Death of Nature; Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution

by Carolyn Merchant

UPDATED 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH 2020 PREFACEAn 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.

Genres: Feminism, History, Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Ecology, Philosophy

Paperback

First published April 1, 1980

About the author

Carolyn Merchant is an American ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science most famous for her theory (and book of the same title) on The Death of Nature, whereby she identifies the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century as the period when science began to atomize, objectify, and dissect nature, foretelling its eventual conception as composed of inert atomic particles. Her works are important in the development of environmental history and the history of science. She is Professor emerita of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley.

Reviews

[Gea · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her 1980 book, The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant developed a feminist theory through the lens of the ecology movement. She explained how the pre-scientific world not only maintained a sense of chivalry and respect toward nature, but also associated feminine and life-giving characteristics to nature. Prior to the works of the founding ‘fathers’ of modern science, such as Bacon and Descartes, the values and images associated with women and nature were revered; however, as the worldview changed toward a more mechanistic and scientific lens, along with scientifically-established hierarchies came a strong belief in the domination and mastery of nature (and, hence, the feminine). Merchant pointed out in her analysis that it was not her intention to advocate that women reassume the role of nurturer (mother earth, provider, etc) as dictated by that historical identity, but rather to examine the values associated with the images of women and nature as they relate to the formulation of our modern world and their implications for our lives today (Merchant: xvii). She sought not to take an essentialist stance, but to point out the contrast between the way the earth and women were viewed previous to the enlightenment and the scientific revolution vs. after the enlightenment and the scientific revolution.

As the name of the book suggests - The Death of Nature – Merchant traced history to show how the feminine/woman was associated with the earth/nature and, as the worldview changed, the death of nature occurred as a result of man’s need to manipulate it. Some of the key ideas behind this new worldview and the economic/scientific changes that began between the sixteenth and seventh century regarding how both women and nature were viewed are: 1. Dominion over nature: Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said, “For like as a man’s disposition is never well known or proved until he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed shapes till he was straitened and held fast, so nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art {mechanical devices} than when left to herself” (Merchant: 169). 2. Mechanical order over nature: For sixteenth century Europeans “the root metaphor binding together the self, society, and the cosmos was that of an organism” (Merchant: 1), but “the fundamental…problem for the seventeenth century was the problem of order. The perception of disorder, so important to the Baconian doctrine of dominion over nature, was also crucial to the rise of mechanism as a rational antidote to the disintegration of the organic cosmos” (Merchant: 192); By the seventeenth century, nature was beginning to be viewed as disorderly and not to be trusted – although it offered both abundance and harmony (harvest/nurturing) it also created plagues and famine (natural disasters/witches). 3. Hierarchies of the sexes: Women who were married and tended to the home were considered more respectable than single women, and scientific research on reproduction was biased toward the male species and said that sperm supplied reason and was superior to the egg (Merchant: pp. 157-61).

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merchant is an historian of science, and her book studies how humankind's relationship with the natural world changed, especially over the past six centuries. Basically, we went from regarding the world as a living organism -- a "mother" -- to viewing nature as a machine ("natural resources"). Fascinating stuff -- not WHAT we think, exactly, but why we think as we do. Merchant is a good writer, if a little academic, when she stays on topic, but has an annoying tendency to digress. Still, this is an enormously interesting and valuable book, not least because Merchant writes from a feminist perspective and ties the rise of proto-capitalism, the rise of science and the increasing subordination of women together in a compelling history.

[Christy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was quite simply not what I expected.

If you're looking for a history of conceptions of nature explored from a feminist and environmentalist perspective, this book is great; if, however, you are looking for a more theoretical approach to the interconnections between women and nature (as the subtitle seems to promise), this book isn't quite what you're looking for.

It does definitely deal with those interconnections and gives lots of specific examples of how women and nature have been brought together in rhetoric and imagery of texts from the Greeks to the Scientific Revolution, which makes this a great resource, but it doesn't add much to my depth of understanding of this connection.

Furthermore, much less time was spent elaborating these connections than was spent providing very detailed histories of various practices and schools of thought regarding nature (including ecological practices, community structures, scientific debates). It is an extremely well-researched book--there's no escaping that. It's unfortunate, however, that I am not currently interested in the history of this time period.

Given my lack of interest, I didn't give this book a very high rating, but I do recognize its value in making apparent what might not otherwise be apparent (or would not have been apparent in 1980, when this book was first published): our current views of nature and of scientific practice are not ahistorical or purely rational, as we are taught to think they are. They have been formed through a series of very specific historical instances, instances which are inextricably caught up in gender politics, commerce, and forms of government.

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn't this extremely dull and slightly preachy book. I consider myself an environmentalist but I wouldn't rate this as one.

Admittedly, I did not read this in it's entirety because it was extremely ponderous in many sections. I ended up jumping chapters and skimming through bits and pieces.

From what I gathered, Merchant seems extremely resentful of science, she complains repeatedly that science has reduced nature to "mechanistic" matter. Science has essentially raped, tortured and murdered nature (whom she treats like a living sentient entity). At times, she came across as a bit of a creationist loon but am not totally sure she is.

There's also much comparison between the oppression of women as analogous with nature.

This book came highly recommended from someone I had respected, and now I am questioning whether or not I really got that person at all--this did not seem like something she'd endorse. She seemed rational, and in contrast, this book spits on rationality.

I'd rate it a negative star if I could.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm so glad this is over.

That sounds like a terrible thing to say, because this is in many ways an excellent book. The research is incredibly thorough. And the argument itself is fascinating: that the history of science allows us to track changing attitudes towards nature, and that those attitudes have knock-on consequences for political and economic thought, and that they have particular consequences for the treatment of women. Merchant therefore observes, in frequently exhaustive detail, the similarity of approach to both nature and women during the Scientific Revolution, and how attitudes to the two often moved in synch.

