Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England

by Carolyn Merchant

By exploring the stages of ecological transformation that took place in New England as European settlers took control of the land, Carolyn Merchant develops a fresh approach to environmental history. Her analysis of how human communities are related to their environment opens a perspective that goes beyond overt changes in the landscape. Merchant brings to light the dense network of links between the human realm of economic regimes, social structure, and gender relations, as they are conditioned by a dominant worldview, and the ecological realm of plant and animal life. Thus we see how the integration of the Indians with their natural world was shattered by Europeans who engaged in exhaustive methods of hunting, trapping, and logging for the market and in widespread subsistence farming. The resulting "colonial ecological revolution" was to hold sway until roughly the time of American independence, when the onset of industrialization and increasing urbanization brought about the "capitalist ecological revolution." By the late nineteenth century, Merchant argues, New England had become a society that viewed the whole ecosphere as an arena for human domination. One can see in New England a "mirror of the world," she says. What took place there between 1600 and 1850 was a greatly accelerated recapitulation of the evolutionary ecological changes that had occurred in Europe over a span of 2,500 years.

Genres: History, Ecology, Feminism, American History, Science, Nonfiction, History Of Science

398 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Carolyn Merchant is an American ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science 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. She is Professor emerita of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley.

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The so-called scientific revolution was an unfolding of several different approaches to learning. Merchant casts a critical eye on the fateful transformations of life, knowledge, and common sense in the early modern West, as farmers were turned from nature workers into disposable units of production. She shows how different scientific traditions emerged from different vocational and cultural circles. In one strand of scientific culture, the scholastic theorists imbibed classical philosophy, then re-conceived God’s laws as scientific principles governing the universe. Such scientists viewed their world through the spectacles of the Bible. As Merchant describes their beliefs, “Matter is dead and inert, remaining at rest or moving with uniform velocity in a straight line unless acted on by external forces.” This “subject-object” context reflected the standpoint of socially dominant people, such as the educated sons of nobles. Their world was an arena subject to command from above, and science was the latest means of dominion over the earth. In the hands of such scientists, learning from nature evolved as “mechanistic science.” Meanwhile the know-how of farmers, craftspeople or healers evolved as “vitalistic science.” In these practical circles, scientific questions concerned how living things could be helped to flourish. For most nature workers and vitalists, the world was alive—much as it was for the old pagans.

[Billy Marino · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Class:

Carolyn Merchant’s second book is densely-packed with fresh methodology and theory of Environmental History. She uses New England as a case-study for her interdisciplinary theories on the relationship of human cultures and their environment, especially how their “ways of knowing” nature change. Merchant structures her work in two parts bolstered by introductory and conclusive sections. She superbly analyzes how “ecological revolutions are major transformations in human relations with nonhuman nature…[that] arise from changes, tensions, and contradictions that develop between a society’s mode of production…ecology…and reproduction…[which] support acceptance of new forms of consciousness, ideas, images, and worldviews.” (2-3)
Merchant opens with a complex philosophical chapter that applies the scientific and social theories of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Marx to the environment, showing that concepts such as ecology are socially constructed. Key here is how viewing history through the processes of ecology reassert nature as a historical actor. In addition, she asserts that the interaction between production, or extraction and use of resources, reproduction, both biological and social, and consciousness are a three-tiered system increasingly removed from nature.
Part 1, “The Colonial Ecological Revolution,” explores the major transformation of New England from 1600-1675. Merchant analyzes how Native American “mimetic consciousness” relied on all human senses and relied on environmental patterns for land use. Colonists adopted similar forms, relying on beaver dams for instance, but pushed a visually based relation to nature that separated humans from their environment. This led to human imposed patterns of agricultural, creating geometric homesteads that translated into newer analytic modes of thinking. Colonial and American Indian ways of knowing and practices were synthesized into an “extensive system” of agriculture. Many rural farmers adopted “oral-aural” practices, but the elites increasingly moved towards scientific management and mechanization.
Part 2, “The Capitalist Ecological Revolution,” transitions to the period of 1775-1860, and shows that production based on family reproduction through patriarchal structures led to increasingly smaller farms. Along with attempts to enter the growing market, land was quickly depleted and they needed new systems of management. “Ordinary farmers” adopted “intensive agricultural” practices based on new mechanical and chemical understandings of land in order to produce more commodified resources. This change from resources for use to sale also changed relationships of reproduction, moving females from the farm into the household, in order for them to teach the moral values of American society. Gendered views of nature also became popular, with the environment considered a “virgin” land meant to be controlled with science.
Merchant’s Ecological Revolutions is a significant addition to the field of Environmental History. She successfully integrates the cultural history of those such as Roderick Nash, with the scientific and economic-based methods of Donald Worster. Her background in philosophy shines through to the benefit of not just this book, but to the field as whole, offering a fresh approach to interpreting both science and culture in history, with the environment at the center. While she distinctly conveys the importance of gender, she also seems to make an early case for American Indian cultural survival, but not as clearly as possible.

[Brent Ranalli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book lacks something in terms of readability, and it is not entirely original, but there is nothing like it for driving home the Aha! insight that environmental impacts hang together with every other aspect of a culture. Merchant breaks down the idea of "culture" analytically in terms of Production (extraction from and interaction with animate and inanimate nature), Reproduction (domestic economy, daily life, socialization, political economy, law), and Consciousness (rituals, morals, taboos, science, myth, language, art, religion, etc.), and shows how three entirely different cultures, each with its own distinct gestalt of P, R, and C (richly illustrated by Merchant with details from primary source material), occupied the same New England landscape over the course of two and a half centuries: indigenous peoples, European subsistence farmers, and early modern capitalist/industrial society. Modes of consciousness in each group were suited to the modes of production and reproduction, and correlated with particular ecological practices and impacts. What makes the case study especially fascinating is that what happened in two and a half centuries in New England (in terms of shifting consciousness and shifting environmental impacts) presents a microcosm and recapitulation of what happened in the Old World over the course of thousands of years.

[Darrah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in Graduate school and it changed the way I looked at the world...

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a neat book discussing the change of ecological equation of New England from the times preceding European contact to 19th century.

There is an obvious direct competitor, Cronon's Changes in the Land. In comparison, Merchant adds chapters on popular farming science of 17th and 18th centuries and pays attention to the gender division of labor. She also adds a chapter on later ecological developments, but that chapter feels more like an afterthought. Both books are quite abstract; the reader will find nearly no discussion of definite characters or events. Marine ecology gets a short shrift, and such an apocalypse as the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 remains a non-entity in both books.