[10] The Fight for the Forests (1973), co-authored with the philosopher Richard Sylvan, Plumwood's second husband, was described in 2014 as the most comprehensive analysis of Australian forestry to date.

[13] Plumwood was born Val Morell to parents whose home was a shack with walls made of hessian sacks dipped in cement.

After obtaining a land grant, her parents had set up home in the Terrey Hills, near the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, north of Sydney.

[14] The poultry farm failed, and when she was ten the family moved to Collaroy, another northern Sydney suburb, where her father found work in the civil service.

[20] They spent time travelling in the Middle East and UK, which included living near a beech forest in Scotland for a year.

[17] Returning to Australia, they became active in movements to preserve biodiversity and halt deforestation, and helped establish the trans-discipline known as ecological humanities.

[21] Commencing in 1975 the couple spent several years building their home near Plumwood Mountain on the coast, 75 km from Canberra, an octagonal stone house on a 120-hectare clearing in a rainforest.

She was found dead on 1 March 2008 in the house she had built with Sylvan; she is believed to have died the previous day, after suffering a stroke.

[5][23] Plumwood's major theoretical works are her Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and her Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002).

[9] She critiqued what she called "the standpoint of mastery", a set of views of the self and its relationship to the other associated with sexism, racism, capitalism, colonialism, and the domination of nature.

This set of views, she argued, involves "seeing the other as radically separate and inferior, the background to the self as foreground, as one whose existence is secondary, derivative or peripheral to that of the self or center, and whose agency is denied or minimized.

Instead, she proposed a view that recognises and grounds ethical responsibility in the continuities and divisions between subject and object, and between people and the environment.

When I pulled my canoe over in driving rain to a rock outcrop rising out of the swamp for a hasty, sodden lunch, I experienced the unfamiliar sensation of being watched.

Having never been one for timidity, in philosophy or in life, I decided, rather than return defeated to my sticky caravan, to explore a clear, deep channel closer to the river I had travelled along the previous day.

I had not gone more than five or ten minutes back down the channel when, rounding a bend, I saw ahead of me in midstream what looked like a floating stick – one I did not recall passing on my way up.

Despite severe injuries – her left leg was exposed to the bone, and she found later that she had contracted melioidosis – she began walking, then crawling, the three kilometres to the ranger station.

Of course we know the walled-moated castle will fall in the end but we try to hold off the siege as long as possible while seeking always more and better siege-resisting technology that will enable us to remain self-enclosed.

Any attempt by others at sharing is regarded as an outrage, an injustice, that must be resisted to the hilt (consider our reaction to the overfamiliar gatecrashers at our high-class feast—mosquitoes, leeches, ticks.