[00:00:01] ANDREW SZERI:
Good afternoon. I am, uh, Andrew Szeri, Dean of Graduate Division, and I’m pleased, along with the Moses Lecture Committee, to present Carolyn Merchant, this year’s speaker in the Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture Series. As a condition of this bequest, we’re obligated to tell you how the endowment supported the lectures, supporting the lectures came to UC Berkeley.
In 1937, University of California President Robert Gordon Sproul and the UC Board of Regents established the Bernard Moses Memorial Lectureship in the Social Sciences. The lectureship honors the memory of the late Bernard Moses, a professor of history and of political science at the University of California from eighteen seventy-five to nineteen eleven, and an emeritus professor from nineteen eleven until his death in nineteen thirty. Professor Moses earned a worldwide reputation for his contributions in understanding the problems of Latin American republics and as a pioneer scholar.
Professor Moses served as a member of the United States Philippine Commission from nineteen hundred to nineteen oh four. Past lecturers in this series have included Herma Hill Kay, Lloyd Ulman, Nicholas Riasanovsky, George Lakoff, Kenneth Stampp, Eugene Hammel, and Ken Jowitt. And now I’d like to invite Margaret Chowning, Professor of History and Chair of the Moses Memorial Lecture Committee, to introduce today’s lecturer, Carolyn Merchant.
[00:01:37] MARGARET CHOWNING:
Thank you.
(applause)
Thank you. Carolyn, I don’t wanna touch your
(laughter)
your computer here, so… Um, uh, Professor Carolyn Merchant is a renowned historian of many things, of science, of the environment, of scientific culture, of economic change, and of women. Her path-breaking book, The Death of Nature: wi-
Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, which was published in nineteen eighty, led to her being called an eco-feminist philosopher, which is a label I think is quite astounding for a historian to earn because of the book’s rich and complex argument about the ways that the modern exploitation of nature subordinated women. In addition to The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant has authored numerous books, including Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England in 1989, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World in 1992, Earthcare: Women and the Environment, in 1996, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History, and Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture in 2003 is when, well, as many articles, uh, on the history of science, environmental history, the women in the environment.
Carolyn Merchant received her BA from Vassar College and her PhD in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is a professor of environmental history, philosophy, and ethics here at Berkeley, where she has been a member of the faculty for the past three decades. Uh, Merchant’s lecture today will focus on humanity’s shift from the ethic of control of nature to one of partnership with the natural world.
Since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the long-term goal for the betterment of humankind was to understand science and manage nature. But in the twenty-first century, this has given way to environmental awareness and the formation of a viable, sustainable relationship in which connections to the global world are recognized through science, technology, and ecological exchanges. On that optimistic note, let me introduce Carolyn Merchant.
(applause)
[00:04:18] CAROLYN MERCHANT:
Thank you very much for those wonderful introductions and for inviting me to give this, uh, lecture, uh. I’m just delighted to be here and to see all of you. And today, what I want to talk about is the, um, transformation from the period prior to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, when basically people had to play the hand that nature dealt and did not have very much or very low-level capacity for the control and management of nature.
During the scientific revolution of the, uh, 17th century, and by that I mean the period basically from Copernicus in the mid-16th century to Newton at the end of the, uh, 17th century. A transformation came about in which the possibilities for, uh, the contained controlled experiment and, uh, uh, uh, therefore the control of nature and the management of the environment became possible. That, uh, philosophy of nature, um, has remained with us and is still with us, uh, to the present day, but I want to outline what I think are new possibilities for a new ethic for the future, and that is what I call a partnership ethic.
So we can talk about an era before environmentalism, and that would be the period, um, at the end of the, uh, medieval, uh, era and the beginnings of the explorations of the New World, the rise of nation-states, and particular, the, uh, emphasis that now became, uh, possible on mining the earth for metals, especially for iron, um, and for coal, and for other metals that would make the nation states of Europe strong and have power and be able to vie with each other. So the process of mining and also, um, of, um, of the extension of, uh, trade such as the wool trade, trade meant that European, uh, forests all over, uh, the continent and especially in England were being depleted of trees, Uh, forests were being cut down, marshes were drained, and much of the land was being converted to pasture. And so as this very early phase of industrialization, uh, began to spread and began to increase, we had, um, a change from the worldview of nature as a living organism and an economy based on human labor, animal labor, wind, and water.
Um, in other words, organic forces of nature to one that was based on the metals and on coal and non-renewable, um, inorganic energy sources. During the process of this immense transformation in Europe, the, um, capability through science and technology to dominate and control the environment became more and more, uh, feasible. And it’s during this period when we have the, um, two-sided, um, development of science and technology, that is the rise of experimentation and the rise of a mathematical understanding of the world, the ability to,
(coughing)
um, derive mathematical laws that described, um, first the heavens and then the terrestrial lands, and then as we move for-forward, um, eventually to, um, hydrodynamics and electricity and magnetism, nineteenth and, uh, century thermodynamics, et cetera. So it is the experimental method and the mathematical method that together begin to give people the sense that they have the, uh, technology and the understanding of the natural world. They are able, through experimentation, to define a closed, controlled space, and through mathematics, a closed system, and therefore to describe and understand the natural world, which then gave them, uh, the capacity for domination, uh, and control.
