Plumwood drives home this message again and again. The failure of rationalism is not only manifested in well-known ecological disasters – such as the crisis caused by overfishing – but in the apparently unconnected deaths of fairy penguins washed up on the shores of Tasmania. It is manifested in all social systems that perpetuate inequality. One reason why environmental crisis is ignored, she argues, is because the effects are visited mainly on the poor and powerless.

Plumwood shares the outlook of many environmentalists: that our culture is profoundly anti-ecological and the problem cannot be solved simply with a greener capitalism or by replacing the free market with ‘rational’ planning. Like other radical environmentalists, she thinks that establishing an ecologically sound society will require a social revolution. Societies, and the world as a whole, have to become more egalitarian, and representative democracy must be replaced with a more direct, deliberative democracy. On the other hand, she rejects the standard political solutions proposed by other radicals. Socialist ideas clearly belong to the rationalist tradition that she criticises. Even anarchism provides no solution. The small-scale, self-sufficient societies that anarchists often recommend may be more predisposed to care for the environments they depend on, but they will not necessarily avoid creating environmental and social problems for each other. The problem, according to Plumwood, is that they would reproduce on a larger scale the autonomous, self-contained agent of rationalist philosophy.

Plumwood argues that rationalism is irrational from a prudential point of view. But she also insists that prudence is not enough. Sound relations with nature also require a revolution in ethics. Her attempt to explain what direction this should take is the most innovative and interesting aspect of her book.

Plumwood is critical of the animal liberation movement. The problem with it is not just that it confines its concern to sentient creatures – and permits us to regard the rest of nature as an instrument. She argues that a position such as Peter Singer’s displays an anthropomorphic bias by valuing animals only insofar, and as much, as they are like us. She is favourable to the idea that things in nature – including non-sentient beings – have value in their own right, but insists that the model for developing an environmental ethics should be the liberation movements that demand a voice for the oppressed. A proper environmental ethics, she thinks, would adopt and extend the Kantian idea of respect for persons. We should not treat others – including non-human others – merely as a means. But a proper ethics would also be egalitarian, contextual and communicative. We should be attuned to the intentions and interests of the beings we interact with, and adopt ways of acting that reflect these interests.

Plumwood believes that communicative ethics applied to nature presupposes a rejection of the dichotomy between matter and spirit. We should regard natural things – including non-sentient creatures, species and ecosystems – as having intentions. By adopting this panpsychist position, Plumwood departs most decisively from the materialist scientific point of view that she claims is a product of rationalist ways of thought. The question remains whether this departure is plausible or even necessary. Why should proper respect for nature require that we think that trees, plants, species or ecosystems have intentions? Couldn’t this idea, and the attempt to apply a communicative ethics to nature, be criticised as another rationalist attempt to make nature seem more like us? By avoiding one rationalist pitfall, we may be subscribing to another.

The ways of thought that Plumwood criticises as manifestations of rationalism take many forms. It is not obvious that all of them are always bad. Nor that they are all dispensable. Her message in this book is mainly a negative one. How people in a populous, modern, industrial society can reject rationalism and live according to an environmental ethic is difficult to imagine, and Plumwood does not attempt to tell us. Nevertheless, she has written a mind-expanding and challenging book.