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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.
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| "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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Above all, Merchant wishes to challenge the linear narratives of humanity's relationship to nature. She divides these into four prevailing stories, each beginning with a fall or decline, and each prescribing a return to an Edenic condition. The Christian (or traditional) recovery narrative follows scripture, which traces Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden and struggle within the fallen world outside. Spiritual transformation is here necessary in order to regain humanity's originally blessed state. A second story, a modern and secular narrative, laments the loss of a golden age and looks to science and capitalism for the proper redevelopment of the world. The third and fourth narratives are, respectively, environmentalist and feminist. These similar and, Merchant argues, necessarily interlocking stories trace a decline from a prehistoric, pristine wilderness and social equality, especially gender equality. Loss of this world necessitates recovery through environmental and feminist transformation (pp. 11–12, 21). |
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Merchant points out the paradoxical nature of the first two narratives: Declension leads to expectations of recovery; human efforts to exercise mastery or even stewardship over nature lead to despoliation. She explores how new theories of chaos and complexity raise questions about the human ability to comprehend natural processes; ditto for new attempts to decode genomes and for bioengineering generally. And Merchant is, as always, superb at pointing out the pervasively gendered telling of all these narratives. In the end, she recommends an alternative to the post-Edenic determination to dominate nature, "an environmental ethic based on a partnership between humans and the nonhuman world" (p. 8). This new narrative draws from the environmental and feminist stories while complicating their linear constructions. |
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Within circa 240 pages (not including notes), Merchant covers several millennia of western culture. This highly compressed narrative will leave many readers wishing Merchant had put her considerable learning and skills toward examining still other questions about humanity and nature. Some comparison to other cultural traditions, for example, would have been illuminating; Merchant has only brief and scattered references to religions and cultures that influenced that of Christian Europe, including Judaism, near eastern cultures, and classical—meaning pagan—Greece and Rome. For the most part, she uses other cultures, such as Native American and west African traditions, as contrasts to those of Europe and the neo-Europe in North America. But the contradictions within the western tradition would have been even more complex when seen in interplay with these other traditions, which were not mere foils or competitors. |
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Nor is it the case, now, that debates over the natural world are shaped only by the western, Christian heritage—arguments over development in other parts of the world are deeply influenced by other cultural traditions, not least Islam. Merchant's book shows why humans should no longer consider themselves dominant over nature, but it is left to others to suggest that humans in the west might no longer be dominant over the globe, and that a project to reinvent Eden may have little purchase in many parts of the world. |
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Joyce Chaplin teaches history at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Harvard, 2001). She is currently writing a book on Benjamin Franklin and science. |
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