The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution

By Carolyn Merchant

UPDATED 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH 2020 PREFACE

An examination of the Scientific Revolution that shows how the mechanistic world view of modern science has sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unrestrained commercial expansion, and a new socioeconomic order that subordinates women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062956743

Carolyn Merchant

Carolyn Merchant, Ph.D., is professor of environmental history, philosophy, and ethics in the Department of Conservation and Resource Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Dedication

For David and John,

Elizabeth and Ann

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Time Line

Preface: 2020, A Look Back

Preface: 1990

Introduction: Women and Ecology

1.Nature as Female

2.Farm, Fen, and Forest: European Ecology in Transition

3.Organic Society and Utopia

4.The World an Organism

5.Nature as Disorder: Women and Witches

6.Production, Reproduction, and the Female

7.Dominion over Nature

8.The Mechanical Order

9.Mechanism as Power

10.The Management of Nature

11.Women on Nature: Anne Conway and Other Philosophical Feminists

12.Leibniz and Newton

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. The Nymph of the Spring, by Lucas Cranach (1518, Germany). Reproduced in E. Ruhmer, ed., Cranach (London: Phaidon Press, 1963), Plate 33. (Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, Lugano-Castagnola.)

Figure 2. The female soul of the world, engraved by Johann Theodore de Bry, in Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica (Oppenheim, 1617–21), vol. 1, p. 3. Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

Figure 3. Isis, in Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegypticus, 4 vols. (Rome: Mascardi, 1652), vol. 1, p. 189. Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

Figure 4. Hermaphrodite, from Aurora consurgens (late fourteenth century). Zentralbibliotek, Zurich, Cod. rhenovacensis 172, endpapers. Reproduced from Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Alchemy (New York: Avon, 1973), Plate 4.

Figure 5. The union of the solar and lunar opposites in the alchemical work, from Arnold of Villanova, Rosarium Philosophorum (sixteenth century). Kantonsbibliothek Vadiana, St. Gallen, ms. 394a, f. 34. Reproduced from Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Alchemy (New York: Avon, 1973), Plate 41.

Figure 6. Miners diverting rivers and cutting down trees for the washing and refining of ores, in Georg Agricola, De Re Metallica (1556), trans. Herbert C. Hoover and Lou H. Hoover (New York: Dover, 1950), p. 337.

Figure 7. Veins of ore in hillsides, in Georg Agricola, De Re Metallica (1556), trans. Herbert C. Hoover and Lou H. Hoover (New York: Dover, 1950), p. 62.

Figure 8. The Classes of Men, woodcut by Hans Weiditz (ca. 1530). Reproduced by permission of the Prints Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Figure 9. The Hierarchical Cosmos, reprinted from Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1661). Courtesy Mrs. Roy V. Sowers, Santa Cruz, California.

Figure 10. The hermetic philosopher following in the footsteps of nature, engraved by Johann Theodore de Bry. Reprinted from Atalanta Fugiens, Hoc Est, Emblemata Nova de Secretis Chymica (Oppenheim, 1618), Emblema 42, De Secretis Natura. Courtesy Tulane University Library. Reproduced from facsimile edition (Kassel and Basel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1964).

Figure 11. Aristotle and Phyllis, woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien (signed and dated 1513, Germany). Berlin, Staatliche Museen. Reproduced from Hannelore Sachs, The Renaissance Woman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), Plate 46.

Figure 12. Two women beating up a monk who has probably molested them, pen drawing by Urs Graf (ca. 1521). Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett. Reproduced from Hannelore Sachs, The Renaissance Woman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), Plate 102b.

Figure 13. The Witches, woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien (signed and dated 1510, Germany). Berlin, Staatliche Museen. Reproduced from Hannelore Sachs, The Renaissance Woman (New York: McGrawHill, 1971), Plate 103.

Figure 14. The Four Witches, engraving by Albrecht Dürer (signed and dated 1497, Germany). Berlin, Staatliche Museen. Reproduced from Hannelore Sachs, The Renaissance Woman (New York: McGrawHill, 1971), Plate 12.

Figure 15. Title page from Hic-Mulier or the Man-Woman (London, 1620). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 16. Five Women. From the Art Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., Art vol. d56 (Nunsuch Palace).

Figure 17. Nature Reveals Herself, sculpture by Louis-Ernest Barrias (1841–1905, France). Photograph by Roger-Viollet, 6 Rue de Seine, Paris, and used by permission.

Figure 18. Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Crooke, 1651). Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

Figure 19. A windmill used for grinding, drawing by Agostino Ramelli, in his Various and Ingenious Machines, trans. Martha Teach Gnudi © 1976, text, translations, glossary, notes copyright Martha Teach Gnudi and Eugene S. Ferguson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; first published 1588), Plate 132.

