BEING PREY

Understanding Val Plumwood

500 Word Critical Thinking Essay

Vivienne Elanta 12021131

Ecofeminism S221 April 2003

It is only through the experience of being death- rolled not once, but three times by a crocodile, that Val Plumwood earns the authority to speak on the topic of being prey. Her central argument in this amazing real life story is that “Crocodile predation on humans threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery of the planet in which we are predators but can never ourselves be prey”(p.138). Through such a dualistic vision, we remove ourselves as separate and outside of nature. Furthermore she suggests, in order to claim an ecological identity as humans, we need to heal this “hypersepraration”.

Plumwood suggests that by extending ecology into the human realm and ethics into the more than human realm, this split can be overcome. She believes that we need to include those we eat within the boundaries of our ethical concerns, as well as honouring a reciprocal ethics within the food chain. She says, by not identifying ethics exclusively with human, and ecology solely with non human, creates the possibility of bringing culture and nature, ethics and the non human closer together. In so doing we embrace our place in the world as both culture and nature and begin to acknowledge that “all our food is souls”(p.139).

The curse of dichotomising within the western psyche extends itself into every realm of Plumwood’s story. Not only was she being prey to the crocodile, but also her story became prey to the appropriation and distortion of a veraciously hungry media. Her story, she says, became a masculinist appropriation, turning the crocodile monster into a sadistic rapist, in which society sees the woman as the helpless victim, one who should not be out there in this untamed terrain of danger which only men can handle.

Val Plumwood has given me a better understanding of the importance of story. I agree with her statement that our society is deeply impoverished in the ability to pass on story in an authentic way. This, she says “is part of the emptiness at its core”, which must be filled with ever more material possessions and control. “Being Prey”, has made me think and feel more deeply about this emptiness, which seems to indicate a deep loneliness of spirit and immense fear of life itself. May authentic stories like “Being Prey” facilitate our escape out of this self-imposed exile from nature of a culture, which is still stuck in a master/monster narrative.

Val Plumwood’s story is powerful beyond measure and her encounter with a crocodile, puts her into a position of experiencing the natural world the way it really is. Most of us live in a cocoon, which protects us from ever being prey in nature. Whereas within culture we are always prey to the patriarchal mindset of dichotomies and oppression of women and nature and the appropriation of story, which keeps on affirming the current dominant world view of hyperseparation of culture and nature. It is a gift to the world that Val Plumwood lived to tell herstory, the real story to a world, which desperately needs a new narrative of cultivating a sense of vulnerability and sensitivity to the ecology and to each other.