Death of Nature Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The death of nature is an evocative metaphor that has been deployed by a number of writers and political activists in order to capture the form of modern social relations with the natural world. In his celebrated book, The End of Nature: Humanity, Climate Change and the Natural World (1989), Bill McKibben implicitly suggested this process of death in his argument that nature has somehow ceased to exist.

Of course, when McKibben talks about the end of nature, he is actually referring to the end of a specific way of understanding nature. This mode of understanding depicts nature as a pristine realm that is somehow separate from society and cut off from human control and intervention. According to McKibben, in the modern industrial era an era of nuclear weaponry and DDT, of elevated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and holes in the ozone layer, of genetic engineering and animal cloning the notion of a timeless, unspoiled nature has become redundant.

While McKibben’s work illustrates how industrialization has led to the elemental, or material, death of nature, it is Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980), that provides the definitive account of how nature has died. Carolyn Merchant is professor of environmental history, philosophy, and ethics at the University of California-Berkeley. According to Merchant, the nature (or world) that has died is an organic one, and recognizes the necessary interdependencies that exist among humans, animals, and the entire physical universe. The organic worldview-suggesting as it does social dependence on the environment – is synonymous with cultures of care and respect in human dealings with nature. This type of understanding of, and disposition toward, the natural world has its antecedents in ancient and medieval scientific frameworks and belief systems, but has recently experienced a resurgence within deep-green thinking and politics.

Merchant’s compelling account of the death of nature charts how the organic view of the world has been usurped by the more mechanical understandings of nature promoted within modern science and industrial society. According to Merchant, the rise of classical science and commercial capitalism have provided new knowledge about and metaphorical frameworks for understanding nature -knowledge and frameworks that have facilitated a belief in human independence from and dominance over the environment.

On Merchant’s terms, the death of nature is not so much an absolute condition (or elemental change) in the condition of nature, but a new, rationally inspired way of understanding and experiencing the natural world. Consequently, while Merchant does chart how nature has been physically transformed by modern science and industrial urbanization, she is primarily concerned with how these material processes were (and continue to be) enabled by cultural and metaphorical practices that serve to deaden nature, and in so doing expose the environment to unchecked socioecological exploitation.

The idea of the death of nature remains a potent metaphor for understanding the profound ways in which human society has changed its ideological apprehensions of the environment, and how this has in turn led to the widespread physical transformation of the natural world. As with all metaphorical devices, however, many now writing about environmental history and the philosophies of nature are keenly aware of the dangers associated with claiming the death of nature. These concerns are based upon the realization that to talk of the death of nature suggests the existence of a natural world that can be dominated, totally controlled, and somehow separated out from human history. The search, it appears, is now on for new ways to understand nature as a simultaneously threatened entity of, and dynamic force within, human history.

Bibliography:

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature: Humanity, Climate Change and the Natural World (Random House, 1989);
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (HarperSanFransisco, 1980; rpt. 1990);
Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (Routledge, 2004).