ABSTRACT
For three and a half decades Carolyn Merchant’s 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution has served as fertile soil in which to grow better understandings of the destructiveness of modern human–nature relationships. Its rich detail on early modern thought about nature provides seemingly endless opportunities for further analysis and interpretation about the ways modern culture and science approach the natural world. The new conception of nature as machine facilitated exploitation, but it also shifted human–nature relations in other ways. Living, autonomous nature requires sustained thought and action to maintain a viable relationship. Dead, inert, mechanical nature is mute and unable to make such demands. Val Plumwood figures the master–slave arising in Western history as the archetype for a set of dualistic relations running through Western thought: human–nature, man-woman, culture–nature, mind–body, reason–emotion, subject–object, reason–nature, and so on.
