| Retrospective Review | Environmental History, 10.4

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.	1
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.	2
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.	3
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.	4
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.	5
But what exactly is meant by book's title, "the death of nature"? Surely not that the whole living world died back in the time of Bacon, that we been living ever since on a dead planet, or even that nature abruptly came to an end and we humans have been left alone in a completely artificial world. That would be a transformation—a crime—that we are incapable of achieving. What died was not "nature" in the usual sense of the word, referring to those forces of matter that we did not invent but only inherit; what died was the cultural concept or metaphor of "Anima Mundi," the notion that the earth is a single living organism of female gender. If that concept did not die completely, it was severely wounded and fell out of intellectual favor. Instead of believing in the old Anima Mundi people began to perceive the world as an enormous cosmic clock.	6
Merchant seemed ambivalent about the loss of that ancient animistic metaphor. Although it had not always led to an ethic of partnership or protection, it had honored women and nature more than what replaced it. Yet nowhere did she call for its restitution or dispute modern science's conclusion that the metaphor was empirically false. A single indwelling spirit does not animate all of nature any more than God creates every organism exactly in its present form and location.	7
Merchant was less ambivalent in calling for a new scientific worldview that might support a feminist political agenda. On page 275 she warns that our scientific thinking is still based on the mechanistic (and anti-female) thinking of early modern Europe and that we have yet to free ourselves from it. But is that so, and do we still need to free our minds from degenerate science? To believe that would be to minimize or ignore a profound change that began at the point where her book ends, around the year 1800. To be sure, rigidly mechanistic thinking in the sciences and elsewhere still survives, but the old picture of nature as a cosmic machine is lying in shreds today. It was challenged by another scientific revolution that began in the nineteenth century—the Darwinian Revolution. Charles Darwin quietly laid an ax to the clock and broke it into smithereens. He did so not by repudiating science, as so many scholars in the humanities seem to want to do, but by pushing truth forward and demonstrating that science does indeed possess self-correcting tendencies.	8
In place of the world clock (designed by a great patriarchal Watchmaker) Darwin gave us the evolving tree of life—another organic metaphor but one radically different from the ancient Anima Mundi. Darwin revealed a nature that is alive, messy, disorderly, unplanned, and seemingly chaotic. His first picture of that world may have been tinged by laissez-faire capitalism and may have encouraged some unfortunate conclusions, but that capitalistic reading was not essential to his discovery. The more important and lasting message was that fixed categories must disappear, old hierarchies crumble. Darwin's science was theologically agnostic and socially open-ended. It did not promote a single, unambiguous, or comprehensive moral philosophy; instead, it left such matters for an evolving society to define.	9
Merchant stopped short of considering that second scientific revolution, but were someone to write a book like hers on the past two hundred years, he or she would have to acknowledge what a revolution we have been through. Our worldview has been radically changed, although religious conservatives are still fighting over the origins of life and many academic humanists have still not absorbed Darwin's message.	10
Evolutionary science, in contrast to its Baconian-Newtonian predecessor, provides us with an account of the natural world that should be foundational to environmental history. Our field is unlikely to illuminate significantly the way the natural world works, but we can strive to expand our sense of the past by forging links to evolutionary science and its perspective into change over time. That is how, in the deepest sense, I view the mission of environmental history.	11
To be sure, we historians will tend to emphasize what our colleagues in science do not touch—the role of cultural beliefs and cultural evolution as a force on the planet. But in doing so we should see ourselves not as opponents but as partners in a collective enterprise that includes biogeography, historical geology, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology. We do not need to locate an alternative, anti-science, or postmodern account of how the world or the human mind function.	12
The Darwinian worldview may never furnish any unequivocal social or environmental ethic, but it will lead us to realize that an ethic can be neither a law given by divine authority nor an absolute truth laid down by ideology; an ethic is merely a cultural idea that evolves to meet the shifting needs of the world. The making of any ethic is thus a pragmatic, ongoing, non-doctrinaire process. The concept of environmental justice, for example, should not be taken as a fixed or absolute idea, and none of us can be in charge of its meaning. Historians cannot determine a society's values any more than scientists can, although values should be informed by the knowledge that scientists and historians try to acquire. Aldo Leopold pointed the way here for all of us: An ethic, he wrote, is not created by intellectuals for a seminar but is a "community instinct in the making."	13
We historians may hold strong convictions about the kind of ethic we believe our society needs, as Carolyn Merchant has long and persuasively demonstrated. We should be moved by such convictions and grateful for those who articulate them. But our humble role is to explain history as a process of cultural evolution, to explain the human role in environmental change, and to do so in a spirit of respect for modern science and the evolutionary worldview.	14
Donald Worster is the Hall Professor of United States History at the University of Kansas, where he teaches environmental history, the history of the American West, and nineteenth-century America. His most recent book was A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (Oxford, 2001), and he is currently writing a companion volume on John Muir, to be published by Oxford.

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