Figure 20. Watermill and pump for raising water, drawing by Agostino Ramelli, in his Various and Ingenious Machines, trans. Martha Teach Gnudi © 1976, text, translations, glossary, notes copyright Martha Teach Gnudi and Eugene S. Ferguson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; first published 1588), Plate 9.

Figure 21. Human-powered treadmill crane from Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Reproduced from Bruegel: Details from His Pictures, trans. Eveline B. Shaw (London: Williams and Norgate, 1936), Plate 16. Reproduced with permission of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Figure 22. Portrait of Jan Fernaguut, by Pieter Pourbus the Elder. Musée Communal, Bruges. From Sir Paul Lambott, Flemish Painting Before the Eighteenth Century, trans. Herbert B. Grimsditch (London: Studio, 1927), Plate 67.

Figure 23. Fifteenth-century geared clock. Musées Royaux d’Art et Histoire, Brussels. From Henri Michel, Scientific Instruments in Art and History, trans. R.E.W. Maddison and Francis R. Maddison (New York: Viking Press, 1967), Plate 77. Originally published in Instruments des Sciences dans l’art et I’histoire, © 1966 Albert de Visscher, Editeur, and used by permission.

Figure 24. Pascal’s adding machine. IBM Corporation, Paris. From Henri Michel, Scientific Instruments in Art and History, trans. R.E.W. Maddison and Francis R. Maddison (New York: Viking Press, 1967), Plate 16. Originally published in Instruments des Sciences dans l’art et l’histoire, © 1966 Albert de Visscher, Editeur, and used by permission.

Time Line

Events in the Period of the Scientific Revolution

1484 Death of Pico della Mirandola

1486 Malleus Maleficarum published

1489 Marsillio Ficino accused of practicing magic

1510 Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia

1513 Niccolò Machiavelli completes The Prince

1515 First printed edition of Ptolemy’s Almagest

1517 Martin Luther’s 95 Theses against the abuse of indulgences

1518 Lucas Cranach paints The Nymph of the Spring

1525 German Peasants War begins in Swabia

1528 Death of Albrecht Dürer

1531 Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour

1535 Henry VIII dissolves Catholic monasteries in England

1541 Death of Paracelsus

1543 Copernicus dies in the year his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres is published

1543 Andreas Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body

1543 Timber Preservation Act in England

1546 Michael Servetus completes book in which the lesser circulation of the blood (heart to lungs) is described

1551 Erasmus Reinhold publishes the Copernican based Prutenic Tables leading to reform of the calendar

1553 Mary Tudor (Bloody Mary) restores Catholicism to England and persecutes Protestants

1556 Georg Agricola’s De Re Metallica

1558 Accession of Elizabeth I to throne of England

1558 John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

1558 Johann Battista Della Porta’s Natural Magic

1564 Death of John Calvin

1565 Bernardino Telesio’s De Rerum Natura luxta Propria Principia

1572 Tycho Brahe’s new star (super nova) challenges the incorruptibility of the heavens

1576 Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic

1578 Queen Elizabeth requests Londoners not to use sea-coal in their industries

1584 Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft

1587 Death of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots

1589 Accession of Henry IV to throne of France

1590 Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen

ca. 1590 Henri Boguet’s An Examen of Witches

1594 Richard Hooker’s On The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

1599 Tommaso Campanella’s revolution in Naples

1600 Giordano Bruno burned in Rome

1600 William Gilbert’s On the Magnet describes his experiments with magnetic and electrical substances

1602 Tommaso Campanella writes City of the Sun in prison

1603 Accession of James I to throne of England

1603 Fabricius of Aquapendente announces his discovery of the valves in the veins

1607 Founding of Jamestown in Virginia

1609 Johannes Kepler’s New Astronomy announces the law of planetary ellipses and the law of areas

1610 Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger announces the satellites of Jupiter, craters on the moon, and the discreteness of the Milky Way

