsqu’elle comprend que l’animal veut la manger lui a permis d’approfondir ses positions philosophiques, sur l’environnement, le rapport aux animaux, la désuétude du cartésianisme, la chaîne alimentaire, les contradictions du véganisme ontologique, la mort humaine, …
Les différents chapitres de recueil prennent des tons très différents, des récits romanesques aux analyses philosophiques. C’est appréciable et cette illustration presque romancées des analyses rend la lecture limpide et facile.
Quelques paragraphes se ressemblent très fort ici et là mais toujours dans des contextes différents.
Les différents chapitres de recueil prennent des tons très différents, des récits romanesques aux analyses philosophiques. C’est appréciable et cette illustration presque romancées des analyses rend la lecture limpide et facile.
Quelques paragraphes se ressemblent très fort ici et là mais toujours dans des contextes différents.
October 2, 2024
Val Plumwood is known both for the story she told of being attacked by a salt-water crocodile and her substantial body of feminist writing. This is a collection of her writings that she was composing at the time of her death many years later.
Her perspective is dramatically informed by her experience as prey, and she write engagingly about it. Other essays in the book are gaggingly abstruse, with a Flesch grade level score of 35! I can only hope that, had she lived, she would have revised it down to a simpler college graduate level at least.
Her perspective is dramatically informed by her experience as prey, and she write engagingly about it. Other essays in the book are gaggingly abstruse, with a Flesch grade level score of 35! I can only hope that, had she lived, she would have revised it down to a simpler college graduate level at least.
November 27, 2025
This was an interesting collection of long essays on human relationship with nature, humans as food for animals, animal agency, and vegetarianism in general. Almost getting eaten by a crocodile will turn anyone philosophical but according to the introduction, Plumwood already had some of these ideas. I appreciate the context provided in the introduction: the loss of both her children and the end of the marriage that led to her motherhood makes me wish that Plumwood found some peace and happiness later in her life.
October 14, 2024
An eye-opening and enjoyable read. I've never(?) made it through a whole academic philosophy book and it was fascinating to read one published post-humorously. This book has a lot to say about death, food, humanity, morality, predation, and the relationship between humanity and nature!
In short, it argues that humans should not think of themselves as separate or superior to nature, but instead as a part of the food chain and cycle of life.
In short, it argues that humans should not think of themselves as separate or superior to nature, but instead as a part of the food chain and cycle of life.
February 10, 2024
Het woordgebruik en de stijl van Val Plumwood mogen dan al niet zo eenvoudig zijn, de inhoud van wat ze vertelt en argumenteert is zeer overtuigend, logisch en heel bevattelijk.
Jammer dat ze zo weinig gepubliceerd heeft, want ik zou met het allergrootste plezier meer van haar gelezen willen hebben.
Jammer dat ze zo weinig gepubliceerd heeft, want ik zou met het allergrootste plezier meer van haar gelezen willen hebben.
December 8, 2024
Ought to be required reading for any feminist theory or environmental post/humanities course. One of, if not THE most groundbreaking and important critiques of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism.
September 17, 2020
If you are food, what kind of world do you want to live in?
December 26, 2024
Good short read, I guess. I wanted it to be more thought-provoking, given the author’s very unique experiences but it didn’t feel like it was anything new. It was well written and had good descriptions but I really didn’t enjoy it that much. Wouldn’t recommend unless you had to read it.
1.5/5
1.5/5
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews