| Retrospective Review | Environmental History, 10.4

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).	1
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.	2
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.	3
The Death of Nature is not then the first text to generate a historical analysis combining the insights of both the women's and ecology movements, but in its attention to history, materialist analysis, science, gender, and environment, it is the most comprehensive. The argument of the book is that a mechanistic, Cartesian view of nature was part of an economic transition from a community based, productive mode to the rise of exchange-based, industrial capitalism, a transition which involved stripping women of traditional modes of female production and craft skills, as well as removing prior restraints on the exploitation of nature. Merchant focuses on the dangers of the shared worldview of capital and science—mechanistic, rationalized, competitive—but her innovation was to connect this with a particular form of dominant masculinity; not in an essential, universal way, but by illuminating the imbrication of capital and science with the operation of a specific form of masculinity within a broad European historical and cultural context, one which included the Darwinian revolution. Such an analysis brought together for the first time the new fields of environmental history and feminist history, as well as accompanying an economic history with an analysis of ideological paradigm shifts, thus exemplifying a complex method of materialist feminist theorizing. Painstakingly researched and complexly argued, the book is a stunning series of scholarly innovations.	4
Though The Death of Nature is clearly important as an early example of the power of environmental history, it is also a founding text of both ecofeminism and of feminist science studies. Merchant's meticulously researched demonstration of the way in which nature is conceptualized by certain Western masculinist ideologies as female—whether a powerful, nurturing mother or as a disorderly, disruptive witch—was a central argument within the development of ecofeminism as a set of theories as well as activisms, not least because of the way in which Merchant connected the feminization of nature to the justification of capitalism's over-exploitation of nature. Thus, she showed that sexism was part of the root cause of environmental crises in the modern era. Ecofeminists have used that insight to develop numerous analyses of the relation between the inequalities of gender, race, class, and sexualities and the exploitation of animals and the environment; the literature is now quite voluminous (a good on-line bibliography on ecofeminism by Richard Twine can be found at http://www.ecofem.org/biblio).	5
For feminist science studies, Merchant's work was also very important. Londa Schiebinger, in a recent special issue of SIGNS on Gender and Science (28/3:2003) notes that historians "date the origins of modern feminist science studies ... from the publication of Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature" (p. 859). This is because the book examined the full range of feminist science studies concerns. It did not just explore the sexism behind much of Western scientific thought and the ways patriarchal motivations structured scientific beliefs and conclusions, but it also examined the concomitant exclusion of women scientists from scientific history and practice (for instance, in her chapter on Anne Conway) as well as the rejection of feminized scientific practices (such as midwifery). By implication, Merchant's feminist critique of science did not just problematize the Scientific Revolution, but gave direction to younger feminist science studies scholars looking at the entire modern history of science. As she says in The Death of Nature, "The use of science as an ideology to keep women in their place was not confined to ancient and early modern times. In the nineteenth century, Darwinian theory was found to hold social implications for women ... In the twentieth century, hormonal differences between men and women have been used to ... keep women in their place as intellectually inferior and economically dependent ... [N]ew fields and new scientific studies continue to generate "evidence" to maintain outdated assumptions about the male-female hierarchy" (pp. 162–63). That the ideological use of purported scientific arguments is still a potent sexist tool shouldn't be doubted by anyone recently reading the newspapers about the comments of a certain president of Harvard, who explained the continued exclusion of women from science, technology, engineering and math fields as evidence of their mental inferiority.	6
