O ne night in 1975, on a camping trip to Bryce Canyon with her young sons, Carolyn Merchant lay awake contemplating the play of light on the living ro

Science Turned Upside Down: Carolyn Merchant’s Vision of Nature, 40 Years Later

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2023-05-26 06:00:03

O ne night in 1975, on a camping trip to Bryce Canyon with her young sons, Carolyn Merchant lay awake contemplating the play of light on the living rock around her. At the time, she was a lecturer in the department of physics and natural sciences at the University of San Francisco, where she had taught for six years. Merchant had studied chemistry and philosophy in college, which led to her discovery of the history of science in graduate school in the Midwest. There she observed wildflowers bloom in a Wisconsin prairie rejuvenated by fire, a moment she would later recall as formative to her keen appreciation for the complex forces constantly reshaping nature. By the late 1960s, Merchant had found her way to the Bay Area. Its social and environmental activism and lively intellectual experimentation shaped the next phase of her education as a young professor.1 That night in 1975, in the twilight of a western evening, as shadows danced along the canyon walls, making nature’s vitality seem like pure poetry, the idea of calling her book “the death of nature” emerged.

Almost 20 years before Merchant published The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) transformed the field of the history of science. Kuhn famously defined the very idea of scientific revolution, articulating the circumstances under which one scientific understanding of the world gave way to another. Like Merchant, Kuhn had a great love of the 16th and 17th centuries, viewing this period as a foundational moment in the transformation of the human understanding of nature. The emergence, in 1543, of the idea that the planets revolve around the sun; the struggles to offer decisive proof that would persuade people that they inhabited a sun-centered cosmos—including the infamous 1633 trial and condemnation of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church—and the magnificent synthesis of physics, mathematics, and astronomy in Newton’s Principia (1687) all made scientific revolution the hinge of science’s incipient modernity. The scientific revolution was—and still is—an exciting and alluring story of how human curiosity inspired the development of intellectual tools and scientific instruments to generate new evidence and new techniques for understanding nature. But it certainly is not the whole story.

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