She is very, very convincing, and I would love to have given this book four stars, because the quality of the research deserves that at least. It's just the book is so very, very dull. Well, not dull exactly. It is dry. It took me weeks to get through, a little a day, and even then I had to reread at least half the paragraphs at least twice, because I'd space out halfway through and go looking for water. I realise that academic prose is not easy, and I have certainly inflicted my terrible share of it, but that doesn't make it any better to read. In fact, what made it worse was that every so often there'd be several pages that were genuinely, appealingly readable, just plain readable, and I'd perk up for all of five minutes before being catapulted back into stodge.

It is truly a fascinating argument, buried underneath the soporific prose. If only I could bear to read it again... but I can't. I'm sorry, once is enough.

[Chase · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is supposed to be about connections between the scientific revolution, and the exploitation of nature and women. Unfortunately, illustrations of these connections are sporadic, and often come at the end of a very long description of some school of thought or thinker - an awful lot like a student who's trying to fill out the word count with detail that's never connected to the point.

There's little radical political content here, and minimal theory, but an abundance of random factoids & excess history. I now know what color pomegranates would be bred in Hobbes' utopia, for instance, and am very convinced that Anne Conway influenced Leibniz's monad!

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dense, dully written with a clear vendetta against men. Good information I suppose, but I'd rather shoot myself before re-reading this book!! It was so bad that I added my own review on the back cover at the time I finished it "Pain in the ass to read, this book marked the death of my soul!"

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merchant is one of those rare scholars who writes in a clear and intelligible style while maintaining the complexity and nuance of her analysis. I have the utmost respect for her book and for her intellect. Reading this book nearly 50 years after its initial publication is honestly quite demoralising though. It feels as though not a warning has been heeded and very little has been changed to achieve or at least work towards the hopeful final conclusions of her epilogue.

Whether you agree with her conclusions the sheer value of the primary sources she quotes from and the art she references in the book are moving enough on their own. Some quotes from men who were previously vaguely known to me as ‘generally learned fellows I should probably read more about’, like Bacon, for instance, actually made me feel sick for the violence, arrogance and misogyny of their language.

Merchant is a brilliant writer and was ahead of her time (alternatively we are way behind where we should be !)

[Ryan Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revealing look at the philosophical evolution of the concept of nature throughout history, focusing on the 1400s-1600s. During this time, the concept of nature went from an organismic, relational view in which everything was alive and connected, to a mechanistic view of nature as dead matter that had to be acted on by outside forces. This change in view, Merchant argues, corresponded with the rise of a capitalist economy, driven by profit accumulation instead of cooperative subsistence living. The exploitation of nature and women were necessary to this endeavor, and so philosophy and science provided theories and ways of viewing the world which justified the exploitation.

A bit dry and gets bogged down a bit in the philosophical minutia, but a really interesting and important study, particularly as it was first published in 1980. Really disturbing to see how the foundations of Western society were based on this exploitative worldview. Merchant argues that a return to the organismic understanding of nature is necessary to preserve humanity and the earth from actual death at the hands of the exploiters.

[Lee Raye · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real classic of ecocriticism. Some parts of it have not aged very well, but other parts are still really provocative to this day.

I loved four chapters in particular:

FARM, FEN, AND FOREST: this chapter argues that the movement from subsistence to intensive farming and communalism to capitalism ended up objectifying the environment.

DOMINION OVER NATURE: this chapter argues that the scientific revolution (& esp. Francis Bacon) popularised the view that nature needed to be dominated and made to serve humanity.

THE MECHANICAL ORDER this chapter argues that the scientific revolution (& especially Descartes, Hobbes, Newton) transformed the idea of nature from a living organism to a passive machine ("the death of nature").

THE MANAGEMENT OF NATURE this chapter argues that the conservation ideal was born as a response to the increased exploitation of nature in the seventeenth century and is especially due to the Latitudinarian ideas of John Evelyn.

[Nick Mather · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book that details the shift from an organic worldview to a mechanistic one, which is one based on oppression towards women and nature. Mercant's writing does leave something to be desired, but the content of her ideas is what is most important. The history of science and worldview that she traces here is essential in understanding our current ecological condition.

[Evie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carolyn - you are quite clearly a genius but also can you drop me an email because how the heck am i meant to write 5,000 words on something i have absolutely nothing to add to x
(Would have enjoyed more pictures in this)

[Stan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Canonical imo. Merchant disassembles the notion of "objectivity," an in so doing identifies it with the unique male supremacist character of the Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment.

[Scotia · Rating 4 out of 5]

difficult to read! but an incredible collection of evidence & really powerful for what it inspired

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ecofeminist banger. Felt so smart after finishing this book.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic feminist text canonized in various disciplines, including both environmental history and science & technology studies. It critiques mechanistic conceptions of the universe, celebrating instead organic views of the universe (as living), particularly where those conceptions intersect with radical, subversive, and revolutionary millenarian movements.

There are some fantastic sections on deforestation, militarization, mining, machines, heretics, revolts, and feminist history. Despite some materialist objections to vitalism, this book by Merchant is widely celebrated by various Marxists, including Andreas Malm, who spoke of the book in this way:

“Not only capitalism is implicated in ecological destruction: so is patriarchy. This realisation animates ecofeminism, which has produced some work that is also aligned to Marxism, although much more needs to be done in this sphere. One classic of this current, which also stand as one of the best books of radical environmental history ever written, is Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. A stunning materialist analysis of ideas, it shows how aggressively dominating attitudes towards nature – and women – grew out of the capitalist property relations that first took hold in England. Other prominent ecofeminists with various degrees of Marxist commitment are Val Plumwood and Ariel Salleh.”

