After the Death of Nature

Kenneth Worthy is research associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley; St. Mary's College of California; and New York University. His research explores the cultural, psychological, philosophical, and phenomenological aspects of the nature-culture divide in modern society. His book Invisible Nature: Healing the Destructive Divide between People and the Environment was published by Prometheus Books in 2013, and he writes The Green Mind blog at Psychology Today. He earned his Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley in 2005 under the direction of Carolyn Merchant.

Carolyn Merchant's foundational 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution established her as a pioneering researcher of human-nature relations. Her subsequent groundbreaking writing in a dozen books and over one hundred peerreviewed articles have only fortified her position as one of the most influential scholars of the environment. This book examines and builds upon her decades-long legacy of innovative environmental thought and her critical responses to modern mechanistic and patriarchal conceptions of nature and women as well as her systematic taxonomies of environmental thought and action. Seventeen scholars and activists assess, praise, criticize, and extend Merchant's work to arrive at a better and more complete understanding of the human place in nature today and the potential for healthier and more just relations with nature and among people in the future. Their contributions offer personal observations of Merchant's influence on the teaching, research, and careers of other environmentalists.

Acknowledgements. Foreword. Introduction. Part 1: Environmental Philosophy and Ethics and Ecofeminism. Chapter 1: Before The Death of Nature: Carolyn Iltis, the Carolyn Merchant Few People Know. Chapter 2: The Death of Nature or Divorce from Nature? Chapter 3: Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature. Chapter 4: From a Partnership to a Fidelity Ethic. Chapter 5: Bewitching Nature. Chapter 6: Leading and Misleading Metaphors. Part 2: Environmental History. Chapter 7: Personal, Political, and Professional: The Impact of Carolyn Merchant's Life and Leadership. Chapter 8: Carolyn Merchant and The Ecological Indian. Chapter 9: All Our Relations. Chapter 10: The Other Scientific Revolution. Chapter 11: Carolyn Merchant and the Environmental Humanities in Scandinavia. Part 3: The Politics of Landscapes, Embodiment, and Epistemologies. Chapter 12: Landscape, Science, and Social Reproduction. Chapter 13: The Spiritual Politics of the Kendeng Mountains Versus the Global Cement Industry. Chapter 14: Toward a Political Ecology of Environmental Discourse. Chapter 15: Environmental History and the Materialization of Bodies. Chapter 16: A Mighty Tree is Carolyn Merchant. Afterword. About the Contributors.