1610 Accession of Louis XIII to throne of France

1611 John Donne’s Anatomie of the World written

1616 Death of William Shakespeare

1616 Godfrey Goodman’s The Fall of Man

1618 Thirty Years’ War begins

1619 Valentin Andreä’s Christianopolis written

1619 Kepler announces the harmonic law in his Harmony of the World

1619 Descartes’ vision of the mathematical method

1622 Indians massacre English settlers in colony of Virginia

1623 Urban VIII becomes Pope

1624 Cardinal Richelieu becomes chief minister of France under Louis XIII

1624 Marin Mersenne’s La Vérité des Sciences

1625 Accession of Charles I to throne of England

1627 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis

1627 Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables

1633 Galileo censured by the Inquisition

1634 Cornelius Varmuyden, Dutch engineer, prepares plan to drain fens and straighten the Bedford River in England

1637 Death of Robert Fludd

1638 Galileo’s Discourses on Two New Sciences

1642 Birth of Isaac Newton

1642 English Civil War begins

1642 Death of Richelieu

1642 Death of Galileo

1643 Death of Louis XIII

1643 Accession of Louis XIV (at age 5) to throne of France

1643 Cardinal Mazarin becomes chief minister of France

1643 Torricelli’s barometer

1644 Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy

1644 Death of Johann Baptista Van Helmont

1644 Matthew Hopkin’s witch trials in England

1649 Charles I of England beheaded

1649 Gerrard Winstanley and Diggers take over George Hill in Surrey

1649 Pierre Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri

1650 Thomas Vaughan’s Anima Magica Abscondita

1651 William Harvey’s On Generation

1653 Henry More’s Antidote Against Atheism

1654 Otto von Guericke’s Magdeburg Experiment demonstrates the force of atmospheric pressure

1658 Death of Oliver Cromwell

1660 English Restoration

1660 Founding of the Royal Society

1661 Death of Cardinal Mazarin, Chief Minister of France

1661 Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chemist

1661 John Evelyn’s Fumifugium

1662 Boyle’s law of reciprocal relation of gas pressure to volume

1665 Newton lays foundation for law of gravitation, integral calculus, and dispersion of light

1667 John Milton’s Paradise Lost

1667 The Duchess of Newcastle visits the Royal Society

1674 Anton von Leeuwenhoek views animalcules in his microscope

1678 Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System

1679 Death of Anne Conway

1685 Accession of James II to throne of England

1686 Bernard de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Pluralíty of Worlds

1687 Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica

1687 Elizabeth Cellier proposes a corporation of midwives

1688 English (or Glorious) Revolution

1689 Accession of William and Mary to throne of England

1690 John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government

1696 Francis Mercury Van Helmont visits Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz at Hanover

1702 Accession of Queen Anne to throne of England

1713 William Derham’s Physico-theology

1716 Leibniz/Clarke correspondence in the year of Leibniz’s death

Preface: 2020, A Look Back

The shadows lengthened on the red, yellow, and brown pillars of the canyon walls. A panoply of moving colors bathed hundreds of eroded limestone spires as the sun sank over the sculpted peaks. In front of me, my two young sons, 11 and 13 years old, picked their way along a narrow trail across a maze of rock outcrops that dropped precipitously to the river below. We watched as a red-tailed hawk ascended the updrafts to an aerie on the high peaks. The view was breathtaking, the colors magnificent, the rocks vibrant and alive.

It was the summer of 1975; the place was Bryce Canyon, Utah, and the three of us were exploring the canyonlands of the American west. After our evening meal in the park campground, the boys fell into an exhausted slumber. I lay awake pondering the irony of the living rocks. Science viewed them as dead and inert, yet for much of human history those very rocks had been alive—growing and reproducing like plants and animals. It was then that the title of a book I had been sculpting for several years emerged into clear relief. The Death of Nature was christened.

Thinking back on that summer of magic, I am awed by the concatenation of personal, intellectual, and social events that led to the formation of the book’s thesis. The influences on my life and their intersections with history seem an odd coupling of chance occurrences, mundane events, and strange flashes of understanding. During the 1960s and ’70s, the women’s movement sparked by Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963), the environmental movement propelled by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and the social upheavals of the civil rights and antiwar movements formed my nascent social consciousness.

I entered the environmental movement in the fall of 1959 in a baptism by fire. On my first date with my ex-husband we went out and burned a Wisconsin prairie. The following spring a multicolored carpet of exquisite native wildflowers adorned a hillside that had been nearly obliterated by encroaching aspens. Working together to save native prairies for the Nature Conservancy, debating the consequences of Rachel Carson’s exposé of pesticides, and pondering the impact of world population on food supplies, I absorbed an environmental ethic early on in the emerging ecological movement.

I spent most of the 1960s as a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin’s provocative program in the History of Science studying the origins of the modern scientific revolution and drafting a dissertation on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s concept of living force.¹ I had always been in love with science, especially physics, and was awed by the beauty of its mathematical derivations, simplicity of explanation, and clarity of worldly description. My childhood and high school joy over biology turned to a fascination with chemistry in college, ultimately leading me to the pursuit of physics and then history of science in graduate school. Raising two sons sensitized me to the problems of housewife and career and I devoured Friedan’s Feminine Mystique when it appeared. I applied for and received one of the nation’s first fellowships designed to support women with children who were attempting to finish graduate school, at which task I ultimately succeeded.

By the late 1960s, the stage was set for the three themes that would subsequently comprise the subtitle of The Death of Nature—women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. Lacking, however, was the conceptual glue that would soon knit them together. The events of the 1970s in my new home in Berkeley, California, would provide that sinew. I began teaching physical science at the University of San Francisco (USF) amid the social turmoil over the bombing of Cambodia, the emergence of Earthday 1970, and the questioning of the role played by science in the new electronic battlefield directed at North Vietnam. With our Chinese-American neighbors, my sons and I joined in San Francisco peace marches and worked to integrate the Berkeley schools.

