Abi Andrews
CAF awarded writer Abi Andrews a grant for her project “Forest Lover, Live Forever!” The project will track the development of “philosophical animism” and its implications for animal advocacy within the work of Val Plumwood, an influential eco-philosopher, by thoroughly assessing her archive for writing on human and nonhuman animal relationships. She will do this by approaching wildlife rehabilitation and the close relationship Plumwood had with a hand-raised wombat named Birubi, by combing out-of-print journals, as well as marginalia, personal correspondence, and other ephemeral texts.
Val Plumwood was a renowned philosopher, Abi writes, “but little has been made of her work specifically on animals, even though this work was very important to her, especially her relationship with the wombat Birubi. It is rare to have had such an important philosopher having worked with and lived alongside wild and rehabilitated animals.” Abi’s project will explore Plumwood’s relationships with actual animals and how these animals acted as agents involved in her philosophical thinking, leading her to her concept of philosophical animism.
Abi Andrews is a writer working at the intersection of environmental ethics, ecological feminism, and so-called “nature writing” in both fiction and nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The National Museum of Australia Magazine, Five Dials, The Ecologist, Caught by the River, The Dark Mountain Project, and other journals. Her debut novel The Word for Woman is Wilderness was published by Serpents Tail in 2018, and has been translated into several languages. She is currently working on two projects: a second novel Sister Species, about the struggle to be ethical in a compromised ecological and social world, and a work of nonfiction provisionally titled Kithness, which will take a close look at the work of Plumwood and the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, using the shared spirit of these women’s work to approach questions of love and ethics in the context of wildlife care.