“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” Donna Haraway

In Feminism and the theory of Nature, Plumwood states that it is usually in the liminal spaces or the edges where great’ tectonic plates of theory meet and shift’ creating upheavals. She goes on to say that if the four tectonic plates of liberation theory-oppression of gender, race, class and nature– came together the tremors would shake the conceptual structures to the foundations.

The foundation being the colonisation and domination by patriarchal rationalism. Most accounts of environmental philosophy are heavily inhabited by a masculine presence retaining the dualistc dynamic albeit subtle or in guise. The western logical structure of dualism and so negation and otherness is the basis for the connection between forms of oppression- modernity.

Plumwood states that ‘the concept of reason provides the unifying and defining contrast for the concept of nature, much as the concept of husband does that for the wife, as master for slave. Reason in western tradition has been constructed as the the priveledged domain of the master who has conceived of nature as a wife or subordinate other encompassing and representing the sphere of materiality, subsistence and the feminine which the master has spilt off and constructed as beneath him’ to be conquered and exploited engendering progress.

Plumwood goes onto speak about the accusation of ‘wild woman’ and finally gives a compelling  account of care and ethics as resistance and a way of changing the master story.  Reason is not banished to the underworld, instead  emotion reclaims her voice as reliable and reflective, crucial and creative and in doing so, affirming neither the irrational nor anti- rational. Perhaps it’s time to plant our own seeds of sympathy and humility and respect the other silenced voices whose kin is the land.