What is interesting, revisiting The Death of Nature, is the way in which, unlike the example set by Merchant's book, ecofeminist theory and feminist science studies have developed relatively separately. In the early period of theorizing in both areas, they were mutually enriching perspectives. For example, in the early and influential feminist science studies anthology edited by Joan Rothschild, Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology, readers will find a chapter from The Death of Nature (actually a revision which combined material from several chapters), "Mining the Earth's Womb," together with the defining early ecofeminist statement by Ynestra King, "Toward a Ecological Feminism and a Feminist Ecology" (Pergamon Press, 1983). Twenty or so years later, however, feminist science-studies scholars don't usually concentrate on the effects of patriarchal science on the environment, while ecofeminist scholars don't often incorporate the insights of feminist science studies. Merchant's impressive achievement was to think not just about science, gender, and the environment, but also about economic structures as intertwined in their development. Her commitment to materialism is still relevant and instructive. I think contemporary feminist science-studies scholars and ecofeminist scholars both can learn from this book today.	7
Though I hope the author is rightfully proud of this achievement, I think the book was not intended so much to inspire these two important strands of feminist scholarship. Rather, its ambition was to be an inspiration to an ecological and feminist revolution for which we are still hoping, twenty-five years later. But clearly the writer of The Death of Nature didn't think it would take that long; at several key moments in a book centered on the history of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are strong gestures toward the present, a contemporary culture that hopefully could learn from this history to remake its material practices and ideological attitudes toward women and nature. For instance, after her discussion of the devastating ecological changes in farm, fen, and forest, wrought by and driving the early development of capitalism, Merchant says: "Using the concept of harmonic balance in the natural community, urban communal households and ecotopian farming communes have challenged the competitive ideals of capitalist society and are attempting to live within the laws prescribed by ecology" (p. 95).	8
Despite this reference to a practical ecological revolution in living that must have seemed commonplace to someone living in Berkeley in the 1970s, anyone who thinks Merchant was interested in a return to a romanticized, holistic organicism in a traditional agricultural society is not a careful reader of The Death of Nature. The utopia that appeals to her most is Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (Bantam, 1975), not just for its feminist elements, but for its strong advocacy of sophisticated technological, scientific development that pays attention to ecological limits and socially just principles. As in all of her work, she is attentive not just to critique, but to supporting an activist vision of change.	9
Despite Merchant's interest in alternative sustainable technologies, some more idealistic than she read The Death of Nature to mean that a holistic, pastoral and ancient organic worldview was preferable to the modern, rationalized, mechanistic worldview. In this light, it is interesting to revisit The Death of Nature from the perspective of reading Merchant's other work to date. The story that she begins in The Death of Nature—exploring Western thought, science, and economic practices at the beginning of capitalism in the context of Europe—is developed further in her second book, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (North Carolina, 1989). Merchant examines the Western colonization of early America and develops a more complex model of production and reproduction from an ecofeminist perspective. In Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (Routledge, 1992—happily, a new update of this book will appear in 2005), Merchant surveys ecological movements, especially those that critique capitalist development and support alternative technology. In Earthcare: Women and the Environment (Routledge, 1996), Merchant argues for a nuanced, technologically sophisticated ecological science in the chapter "Isis: Women and Science," and in the chapter "Earthcare: Women and the Environmental Movement," she pays needed attention to the contribution of women to the alternative energy movements. Then, the interwoven analysis begun by The Death of Nature is brought up to date, through the colonization of the U.S. west and the development of the modern consumer economy, by her most recent book, Reinventing Eden (Routledge, 2004). Time does not permit me to tease out the details of how the story changes as Merchant, in all of these books, and with her usual and admirable detailed research, demonstrates that the analysis begun by The Death of Nature can brilliantly illuminate a great deal of American history up to the present. But clearly, along the way, Merchant decisively rejects any nostalgia for medieval organicism by arguing for a partnership ethic that thoroughly incorporates critiques of holism and organicism, racism, and imperialism. Instead of nostalgia and pessimism, she consistently inspires us to renew our commitment to that longed for feminist and ecological revolution that we, and the earth, ever more desperately need.	10
Noël Sturgeon is chair of Women's Studies at Washington State University and the author of Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (Routledge, 1997), as well as numerous articles on ecofeminism, anti-militarist activism, and global social justice. She is working on a book manuscript entitled The Politics of the Natural: Race, Gender, US Culture and Global Environmentalism.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.