ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows how Carolyn Merchant’s original and provocative work, as well as her wonderful and grand presence, has expanded and enriched the author and the thousands of students the author have been fortunate enough to know over decades of university teaching. The Death of Nature (TDN) challenges the hegemony of mechanistic science. It shows how this construction of science is implicated in the ecological crisis, how it contributes to the belief that we can and should control and dominate nature, and how this exacerbates the devaluation and inferiorization of women. After TDN, Merchant went on to write many efficacious books, all with arresting titles. TDN has been enormously influential. The final lines of the book, which call for a reassessment of the organic world view and for the integration of human and natural ecosystems, are as contemporary as landing a space probe on a comet.