As a young woman on fire with the conventional beauty of science I was poised at a unique moment in which my personal experiences came into juxtaposition with the social implications of the scientific domination of nature. I began investigating the character of science in terms of its implications for women and nature.

Inspired by the widespread questioning of 1950s assumptions about science, society, and mainstream values, I started re-evaluating the meaning of my earlier work in the history of science. The history of mechanics as a system of matter in motion on which I had done my graduate work took on new implications when set against a Renaissance cosmology of animate spirits and ensouled beings in which everything was alive. What role did the history of the scientific revolution play in the way we in the late twentieth century world were conducting our lives? What historical alternatives, both real and utopian, had challenged some of the excesses of mainstream society? Such questions stimulated my work as a teacher and I turned to students, colleagues, and friends in seeking answers.

At USF, I introduced a new course on science and society and began teaching the social context of the rise of modern science in my history of science courses. Then in the summer of 1972, I traveled to Italy to participate in the Enrico Fermi Institute’s course on the History of Twentieth Century Physics in which issues of the social responsibility of science took center stage. From Marxist philosopher of physics Robert Cohen, I learned that the scientific revolution had been explained by historian Boris Hessen (1931) and sociologist Edgar Zilsel (1953) as phenomena arising out of early capitalist development and emerging middle-class crafts and trades. Cohen also introduced me to William Leiss’s new book The Domination of Nature which appeared in the fall of 1972. I began to understand some of the specific ways in which economic and social changes could influence the choices and underlying assumptions available to scientists as they pursued their theoretical work.²

That fall, two additional events conspired to change my outlook and launch the writing of the book. While teaching my new science and society course, I heard high praise from science writer Daniel Greenberg for Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends. Not only was Roszak’s book a startling critique of mechanistic science and an exploration of alternative timetold approaches such as the Gnostic tradition and William Blake’s art and poetry, but it heralded a new holistic ecological worldview. It was through Ted Roszak’s subsequent kindness that the manuscript of The Death of Nature made its way to the desk of my editor John Shopp of Harper, San Francisco.

On the very same day that I learned of Roszak’s remarkable book, I also met fellow historian of science David Kubrin. David, who had done a graduate dissertation on Isaac Newton and published a highly regarded article on Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos (1967), attended a lecture given by our British colleague Peter Harman. Peter noticed a guy in the audience sewing patches on his clothing and from the nature of his post-lecture question deduced that this must indeed be the well-known Kubrin. Early the next year I began attending a small class on the rise of modern science given by Kubrin at an alternative school in San Francisco. David introduced me and others to the pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English as well as ideas that took seriously the work of the alternative magical tradition in science history. It was David’s idea that the key concept of early modern science was that matter was dead. In a 1972 article, entitled How Sir Isaac Newton Helped Restore Law ‘n’ Order to the West and a later article called Newton’s Inside Out (1981), Kubrin explored the role that Newton played in suppressing magical and alchemical ideas in society and in his own mind and promoting the mechanical view of nature. My work on Leibniz and David’s work on Newton provided grist for an emerging analysis of the rise of modern science in which a world of living, vital forces gave way to a dead mechanical system that supported the new capitalist tendencies of early modern society.

What ultimately emerged as The Death of Nature began as a series of three essays I started writing in the summer of 1973. The first was on women and witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the second interpreted the change from magic to mechanism, and the third rethought the meaning of science and utopias from Campanella and Andrae to Francis Bacon. I began giving papers on women and nature and on natural philosophy and the environmental crisis to local, national, and international meetings of the History of Science Society and the American Historical Association.

Under the threat of recessionary layoffs at USF in 1976, I applied for and received four fellowships and grants that enabled me to rework and expand the initial essays into a book-length manuscript that covered the period of the entire scientific revolution. Despite the economic hardships of the layoffs and part-time employment, the times were intellectually heady. With great excitement, I read and absorbed hundreds of articles and books on the period. Everything seemed to fit together and to make sense of a period I had begun to know intimately and love deeply. As the book neared completion I accepted employment at the University of California, Berkeley, in an environmental studies program in the College of Natural Resources. After revisions and final editing The Death of Nature was launched in June of 1980.