Some excerpts I particularly appreciated:

p. 2-3: The change in controlling imagery was directly related to changes in human attitudes and behavior toward the earth. Whereas the nurturing earth image can be viewed as a cultural constraint restricting the types of socially and morally sanctioned human actions allowable with respect to the earth, the new images of mastery and domination functioned as cultural sanctions for the denudation of nature. Society needed these new images as it continued the processes of commercialism and industrialization, which depended on activities directly altering the earth-mining, drainage, deforestation, and assarting (grubbing up stumps to clear fields). The new activities utilized new technologies-lift and force pumps, cranes, windmills, geared wheels, flap valves, chains, pistons, treadmills, under- and overshot watermills, fulling mills, flywheels, bellows, ex-
cavators, bucket chains, rollers, geared and wheeled bridges, cranks, elaborate block and tackle systems, worm, spur, crown, and lantern gears, cams and eccentrics, ratchets, wrenches, presses, and screws in magnificent variation and combination.

p. 29:
The ancient Greek philosophers Anaxagoras (500-428 B.c.), Theophrastus (370-278 B.C.), and Dionysius of Periegetes (fl. A.D. 86-96) believed that metals were plants growing beneath the earth's surface and that veins of gold were like the roots and branches of trees. Metals were believed merely to be a lower form of life than vegetables and animals, reproducing themselves through small metallic seeds.
A popular Renaissance belief held about mining was the metaphor of the golden tree. The earth deep within its bowels produced and gave form to the metals, which then rose as mist up through the trunk, branches, and twigs of a great tree whose roots originated at the earth's center. The large branches contained the great veins of minerals, the smaller the metallic ores.

p. 45: By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, conflict was already evident over the use and control of technology for energy production. The energy of the preindustrial economy was drawn from renew- able sources-wood, water, wind, and animal, including human, power. Watermills had been introduced into Europe slowly ever since Roman times, reaching Great Britain by the eighth century and Scandinavia by the twelfth, and were used for grinding grain, fulling (or shrinking and thickening) cloth, sawing timber, extract- ing oil from olives, and making paper. …Problems arose over the control of wood- lands for the building of ships, the substitution of coal for wood in the trades as timber supplies became scarce, and the use of the lord-of-the-manor's watermill.2 The impact of access to resources for differing interest groups can be illustrated by selected examples chosen from three historically changing ecosystems-the farm, the fen, and the forest. …The use of the manor's watermill as energy for the grinding of grain was controlled by the lord, who raised revenue from its use by the villagers and tenant farmers. At harvest time, grain was hauled to the mill and, for a fee, ground into flour, a practice that encouraged peasants to keep hand-operated mills in their homes and therefore to resist the advent of wind and water as new energy sources. Lords were careful to see that competing mills were not erected on manor lands, but it was more difficult to prevent peas- ants from keeping hand-operated mills at home.
Handmills survived into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in areas devoid of sufficient waterways, as security against winter frost, summer drought, and siege. Hidden handmills thus competed with the manor mill, human muscle with the manor's centralized inanimate energy sources-water and wind.
Evidence of centuries of attempts by landlords to obliterate peasant handmills has been found in scattered documents.

p. 76-77: Ideas that stressed the common consent of the people and mutual will of the community represented a formulation of the organic theory at the communal or socialist end of the political spectrum. Despite numerous variations in local rural social stratification and economic patterns, the peasant society of much of western Europe can accurately be described in terms of cohesive community responsibilities and common traditions and exemplifies the communal variant of the organic model.
In the communal variant, both the law of God and nature dictated an original equality among the parts of the village community, cooperative land use, and communal sharing of tools and goods. Moreover, the body of the people had the right to choose its own head by elective right. Consent of the community must validate the actions of the village officials who remained parts of the whole and subordinate to it.

p. 77: Agrarian communism in such villages reached a new level of cooperation with the introduction of compulsory tillage in response to population increases and land shortages: all persons in the village plowed, planted, and harvested at the same time in order to increase productivity. In many central European communities, as family groups split, land was periodically redistributed, to equalize the fertility, productivity, and accessibility of plots. These variations on the model of the organic community were established widely over most of medieval and early modern Europe, surviving in much of central and eastern Europe well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

p. 197: The Rosicrucian movement bore similarities to the millenarian mystical anarchists. The reputed founder, Christian Rosenkreutz, was supposed to have been born in 1378 and his tomb to have been discovered in 1604, the year of general millenarian reformation signaled by Kepler's 1604 supernova. Like the original "people's messiah," crusader Emperor Frederick I, Christian Rosenkreutz had traveled to the East where he learned his wisdom from Eastern sages. Rosenkreutz, a Paracelsist physician, was .dedicated to the life of an itinerant doctor who wore the garb of the people of each locale.
The _second Rosicrucian manifesto, the Confessio, which appeared in 1615, linked the brotherhood to millenarian and religious movements that had called the pope the Antichrist:

p. 218: Many fulling mills, driven by water power and used for shrinking and thickening cloth, had been built along streams by the late twelfth century. These operated by the rotary action of cams that lifted large hammers and then released them to deliver a blow to the cloth in the vat below. The fulling mill was also pressed into service as the village washing machine.
By the end of the sixteenth century, watermills were used extensively in the lead and tin industries for smelting and stamping and for hammering iron bars and drawing iron into rods. Large watermills of the type employed in paper and gunpowder manufacture required capital outlays in the neighborhood of £1,500.

p. 226-227: In England, because of the political tensions between order and freedom, the clock metaphor eventually became more convincingly articulated as a balance, symbolic of regulating the balance of power and balance of trade. As the machine technologies and capitalist modes of trade and manufacture, already a part of the growth of medieval guilds, markets, and towns, evolved toward industrialized capitalist society, machines, calculations, and measurements were increasingly integrated into the ·commercial and industrial life of European society.
The philosophy that the world was a vast machine made of inert particles in ceaseless motion appeared at a time when new and more efficient kinds of machinery were enabling the acceleration of trade and commerce.

