Reinventing Eden: the Fate of Nature in Western Culture/By Carolyn Merchant
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REINVENTING Eden REINVENTING EDEN The Fate of Nature in Western Culture CAROLYN MERCHANT ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK & LONDON Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permis sion in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: the fate of nature in Western culture/by Carolyn Merchant. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-415-93164-9 (alk. paper) 1. Human ecology—Philosophy. 2. Human ecology—History. 3. Nature— Effect of human beings on. I. Title. GF21 M473 2003 304.2′8—dc21 2002036787 Portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different form in Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Liveable World (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 93–100. Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 216–223. iv Carolyn Merchant, “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: W.W.Norton, 1995), pp. 132–59. Carolyn Merchant, “Partnership With Nature,” Landscape, Special Issue (1998): 69–71. Carolyn Merchant, “Partnership Ethics: Business and the Environment,” in Patricia Werhane, ed. Enviornmental Challenges to Business (Bowling Green, OH: Society for Businesss Ethics, 2000), pp. 7–18. ISBN 0-203-49762-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-57515-6 (Adobe eReader Format) FOR CHARLIE CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x 1. A GARDEN PLANET 1 PART I. Genesis of the Recovery of the Recovery Narrative Narrative 2. THE FALL FROM EDEN 10 3. RECOVERING THE GARDEN 37 4. FROM WlLDERNESS TO ClVILIZATION 62 PART II. New World Edens World Edens Edens 5. ADAM AS HERO 87 6. EVE AS NATURE 110 7. COLONIZING EDEN 137 8. EDEN COMMODIFIED 157 PART III New Stories 9. EARTH IN RECOVERY 176 10. ORDER OUT OF CHAOS 193 11. PARTNERSHIP 210 EPILOGUE 230 vii NOTES 232 BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 INDEX 296 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.1 Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Christi (1487) 14 Figure 2.2 J.J.du Pré, Heures a l’usage de Rome (1488) 16 Figure 2.3 G.B.Andreini, “Adamo,” in L’Adamo, Sacra 18 Rapresentatione (1617) Figure 2.4 G.B.Andreini, “Eua, Adamo,” ibid., (1617) 19 Figure 2.5 Neolithic Figure, Tel Chagar Bazar, Mesopotamia 31 Figure 2.6 Isis, in Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegypticus 33 (1652) Figure 3.1 “Dante’s Conception of the Universe” 47 Figure 3.2 Ludolphus of Saxony (d. 1378), Speculum humanae 49 salvationis, early 15th century Figure 3.3 Lucas Cranach, Adam and Eve (1526) 50 Figure 3.4 St. Genevieve Guarding her Flock, French School, 53 late 16th century Figure 3.5 Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (1614) 56 Figure 3.6 Salomon van Til, Dissertationes philogico- 58 theologicae (1719) Figure 3.7 “Chatsworth Garden,” Britannia illustrata (1709) 60 Figure 4.1 Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth 70 (1684) Figure 4.2 Francis Bacon, frontespiece, Novum Organum 71 (Instauratio Magna) (1620) Figure 5.1 Theodor de Bry, “Adam and Eve” (1590) 89 Figure 5.2 Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden 100 (1827–28) Figure 5.3 Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, or A View from Mount 101 Holyoke (1836) Figure 6.1 Jan van der Straet, America, in Nova Reperta 113 (Antwerp, 1579) Figure 6.2 Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbus Terrarum 114 (Antwerp, 1579) Figure 6.3 John Gast, American Progress (1872) 121 Figure 6.4 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire 122 Takes its Way (1861) Figure 6.5 Domenico Tojetti, The Progress of America (1875) 123 ix Figure 6.6 George Willoughby Maynard, Civilization (1893) 124 Figure 7.1 Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota (undated) 143 Figure 8.1 Bill Sanderson, “In the Beginning Was the Genome 166 I” (1990) Figure 8.2 Bill Sanderson, “In the Beginning Was the Genome 167 II” (1990) Figure 9.1 Alexander Hogue, Erosion No. 2. Mother Earth 177 Laid Bare (1936) Figure 11.1 Teresa Fasolino, Adam and Eve (1990) 229 Table Table 2.1 Reinventing Eden: Narratives of Western Culture 20 Poem “The Lesson,” David Iltis 207 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Working on Reinventing Eden has afforded me the opportunity to synthesize formative ideas in my thinking over the past three decades. Many of the issues I explored as a historian of science that led to my 1980 book The Death of Nature have meshed with my more recent work as an environmental historian of North America and my explorations of the connections between gender and the environment. