The year is 1985. Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood (1939–2008) sets out in her small canoe on a cruise down the Erre River (East Alligator) in Australia's Kakadu National Park during the winter monsoon rains. Nothing bad seems to happen that day – after all, it is not Plumwood's first time on the river. However, during the cruise, she is unexpectedly attacked by a saltwater crocodile, one of the most dangerous predators. By some miracle, she manages to survive the deadly attack and reach the shore. After several agonizing hours in a swampy area full of other hungry crocodiles, she finally crawls out with all her strength for help. This near-death experience will later lead Plumwood to reflect on the human role in the food chain, which she posthumously collected in an unfinished book The Eye of the Crocodile (ANU Press 2012).
In many African and Australian indigenous cultures, the crocodile is seen as a mischievous figure par excellence. The crocodile is – like the North American coyote – a witness from the depths of antiquity; an ancient intelligence that was present at the very beginning and critically measures the folly of human action. Something of the power of this mythologem persists to the present day, as demonstrated, for example, by the opening image of the film Thin red line (1998) by director Terrence Malick. A crocodile slides down a sloping bank into a greenish pond and slowly sinks below the surface, while the camera zooms in on its fixed reptilian eye – that calmly watching mirror in which the futility of all human hopes and dreams is reflected. However, there is another dimension present in this image. The crocodile is not only a distant observer from the primeval time of creation, but also a symbol of the inevitable end and transformation of everything, the renunciation of one's own form in favor of the forms of others, of new life – a symbol of cyclicality and predation, the overflowing from one form to another (in Malick's dictionary: wars in the heart of nature). Looking into the crocodile's eye reminds us: there are forces here much older and more powerful than your insignificant self - you too will not escape decay and death, you too are part of an age-old feast. Foolish man, you are nothing but a tasty morsel - your blood waters future vineyards, future prairies, meadows and forests. You too will disintegrate and decompose, you will lose your individuality and organization and in the process of your disintegration you will already shape and nourish others; you too will one day have to surrender to what devours us, what craves our bones and muscles, our fire.
Before Plumwood set out on her fateful voyage down the Erre River, she had never thought of herself as a nutritious prey for another creature. She had never thought of her own vulnerability; of the fact that humans, after all, are food. And no wonder. Experience life-like-a-bite (at least for most of the inhabitants of the "over-privileged" Western world) has completely disappeared from our horizon of existence - it has become something unimaginable, a matter of ancient history. In fact, today many believe that even the meat on supermarket shelves is somehow created again; that it materializes on shelves like the mud swallows of 17th-century naturalists. Because we generally lack this direct experience, we view predation as something we do to other (subordinate) creatures, but never as something that happens to ourselves. “We are victors, but never victims,” says Plumwood. We place ourselves at the imaginary top of the food chain, and this perspective prevents us from seeing ourselves as a direct part of that ongoing, multilayered, and equitable exchange of energy and matter.
The crocodile experience allowed Plumwood to see through this human self-deception. In the crocodile’s eye, Plumwood saw a glimpse of a “parallel universe”—an uncharted terrain where rules are completely different from our own. She calls this stark parallel universe “Heraclitean” (after the pre-Socratic perceiver Heraclitus, an advocate of the dynamic, processual nature of the world)—a universe where (to put it succinctly) everything flows, where the death of one is the life of another and vice versa – where everything is subordinated to the dance in the tangle of food relations; to transformations, interpenetrations, flows. From a human being – the measure of all and the pinnacle of creation – she instantly became a tiny morsel in a never-ending game of transformations. With no small horror, she saw that she inhabited this merciless (but in its essence perfectly just, egalitarian) world, where there were no special exceptions for her as a member of the supposedly privileged human species – where it did not matter how smart she was and how much she had accomplished in life, because like all living beings she was “made of flesh” and therefore was potentially a “nutritious morsel”.
We see ourselves primarily as spiritual, thinking creatures, but we are rarely aware of our physical (or, better said, physical) embodied) dimension of our existence, our “animality.” Being food, according to Plumwood, confronts us with the very basic reality of our embodiment—with the fact that we are part of the animal food world, with our blood relationship to the creatures we consume and who consume us; with the fact that we are “part of the feast,” and not just those who watch the feast from afar. That we are, in short, feast! And there are many, many forms of life for which humans are food like any other. We are food for sharks, tigers, bears, pumas, jaguars, crocodiles. But also for crows, snakes, vultures, pigs, hyenas, rats, monitor lizards and a whole host of smaller creatures and microorganisms that feed on our bodies after our untimely death (and in the case of various parasites, often while we are still alive).
