The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution

This book is, without a doubt, a critical and insight work of scholarship which serves as a standard for today's examination of the role of science in the interconnected domination of women and the natural world through mechanistic science. A landmark work that is still relevant today.

Merchant's book is the only one out there which incorporates the history of environmental degradation with the history of ideas and ideology. I had never considered the power of "mechanism" as an ideology; I had assumed it was an objective account of natural processes as they actually occur. So, that was a good point the book brings into the center of the discussion. But the problem is that this idea of mechanism is inadequately theorized in this book. Where did it come from? How did it become the authoritative worldview? I read Merchant's "Radical Ecology" published 20 years later, and the idea of mechanism is still underdeveloped here too. The world is corpuscular, mechanical, lifeless -- why? Says who? Why do they start saying it? There are links here to Protestantism, but Merchant does not realize this.

Merchant sets the record straight in this powerful, straightforward book. She illustrates the abuses of political power that drove the scientific revolution, dethrones its "father," Sir Francis Bacon, and unravels the presumption of the scientific, paternal myth. This scholarly book provides the reader with the knowledge to ask the right questions and demand answers: about ecology, nature, the economics of science, and the torture and sexualization of the feminine. And even better, Merchant gifts us with the opportunity to imagine something better.