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Why has The Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980) become a citation classic in environmental studies? Because as many readers as one asks, one is bound to hear as many celebrations. Indeed, The Death of Nature presents something of a cataloguing nightmare for librarians. Does it fall under feminism and gender studies, environmental ethics or philosophy, history and philosophy of science, economic history, environmental history, cultural studies, or art history? The librarian's conundrum is testimony to the sheer breadth, diversity, and ambition of The Death of Nature. The subtitle to this book-Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution-comes close but necessarily fails to capture fully the breadth of Carolyn Merchant's groundbreaking inquiry.
In view of this breadth and diversity, perhaps the most general and enduring contribution of The Death of Nature is that it succeeded in bringing ecology to the humanities by showing the complex ways in which nature is an active partner rather than passive accessory in the unfolding of human communities. As Merchant points out, "psychological adaptation to altered environments helps to explain the rise of intellectual movements, conceptual structures, and new human behaviours" (p. 68). In the wake of this book, any account of broad historical transformation-including civilisational change-which ignores the nonhuman dimension may be exposed as lopsided and incomplete, not to mention being at risk of the charge that it is perpetuating arrogant assumptions about nature's subservient role in the historical drama.
In the course of charting some of the crucial intellectual struggles that were part of the scientific, industrial, and social revolutions that took place between 1500 and 1700 in Europe, Merchant also succeeded in underlining the striking congruence between the different overarching conceptions of self, society, and nature or cosmos that rose to dominance during different epochs. According to Merchant, the actual "death of nature" was constituted by the marginalisation of animistic, organic assumptions and images of the self, society, and nature and the ascendancy of a new mechanistic image of nature as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external rather than inherent forces. Such an image suited the new capitalist, scientific, and state bureaucratic order and served to sanction and legitimate the domination of nature and, by mutual association, women (and many...