ABSTRACT
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution had been released with a new Preface reflecting on the intensification of ecological degradation since the 1970s, when the original thinking for the book occurred. The Preface also addressed prospects for new intellectual paradigms such as process physics, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, and chaos theory to challenge the mechanistic model of nature. This chapter explores how a new, more life-giving environmental ethic, of the kind discussed in Earthcare, Reinventing Eden, and Radical Ecology can arise from tracing the history of the Western material-scientific ethic, and from understanding the beliefs and practices of people who locate value, power, and spirituality in nonhuman nature. In the context of climate change and global mass extinction, it investigates how the human relationship with nonhuman nature became so one-sided and dominating, and describe alternative possibilities.