p. 236: By the early 1660s, the British navy had become distressed over the lack of tall timber to repair the masts and hulls of its ships, reducing its ability to defend the nation. Its commissioners and officers requested that the Royal Society study the state of the king's forest reserves. The English diarist and founding member of the Royal Society, John Evelyn (1620-1706), began an analysis of the destruction caused by wasteful land practices and lack of conservation methods and in 1662 published the results in his Silva, A Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions. Increasing numbers of shipping vessels were needed for commercial trade, glass-works and iron-works needed charcoal for smelting, and additional forests had been cut for pasture. "Prodigious havoc" had been wreaked through the tendency not only to "cut down, but utterly to extirpate, demolish, and raze ... all those many goodly woods and forests, which our more prudent ancestors left standing," a devastation that had now reached epidemic proportions.1

p. 237: Since the mid-sixteenth century, England's forest reserves had been declining, in conjunction with rapid increases in population, trade, and the growth of industries that depended on wood. Writing of the shortage of timber in the 1660s, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) exclaimed in his diary, "God knows where materials can be had."2 At the time of the Civil War and the Interregnum, widespread destruction had occurred in the forests of the king and the gentry. Forest supervisors had not performed their duties adequately. England, emerging from internal troubles and looking again to the external defense of the nation, found the "wooden walls" for her protection lacking. Something more in the way of wise management and conservation had to be ·instituted if England's military and commercial superiority were to be maintained "since our forests are undoubtedly the greatest magazines of wealth and glory of this nation, and our oaks the truest oracles of its perpetuity and happiness, as being the only support of the navigation which makes us feared abroad, and flourish at home."
In his Silva, Evelyn called for the institution of sound conservation practices that would contribute to steady economic progress. Like many other intellectuals of his generation, Evelyn was a religious moderate of Latitudinarian persuasion and social philosophy. Latitudinarianism, a religious compromise arising after the English Civil War, retained the Anglican's episcopal form of government, but denied its divine origin.

p. 258: ANNE CONWAY'S MONISTIC VITALISM. Whereas the Cartesians and the Cambridge Platonists, More and Cudworth, were dualists, Anne Conway, like Van Belmont, was a monist. In her philosophy, there was no essential difference between spirit and body and, moreover, the two were interconvertible. She distinguished her views sharply from those of Descartes and also from More and Cudworth on these points. Body was condensed spirit and spirit was subtle, volatile body. Body and spirit were not contrary entities, the first impenetrable and divisible, the other penetrable and indivisible, as More had held. Matter was not dead, "stupid," and devoid of life, as Descartes and the Cambridge Platonists had thought. For Lady Conway, an intimate bond and organic unity existed between the two. Body and soul were of the same substance and nature, but soul was more excellent in such respects as swiftness, penetrability, and life.10
If, as More asserted, spirit was the principle of motion in dead, unorganized matter, and if spirit could see, hear, and sense of itself, then it would have no need for body or sense orga·ns. But since the soul felt pain and grief when the body was cut or wounded, the two must be united and of one substance. Otherwise the soul, as an independent substance, could simply move away from the suffering of a damaged body and thereby be insensitive to it.

p. 261: Anne Conway radically opposed Hobbes and Spinoza, both of whom had reduced nature to a monistic materialism that denied any distinction between God and his creation. Like Conway, they accepted the interconvertibility of all things, but their materialism admitted no distinction between lower and higher forms and saw God as interconvertible with corporeal species.

p. 261-271: Anne Conway wrote that "in every creature, whether the same be a spirit or a body, there is an infinity of creatures, each whereof contains an infinity, and again each of these, and so ad infinitum."
Like Leibniz, who wrote that there was nothing dead or fallow in the universe, Conway asked, "How can it be, that any dead thing should proceed from him, or be created by him, such as is mere body or matter. . . . It is truly said of one that God made not death, and it is true, that he made no dead thing: For how can a dead thing depend of him who is life and charity?"

p. 272-273: Significantly, in this new age when God had become an engineer and mathematician, nature in Fontenelle's fantasia had become a housewife. "Nature is a great housewife, she always makes use of what costs least let the difference be ever so inconsiderable and yet this frugality is accompanied with an extraordinary magnificence, which shines through all her works; that is, she is magnificent in the design, but frugal in the execution."
Fontenelle's book was translated into English in 1688 by playwright Aphra Behn. Although she approved of the idea of instructing women in science, Behn found the Marchioness somewhat less than convincing, because for a student her comments vascillated between silly and excessively profound.

p. 280: Leibniz applied his interest in a universal logical language and mathematical method to practical inventions which would foster the capitalist spirit. His design for a calculating machine which he called a "living bank-clerk" would, he believed, be useful in business, surveying, military affairs, and astronomy. He worked on a new kind of pump that could be used to remove water from the Harz mines in Germany. He designed "catadoptic tubes" of mirrors and perspective lenses to improve the science of optics and a submarine to aid in navigating through storms, dangerous seas, and naval combats.

p. 285-286: Why did Newton attribute such importance to the concept of fermentation? Fermentation had had a long and clear historical connection with motion and activity and could be viewed as a source of violent change. From a political standpoint a ferment carried the connotation of agitation-the inflaming and fomenting of passions and tumult. A ferment could "work up to foam and threat the government." In alchemy and chemistry changes in the properties of metals were thought to be produced by a ferment operating within them. The action of yeast on dough and the brewing of beer produced an internal commotion and effervescence. All were examples of new motions generated in both living and nonliving things.19
Newton, at work on his queries to the Opticks in the early 1700s, still presumed these violent motions resulting from fermentation to be operative in cosmic chemical processes. The fermentation of sulfurous steams with minerals deep within the "bowels of the earth ... if pent up in subterraneous caverns burst the caverns with a great shaking of the earth," generating tempests and hurricanes, landslides and boiling seas. In the air fermentation caused lightning, thunder, and fiery meteors.20
But fermentation was not only an important cause of violent cosmic motions resulting from chemical reactions, it was also a cause of the life motions of animals and vegetables. It was responsible for "the beating of the heart by means of respiration," and of "perpetual motion and heat." Without fermentation as an active principle, "all putrefaction, generation, vegetation, and life would cease."

