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Retrospective Review
Decaying Nature/Natural Beauty: How to Find Refuge Post-The Death of Nature?
By Vera Norwood
| WITHOUT CAROLYN MERCHANT's book I never would have appreciated and been called to participate in the twenty-year-plus recovery project of women's roles in environmental history. Before I read The Death of Nature I was interested in ideas of space and place and gender; after, I realized that my real passion for those issues sprang from fundamental questions about the intersections of nature and culture. I was not an environmental historian until I read Carolyn's book; I have identified myself as such ever since. |
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This review led me back to my teaching copy of The Death of Nature to see what, over the years, I have chosen to read with my classes. As Don Worster notes, the early modern period is not one that many environmental historians or our students have been grounded in—so that makes this a difficult book to teach. I spend a great deal of time trying to help students "live" in the, to them, "ancient history" Carolyn writes about. I discovered in my teaching text all sorts of notes to myself to make slides of the visual materials Carolyn alludes to—as we all know, one or two such illustrative sources can help students "see" the history they are reading. A favorite is the female "Soul of the World"—students really engage the project of drawing their own sense of an organic nature off this image. The book is also filled with "one liners" that can lead to energized conversations in class. For example in a section on science and the witch, Carolyn alludes to the ways that sixteenth-century feminists flipped ideas about feminine nature and disorder: "In women the tempering of heat by humidity made them more deliberate in their decisions and less given to outbursts of violent anger. This also made them more superior to men in their capacity for understanding" (p. 143). If I am teaching the graduate seminar in Environmental Theory and Practice and I want to make sure that the students "get" that gender matters—I assign The Death of Nature. Were I teaching The Death of Nature this semester I might place the section on science and the witch up against the current controversy over women's innate ability to do math instigated by Harvard's president and the consequent "he said/she said" debates at play in both academic and popular circles. |
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The book accomplishes some other "heavy lifting" as well. There is the Epilogue—which might be seen as the prolegomena to the rest of Carolyn's career. Here we have a call to action in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. Carolyn places the wages of the forces of modernism that resulted in a vision of nature as inert and subject to human intention up against recent ecological understandings of a natural world in which every thing is hitched to everything else. Appearing just after the Three Mile Island event in 1979, the last two paragraphs of the book offer both a caution and a call: "the sick earth, 'yea dead, yea putrefied,' can probably in the long run be restored to health only by a reversal of mainstream values and a revolution in economic priorities. In this sense, the world must once again be turned upside down" (p. 295). Not only is nature dead—but its decaying carcass threatens any human future we can imagine. Merchant's call in 1980 was to radically change the way we live in nature and in society, and this has been a consistent refrain in Carolyn's writings for the ensuing twenty-five years. |
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This notion of a toxic landscape requiring rejuvenation by critical social revolutions continues to invigorate recent scholars who rely on her historical work, take it in new directions, but come back to her passionate call for social change. For example, Miguel Lopez relies on Merchant's work as a jumping off point for an analysis of dystopian images of globalization in recent Mexican and Chicano narratives. These narratives echo Merchant's critiques of twentieth century modernism and, he argues, assert that the "cure for the plagues of the (present and) future ... entails embracing more holistic values characterized by a greater respect for the environment, indigenous communities, and individuals of both genders." His work will add to a growing body of literature famously described lately by Larry Buell as "toxic discourse"—the developing sentiment that indeed the world now suffers under a universal pall of pollution unrelieved by lingering edenic refuges, that there is a bright line between our current putrefying environment and a "healthy" nature existing only as a potential future.1 |
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