A Conversion with Carolyn Merchant
"changing the way we think about ecology"
Article Summary
Dr. Carolyn Merchant is a famed eco-feminist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Her main points in the interview are as follows.
Prior to the start of the scientific revolution (mid-16th c) Nature was a living entity, of which the earth and all its myriad creatures existed in a balanced, self-sustaining system. The constituent elements of the Earth-Garden were themselves imbued with numinous properties associated with the creative, life-bearing power of females; hence the idea of Mother Nature.
The scientific revolution (i.e., the rise of empirical thought), transformed Mother Nature into a shadowy spirit, and her quasi-mystical elementary particles into inert materials to be studied, understood, and put to profitable use (Weber 1905).
In the context of Dr. Merchant’s point of view, the “Death of Nature” was both the death of a metanarrative that defined our species’ primal relationship with the natural world, and death of nature in the sense of material exploitation. Once the scientific cataloguing of earthly elements was completed, profit sought out knowledge, and the commodification of the Earth began.
The intersection of the industrial revolution and the global commodification of natural resources gave rise to capital economies of scale. The system we live in today is a highly evolved iteration of capitalism somewhere between global consumerism and the “virtual” as yet unknown. Whatever its form, Dr. Merchant is arguing that the only way to breathe new live into Mother Earth is to deconstruct the capitalist system, while simultaneously working to restore the natural balance of the planet’s ecosystem.
One can admire Dr. Merchant’s healing point of view, however, in the context of our work, the effect of an end of global capitalism would be shockingly simple and immediate—good-bye digital classrooms, and hello blackboards and chalk.
