ABSTRACT
Central to the mainstream Recovery Narrative is the effort to create order out of chaos. By contrast, newer narratives welcome and even valorize chaos. The Scientific Revolution’s success in formulating a mechanistic approach to science allowed humanity to predict and therefore to control, manage, and dominate nature. Mechanistic science coupled with technology and capitalism set up the possibility of reinventing Eden on earth. By the late nineteenth century, the successes of mechanistic science included not only mechanics and astronomywhich Newtonian physics had synthesized-but also optics, thermodynamics, electricity, and magnetism. By the early twentieth century, however, mechanistic science had been chal lenged by relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and by the late twentieth century it was challenged by chaos and complexity theory In this chapter, I will show how these new twentieth century sciences question the possibility of certainty and predictability and hence undermine
mechanism’s goal of controlling nature. My own view is that humanity must abandon the hubris of dominating nature-the central idea of the main-stream Recovery Narrative. Instead, the unpredictability of nature means that humans should use the new sciences as one basis for formulating a new relationship with nature-one based on partnership rather than domination (see chapter 11).
