Carolyn Merchant

{{short description|American ecofeminist}} {{Infobox person | name = Carolyn Merchant | image = File:Carolyn Merchant 2017 IMG 8486.jpg | alt = | birth_date = {{birth date and age|1936|07|12|df=y}} | birth_place = Rochester, New York, U.S. | alma_mater = University of Wisconsin–Madison | occupation = Philosopher, historian of science | employer = UC Berkeley }}

'''Carolyn Merchant''' (born July 12, 1936) is an American ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science<ref>{{Cite book |last=Dolbeare |first=Kenneth M. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7oojAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Carolyn+Merchant%22++1936 |title=American political thought |publisher=Chatham House |year=1998 |isbn=1566430593 |page=523}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://ecnr.berkeley.edu/facPage/dispFP.php?I=617 |title=Carolyn Merchant |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070621170436/http://ecnr.berkeley.edu/facPage/dispFP.php?I=617 |archive-date=June 21, 2007 |website=Berkeley.edu}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Schoch |first=Russell |date=June 2002 |title=A conversation with Carolyn Merchant |volume=112 |work=California Monthly |issue=6 |url=http://www.mindfully.org/Sustainability/Carolyn-Merchant-ConversationJun02.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20041204062334/http://www.mindfully.org/Sustainability/Carolyn-Merchant-ConversationJun02.htm |archive-date=2004-12-04 |via=Wayback Machine}}</ref> She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Carolyn MERCHANT |url=https://ourenvironment.berkeley.edu/people/carolyn-merchant |website=Our Environment at Berkeley}}</ref>

== Education and career == In 1954, as a high school senior, Merchant was among the Top Ten Finalists for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.<ref>{{Cite news |date=2016-06-28 |title=Science Talent Search 1954 |language=en |work=Student Science |url=https://student.societyforscience.org/science-talent-search-1954 |access-date=2017-04-18 |archive-date=2019-06-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190624035343/https://student.societyforscience.org/science-talent-search-1954 |url-status=dead }}</ref> She received her A.B. in Chemistry from Vassar College in 1958.<ref>{{Cite web |date=February 2008 |title=Mixed Media – Vassar |url=https://vq.vassar.edu/issues/2008/02/beyond-vassar/mixed-media.html |access-date=2017-04-18 |website=Vassar Quarterly, the Alumnae/i Quarterly |language=en}}</ref>

She then went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Science. There, she was one of the first to be awarded the E. B. Fred Fellowship, to demonstrate that women could make significant contributions to professional fields. In 1963, Merchant, along with 13 other women out of a pool of 114 applicants, was awarded a three-year grant to fund field non-specific graduate research.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Graduate: Fellowships |url=https://pubs.wisc.edu/home/archives/gopher/education93/00000052.html |access-date=2017-04-18 |website=pubs.wisc.edu}}</ref> Her thesis, titled ''The Controversy over Living Force: Leibniz to D'Alembert'', was advised by Erwin N. Heibert.<ref>{{Cite web |last=O'Connor |first=John |last2=Robertson |first2=Edmund F. |author-link2=Edmund F. Robertson |date=April 2015 |title=Erwin Hiebert's doctoral students |url=https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Hiebert_doctoral_students/ |access-date=November 23, 2024 |website=MacTutor: School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland}}</ref>

She was a lecturer in the History of Science, Department of Physics and Natural Sciences Interdisciplinary Program at the University of San Francisco from 1969 to 1974, assistant professor from 1974–76, and associate professor from 1976–78. She was a visiting professor at Oregon State University in the History of Science Department and General Science Department in 1969.<ref name="CV.html" />

Merchant has been a member of the History of Science Society since 1962. From 1971–1972, she was co-president of the West Coast History of Science Society. She was chair of the Committee on Women of Science from 1973–1974 and co-chair from 1992–1994. She has been a member of the American Society for Environmental History since 1980 and has held positions such as vice-president and president in addition to serving as associate Editor of the ''Environmental Review'' and as a member of the Rachel Carson Prize Committee for best dissertation.<ref name="CV.html" />

In 1984, she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Umeå in Umeå, Sweden, where she taught in the Department of History of Ideas.<ref name="CV.html" />

