Earth Philosophies Australia  will be holding another PHILOSOPHY FOR THE FOREST camp
5 days camped in bushland near Braidwood in southern NSW from Feb 12-16.
Ruth Rosenhek, John Seed, Val Plumwood, Freya Matthews, Deborah Bird Rose

This is the fifth  Environmental Philosophies Australia Bush  Camp (the first four were in northern NSW (twice), the SW of WA and Braidwood NSW). The meeting will consist of presentations, discussions and workshops as well as experiential processes and  bushwalks.

We will be camping at Val Plumwood's beautiful land in the bush near near Braidwood.

Presenters include:

Val Plumwood (Australian Research Council Fellow at ANU) who will offer a workshop on Eco-animism (abstract below)

Freya Mathews has published widely in the field of environmental philosophy.
She is the author The Ecological Self (1991), For Love of Matter: towards a
Contemporary Panpsychism (2003), Journey to the Source of the Merri (2003)
and Reinhabiting Reality: towards a Recovery of Culture, as well as many
articles. She is associate professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University.

Deborah Bird Rose is one of Australia's most distinguished anthropologists and is the author of a number of prize winning books including "Dingo Makes Us Human". She will be speaking (along with Val Plumwood) on ecoanimism, a subject of which she will be teaching a course next year at Shumacher College in the UK. She is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, ANU.cres.anu.edu.au/environhist/people/rose.html,

Kate Rigby is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for
Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University
(www.arts.monash.edu.au/cclcs/staff/rigby/index.html) and one of
Australial's leading ecocritics. Her most recent book is *Topographies
of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism* (2004).

Kate will give a workshop on 'facing catatstrophe' with a focus on the
cultural mediation of environmental (both natural and otherwise)
disaster: How have such catastrophes as earthquake, flood, fire,
drought, plague, etc. been interpreted and represented? What kinds of
stories have they provoked? What values and norms of human behaviour
have these narratives provoked? What conclusions have been drawn from them?

The necessity of discussing such questions is of course not purely
academic, but emerges from the recognition that we are now in the midst
of a new kind of environmental catastrophe, new not only because humanly
engendered, but also and specifically because of its global character.
We need to consider how we might comport ourselves in this situation:
what kinds of culturally mediated ethical and spiritual guidance might
we draw on in order to face catastrophe in a dignified and loving
manner. What kinds of stories and practices might enable us to 'dance
with disaster'?

Ruth Rosenhek, Rainforest Information Centre, www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/rosenhek.htm, will offer deep ecology experiential exercises and will facilitate a discussion on EcoFeminism Now.

John Seed www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/johnseed.htm will speak on "ecology and spirituality" and "Climate Change, Despair & Empowerment".

There will be a maximum of 25 participants, entry by donation.

For bookings contact John Seed: johnseed1@ozemail.com.au 

Val Plumwood : Ecoanimism workshop: This workshop will discuss some theoretical alternatives to reductionist worldviews and explore other ways to experience and describe living world. Philosophical animism presents an important but neglected alternative to modern reductive materialism. MODERNIst reductionism is highly relevant to the ecological crisis : This ideology has been functional for western culture in enabling it to colonise and exploit the nonhuman world and so-called ‘primitive’ cultures with less constraint – the “empire of man over mere things”. But it also inherits dangerous illusions denying human embeddedness in and dependency on nature. It generates modernity’s dominant narratives of scientific progress, unconstrained commodity culture and unlimited growth. IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE REDUCTIVE MATERIALISM THAT DEFINES MODERNITY has been formed to understand the alternatives to it. Suppose that instead of following the reductionist route of splitting and denigrating the intelligence of the world of nature and attributing creation to external deities/drivers, we began to try to see creativity and agency in the other-than-human world around us.

Here  is   Earth Philosophies Australia's  Kurrabup Manifesto (this is the local  aboriginal name   for the Inlet at Denmark, WA where the 2nd EPA bush camp was held and where this  Manifesto was drafted. It means "Place of  the Black Swan" )

We recognise that :

1: Earth is the ground of philosophy.

2: Philosophy should foster the love of wisdom and a cooperative search for the good life.

3: Good environmental philosophy should aim to provide ecologically self-reflexive practices and ecological literacy, attuning to the planet as part of dialogue with place, presence and biosphere.

4: Philosophy is llived through rather than despite the body, and should be expressed by social and political actions that challenge the dominant presuppositions of societies.

5 : One of our central metaphysical purposes is to acknowledge our belonging within the eco-community (instead of seeking to own it), to relate communicatively with it and discover its responsiveness.

6: One of our central moral purposes is to supplant the dominant conception of human/nature relations as based upon a hierarchy in which all other species serve humanity, and creatively to serve the entire earth community.

7: One of our central epistemological principles is that a complete knowledge of nature as a whole and of its members will never be available to us and that we require humility, openness and a beginner's mind in our
interactions with the universe.

8: One of our central political purposes is to understand, oppose and resist oppression, whether it is of race, class, gender,  species or other in form, and whether economic, political, cultural or biological in
character.

9 : Honour and remembrance are due to the the forgotten and erased histories of human and non-human generations who were tested and often sacrificed to give us the present, and whose gift must be passed on to
future earth generations.

10: We acknowledge that conflict, suffering and death also have their role in the web of life and need to be challenged where appropriate and wisely negotiated when not.

11: We aim to respect our differences and celebrate one another and all of life through education, a cultivation of playfulness and creative participation.

12: The members of the EPA are entitled  to discuss, revise and augment these principles as seems to them suitable.