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Retrospective Review
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. By Carolyn Merchant. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980. xx + 348 pp. Includes bibliographic references and index.
Re-inspiration, Recommitment, and Revolution: Revisiting The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant
By Noël Sturgeon
| IT IS AN HONOR to be invited to look back on Carolyn Merchant's important book, The Death of Nature, in this twenty-fifth year of its publication. Though The Death of Nature (Harper Collins 1980) represents a foundational framework for my own work, I had not revisited it for quite some time, and it was a pleasure to do so. Though I certainly remembered the important advances the book made in bringing together an analysis of gender, nature, and science, I had not recalled what a rich and complicated book it is. One of the things I was struck by was the air of a different era that emanated from my worn first edition, even though the insights of the book remain fresh and, indeed, are still deeply connected to Merchant's most recent work, as represented in her latest book, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (Routledge, 2004). |
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The Death of Nature was published in 1980, fifteen years from the first outbreak of women's liberation and ten years from the first Earth Day. I was given it to read by my advisor, Donna Haraway, in my first year of graduate study in 1982. The eighties were an interesting time, a time when the first flush of revolutionary expectations generated in the late sixties had settled into a sense of retrenchment over the long haul. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Feminist movements were rent by critiques of white middle-class women's hegemony, while the ecology movement began to split into ecocentric and homocentric factions, just as the environmental justice movement had begun to make nonsense of such a division. |
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Reading the acknowledgements for the book, finished in late 1978 in Berkeley—seeing the references to the San Francisco Liberation School and Strawberry Creek College, the community of diverse people Merchant thanks—calls up a cultural, intellectual, and political milieu in which so much that was revolutionary must have seemed possible, while still so much needed to be explored, researched, and imagined. Clearly, as Merchant says in the introduction, the book has as its touchstone the intersection between women's movements and environmental movements, but in 1980, that intersection was little theorized or analyzed. Something definitely was going on in Berkeley at the end of the 1970s, though, some set of interrelations of people, theory, movements, and culture that made it a fertile place for early ecofeminist theorizing. Susan Griffin's Women and Nature (Harper & Row, 1978), which covers much of the same material (the gendered ideology of the scientific revolution) as The Death of Nature but through a literary, poetic approach, was published two years before Merchant's book. And Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land (North Carolina, 1975), which innovatively looks at the gendered nature of the early European-American male colonists' understanding of the land and the consequences of that viewpoint, was published in 1975. As we can see by the fact that Griffin thanks Carolyn Merchant in her acknowledgements for sharing her research and that Kolodny thanks some of the same faculty as Merchant though they were in different departments, these three groundbreaking books were clearly written roughly at the same time, in the same community and in the same place: Berkeley in the late 1970s. |
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