She argued that the Scientific Revolution must be understood not only as the emergence of a mathematical method of describing nature, but through metaphors about the earth as a female to be used, exploited, and conserved for human welfare and through the changing roles of women in seventeenth century society. In it she set out a new way of understanding the History of Science that helped to broaden and transform the field.
She is well known for her landmark book, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, which has shaped the fields of the History of Science, Women’s Studies, and Environmental History ever since its publication in 1980 (40th anniversary edition, 2020). She is Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. The viability and success of new human modes of existing within the constraints of the environment and its resources requires both an understanding of the past and the articulation of a new ethic for the future.Ĭarolyn Merchant holds a PhD in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin (1967) and honorary doctorates from Umeå University, Sweden, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. An analysis of ecological history as the history of an expanding power over nature by social institutions and ideologies, together with identifying possibilities for overcoming an instrumental approach to nature, could lead to a sustainable partnership with the natural world. Studying the past can sometimes suggest guidelines for the future and in this sense environmental history plays a role in policy formation. She is interested in the role of consciousness and symbols about nature, the interaction between productive and reproductive forces in human and nonhuman history, and the place of ecological change in understanding development over time. how they have affected that environment and with what results." The goal, as environmental historian Donald Worster puts it, "is to deepen our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time, and conversely.
It deals with relationships between land forms, climate, population fluctuations, pollution, wilderness preservation, resource conservation, and environmental deterioration.
Concerned with human interactions with the natural environment at particular times and places, it draws on social, political, economic, and intellectual history, the history of science, and the roots of environmental values. Over the past four decades, environmental history has emerged as a lively new field. She focuses on American environmental and cultural history in the overall context of Western history, philosophy, and the history of science. As Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics, Carolyn Merchant conducts research on these three topics and their interrelationships.
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