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many persons and institutions that have supported this work. The ideas behind this book were developed in lectures I gave on the topic “Women and Nature: A Declensionist Narrative?” at John Hopkins University in 1990, in Australia as an ecofeminist scholar in 1991 and at the Fifth Annual Conference on Narrative in Albany New York in 1993. In 1994,1 was a member of a seminar, Reinventing Nature, led by William Cronon at the University of California-Irvine. Cronon had introduced the idea of environmental history as a narrative of decline from a prior pristine state of nature at a session of the American Society for Environmental History in 1987, and the idea became very influential in the field of environmental history and at the Irvine seminar. Some of the ideas that appear here were first developed in my article “Reinventing Eden” for the seminar’s published volume, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995) that Cronon edited. I am grateful to Bill Cronon and all the members of that seminar for their inspiration, intellectual input, and stimulating conversa tions and to W.W.Norton for allowing me to include materials from the essay throughout the book. I received additional support for developing my ideas as a 1995 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, which allowed me to spend the 1996 year writing the book, and in 2001 as a John D. and Catherine T.MacArthur Fellow in the Ecological Humanities at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, which allowed me to continue my research and writing. The fellows and staff at the Center were most helpful in contributing ideas and challenging my thinking in an extraordinarily xi congenial setting. In 2002, a fellowship from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley allowed me to finalize the manuscript. My colleagues and graduate students at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley have over the years helped me to fine-tune parts of my argument and challenged me to probe more deeply into particular ideas. Grants from the Committee on Research at the University of California-Berkeley have contributed to my research, acquisition of illustration permissions, and the preparation of the index. I am indebted to Mary Graham for editing the manuscript and contributing her keen insights to its argument and prose. My students Shana Cohen, Earth Trattner, and Ken Worthy read portions of the manuscript, encouraged my thinking, and helped me refine my ideas. Over the years students in my graduate courses have helped me to think through my arguments. I am especially grateful to Victor Rotenberg, Dean Bavington, Ron Feldman, Tim Hessel-Robinson, Carol Manahan, Ray Maria McNamara, Sarah Trainor, and Greg Zuschlag. My editor at Routledge, Ilene Kalish, encouraged me to make my own perspective more visible throughout and to clarify the implications of my ideas. I am grateful to Celeste Newbrough, who prepared the index for this as well as several previous books and who has been an important inspiration in my thinking about women and nature. My son David Iltis has afforded me the pleasure of including his poem, “The Lesson,” in the chapter on “Partnership.” My partner and husband Charles Sellers has been my intellectual inspiration and rock of support through this process and to him I give my deepest thanks. This book is for him. Berkeley, California June 2002 ONE A Garden Planet LIFE LIKE A SPIDER SPINS ITS WEB IN CYCLICAL MELODIES TELLING ENIGMATIC, SACRED TALES To DEAF, DUMB, BLIND ME. —Carolyn Merchant, 1998 A lush garden. Pathways wander invitingly among rolling lawns and fragrant flowers. Lilies, roses, and herbs send forth a sweet ambrosia. The air smells continuously fresh. Peacocks strut among the trees in the near distance and doves make their distinctive three-note coo. A cottontail, appearing unconcerned, nibbles at grass nearby, while lambs suckle at their mother’s teat. Nearly hidden among the taller and more distant cedars, a doe and fawn munch at the undergrowth. A small grove of fig trees can be glimpsed down a side path. A couple strolls arm in arm toward a fig grove near the middle of the garden, where a waterfall gushes over rocks fed by a clear bubbling stream. At the garden’s very center are two trees known simply as the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.