Summary
‘The Death of Nature’ is the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant’s name for a change in how Europeans pictured the natural world: once a living, female organism, it became a machine made of passive matter. Her 1980 book dates this to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and argues that the new science “could be implicated in the ecological crisis, the domination of nature, and the devaluation of women”. Ideas didn’t act alone. Drained fens, mills, forges and early capitalism made mechanical explanations “seem more plausible than others”.
Her reading of Francis Bacon’s language as echoing witch-trial interrogation is disputed. Merchant herself notes he never wrote of torturing nature.
Rationale
Where separation came from, Part 1 doesn’t say. Merchant gives one origin among several here: Europe’s Scientific Revolution, with gender built in. Like us, she has conditions and ideas working on each other.