Review Of Carolyn Merchant's Death Of Nature

Death of Nature was written by Carolyn Merchant in 1980, at the forefront of two emerging genres, gender and ecological history. It was written to explore the changing perception and treatment of nature during the European Scientific Revolution. However, Merchant specifically framed it through a feminist perspective by comparing the treatment of women to the treatment of nature during this time frame, drawing on the emerging ecological and gender studies of history. This decision shifted the emphasis away from the men leading the scientific revolution and moved it towards the people and resources they used to make the revolution happen. Merchant first established the relationship between man and nature before the 16th century along with the

Merchant showed what changes were required to make the shift from an agrarian economy reliant on renewable resources, to the industrialized early modern Europe content with mining away the Earth’s interior to maximize profits. She begins with the tensions that existed in pre-industrial Europe between manors and their tenants, and the shift that came with the sudden lack of labor due to the black plague (70). This is followed by philosophies accompanying this cultural shift, exemplifying the attitudes towards both women and nature through imagined utopias and understandings of the world. As science developed more into its modern form, a desire to control and subdue nature was established, exemplified by Francis Bacon. Bacon’s worldview differed from previous examples with his emphasis on the well-being of merchants and the state rather than the lower classes (185). This trend continued up to the end of the 17th century, with Newton and Leibniz’s explanation of the mechanical cosmos cementing our understanding of the world around us today

Using philosophy, Merchant was able to demonstrate how people viewed the world, rather than focusing solely on what may or may not have happened, to explain the shift in cultural understanding of people of the past in order to help understand our current culture and relationship with nature. Along with Merchant’s subsequent works, this book helped establish the ecofeminist movement, a term coined only six years prior to the publication of Death of Nature, in Françoise d'Eaubonne’s Le Féminisme ou la mort. It reflected the changing landscape of history after the tumultuous 1960’s that caused more people to not only enter the field of history, but also to reconsider what is included in the definition of history. This came in the form of “history from the below” that emphasized telling history from the perspective of those overlooked in previous historical practices. One of these ignored perspectives was that of the planet itself, which was facing the destruction of the environment caused by the rapid industrialization of the