Carolyn Merchant

Professor
PhD  History of Science    University of Wisconsin at Madison
B.A.  Vassar College

138 Giannini Hall
Berkeley, California 94720
merchant@nature.berkeley.edu
office: 510-642-0326   lab: 510-643-3831   fax:  510-643-4361

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ESPM 160: American Environmental and Cultural History
ESPM 161: Environmental Philosophy and Ethics
ESPM 250: Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics

As Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics, I conduct research on these three topics and their interrelationships. I focus on American environmental and cultural history in the overall context of Western history, philosophy, and the history of science. Over the past three decades, environmental history has emerged as a lively new field. Concerned with human interactions with the natural environment at particular times and places, it draws on social, political, economic, and intellectual history, the history of science, and the roots of environmental values. It deals with relationships between land forms, climate, population fluctuations, pollution, wilderness preservation, resource conservation, and environmental deterioration. The goal, as environmental historian Donald Worster puts it, "is to deepen our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time, and conversely. . . how they have affected that environment and with what results."

I am interested in the role of consciousness and symbols about nature, the interaction between productive and reproductive forces in human and nonhuman history, and the place of ecological change in understanding development over time. Studying the past can sometimes suggest guidelines for the future and in this sense environmental history plays a role in policy formation. An analysis of ecological history as the history of an expanding power over nature by social institutions and ideologies, together with identifying possibilities for overcoming an instrumental approach to nature, could lead to a sustainable partnership with the natural world. The viability and success of new human modes of existing within the constraints of the environment and its resources requires both an understanding of the past and the articulation of a new ethic for the future.

My research investigates the environmental history of the United States and California. I explore the development of natural resources--agriculture, forestry, ranching, minerals, and water--and the history of the environmental sciences and conservation. I use documents from ecological and geological history, Native American sources, the gold rush, farming, mining, water use, and urbanization. My approach is designed to cast new light on the nation's and California's environmental history and contribute to a reassessment of policies. My students are currently working on projects as diverse as the history and philosophy of twentieth century complexity theory, the history of open space in the twentieth century, the history and philosophy of human alienation from nature, and the development of a theological ethic of the land.

Merchant has been a Guggenheim fellow; a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies; a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow in the Ecological Humanities at the National Humanities Center; a Fulbright senior scholar in Sweden; and the 1991 ecofeminist scholar at Murdoch University in Western Australia.

Merchant is the author of The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980); Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (1989); Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (1992; 2nd ed., 2005); Earthcare: Women and the Environment (1996); The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (2002; 2nd ed. 2007); and Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (2003), as well as numerous articles on the history of science, environmental history, and women and the environment. She is the editor of Major Problems in American Environmental History (1993; 2nd ed., 2005); Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology (1994; 2nd ed. 2008); Green Versus Gold: Sources in California's Environmental History (1998); and co-editor, with Shepard Krech, III and John McNeill, of The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, 3 vols. (2004).

She is a past-president of the American Society for Environmental History and has served on the executive and advisory boards of the History of Science Society, Environmental History, Environmental Ethics, Ethics and the Environment, the International Journal of Ecoforestry, Organization and Environment, and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.