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Retrospective Review
Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature at 25 Years
By Donald Worster
| TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO a grand project began with the book we honor here. Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, published in 1980, was the beginning of a multi-volume history of modern attitudes toward the natural world emphasizing attitudes toward gender, women, and reproduction. As Professor Merchant reveals in her most recent book, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (Routledge, 2004), she has been searching for a new story to tell about the past, a story promoting a new environmental ethic of equal partnership between men and women and humans and nature, uniting economic and social justice with environmental protection. Hers has been a moral vision that transcends what most historians undertake to realize. We are here to celebrate that vision and achievement today, not only for Merchant's distinguished leadership in environmental history but also for her path-breaking contributions to gender studies, intellectual history, the history of science, and environmental ethics. |
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Among the many strengths of The Death of Nature was the period it held up for scrutiny: Western Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Back in 1980 few American environmental historians, myself included, thought much about that period or place, and even now we do not pay enough attention to it. Search recent programs of the American Society for Environmental History for any paper that deals with pre-1800 European history. We have largely ignored the example Merchant set for us, and in doing so we may be missing a deeper understanding of the forces that have made us what we are today. |
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After twenty-five years The Death of Nature stands up well, both as argument and narrative. It skillfully weaves together seemingly disparate threads—land use, technology, witchcraft, science and philosophy, and gender roles, and does so over a wide spectrum of European thought. Its first chapter is a brilliant account of how nature was seen in gendered terms from Classical Greece down to the Renaissance, surprisingly revealed through the history of mining. The next chapter is a wonderful account of changes in the physical landscape during the early modern period, following the breakdown of peasant agriculture and its traditions of ecological balancing. Throughout the rest of the book, even when the analysis becomes more abstract, Merchant repeatedly ties past ideas to present issues, including forest conservation, industrial pollution, the limits to growth debate, and the rise of ecology and environmentalism. This is history firmly grounded in the past but forcefully speaking to our current condition. |
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The Death of Nature argues that the Scientific Revolution, which often has been praised as "progressive," had a darker side, with destructive consequences for women, society, and the natural world. A movement that was meant to free people from superstition and blind faith often left them imprisoned in an ethos of domination and repression. Its great philosopher Francis Bacon appears here as the Karl Rove of modernity: a ruthless courtroom prosecutor, an arrogant exploiter of women and those below him in the social scale. But other great figures of the Scientific Revolution—William Harvey, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz—do not come off much better. Allowing that these men were as full of complexity as any of us today, Merchant shows that there was a sinister aspect to science and the Age of Enlightenment that glorified it. |
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She goes on to suggest that a vital connection grew up between science in the era and the rising class of capitalist entrepreneurs. This is a profoundly important linkage, one that still needs to be more fully explored. Its plausibility rests on the fact that emergent capitalism was distinguishable from old-fashioned greed mainly by its claim to be objective, rational, and allied to modern science. Merchant's point was that science and capital shared a worldview that reduced the living world of nature to a dead, lifeless machine. Scientists, she argues, created that worldview while the capitalists took it to market. |
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