Val Plumwood and Lazozi in the Age of Anthropocene

Abstract

In the age of globalization, the global climate change is unprecedented and extraordinary, forcing us to rethink our place in the world. In correlating human-induced climate change with the concept of the Anthropocene, scholars caution us to look at the environment of the world in a different and more urgent perspective. In this paper, the author tries to analyzes Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist philosophy in the context of the Chinese philosophy of nonduality of male versus female and human versus nature. In Plumwood’s view, what lies behind Western dualistic hyper-separation of man and nature is the concept of human-centeredness, or the anthropocentric way of acting, which treats animals and nature as property and inexhaustible, and this anthropocentric, rather than ecocentric way of behavior, becomes the real focus of modern environmental crisis. Val Pumwood’s analysis shares in many ways with the traditional Chinese philosophy where the use of pronouns is quite gender indiscriminate and the livings beings and nature coexist harmoniously, which may give us another perspective of looking at modern environmental crisis.