p. 288: Similarly, although the mechanistic analysis of reality has dominated the Western world since the seventeenth century, the organismic perspective has by no means disappeared. It has remained as an important underlying tension, surfacing in such variations as the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, American transcendentalism, the ideas of the German Naturphilosophen, the early philosophy of Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century vitalists, and the work of Wilhelm Reich. The basic tenets of the organic view of nature have reappeared in the twentieth century in the theory of holism of Jan Christiaan Smuts, the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the ecology movements of the 1930s and 1970s, alternative analyses in nuclear physics (the "bootstrap" model), and developmental theories in psychology. Some philosophers have argued that the two frameworks are fundamentally incommensurable. Although such a perception of the dichotomy is too extreme, as the fusions between the two perspectives discussed in previous chapters have shown, a reassessment of the values and constraints historically associated with the organic world view may be essential for a viable future.

[Joel Beebe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would describe this book as a history of the idea of nature within the mainstream Western canon. Specifically, the immanence of God within nature and how the scientific revolution has led to a mechanistic worldview. I recently listened to a podcast, and such is an idea in archaeology, that says to know something is to destroy it, or aid in its destruction, it's dissection. As we probed further and further into the reaches of our mind and the nature of matter, our philosophy became mechanistic and geared towards atomized exploitation.

The climax of this book comes with the introduction of Francis Bacon, the so-called "father of modern science". Bacon's influence comes at a turning point in the development of science and technology in the Western sphere, and he developed an ethic that privileged the middle-class male entrepreneur and sanctioned the exploitation of women and nature. Of course, single men don't make history, and he dropped his ideas within a culture fresh off the witch hunts and in the development of the medical establishment. His ideas are a touchstone for the mechanization of nature because of his development of the deductive scientific method. Here again, we find the theme of knowledge, the dissection of the world into parts, sanctioning the destruction and exploitation of the world.

From there, the dominoes fall into place. From Bacon emerges a three-way relationship between knowledge, power, and mechanism. Central to the mechanistic worldview is Hobbes, who viewed the state as a machine. Political organization requires, from his point of view, a rigid hierarchy of being which can allow for more powerful forms of social organization to take place.

It's important to note that the organic worldview of social organization and an immanently alive natural world never fully left the "canon" and even the ideas which unfold within the book are an example of an organic progression of ideas animating form and vice versa. For instance, Newton, while developing the laws of physics in a deductive way that set us down in our current mechanical paradigm, still argued for an organic and active force within the universe. He practiced alchemy, for instance, and viewed God as an immanent force within the universe.

Merchant also discusses female philosophers who opposed the mechanistic philosophy such as Anne Conway, an aristocratic critic of the mechanistic worldview who argued for a monistic worldview. So the contrary view to the cartesian paradigm of dead, inert matter, has always been a thread since his ideas first took hold.

The conflation of women with nature has a long history going back to classical Greek and Roman times. The paternal aspect of reality, is ever seeking to divide, organize, and dissect, which often leads to the destruction of nature or the thing dissected.

This is an important history detailing the evolution of a particular scientific worldview and the effect it has on our social systems and the development of knowledge. Knowledge as dissection, leading to an atomization of nature into inert parts, sanctioning the mechanization of nature and the development of the state into a kind of machine after more power.

[Dallin Kohler · Rating 1 out of 5]

The subtitle of the book is "women, ecology, and the scientific revolution". Merchant argues that these three are deeply connected, but her book was too boring to convince me.

I don't usually write reviews for books I dislike since I rarely end up finishing them, but I had to read this for a class in a week so it gets the full treatment. In terms of the three topics of the book (women, ecology, and the scientific revolution), only the first is done well. Merchant is clearly not a scientist and her ecological analysis is very subjective (though not necessarily inaccurate). Additionally, she pins the destruction of nature largely on the scientific revolution. There were important shifts in societal views and practices that accompanied the scientific revolution, but I think it would be more appropriate to attribute ecological destruction to economic (read: capitalist) reasons. People don't cut down trees or use pollutants in a mine for science. It's economics. I think Merchant misses the mark.

The book was a long stream of historical facts, and it was utterly devoid of ANY quantative analysis. I'm not a math guy per se, but when the only numbers you use are dates it's hard to have a compelling argument. I was also disappointed by her total focus on the west; juxtaposing western and eastern ecological philosophies could have been insightful, but alas it was not to be. Maybe 1 star is too harsh (and it's probably partly because I was compelled to read this), but reading this felt like a waste of time.

[Eddie Matthew Pagtakhan]

crazy book. tackles a 200 year historical, ecological and feminist anaylsis on the philosophical death of nature. by the time i made it to the end i was pretty impressed by the level of historical and philosophical knowledge merchant impresses on the reader. at times though it does lose me from how complex some of the topics on natural philosophy can get especially in the explanation of monads because damn i did not really get that at all. but that’s a skill issue. it’s a great book.

[Angie Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book may be a bit too erudite and technical for me.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across two copies of this book at different times and in different locations. I was intrigued by the title and information on the cover. Also, Dewey Decimal classifications interest me and I wondered what "Human ecology" is. Human ecology is the study of the interrelationships between humans and their environment, drawing on diverse fields from biology and geography to sociology.

