| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. By Carolyn Merchant. New York: Routledge, 2003. xii + 308 pp. Includes illustrations, bibliographical references and index. Cloth $25.00, paper $15.17.

"She has taken up with a snake now. The other animals are glad, for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them ... I advised her to keep away from the tree. She said she wouldn't. I for[e]see trouble. Will emigrate" (p. 11). With this and other passages from Mark Twain's "Extracts from Adam's Diary," Carolyn Merchant frames her Reinventing Eden, an overview of western attitudes toward the natural world. Merchant argues that most of these attitudes have focused on the idea of Eden and attempts to recover it; how fitting that the experimental Eve and the dubious Adam be our guides. Merchant intends her book to summarize the different works within her scholarly career and builds upon her essay, "Reinventing Eden," published in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (W.W. Norton, 1995). By revisiting questions she has pondered for some time, Merchant provides a lively overview of the major issues in environmental studies.

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