Carolyn Merchant

The Columbia guide to American environmental history

Part I: Historical Overview: Topics and Themes 1. The American Environment and Native-European Encounters, 1000-18752. The New England Wilderness Transformed, 1600-18503. The Tobacco and Cotton south, 1600-19004. Nature and the Market Economy, 1750-18505. Western Frontiers: The Settlement of California and the Great Plains, 1820-19306. Urban Environments, 1850-19607. Conservation and Preservation, 1785-19508. Indian Land Policy, 1800-19909. The Rise of Ecology, 1890-199010. The Era of Environmentalism, 1940-2000Part II: American Environmental History A to Z: Agencies, Concepts, Laws, and People Part III: Chronology: An Environmental History Timeline Part IV: Resource Guide Visual ResourcesElectronic ResourcesBibliographical EssayBibliography

The Scientific Revolution and The Death of Nature

The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, published in 1980, presented a view of the Scientific Revolution that challenged the hegemony of mechanistic science as a marker of progress. It argued that seventeenth‐century science could be implicated in the ecological crisis, the domination of nature, and the devaluation of women in the production of scientific knowledge. This essay offers a twenty‐five‐year retrospective of the book’s contributions to ecofeminism, environmental history, and reassessments of the Scientific Revolution. It also responds to challenges to the argument that Francis Bacon’s rhetoric legitimated the control of nature. Although Bacon did not use terms such as “the torture of nature,” his followers, with some justification, interpreted his rhetoric in that light.

‘Peace with the earth:’ Women and the environmental movement in Sweden

Abstract Women active in the contemporary Swedish environmental movement draw much of their inspiration from twentieth century feminist Elin Wagner (1882–1949) who in the 1930s saw connections between environmental issues, feminism, and matriarchal cultures of the past. Contemporary women writers, poets, and artists celebrate periods in which both women and nature seemed to be more powerful than they are today. Contemporary women are most active in environmental issues that involve the reproduction of the human species (such as nuclear issues) and their own reproductive labor as it affects themselves, the family, and the state (such as pesticides, food quality and distribution, and work environments). These issues are analysed as a ‘politics of reproduction’ that leads to conflicting strategies of equality politics, womens culture politics, and alternative ‘green’ politics. These conflicting strategies exemplify contradictions inherent in both the wider womens movement and the ‘women and environment’ movements throughout the world today.

Green versus gold : sources in California's environmental history

Green Versus Gold provides a compelling look at Californias environmental history from its Native American past to conflicts and movements of recent decades. Carolyn Merchant has brought together primary sources and interpretive essays to create a comprehensive picture of the history of ecological and human interactions.

“The Violence of Impediments”: Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation

Francis Bacons use of metaphors to characterize his nascent concept of experimentation must be interpreted within the historical context of his time. His approach to experimentation is one in which nature is constrained by the “violence of impediments” and is made new by “art and the hand of man.” His language about nature should be placed in the context of the history of the contained, controlled experiment, a concept that emerges from juridical practice, from the idea of nature in bonds, and from the tradition of the secrets of nature in settings such as the courtroom, the anatomy theater, and the laboratory.

Francis Bacon and the ‘vexations of art’: experimentation as intervention

Francis Bacons concept of the ‘vexations of art’ ( vexationes artium ) entailed experimentation as an intervention into nature for the purpose of extracting its secrets. Although the standard edition of Bacons works by Spedding, Ellis and Heath and the new Oxford edition by Graham Rees translate the phrase vexationes artium as the ‘vexations of art’, a significant number of scholars, translators and editors from the seventeenth century to the present have read Bacons Latin as the ‘torment’ or ‘tortures of art’. Here I discuss these latter interpretations and speculate on the reasons for their association of the term with experimentation. While it may not be possible to say with certainty what Bacon meant by ‘vexation’, the context of his thought, the rich set of metaphors on which he drew and the interpretations of dozens of scholars over four centuries would seem to favour assigning a robust, interventionist meaning to vexare .