Here it becomes a rather intriguing history of science as to how it understood the natural world and how views of nature affected society.

Twentieth-century ecology emerged from the intellectual frame-work historically associated with an organic approach to nature and society. Employing the hierarchical variant of the organic model, ecologists in the early decades of this century used concepts such as "organic community," "mutual interdependence," and "evolution toward higher forms" on a hierarchical scale to provide an under-standing not only of the organization of bacterial colonies, grass-land climax vegetation, and bee and ant communities, but also of human tribal societies and the world economy. They stressed an evolution toward greater cooperation on a worldwide basis and argued that nature could provide the model for an ethic of human sharing, integration, and unity. But the emergence of fascist tyranny based on a centralized organismic model glorifying the father as absolute dictator undermined the evolutionary hierarchical component of their argument, and ecology turned in a mathematically reductionistic direction.

In this post-industrial information age, the rise of charismatic autocratic disruptors seems to reflect the 12th century Millenarianism recalled here.

Millenarianism represented a preindustrial form of social revolution. It differed from the movements of the industrial revolution by preparing people, through revelation, to accept revolutionary change, as opposed to politicizing the working class. Signs in the heavens, prophets, and saviors would appear predicting the arrival of the millennium. For example, persisting since the Middle Ages was the prophecy that Frederick I (Barbaroso), King of Germany, would be resurrected; he had died in 1190 on the third crusade and was idealized as a savior of the poor who would bring with him a communal state. He would banish the Pope as Antichrist, and destroy his cohorts-the clergy, the wicked, and the rich, well-fed laity. Throughout the Middle Ages, prophets and written manifestos sustained revolutionary influences and the real hopes of the poor for a new social order.

One things that makes this interesting is the focus on England and European scientific development and history ends up recalling centuries of fen filling and forest clearing and generally a history unknown to me. Also, I seem to keep reading of the battle of the sexes as forceps-wielding men sought to edge out midwives -- the small corner of medical science women retained.

... By the end of the century, childbirth was passing into the hands of male doctors and "man-midwives."

While women's productive roles were decreasing under early capitalism, the beginning of a process that would ultimately transform them from an economic resource for their families' subsistence to a psychic resource for their husbands, the cultural role played by female symbols and principles was also changing. The female world soul, with its lower component, Natura, and the nurturing female earth had begun to lose plausibility in a world increasingly influenced by mining technology essential to commercial capitalism. The older organic order of nature and society was breaking up as the new mercantile activities threatened the ideology of natural stratification in society.

Symbolic of these changes were the midwife and the witch. From the perspective of the male, the witch was a symbol of disorder in nature and society, both of which must be brought under control. The midwife symbolized female incompetence in her own natural sphere, reproduction, correctable through a technology invented and controlled by men the forceps. But from a female perspective, witchcraft represented a form of power by which oppressed lower-class women could retaliate against social injustices, and a source of healing through the use of spirits and the regenerative powers of nature. For women, the midwife symbolized female control over the female reproductive function. But until medical training became available to women and licensing regulations were equalized for both women and men, women had no opportunity to compare the effectiveness of the older, shared traditions of midwifery as an art with the new medical science.

Descartes moved the spirit out of matter in sensing a mechanized world.

Similarly, his Principles of Philosophy (published in 1644) re-structured the cosmos as a mechanism, based on the motion of inert material corpuscles that transmitted motion consecutively from part to part through efficient causation. The force that produced the motion was not something vital, animate, or inherent in bodies, but a measure of the quantity of matter and the speed with which they moved. Motion was external to matter and was put into the universe at the moment of creation. It could be transferred among bodies, but its total amount was conserved from instant to instant by God. Change occurred through the rearrangement of inert corpuscles. The spiritus mundi of the Neoplatonists was translated into a subtle mechanical ether whose whirlpool circulations pushed the planets around, a sleight-of-hand not lost on subsequent critics such as Henry More and Henry Power.

The ghost got back into the machine, ushered in by the forgotten Leibniz-inspiring and Kabbalah-reading Anne Conway, an English philosopher whose work was in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists.

THE MONADS OF CONWAY, VAN HELMONT, AND LEIBNIZ.

By September, after Van Helmont's March 1696 arrival in Hanover, one finds in Leibniz's writings the first use of the term monad to characterize his concept of "individual substance." In long hours of conversation with Leibniz and the Electress Sophie, Van Helmont spoke about his own ideas, those of Anne Conway, and of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata, conversations which Leibniz found "very instructive," in contrast to Van Helmont's books, which were more enigmatic.

Prior to 1696, Leibniz had used the terms entelechie, formes substantielles, unité substantielle, point metaphysical, and forces primitives interchangeably to mean "individual substance." But in 1696, the disparate elements of his metaphysics coalesced when he began using the concept of the monad to represent an independent individual-a substance endowed with perception and activity-existing in a state of accommodation and consensus with other substances.

[Jill Geyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science is considered rational, and yet not all progress made during the Scientific Revolution can be considered rational. In her book, Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant pinpoints the origins of female suppression and modern environmental exploitation in the 15th-17th centuries. She identifies the shift in value systems from organic to mechanistic to be at the crux of these two crises. Her basis for understanding value systems comes from prevalent philosophy, art, and literature during the time-period of study. Merchant argues capitalism and early modern science transformed the view of the earth from a living being with animistic features to inert, passive, manipulatable matter. The manipulation of matter inaugurated and cemented in Western ideals the domination of nature for man’s personal advantage. Females, who were closely associated with nature due to their physiological functions were swept up into this subjection and domination by their male counterparts and placed in a position where they were considered intellectually inferior and economically dependent.

