In her conclusion to The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant made the following diagnosis: “The world must once again be turned upside down.”132 She was writing the day after the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear explosion, the worst nuclear power accident in the US to date. If we want to decide today what might justify such a conclusion, we are spoiled for choice. Turning the world upside down is no small undertaking. But there can be great joy—the joy of audacity, of insolence, of a vital affirmation, of defying faceless authority—in allowing our ideas and imaginations to follow the paths down
...more
