Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England de Merchant, Carolyn - 1989

Chapel Hll: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo. Full green cloth. xv, 379 pp. B&W illustrations. Slight sunning to spine of dust jacket. Fine overall. By exploring the stages of ecological transformation that took place as Europeans settled New England, Carolyn Merchant develops a fresh approach to environmental history. Her analysis of how human communities are related to their natural environment opens a perspective that goes far beyond overt changes in the landscape. Merchant brings to light the dense network of links between the human realm of economic regimes, social structure, and gender relations, as they are conditioned by a dominant worldview, and the ecological realm of plant an animal life. Thus we see how the integration of the Indians with their natural world was shattered by Europeans who engaged in exhaustive methods of hunting, trapping, and logging for the market and in widespread subsistence farming. The resulting "colonial ecological revolution" was to hold sway until roughly the time of American independence, when the onset of industrialization and increasing urbanization brought about the "capitalist ecological revolution." These revolutions changed the ecology of the landscape, gender relations between men and women, and forms of thought - mythology, religion, and science - through which people related to their environments.