In 1979, she became Assistant Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics, at the University of California, Berkeley, Associate Professor in 1980, and Full Professor in 1986. She retired in 2018 and since then has been Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley.<ref name="CV.html">{{Cite web |title=CV.html |url=http://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/cv.html |access-date=2017-04-18 |website=nature.berkeley.edu}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=CV.html |url=https://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/cv.html |access-date=2021-03-02 |website=nature.berkeley.edu}}</ref>

Merchant has been a Guggenheim fellow; a Fulbright scholar; a two-time fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; a fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC; a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; and an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Carolyn Merchant: Brief Bio |url=https://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/bio.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180223031358/https://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/bio.html |archive-date=2018-02-23 |access-date=2021-03-08 |website=nature.berkeley.edu}}</ref> She has presented over 360 lectures in the United States, Canada, Europe, Brazil, and Australia.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Carolyn Merchant: Lectures Given |url=https://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/talks.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120515012857/http://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/talks.html |archive-date=2012-05-15 |access-date=2021-03-08 |website=nature.berkeley.edu }}</ref> There are over 230 reviews and discussions of books written by Carolyn Merchant.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Reviews of Books Written by Carolyn Merchant |url=https://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/reviews.html |access-date=2021-03-08 |website=nature.berkeley.edu}}</ref>

In 1971 Merchant was one of the first women to be invited to join the exclusive History of Science Dinner Club at Berkeley.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hahn |first=R |year=1999 |title=Berkeley's History of Science Dinner Club: A Chronicle of Fifty Years of Activity |journal=Isis (journal) |publisher=University of Chicago Press |volume=90 |issue=Supplement |pages=S182–S191|doi=10.1086/384613 }}</ref>

== ''The Death of Nature'' == ''The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution'' (1st edition, 1980; 2nd edition, 1990; 3rd edition, 2020) is Merchant's most well-known book. In this book, she emphasizes the importance of gender in the historiography of modern science. Additionally, she focuses her book on "the sexist assumptions that informed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conceptions of the universe and human physiology."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Park |first=Katharine |date=2006 |title=Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science |url=http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3209547 |journal=Isis |volume=97 |issue=3 |page=492 |doi=10.1086/508078 |jstor=508078 |s2cid=7079025|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Merchant expresses the importance of gender in early modern writing on nature, and the use of environmental, social, and literary history as a context for the history of science.{{sfn|Park|2006}}

The book has been translated into the following languages: Japanese (1985), German (1987, 1994, 2020), Italian (1988), Swedish (1994), Chinese (1999), Korean (2005), Spanish (2020), French (2020), and Portuguese (2021). There is also a CD collection read by Juliet Jones for HarperAudio (2020).

== Philosophy ==

Merchant argues that prior to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, nature was conceived of as the benevolent mother of all things, albeit sometimes wild. This metaphor was gradually replaced by the "domination of nature" model as the Scientific Revolution rationalized and dissected nature to show all her secrets. As nature revealed her secrets, so too she was able to be controlled. Both this intention and the metaphor of "nature unveiled" are still prevalent in scientific language. Conceptions of the Earth as a nurturing bringer of life began slowly to change to one of a resource to be exploited as science became more confident that human minds could know all there was about the natural world and thereby effect changes on it at will.

<blockquote>The female earth was central to organic cosmology that was undermined by the Scientific Revolution and the rise of a market-oriented culture ... for sixteenth-century Europeans the root metaphor binding together the self, society and the cosmos was that of an organism ... organismic theory emphasized interdependence among the parts of the human body, subordination of individual to communal purposes in family, community, and state, and vital life permeate the cosmos to the lowliest stone.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Merchant |first=Carolyn |title=The Death of Nature |publisher=Harper & Row |year=1980 |page=1}}</ref></blockquote>

Merchant cites Francis Bacon's use of female metaphors to describe the exploitation of nature at this time: "she is either free, ... or driven out of her ordinary course by the perverseness, insolence and forwardness of matter and violence of impediments ... or she is put in constraint, molded and made as it were new by art and the hand of man; as in things artificial ... nature takes orders from man and works under his authority".{{sfn|Merchant|1980|p=170}} Nature must be "bound into service" and made a slave to the human ends of regaining our dominion over nature lost in the "fall from grace" in Eden.