The book’s debut was surprising. A friend invited me to take a tour of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue where it was displayed in several bookstore windows. Another friend who gave me a book party reported the incredulity of a local bakery: You want ‘death’ on a cake? I gave talks that week on the UC campus to the Women’s Studies program and at Cody’s bookstore to large numbers of people. The California Monthly featured an early review. I was soon asked to give an endowed lecture at Harvey Mudd College, the first of many such invitations over the years. For an academic book, which my editor said was ahead of its time, this response was gratifying. There were three obvious audiences for its themes: feminists, environmentalists, and historians of science and technology. Yet the book also garnered interest from political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, geographers, English teachers, and scientists. Over one-hundred reviews of the book have appeared during its lifetime. Among those who appraised, reviewed, or discussed the book were: Christopher Hill, Everett Mendelsohn, Houston Baker, Jr., Fritjof Capra, Walter Pagel, Evelyn Fox Keller, Donna Haraway, Helen Longino, Susan Griffin, Stephen Brush, Joan Rothschild, Margaret Jacob, Bruno Latour, Nina Gelbart, Tore Frängsmyr, Ronnie Ambjörnsson, Shigeru Nakayama, John Perkins, Audrey Davis, Margaret Osler, Rita Arditti, Joseph Meeker, Harold Gilliam, Murray Bookchin, Jim Swan, Kirkpatrick Sale, David Ray Griffin, and Jerry Mander.³

The early reviews focused on the connections between science and the domination of nature and on the relationships between women and nature. Reviewers emphasized the argument that the mechanistic world view laid open a new and brutal exploitation of the environment, animals, and a living, vital nature. The shift was part of a rejection of the feminine as a constitutive part of reality and a concomitant oppression of women. The machine metaphor redefined reality as controlling heretofore unruly events. There was praise for the integration of topics as diverse as ecology, natural magic, utopias, witch trials, midwives, women scientists, and for the recasting of the work of such founders of modern science as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, William Harvey, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Some commentators admired its lively style and correlated illustrations, while others found it dry and academic in tone.

More controversial was the issue of how historical events were related to each other and especially to ideas. One reviewer noted that the ideas explored in the book sometimes reflected social values and sometimes seemed to trigger changes. Yet this was a proverbial problem for historians, she stated, and the strength of the argument was that it avoided simple causations and hasty conclusions. Plausibility, associated values, compatibility, and the simultaneity of events made for a rich and complex argument. Others agreed that this approach resisted an easy determinism in favor of subtlety. Still others were concerned that the book’s crusading tone and feminist orientation might create opposition. Yet another objection lay in the problem of the precise relationship between female metaphors that described nature and the social subjection of women.

The book soon found an audience beyond academia. It made its way into congressional circles at a House of Representatives hearing on energy research and production in 1980, was addressed by Ronald Reagan’s science advisor, George A. Keyworth II in 1982, and was picked up by Newsweek in a 1983 discussion of the mainstreaming of feminist scholarship. The book made its movie debut in the British production of Crucible: A History of Nature by Central Television in January 1983, the first third of which was based on The Death of Nature.

Soon foreign journals and newspapers began to take notice of the book and its thesis. Early in 1981 Tore Frängsmyr introduced the topic to the Swedish audience and the publicity he gave it was followed by reviews in the Gothenburg Post and Stockholm’s Dagens Nyheter later that year. The book was reviewed in France in 1981, Japan in 1982, Poland in 1983, and in Denmark, France, and Germany in 1984. India gave it a central place in its 1984–85 report on The State of India’s Environment, and in 1986 it received attention in Australia. With its translation into Japanese (1985), German (1987, with a mass market edition in 1994), Italian (1988), Swedish (1994) and Chinese (Green Classics Library, in press), additional foreign language reviews followed. In 1990, a tenth anniversary second-edition appeared in English.⁴

In assessing the impact of the book’s lifespan, three contributions seem to stand out. The book was an early critique of the problems of modernism and especially mechanistic science and its associated worldview that lent grist to the postmodern deconstruction of Enlightenment optimism and progress. Second, as ecofeminism gained attention in the 1980s and ’90s, the book came to be viewed as an early classic statement of the women-nature relationship. Third, the book pointed the way toward a reassessment of the human ethical relationship to nature by moving away from ideas of domination and toward a new dynamic partnership between people and their environment. Over the years, at numerous gatherings and lectures on several continents, people have told me that The Death of Nature has affected their lives, even changed their whole way of thinking. For this I am very grateful.

