Written by Dominic Hyde:

“The floral mead – the pearly stream – the goodly grove, however they delight the eye, or ravish the imagination – what are they all? – a worthless waste, until the genius and industry of man converts and fits them all for the welfare and enjoyment of his kind.” A. Burn, A Picture of Van Diemen’s Land (1840).

It was late 1973. Two young philosophers, Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood, were about to confront Australia’s forest industry with their book The Fight for the Forests but the opposition were playing dirty.

Working under their then-married surname of ‘Routley’, they had arrived in Canberra a few years earlier when Sylvan had taken up a position in Philosophy at the Australian National University (ANU), in the field of Logic. He was trained in Wellington (NZ) and Princeton (USA). She was a star philosophy graduate from Sydney who met Sylvan there and worked with him at the University of New England where he had helped establish the country’s first centre for advanced research and training in modern formal logic.  At the ANU they formed the core of what became known as the Canberra Logic Group, which was to become well known in international philosophy circles for its ground-breaking work in non-classical (especially paraconsistent and relevant) logics.

Coincidentally, the ANU was also the centre of Australia’s forest policy development and soon after their arrival Plumwood and Sylvan became aware of a policy to clear-fell three million acres of our “unruly” and “low yielding” native forests for pine plantations. This was part of a colonial improvement agenda recently turbo-charged by government funding to boost softwood planting. Looking into the proposal, they were horrified by what they found. After two years research, drawing on key material held in the ANU’s Forestry Library and input from forestry insiders, they had written a book carefully arguing that the project just didn’t stack up – economically, socially or environmentally. They made no apologies for its savage criticism nor did they hide their contempt for the proposal to wood-chip what they calculated was about half of the country’s publicly owned coastal forests. Australia’s forestry industrial complex was becoming a monster.

Once aware of the criticism, the industry response, including that of the ANU’s Forestry Department, was remarkable. Insiders directing Sylvan and Plumwood to relevant (public) information were labelled “disloyal fifth columnists” and sanctioned by State forestry services – one employee noting that receiving a letter from Sylvan was “akin to a new Party member getting a birthday card from Alexander Solzhenitsyn”. They and their researchers were banned from the Forestry Library housing crucial documents. And now the publication of the book through the ANU Press was stopped pending a request by the Head of Forestry that the manuscript be revised to his satisfaction.

Through stubborn resistance and the support of some willing colleagues, this attempt at censorship was thwarted and, over coming years, three editions were published (accompanied by public vilification from forestry). All sold out – a thousand copies in just the first run.  Described 25 years later by a leading forest economist as “the most incisive and devastating economic analysis of forestry … ever done in Australia”, it stimulated two subsequent government enquiries which confirmed Sylvan and Plumwood’s economic analysis – convincing the Whitlam government to reduce pine plantings by 75%. And it also furnished the emerging environmental movement with both a general framework for how one might construct arguments and campaigns in defence of the forests, as well as specific data, methods of analysis and arguments that could be employed. It became “a bible constantly referred to”.

While Plumwood and Sylvan’s arguments focussed heavily on an economic analysis of the proposed policy, they also raised deeper questions. They thought damaging forest policy and practice were a symptom of deeper problems concerning our relationship with nature, problems that were evident in the very foundations of Western ethics. In 1973 Sylvan published a landmark paper that became a key stimulant to the emerging field environmental ethics: “Is there a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?” (significantly elaborated upon in subsequent work with Plumwood). Its centerpiece is a thought experiment – The Last Man Example – which both he and Plumwood took to show that a radically new ethic was indeed needed.

The experiment invites us to consider a world in collapse where humanity is reduced to a single last man (or person) who then proceeds to painlessly eliminate every living thing, animal or plant. Is their action morally acceptable? Sylvan (and Plumwood) thought not. It was wrong. Significantly, however, traditional Western moral theory suggested otherwise. It maintained that any properly considered view should accept the following core Freedom Principle, circumscribing what is morally acceptable:

One should be able to do what they wish, providing (1) that they do not harm others and (2) that they are not likely to harm themselves irreparably.