In combination with increasing industrialization and the rise of capitalism that simultaneously replaced women's work such as weaving with machinery, and subsumed their roles as subsistence agriculturists, these changes also drove people to live in cities, further removing them from nature and the effects of industrialized production on it. The combined effects of industrialization, scientific exploration of nature, and the ascendancy of the dominion/domination metaphor over that of a nurturing Mother Earth, according to Merchant, can still be felt in social and political thought, as much as it was evident in the art, philosophy, and science of the seventeenth century.

== Legacy of ''The Death of Nature'' == Merchant's ''The Death of Nature'' leaves a scholarly legacy in the fields of environmental history, philosophy, and feminism.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last=Warren |first=K. J. |year=2016 |title=''The Legacy of Carolyn Merchant's the Death of Nature'' |journal=Organization & Environment |language=en |volume=11 |issue=2 |pages=186–188 |doi=10.1177/0921810698112005 |s2cid=145304275}}</ref> The book is considered groundbreaking due to her connection between the feminization of nature and the naturalization of women. Along with this connection, she backs up her claim with historical evidence during the time of enlightenment.<ref name=":0" /> However, Merchant was not the first to present ecofeminist ideals and theories. Françoise d'Eaubonne coined the term ''ecofeminisme'' to portray the influence of women and their ability to generate an ecological revolution in her 1974 book ''Le Feminisme ou la Mort''.<ref>{{Cite book |last=d'Eaubonne |first=Françoise |title=Le Féminisme ou la mort |year=1974}}</ref> Susan Griffin's 1978 book ''Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her'', which also talks about women and ecology, was written just before the ''Death of Nature''.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Griffin |first=Susan |title=Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside her |year=1978}}</ref> ''The Death of Nature'' is influential despite these earlier works because it is the first interpretation of an ecofeminist perspective on the history of ecology.<ref name=":0" />

== List of publications == * ''The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution'' (1980, 2e 1990, 3e 2020). [https://www.publicbooks.org/science-turned-upside-down-carolyn-merchants-vision-of-nature-40-year-later/ Review] by Paula Findlen. * ''Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England'' (1989, 2010) * ''Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World'' (1992, 2005) * ''Major Problems in American Environmental History'' (1993, 2004, 2012, editor) * ''Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology'' (1994, 2008, editor) * ''Earthcare: Women and the Environment'' (1996) * ''Green Versus Gold: Sources in California's Environmental History'' (1998, editor) * ''Columbia Guide to American Environmental History'' (2002) * ''Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture'' (2003, 2013) * ''Encyclopedia of World Environmental History'', 3 vols. (2004, co-editor) * ''American Environmental History: An Introduction'' (2007) * ''Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control from Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution'' (2015) * ''Spare the Birds! George Bird Grinnell and the First Audubon Society'' (2016) * ''Science and Nature: Past, Present and Future'' (2018) * ''The Anthropocene and the Humanities'' (2020)

==References== {{Reflist|22em}}

==Further reading== * {{Cite journal |last=Park |first=Katharine |date=2006 |title=Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science |url=http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3209547 |journal=Isis |volume=97 |issue=3 |page=492 |doi=10.1086/508078 |jstor=508078 |s2cid=7079025 |ref=none|url-access=subscription }} * Carolyn Merchant's [https://ourenvironment.berkeley.edu/people/carolyn-merchant webpage]. * Findlen, Paula. [https://www.publicbooks.org/science-turned-upside-down-carolyn-merchants-vision-of-nature-40-year-later/ “Science Turned Upside Down: Carolyn Merchant's Vision of Nature, 40 Years Later.”] Public Books, January 22, 2021.

==External links== * [http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=19243 "Environmentalism: From the Control of Nature to Partnership"], video lecture

{{DEFAULTSORT:Merchant, Carolyn}} Category:1936 births Category:Living people Category:Feminist studies scholars Category:Ecofeminists Category:Writers from Rochester, New York Category:American historians of science Category:American philosophers of technology Category:Environmental historians Category:Activists from Rochester, New York Category:Presidents of the American Society for Environmental History Category:Environmental philosophers