Since 1980, my own work has moved beyond The Death of Nature’s assessment of the scientific revolution and toward a reassessment of the book’s implications for American history, the current environmental movement, and a new environmental ethic. In Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (1989), I asked how the issues discussed in seventeenth century Europe were played out in America.⁵ I attempted to develop a more precise approach to the interactions between ideas, the material world, and social and economic change by articulating a model of revolutionary transformations based on ecology, production, reproduction, and consciousness. These American ecological revolutions bore similarities to the change from an organic to a mechanical worldview brought about by early capitalist development discussed in the The Death of Nature. In Radical Ecology (1992), I expanded the idea of ecological revolutions to an analysis of the environmental movement of the past thirty years and in Earthcare: Women and the Environment (1996), I attempted to develop more precise relationships between women’s involvement in environmental movements and symbols of nature as female.⁶ In Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture, I worked out the details of a partnership ethic between people and the non-human environment that removes some of the stigmas associated historically with nature as female and men as agents of domination and which draws on some of the newer developments in the sciences such as chaos and complexity theory.⁷ And with my most recent book, Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control from Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution, I have come full circle back to the issues of the European transformation. Here I emphasize the aspect of nature that is unruly, unlawful, rambunctious and recalcitrant as manifested in the unpredictability of volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and plagues.⁸

In thinking back to the poignancy of that summer of 1975 in Bryce Canyon and to my many subsequent encounters with the birds and mountains of the world, accompanied by loved family members and friends, I am brought increasingly to appreciate the power of life on the planet and the need for an ethic of earthcare. If The Death of Nature contributes even in some small way to a new environmental consciousness, its legacy will live on.

Preface: 1990

In the decade since The Death of Nature first appeared, its major themes have been reinforced. Today, a global ecological crisis that goes beyond the environmental crisis of the 1970s threatens the health of the entire planet. Ozone depletion, carbon dioxide buildup, chloroflurocarbon emissions, and acid rain upset the respiration and clog the pores and lungs of the ancient Earth Mother, rechristened Gaia, by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock. Toxic wastes, pesticides, and herbicides seep into ground water, marshes, bays, and oceans, polluting Gaia’s circulatory system. Tropical rainforests and northern old-growth forests disappear at alarming rates as lumberers shear Gaia of her tresses. Entire species of plants and animals become extinct each day. A new partnership between humans and the earth is urgently needed.

Celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a 1987 conference on ecofeminist perspectives called upon women to lead an ecological revolution to restore planetary ecology. During the past decade, women over the entire globe have emerged as ecological activists. In Sweden, they have protested the use of herbicides on forests by offering jam made from tainted berries to members of Parliament. In India, they joined the Chipco, or tree hugging movement, to preserve fuelwood for cooking in protest over market lumbering. In Kenya’s Greenbelt movement, they planted millions of trees in an effort to reverse desertification. In England, they camped for many years at Greenham Common to protest the deployment of nuclear missiles that threatened the continuation of life on earth. German women helped to found the Greens Party as a platform for a green future for the country and the planet. Native American women protested uranium mining linked with an increased number of cancer cases on their reservations. At Love Canal near Niagara Falls, housewives demanded action from New York state offices over an outbreak of birth defects and miscarriages in a neighborhood built on the site of a former hazardous chemical dump.

Simultaneously, feminist scholars were producing an explosion of books on ancient goddesses that became the basis for a renewed earth-rooted spirituality. They revived interest in statues, images, poetry, and rituals surrounding prehistoric earth goddesses, the Mesopotamian Innana, the Egyptian Isis, the Greek goddesses Demeter and Gaia, the Roman Ceres, and European paganism, as well as Asian, Latin American, and African female symbols and myths. Concerts, street theater, solstice and equinoctial rituals, poetry, bookstores, and lecture series celebrated human resonance with the earth.

Yet these celebrations of the connection between women and nature contain an inherent contradiction. If women overtly identify with nature and both are devalued in modern Western culture, don’t such efforts work against women’s prospects for their own liberation? Is not the conflation of woman and nature a form of essentialism? Are not women admitting that by virtue of their own reproductive biology they are in fact closer to nature than men and that indeed their social role is that of caretaker? Such actions seem to cement existing forms of oppression against both women and nature, rather than liberating either.

But concepts of nature and women are historical and social constructions. There are no unchanging essential characteristics of sex, gender, or nature. Individuals form concepts about nature and their own relationships to it that draw on the ideas and norms of the society into which they are born, socialized, and educated. People living in a given period construct nature in ways that give meaning to their own lives as elites or ordinary people, men or women, Westerners or Easterners. The historian must ask, How have people historically conceptualized nature? How have they behaved in relationship to that construction? What historical evidence supports a particular interpretation?

Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans. The Death of Nature deals with the economic, cultural, and scientific changes through which this vast transformation came about. In seeking to understand how people conceptualized nature in the Scientific Revolution, I am asking not about unchanging essences, but about connections between social change and changing constructions of nature. Similarly, when women today attempt to change society’s domination of nature, they are acting to overturn modern constructions of nature and women as culturally passive and subordinate.

When the historian raises questions about the way nature was viewed in another era, she is also asking questions meaningful to her own epoch. One reason the historical changes described in The Death of Nature are of interest is that we may be experiencing a similar revolution today. The machine image that has dominated Western culture for the past three hundred years seems to be giving way to something new. Some call the transformation a new paradigm; others call it deep ecology; still others call for a postmodern ecological world view.