Clearly, the last man’s actions do not hurt others – there are no other people. And self-harm may be easily avoided (just ensure complete elimination occurs at the last man’s point of death). Thus, according to the Principle, the last man’s act is morally acceptable. Upshot: the Principle is wrong and must be rejected. So too, then, traditional moral theory. It neglects environmental harms that ought to limit morally permissible action.

The broader problem, as Sylvan and Plumwood saw it, was what they called the inherent “human chauvinism” or “anthropocentrism” of traditional Western moral positions – a chauvinism that they argued was not found in Aboriginal worldviews. The Freedom Principle demands that we only consider harm to humans because only humans matter. (Compare: male chauvinism – only men matter; race chauvinism – only whites matter; etc.) This kind of human exceptionalism – closely connected with the idea of human domination of nature – is traceable back through Kant to Aristotle and embraced by much Judeo-Christian thinking. It places humans at the centre of the moral universe. (Plumwood later argued that human domination was structurally similar to male domination, alongside forms of race and class domination – thus marking out her later “ecofeminist” position.)  Humans, as the locus of moral value, are valuable in and of themselves, for their own sake – they are “intrinsically valuable”. So we rightly condemn the use of others as mere means to our own ends for this reason. Anything nonhuman, however, has whatever value it has onlyinsofar as it is a means to our ends, serving human interests (e.g. a forest used for our wood supply, a river for our water supply) – its value is merely instrumental. A world where humans have vanished is one without value, thus its destruction involves nothing of value and is therefore permissible.

What the Last Man Example showed, according to Sylvan and Plumwood, was that this human chauvinism must be rejected. The nonhuman world (while obviously of enormous instrumental value in sustaining human life) also includes things of intrinsic value, deserving our respect – even to the extent that sometimes human interests may have to lose out to the values and interests of the nonhuman world. It is this intrinsic value that explains the intuition that the last man acts wrongly.

Of course, their view was and is contested. Starting in the 1970s, Australian philosophy saw the publication of some of the earliest writing marking out various key positions in environmental ethics, positions that came to dominate international debate: a defence of anthropocentrism by John Passmore (1974); Singer’s animal liberation (1975); and the deep environmentalism of Sylvan and Plumwood (carefully differentiated from what they saw as defective Deep Ecology).

Plumwood and Sylvan separated in the early 1980s but each continued to work on environmental philosophy. Sylvan saw the debate as really just beginning. So, too, Plumwood whose later books on ecofeminism (Feminism and the Master of Nature (1993) and Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002)) were regarded as pioneering. The leading American environmental philosopher J.B. Callicott commented, after Plumwood’s death in 2008, that she “was the best philosopher in the community of environmental philosophers – the best among us in the twentieth century and so far the best in the twenty-first. She was a master of what I think of as the Australian philosophical style: conceptual clarity, conceptual creativity, and a leave-no-stone-unturned, leave-no-inference-unarticulated approach to exposition and argument.”

Their work in ethics – developing the moral architecture of a radically different environmental culture – sat alongside other work in social and political theory, more broadly. Seeking adequate philosophical foundations for an improved counterculture, they were pacifists, anarchists, and iconoclasts in the fields of logic and metaphysics, alongside ethics. And they also “walked the talk” of their environmentalism – living off-grid from the mid 1970s in houses they built themselves and in ways they thought demanded by their philosophy. As time went on, they were increasingly disillusioned by the world around them – academic and non-academic – especially our failure to acknowledge the prudence and morality of a more environmental culture. Just before his death in 1996, Sylvan noted with dismay that philosophers still “fiddle while the earth begins to burn”. As we enter what Stephen Pyne has argued is a new, anthropogenic, age of fire – the Pyrocene – Sylvan’s words take on a resonance that may be hard to shake.