Description
Carolyn Merchant’s foundational 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution established her as a pioneering researcher of human-nature relations. Her subsequent groundbreaking writing in a dozen books and over one hundred peer-reviewed articles have only fortified her position as one of the most influential scholars of the environment. This book examines and builds upon her decades-long legacy of innovative environmental thought and her critical responses to modern mechanistic and patriarchal conceptions of nature and women as well as her systematic taxonomies of environmental thought and action. Seventeen scholars and activists assess, praise, criticize, and extend Merchant’s work to arrive at a better and more complete understanding of the human place in nature today and the potential for healthier and more just relations with nature and among people in the future. Their contributions offer personal observations of Merchant’s influence on the teaching, research, and careers of other environmentalists.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword – Susan Griffin
Introduction – Kenneth Worthy, Elizabeth Allison, & Whitney A. Bauman
Part 1: Environmental Philosophy and Ethics and Ecofeminism
- Chapter 1: Before The Death of Nature: Carolyn Iltis, the Carolyn Merchant Few People Know – J. Baird Callicott
- Chapter 2: The Death of Nature or Divorce from Nature? – Kenneth Worthy
- Chapter 3: Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Launching new trajectories in interdisciplinary research – Heather Eaton
- Chapter 4: From a Partnership to a Fidelity Ethic: Framing an Old Story for a New Time - Norman Wirzba
- Chapter 5: Bewitching Nature – Elizabeth Allison
- Chapter 6: Leading and Misleading Metaphors: From Organism to Anthropocene - Holmes Rolston, III
Part 2: Environmental History
- Chapter 7: Personal, Political, and Professional: The Impact of Carolyn Merchant’s Life and Leadership – Nancy C. Unger
- Chapter 8: Carolyn Merchant and The Ecological Indian – Shepard Krech III
- Chapter 9: All Our Relations: Reflections on Women, Nature, and Science – Debora Hammond
- Chapter 10: The Other Scientific Revolution: Calvinist Scientists and the Origins of Ecology – Mark Stoll
- Chapter 11: Carolyn Merchant and the Environmental Humanities in Scandinavia - Sverker Sörlin
Part 3: The Politics of Landscapes, Embodiment, and Epistemologies
- Chapter 12: Landscape, Science, and Social Reproduction: The Long-Reaching Influence of Carolyn Merchant’s Insight – Laura Alice Watt
- Chapter 13: The Spiritual Politics of the Kendeng Mountains Versus the Global Cement Industry – Dewi Candraningrum, translated by Bryanna Wilson
- Chapter 14: Toward a Political Ecology of Environmental Discourse – Yaakov Garb
- Chapter 15: Environmental History and the Materialization of Bodies – Whitney A. Bauman
- Chapter 16: A Mighty Tree is Carolyn Merchant – Pasty Hallen
Afterword – Carolyn Merchant
About the Contributors