Emerging over the past decade are a number of scientific proposals that challenge the Scientific Revolution’s mechanistic view of nature. According to physicist David Bohm, a mechanistic science based on the assumption that matter is divisible into parts (such as atoms, electrons, or quarks) moved by external forces may be giving way to a new science based on the primacy of process. In the early twentieth century, he argues, relativity and quantum theory began to challenge mechanism. Relativity theory postulated that fields with varying strengths spread out in space. Strong, stable areas, much like whirlpools in a flowing stream, represent particles. They interact with and modify each other, but were still considered external to and separate from each other. Quantum mechanics mounted a greater challenge. Motion is not continuous, as in mechanistic science, but occurs in leaps. Particles, such as electrons, behave like waves, while waves, such as light waves, behave like particles depending on the experimental context. Context dependence, which is antithetical to mechanism and part of the organic world view, is a fundamental characteristic of matter.

Bohm’s process physics challenges mechanism still futher. He argues that instead of starting with parts as primary and building up wholes as secondary phenomena, a physics is needed that starts with undivided, multidimensional wholeness (a flow of energy called the holomovement) and derives the three-dimensional world of classical mechanics as a secondary phenomenon. The explicate order of the classical world in which we live unfolds from the implicate order contained in the underlying flow of energy.

Another challenge to mechanism comes from the new thermodynamics of Ilya Prigogine. The equilibrium and near-equilibrium thermodynamics of nineteenth-century classical physics had beautifully described, closed, isolated systems such as steam engines and refrigerators. Prigogine’s far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics allows for the possibility that higher levels of organization can spontaneously emerge out of disorder when a system breaks down. His approach applies to social and ecological systems, which are open rather than closed, and helps to account for biological and social evolution.

The recent emergence of chaos theory in mathematics suggests that deterministic, linear, predictive equations, which form the basis of mechanism, may apply to unusual rather than usual situations. Chaos, in which a small effect may lead to a large effect, may be the norm. Thus a butterfly flapping its wings in Iowa can result in a hurricane in Florida. Most environmental and biological systems, such as changing weather, population, noise, nonperiodic heart fibrillations, and ecological patterns, may be governed by nonlinear chaotic relationships. Chaos theory reveals patterns of complexity that lead to a great understanding of global behaviors, but militate against overreliance on the simple predictions of linear differential equations.

What all these developments point to is the possibility of a new world view that could guide twenty-first-century citizens in an ecologically sustainable way of life. The mechanistic framework that legitimated the industrial revolution with its side effects of resource depletion and pollution may be losing its efficacy as a framework. A nonmechanistic science and an ecological ethic, however, must support a new economic order grounded in the recycling of renewable resources, the conservation of nonrenewable resources, and the restoration of sustainable ecosystems that fulfill basic human physical and spiritual needs. Perhaps Gaia will then be healed.

Introduction

Women and Ecology

Women and nature have an age-old association—an affiliation that has persisted throughout culture, language, and history. Their ancient interconnections have been dramatized by the simultaneity of two recent social movements—women’s liberation, symbolized in its controversial infancy by Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963), and the ecology movement, which built up during the 1960s and finally captured national attention on Earth Day, 1970. Common to both is an egalitarian perspective. Women are struggling to free themselves from cultural and economic contraints that have kept them subordinate to men in American society. Environmentalists, warning us of the irreversible consequences of continuing environmental exploitation, are developing an ecological ethic emphasizing the interconnectedness between people and nature. Juxtaposing the goals of the two movements can suggest new values and social structures, based not on the domination of women and nature as resources but on the full expression of both male and female talent and on the maintenance of environmental integrity.

New social concerns generate new intellectual and historical problems. Conversely, new interpretations of the past provide perspectives on the present and hence the power to change it. Today’s feminist and ecological consciousness can be used to examine the historical interconnections between women and nature that developed as the modern scientific and economic world took form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a transformation that shaped and pervades today’s mainstream values and perceptions.

Feminist history in the broadest sense requires that we look at history with egalitarian eyes, seeing it anew from the viewpoint not only of women but also of social and racial groups and the natural environment, previously ignored as the underlying resources on which Western culture and its progress have been built. To write history from a feminist perspective is to turn it upside down—to see social structure from the bottom up and to flip-flop mainstream values. An egalitarian perspective accords both women and men their place in history and delineates their ideas and roles. The impact of sexual differences and sex-linked language on cultural ideology and the use of male, female, and androgynous imagery will have important places in the new history.

The ancient identity of nature as a nurturing mother links women’s history with the history of the environment and ecological change. The female earth was central to the organic cosmology that was undermined by the Scientific Revolution and the rise of a market-oriented culture in early modern Europe. The ecology movement has reawakened interest in the values and concepts associated historically with the premodern organic world. The ecological model and its associated ethics make possible a fresh and critical interpretation of the rise of modern science in the crucial period when our cosmos ceased to be viewed as an organism and became instead a machine.