The sense of profit from this feasting, Plumwood argues, is enhanced by the fact that we systematically exterminate creatures for whom we are potential prey. Human predation is perceived as something “unacceptable” and its occurrence is usually accompanied by disproportionately harsh sanctions. What allows us to treat supposedly “competitive” creatures in this way is the dominant story of the superiority and ontological difference of the human species. Whenever an animal (for example, a fox that accidentally bites a small child) crosses that boundary we have set, whenever it undermines our idea of ourselves as the unquestioned rulers of the planet, the foundations on which our entire world has stood for centuries are shaken. People will easily give up many things, but not the idea that the human race has the right to decide the life and death of other species – its role in directing the development of the world. Mainstream forms of conservation, after all, are guided by similarly questionable premises – we are the ones who know best how an ecosystem “works” and what it should look like. Hence the often ethically questionable actions, such as the mass culling of inconvenient species (“alien”, invasive species in favor of the so-called “native” ones).
The extent of our injustice to the rest of the animal kingdom is well illustrated by the example of sharks. Although the number of fatal incidents involving these ancient carnivores is statistically practically negligible (and although many shark species are not even carnivorous, let alone large enough to pose any threat to humans), sharks have an unjustified reputation as bloodthirsty hunters of humans. Now compare the human mortality rate from shark attacks with the tens of millions of sharks annually caught and (without much public outcry) slaughtered by the fishing industry in the name of easy profit…
Plumwood calls for an “ecological animalism” that emphasizes human-animal mutualism, equality, and reciprocity in the food chain. We need to start seeing ourselves in terms of our utility/role within a constantly flowing ecosystem. And one way to do this is to start seeing ourselves as food for others. It is the easiest way to acknowledge and affirm our solidarity with other living beings. We must not believe that we are “too good” to “be food,” too privileged, while other creatures—like pigs and cows—are only good for consumption.
This recognition can have much deeper consequences than just a transformation of the relationship at the interspecies level – it would also help us resolve our extreme intolerance towards death and dying (this is evident, for example, in the removal of fallen and dying trees from forests and parks); the effort to avoid death, to artificially delay it at all costs. We do not view death as an act of sharing our temporarily lent bodily essence with other temporarily existing creatures, with the mortal world to which we owe our bodily existence (our matter). On the contrary, we perceive it as a farewell to an immaterial spiritual essence – and we shape our funeral rituals accordingly. However, we forget that the world is alive from our bodies – that the entire community of life is nourished by them. We believe in a reductionist story in which the death of the body is the final station, the full stop of the narrated story. The price for this is the loss of awareness of continuity and interconnectedness.
One layer of what it means to live ecologically is to be aware (i.e., to deeply experience) one's participation in a wider earthly community of mutuality and mutual support. To be aware of the interconnectedness of all lives—of the cyclical nature, the continuity of life; to understand life as loan, a temporary gift from all previous generations, human and non-human. Death is part of life – not something to be wiped out and obliterated by all means. When we separate death from life, we cut ourselves off from our own origins – from the community of (co)life and all our animal and plant ancestors (‘ecological others’), but also from the earth that hosts and supports life. From this perspective, our bodies belong to everyone – they are part of a continuous sharing; matter that gives rise to other forms of feeling, being and beauty.
To be a body (i.e. a sentient, feeling, and transient being) in this Heraclitean world carries with it the risk of getting hurt, of bleeding and suffering—and of eventually dying, of undergoing transformation. To see one's own life in this perspective (Plumwood would say in crocodile eye) leads to greater humility – it teaches us that this meticulously cared for body is just a mist over the river, a temporary dwelling. Perhaps it would be worth adapting the traditional ancient maxim “Know thyself” (Gnóthi Seautón), which supposedly stood above the entrance to the Delphic oracle, to a more current and in some ways more beneficial form: “Know thy feast”.
One dies, the other lives. We are all partners in Shiva's dance of resurrection and destruction.
Book The Eye of the Crocodile can be downloaded for free on the ANU Press website.
Val Plumwood was an outstanding representative of radical ecosophy and ecofeminist. Her main works are: Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002); with her second husband Richard Sylvan, she wrote a book that is still highly regarded today The Fight for the Forests (1973), which is considered the most comprehensive analysis of Australian forestry.