Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England, Edition 2

Carolyn Merchant

nov 2010 · Univ of North Carolina Press

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With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England’s industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In Ecological Revolutions, Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860.

In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future.

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Carolyn Merchant is professor of environmental history, philosophy, and ethics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of The Death of Nature, Reinventing Eden, and several other books on environmental history. She is a past president of the American Society for Environmental History and a recipient of the society’s distinguished scholar award.