Carolyn Merchant’s argument is heavily based on the change in human value systems from an organic view of nature to a mechanistic view of nature. The organic view was the dominant view of the earth held prior to the Scientific Revolution. The earth was understood as having female traits and qualities. The earth gave birth to new life. It provided the nourishment needed for man-kinds survival. Historical change began to challenge this organic view. For example, the practice of mining undermined the animistic aspects of the earth. Mining violated the earth’s womb, but the profits from mining incentivized people to put aside their organic view of the earth and disrespect the earth. Merchant understands the view of the earth to be organic before the scientific revolution. The earth was feminine and revered for its life-giving power and she argues historical changes such as population growth and the scientific revolution fueled the casting aside of the established organic value system.

Merchant emphasizes in her book that science is not value free, abstract, or isolated. She argues for intersectionality between scientific change and the treatment of females. The subjection of the earth brought about the subjection of women. In her book, Merchant details prevailing science on procreation at the time. It theorized that women were merely incubators for the embryo while males did the actual creating and determined the excellence of the child. Additionally, male doctors churned out by the scientific revolution ousted midwives from their position at the bedside. As a result, women were stripped of their identifier as life giving by popular science. A leisurely wife was also the symbol of pride for a rich man at the time; Thus women were removed from an increasing number of communal functions from which power was derived and assigned domestic tasks within the home. Merchant does her best to argue that these changes in the 15th-17th centuries cemented patriarchy in Western ideals. For example, she cites Francis Bacon’s work, “The New Atlantis.” Bacon was widely considered the founder of modern science. He supported the use of the scientific method to interrogate the earth, saying, “Nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art,” and nature must be “made a slave.” Bacon supported the acquisition of knowledge of the earth solely for subsequent domination of the earth. His approach to the earth carried over into his view of gender roles. In addition to being an inquisitor during the witch trials, Bacon supported the patriarchal system where man is master and father while woman is a subordinate partner.

Merchant develops a strong case for the correlation between the shift in value systems during the 15th-17th centuries and environmental exploitation. In Europe, the earth’s resources were manipulated via farming or mining during this time for man’s advancement and to provide for the needs of a burgeoning population. To prevent famines, better farming techniques were necessary. These changes meant sacrificing the organic view of the earth. To treat the earth as manipulatable matter, the high regard held for the earth had to be discarded. Her argument that female subordination also originated during this shift of value systems is a little less convincing. While she aims for valuable intersectional analysis and peddles a possible origin for patriarchy in history, her argument is lacking. There is strong evidence for the subjection of females by males before this point in history: obeying one’s husband, arranged marriages, overseeing a house and yet holding no governmental position. Merchant’s argument could be fortified if she acknowledged existing patriarchy and identified how the scientific revolution deepened patriarchy in a unique way. Her intersectional analysis could also be strengthened if she acknowledged other factors besides a shift in value systems that contributed to the domination of females such as religion. Her valiant effort to study women’s history alongside environmental history is valuable and tells the untold impacts of the scientific revolution. Such a big task leads to dense writing and consequently difficult reading.
The Death of Nature cautions readers to understand the earth as a living entity that cannot be relentlessly pushed. If the earth is broken, she fails to function as a life giver. The solution to the environmental crisis lies in returning to a more organic approach to nature which acknowledges the interdependence between humans and the earth. This argument is echoed by other environmental historians such as Brian Fagan who understood the Mayan collapse to be “A cautionary tale in the dangers of using people, power, and technology to expand the carrying capacity of a tropical environment.” Understanding a land’s carrying capacity is vital to the thriving of any society. The extensive use of technology can lead people to believe land is more capable than its actual limits. Merchant steers her readers away from believing nature is for their own use but does not persuade her readers of nature’s intrinsic value. If a homocentric view of conservation where nature is preserved for the sake of human use is not the best understanding of conservation, then a stronger pitch for ecocentric conservation and nature’s intrinsic value should have been made in the book. Using the earth’s resources for humanities sake does not seem like such a bad use. After all, they must be used for human sustenance.

Excessive understanding of the earth and the advancement of technology put humans on the precipice of deciding how they were going to treat the earth at the end of the 17th century. Technology could be used to exploit and push the limits of the earth, or it could be used to understand her limits. Unfortunately, the emergence of the economic system of capitalism incentivized abuse of the earth for man’s profit rather than equal treatment. This can be exemplified in Donald Worster’s work “Dust Bowl” where he argues how money incentivized farmers in the great plains in the 1930’s to farm unsustainably which led to the environmental crisis of the dust bowl. Today, technology and capitalism are two very strong forces in society. The Death of Nature makes a strong case for uprooting and challenging entrenched Western ideals of domination rooted in the resulting mechanistic value system of the 17th century but leaves readers waiting to be convinced of an achievable view of conservation. Profit has an obvious intrinsic value for most people. If it is what is driving people to abuse the earth then how can they be persuaded otherwise that nature has intrinsic value?

[Candy Wood]

First published in 1980, The Death of Nature represents the conjunction of the women's rights movement (which Merchant dates from the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963) and the ecology movement, nationally recognized in the U.S. by Earth Day 1970. Merchant focuses primarily on Europe from 1500 to 1700, tracing the shift from the view of nature as organism that lasted into the Middle Ages to the view of nature as machine that came out of the Scientific Revolution. Part of her argument is that the two views are not complete opposites--for one thing, women can be viewed as inferior under either model--and that the survival of the planet may depend on discovering ways of reconciling them. To that end, she shows how Leibniz and Newton, both popularly associated with mechanistic philosophies, have elements of the organic in their thinking. A useful survey of the past, always reminding readers of its relevance to the present.

[Bri · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tedious is the only word I can think of to describe this book. There are a few, brief paragraphs, that I actually enjoyed, but for the most part I found myself reading multiple pages without remembering a single word I'd read. She makes a few valid points, but has an annoying tendency to oversimplify some very complicated issues.