Partnership with Nature

E co-revelatory design is a partnership between people and nature. The designs show local communities in a relationship with their local environments. As such, the exhibits reveal what I have called a partnership ethic: the greatest good for the human and nonhuman community is to be found in their mutual living interdependence1. The new ethic supplants older self-interested and human-centered ethics. Each exhibit involves attention to ecological partnerships as the overriding guideline for a proposed reconstruction. Here through conscious design, ecology not only guides but is revealed through education and direct experience of the result. A partnership ethic, I believe, is required for the future welfare of both people and nature. For most of human history, people lived at the mercy of nature’s storms, droughts, frosts, and famines. Only in the last few centuries have technologies and attitudes of domination stemming from the scientific revolution turned the tables, enabling humans to threaten nature with deforestation and desertification, chemical pollution, destruction of habitats and species, nuclear fallout, and ozone depletion. But today, as the exhibition attests, we are beginning to see nature as our partner in bringing the pendulum back into balance. It is clear that eco-revelatory design team members have worked cooperatively not only with nature and local communities, but also with each other to achieve their goals. Men and wotnen are both well represented in the teams that created the exhibits and the designs. Behind the partnership ethic lies an implicit assumption. Teams of men and women, women and women, and men and men have worked together as equals. Moreover, nature, traditionally represented as mother, virgin, or witch, is not gendered as female to be managed, controlled, or exploited, but instead is accepted as a partner to humanity. Such cooperation, revealed not only in the exhibits but in the resultant landscapes, presents exciting new opportunities for working with nature. To achieve the new partnership with nature, the past must be understood in terms of its ecological and human histories, and negative outcomes must be reassessed. Environtnental history often shows a prior era flaught with the exploitation of natural resources with little regard to long-term consequences. It teaches us that many past interventions have been ecologically shortsighted. Eco-revelatory design seeks to remedy such errors. The exhibits reveal four precepts of a new partnership ethic. A partnership ethic is, first of all, based on equity between human and nonhuman nature. In a Maplewood, Minnesota, neighborhood, past problems with stormwater runoff offered an opportunity to rethink human needs together with nature’s needs. Landscape architect Joan Iverson Nassauer worked with residents and city engineers to redesign yards, vacant lots, and curbside strips with native wetland and prairie plants that would use water runoff and at the same time enhance traditional neighborhood tidiness by adding a touch of wildness. While neighbors dreaded the disruption of torn-up streets, they also saw an opportunity in the new ecology, a way to improve runoff and create aesthetically pleasing gardens on their own property. Here the partnership

Science and social passion: the case of seventeenth-century England.

Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981,233 pp., plus introduction and appendix. John Bowle, John Evelyn and His World. A Biography. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, 277 pp. Brian Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy. An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution, 1450-1750. Harvester Press, Brighton, Sussex and Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1980. Morris Berman. The Reenchantment of the World. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1981. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1980, 348 pp. plus introduction.

Spare the Birds!: George Bird Grinnell and the First Audubon Society

An engaging history of the founding of one of the worlds most popular environmental organizations, the Audubon Society In 1887, a year after founding the Audubon Society, explorer and conservationist George Bird Grinnell launched Audubon Magazine. The magazine constituted one of the first efforts to preserve bird species decimated by the womens hat trade, hunting, and loss of habitat. Within two years, however, for practical reasons, Grinnell dissolved both the magazine and the society. Remarkably, Grinnells mission was soon revived by women and men who believed in it, and the work continues today. In this, the only comprehensive history of the first Audubon Society (1886-1889), Carolyn Merchant presents the exceptional story of George Bird Grinnell and his writings and legacy. The book features Grinnells biographies of ornithologists John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson and his editorials and descriptions of Audubons bird paintings. This primary documentation combined with Carolyn Merchants insightful analysis casts new light on Grinnell, the origins of the first Audubon Society, and the conservation of avifauna.

Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England.

With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New Englands industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In Ecological Revolutions , Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860. In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future. |With the arrival of European settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution lasted until the nineteenth century, when New Englands industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change.