ABSTRACT
Working together to save native prairies for the Nature Conservancy, debating the consequences of Rachel Carson's expose of pesticides, and pondering the impact of the world population on food supplies, the author absorbs an environmental ethic early on in the emerging ecological movement. She spent most of the 1960s as a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin's provocative program in the History of Science studying the origins of the modern Scientific Revolution and drafting a dissertation on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's concept of living force. The author investigates the character of science in terms of its implications for women and nature. Under the threat of recessionary layoffs at University of San Francisco in 1976, the author applied for and received four fellowships and grants that enabled her to rework and expand the initial essays into a book-length manuscript that covered the period of the entire Scientific Revolution.