[Campbell Rider]

forest conservation was invented because european monarchies realised they needed trees to build navies

[Hypathie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"L'ancienne structure hiérarchique du macrocosme se trouva perturbée par la cosmologie de Nicolas Copernic qui, en 1543, avança l'hypothèse héliocentrique remettant en cause le géocentrisme ptolémaïque de l'univers. Copernic déplaça la terre féminine du centre du cosmos et la remplaça par le soleil masculin". Et voilà comment on se prend tous les tours de vaisselle pour des siècles !
Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, principaux philosophes de la structure mécanique du cosmos et de la société, y sont examinés en opposition à la précédente vision holiste et organique (ptolémaïque) du cosmos et de la nature, dans laquelle l'ensemble est plus que la somme des parties : ainsi se présente cet ouvrage classique d'épistémologie éco-féministe de Carolyn Merchant. Les philosophes en question se contorsionnant pas mal pour caser Dieu dans l'explication du monde (Et Dieu dans tout ça ? on est au XVIe et XVIIe siècle) et tombant tout de même sur un os, puisque leur thèse est la soumission de la nature et des femmes renvoyées à la Nature, sauvage(s), irrationnelle(s), qu'il faut asservir et maîtriser, exploiter, dont il faut fouiller les entrailles pour en extraire des ressources, des métaux, -Francis Bacon est aussi entrepreneur minier au service de la monarchie britannique-, l'os étant Elizabeth 1ère, reine d'Angleterre (c'est qui la patronne ?), refusante du mariage et de la sacro-sainte maternité. La vie du philosophe n'est pas simple. Les dualistes mécanicistes (Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, tous des hommes) gagnent contre les holistes (Conway -une femme effacée de l'histoire-, Liebniz...) et imposent leur vision dualiste, et mécanique du monde, leurs machines, leurs techniques de maîtrise, de gestion et d'exploitation de la nature jusqu'à épuisement, idées sous le diktat desquelles nous vivons encore aujourd'hui. Dans son épilogue, comme tout au long du livre, Carolyn Merchant plaide pour sa substitution par un système moniste, holiste, qui prend en considération le tout plutôt que la partie, ce que font les écologistes actuels, dont des femmes et des peuples premiers, pour maintenir la qualité de l'environnement et la survie des espèces vivantes, dont la nôtre, qui peuplent notre biotope Terre. Une révolution en somme.
La mort de la nature est un ouvrage de philosophie, employant les termes de la philosophie, truffé de références et de citations, très documenté et érudit, de 440 pages. Certains passages sont lumineux, d'autres assez filandreux. Cependant, c'est un ouvrage à lire, un livre indispensable, qui fait partie du fond de toute bibliothèque féministe digne de ce nom.

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not enjoy this as much as I was hoping.

I saw it referenced with Caliban and the Witch, which -- thought I definitely felt like more knowledge about some topics would have been helpful -- was so interesting and educating and wonderful.

For Death of Nature, I guess the first problem is that I was interested in the subtitle's premise of women and ecology in relation to the scientific revolution, but it was really more about the philosophical history of that time period and its interplay with science.

How that affected the view of women and nature came up periodically, but the strongest information was not there, or the demonstrations to back it up. So, there could be a really good book on this topic, but it's not here.

For example, there is a reference to Copernicus and his heliocentric theory, and then a quote from Fontenelle about Copernicus punishing the earth for her laziness... yes, there is some relation between the view of science and the view of the feminine, but it seems important here that the earth and the other planets in this solar system to orbit the sun, not the other way around. If you want to demonstrate that it was sexist of Copernicus to figure that out, or that this specific discovery changed the discourse, there needs to be a better case made.

[Greyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merchant's depth of scholarship is almost intimidating. Here, she traces conceptions of "nature" and "femininity" from the middle ages through the work of Leibnitz and Newton in the 1700's. Essentially the argument is that scientific atomization and reduction of the universe into constituent, mechanical parts that we can manipulate (i.e. through industry, mining and smithing, and other technological advancements) has led to the denigration and corruption of the environment which was previously held to be a whole, sacred body--that is, "Mother Earth" herself.

Written while she was a lecturer on the west coast in the late 70's, this book combines the fervor of the environmental movement that spawned the EPA and other protections with second-wave feminism to produce a seminal ecofeminist tract.

It does get very into the weeds--as necessary when developing and defining a new mode of thought--so most of the philosophical details could (now) be distilled into a lecture or two (or analytical paper) without losing too much of the meat. But this is only possible by relation to works post-publication since it has had so much influence on modern feminist critiques of the ahistoricity and apolitization of science.

[Peggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been taking my time with this book, partly because it reads like an expanded doctoral thesis that sometimes makes me impatient. But, honestly, in the long run that’s a good thing if sometimes tedious.
This is very much grounded in the history of science and philosophical thought. I enjoyed it, overall, and believe its premise to be valid in every way. She is looking at the development of mechanistic theories of the nature of the world and correlating it with female-centric models of the earth and nature from pre-scientific (prior to the 16th century) times, and clearly coming down in favor of a model that both acknowledges the scientific truths our society operates under while learning to honor the value and purpose of an ecologically driven politics and economics. I don’t see this happening any time soon although I wish it with all my heart. This is a book very influential in its time and still utterly relevant. I read a review of another book, recently published, that appears to be essentially an updating of this. Hope credit was given.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like so many of the other reviews for this book, I completely agree that this book is a wolf in sheep's clothing, in the sense that the title and thesis are entirely misleading. This book is not an exploration of women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. It is an overly dense history lesson on the ramblings of philosophers. Merchant's writing is dense, dull, and unimaginative. It's written as if she's entirely unaware that writing can be fun, imaginative, and engaging. The only reason I didn't give this one star is because there are some good ideas mixed throughout. This is definitely one to skip.