Both the women’s movement and the ecology movement are sharply critical of the costs of competition, aggression, and domination arising from the market economy’s modus operandi in nature and society. Ecology has been a subversive science in its criticism of the consequences of uncontrolled growth associated with capitalism, technology, and progress—concepts that over the last two hundred years have been treated with reverence in Western culture. The vision of the ecology movement has been to restore the balance of nature disrupted by industrialization and overpopulation. It has emphasized the need to live within the cycles of nature, as opposed to the exploitative, linear mentality of forward progress. It focuses on the costs of progress, the limits to growth, the deficiencies of technological decision making, and the urgency of the conservation and recycling of natural resources. Similarly, the women’s movement has exposed the costs for all human beings of competition in the marketplace, the loss of meaningful productive economic roles for women in early capitalist society, and the view of both women and nature as psychological and recreational resources for the harried entrepreneur-husband.

It is not the purpose of this analysis to reinstate nature as the mother of humankind nor to advocate that women reassume the role of nurturer dictated by that historical identity. Both need to be liberated from the anthropomorphic and stereotypic labels that degrade the serious underlying issues. The weather forecaster who tells us what Mother Nature has in store for us this weekend and legal systems that treat a woman’s sexuality as her husband’s property are equally guilty of perpetuating a system repressive to both women and nature. Nor am I asserting the existence of female perceptions or receptive behavior. My intent is instead to examine the values associated with the images of women and nature as they relate to the formation of our modern world and their implications for our lives today.

In investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma and its connections to science, technology, and the economy, we must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that, by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women. The contributions of such founding fathers of modern science as Francis Bacon, William Harvey, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton must be reevaluated. The fate of other options, alternative philosophies, and social groups shaped by the organic world view and resistant to the growing exploitative mentality needs reappraisal. To understand why one road rather than the other was taken requires a broad synthesis of both the natural and cultural environments of Western society at the historical turning point. This book elaborates an ecological perspective that includes both nature and humankind in explaining the developments that resulted in the death of nature as a living being and the accelerating exploitation of both human and natural resources in the name of culture and progress.

The central problem of this book is informed by the concerns of the present. Yet the perspectives of our own age do not dictate the account that results. Instead they help us to formulate questions and to reveal aspects of the Scientific Revolution that might otherwise escape us and that have validity for a history of the period. Several different revolutions took place in the various sciences of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and I do not

Reviews for The Death of Nature

[gwendydd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book remains a classic after over 40 years in print, and rightfully so.Merchant examines how the Scientific Revolution happened hand-in-hand with the rise of capitalism, the justification of ecological exploitation, and further suppression of women's freedom. Before the Scientific Revolution, nature was seen as an organic whole, and humans were an integral but equal part in this organic system. Science focused on studying the relationships between microcosms and macrocosms and understanding the system as a whole. Nature was portrayed as a goddess who gave bounty in exchange for reverence and harmony.Then the Scientific Revolution began to focus on laws that can be universally applied, and on breaking things down into small components and understanding those components individually. It also focused on how to exploit nature to get the most out of it in the interests of capitalism. In essence, the Scientific Revolution re-imagined the world as a machine rather than a living organism. A machine has predictable behavior, exists to serve man, and has no life or soul. This shift in thinking completely changed the course of history.Merchant examines in detail how this shift happened, in both scientific thinking and in literature. It's clear from reading this that the Scientific Revolution was the beginning of rampant capitalism, the current climate crisis, and our difficulty with understanding nature as a whole system instead of as a bunch of discrete parts. It's fascinating to think about how different the world would be if these changes hadn't happened.

[keebrook · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a fascinating and enlightening book. Merchant wonderfully tells the compelling tale of how Western civilization in Europe began seeing the Universe as a dead thing rather than a living being- a pile of resources to be exploited rather than a mother figure to be nourished and nurtured. She looks most pointedly at records from mining charters form the time period in question as well as works previous to that. It seems a definite shift occurred around 1500 concerning our attitude towards Nature and the Earth.She argues that a more rigid, violent,and paternalistic culture came to dominance at that time, virtually crushing the older more wholistic and maternalistic culture. It allowed us to coldly rationalize our "rape" of what used to be Mother Nature through mining and timber harvesting mainly.Although Merchant has gone on to argue points and positions much more radical in later years, she has always done so in a rational manner, backed up with solid evidence- she does not simply hollowly bark at ideas she does not like. The Death of Nature is first and foremost a history book. It does end up arguing a more environmental message but only because the evidence leads us that way not because Merchant forces the idea down our throats.