Heading South

Background: This paper contributes to discussions within environmental philosophy, particularly those which draw from ecofeminism and deep ecology to reconstruct the boundaries of the human/nature relationship from an embodied point of view. Key scholars in this discussion include Val Plumwood (2012), Arne Naess (1973), Freya Mathews (2009) and David Abram (2017). Contribution: Heading South contributes to the development and exploration of ontopoetics (Mathews) by taking a reflexive and phenomenological view of my experiences on an overnight bushwalk through the Southeast National Park, Tasmania. Through the writing, I engage with the work of Plumwood to navigate my way through cultural and philosophical debates about how we relate to nature. This work uses an ecofeminist approach to ‘knowing the world’ and a phenomenological approach to environmental philosophy. This work also extends my research in environmental philosophy to explore the discourse of corporate sustainability reporting. In this work, I have drawn from the ecofeminist traditions to highlight a lack of ‘connection’ between corporations and nature. I argue that in many fields, particularly in business (including Accounting – my own discipline), it is critical that researchers look beyond and engage with non-traditional forms of knowledge creation and incorporate that into an understanding of the roles of accounting and business in society. Environmental philosophy recognises that many western cultural approaches to nature are problematic and attempt to re-navigate this relationship. Significance: By publishing in the peer-reviewed journal PAN (Philosophy, Activism, Nature), I add my voice to ‘philosophical underpinnings of environmental thought and the discursive changes needed to shift society towards a new ecological culture of sustainability’. As editor of the Ontopoetics section of PAN, Mathews' review was pivotal to its development and subsequent publication.