DR JUL.-28

 It resembled a fragment of driftwood adrift upon the ochre-hued tumult of floodwaters, unassuming and inert, until two eyes emerged with quiet deliberation above the water’s surface. As the canoe neared, the crocodile lunged without warning, attempting to unseat its occupant. Bereft of recourse, the woman propelled her canoe toward an overhanging copse of trees. In her desperate leap to grasp a branch, the reptile rose, too, dragging her beneath the surface in a harrowing death roll. “That was the worst part of the whole experience,” she recounted from her hospital bed, voice wavering in retrospective dread. “The part that I still don’t like to remember.”

In the torrid February of 1985, Val Plumwood, an Australian eco-philosopher of formidable intellect, survived this primeval encounter on a secluded river in Kakadu, a remote region of immense biodiversity. Submerged thrice beneath the water's opaque surface, she clawed herself, grievously wounded, up the embankment, fabricating a makeshift tourniquet to stanch the hemorrhage from her leg. With relentless tenacity, she dragged herself for hours through an unforgiving terrain, anticipating at every moment a second onslaught which, mercifully, did not materialise.

Had she succumbed, Plumwood would have marked the 17th human consumed or slain by a crocodile in the Northern Territory since 1930. As the journalist reminded her, official responses to such occurrences are bifurcated: captivity or execution of the beast. Allegedly, the crocodile in question had been shot. Yet Plumwood, in convalescence, dismissed this retaliatory act as fundamentally futile. Why, she queried, is an animal’s attack upon a human construed as a moral aberration? Why does such predation provoke such astonishment?

To which the interviewer proffered: “That we’re the dominant species and should never be under attack?”

“Exactly,” she affirmed. “We eat other species without compunction, we perpetrate atrocities upon them with untroubled conscience, and deem it entirely natural. But the moment the roles invert, when we become the prey, it violates our sense of cosmic propriety.”

This visceral unease is steeped in a centuries-old cultural legacy. Western metaphysics, sculpted by Christian theology, has long sequestered humanity from nature, imagining us as imago Dei—divine reflections—possessing souls that transcend biological constraint. Yet, this illusion of separateness is unraveling. Contemporary science reveals us to be permeable, ephemeral, and deeply embedded in biological systems. On a molecular level, we are continuous with the world: atomically commingling with every surface, swarmed by microbial multitudes cohabiting our skin, mouths, and intestines. We are less sovereign entities than shifting, interdependent ecosystems.

This conceptual dismantling of human exceptionalism does not arise from empirical truth alone. Ethicists and philosophers have begun scrutinising its disastrous ecological consequences. Human supremacy, they argue, legitimizes planetary exploitation and the erasure of countless species. Philosophers such as Jane Bennett urge us to embrace “entanglement”—a recognition that the boundaries between matter, mind, and environment are illusory. Her seminal work Vibrant Matter posits that such entanglements can humble anthropocentric fantasies, decentralising human agency and revealing the animate potential of all matter.

Nonetheless, entanglement is not a uniformly pleasant notion. To be entangled is also to be vulnerable—to contagion, consumption, and dissolution. Horror cinema dramatizes this disquieting permeability: the Alien franchise’s parasitic monstrosities embody fears of bodily violation. Even noble choices—eschewing pesticides, for example—entail risks, as porous ecosystems can usher in pathogens. Boundaries, while artificial, provide psychic and physiological security.

Plumwood’s epiphany was profoundly unsettling: she perceived herself not merely as a subject but also as a meal. This “parallel universe,” as she described it, reveals a reality wherein human flesh is no different from any other in the food chain. Philosophically, Friedrich Nietzsche anticipated such revelations. In Beyond Good and Evil, he endeavoured to reintegrate humanity into the flux of nature, castigating the theological delusions that elevated us. For Nietzsche, moral values themselves were born of our illusory distinction from animals. To truly entangle ourselves, then, we must relinquish not only supremacy but also the comforting illusions of our inherited morality.

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Difficult Word Meanings:

• Ochre-hued: Yellow-brown colored

• Copse: A small group of trees

• Hemorrhage: Heavy bleeding

• Convalescence: Recovery from illness or surgery

• Bifurcated: Divided into two parts

• Imago Dei: Latin for "image of God"

• Anthropocentric: Human-centered

• Permeability: The quality of being penetrable or passable

• Castigating: Criticizing severely

• Epiphany: A sudden, intuitive insight

• Word Count: 596
  Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 17.3