So the Renaissance, um, philosophy of nature was one of a living organism. It was a projection of the human body onto the, um, cosmos. The cosmos, like the human being, had a body, soul, and spirit.
The earth also was alive. The– and the earth was conceptualized as a nurs-nur– a nurturing mother, um, which had, uh, s-s, uh, systems like the human being. A circulation, reproduction, and even elimination systems.
Earthquakes, uh, were said to be the earth breaking wind. Um, and the metals, uh, grew in the earth’s womb. And once a mine was, uh, uh, dug and the metals dug out of it, it was thought that the metals were alive and would grow back.
So nature was the servant of God, the deity, carrying out God’s will in the world below. And so, uh, uh, in this picture, we see here, uh, by Athanasius Kircher in his book, uh, Mundus Subterraneus, um, we see the interior of the earth and as, uh, an earth that looks alive as if it has wounds and, um, veins and, uh, circulatory devices and, and elimination as well. And, uh, Kircher went to, um, uh, wrote this book in conjunction with a trip up Mount Vesuvius.
Um, Pliny the Elder had been killed in the eruption of Vesuvius in seventy-nine CE, and Kircher wanted to, um, understand the interior of the Earth Mother, and so he took a journey down into the interior of Mount Vesuvius. I was in Naples about three years ago, and I decided I’d like to follow in the s- footsteps of Kircher, and so I commissioned my friends to take me up, uh, Mount Vesuvius. And we got as far as the road that continued up to the top, but it was closed.
So unfortunately, I, uh, had to be satisfied with just seeing the, uh, outside. The other primary view of nature in the, uh, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the opposite of nature as a nurturer or as a mother, but rather, uh, nature as the bringer of famine, of disease, of, uh, hurricanes, of drought, and therefore, uh, a more negative side of, um, of the aspect of nature as female. And nature also was thought to, in the interior of the earth, in the interior of nature, to harbor secrets.
And it’s the extraction of those secrets which were the goal of the seventeenth, uh, century scientists. Uh, in some ways, this was nature being put to the question. A question would be asked of nature, and then one would pry into the inner workings of a, an organism or of, of the Earth itself to try to answer that question.
And it is, uh, the vision of Francis Bacon, to whom we owe, um, the idea that it would be possible to extract the secrets of nature through science and technology, through the arts. Um, “Humans,” Bacon said, “should endeavor to establish and extend the power and do- and dominion of the human race itself over the universe.” So this is a major goal, a vision, um, which we owe to Francis Bacon and which inspired his followers throughout the seventeenth century and, um, s- for several centuries beyond.
So Bacon’s, um, idea was one of experimentation. How was one, through experiment, going to reveal the secrets of nature to everybody for the good of humankind. Up until this time, uh, mu-much of this work was done by alchemists and natural magicians and astrologers, and those who believed that they had their own idea of, uh, of how to extract the secrets.
Bacon wanted to make this public knowledge. And in, uh, 1620, he wrote, um, the Novum Organum or the New Organon, which was a revision of Aristotle’s work. He called it or it translates as the new instrument, and basically it means that the human being through hands and eyes, um, and mind can act as an instrument on nature.
Bacon’s idea was that it was important to recover the lost Garden of Eden. And he said, “Man, by the fall, fell from his dominion over creation.” But he argued that through science and technology, that is what he called the arts and science, it was possible to repair, um, that loss and to therefore to retain, um, and regain the, uh, original garden.
He said, “Man can recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest.” So the goal of extracting the secrets of nature through technology meant that because the earth was conceptualized as a female or a mother, that, uh, he used, um, uh, language, uh, such as the, the idea that the secrets are still locked in nature’s bosom, and that the miners and smiths were searching into the bowels of nature. Again, organic imagery and shaping nature as on the anvil.
So the idea of the experiment comes, um, through Bacon, and it’s developed in, uh, ever greater sophistication as we move through the seventeenth century. But what I want to, uh, talk about is Bacon’s nascent idea of experimentation. He used the word experiment, and what he meant by it was that we should ask a question of nature.
Um, now he did not have the full idea of a contained, controlled experiment or what he would have called nature in bonds. He said there were three states of nature. Nature is free and at liberty to develop all the animals and plants that we find on the earth today.
Nature in error, uh, meaning nature, who had gone astray and somehow created monstrosities that shouldn’t have been there. And then nature in bonds. Nature in bonds, um, he argued, was the, um, control of nature, uh, uh, in the process of using technology to extract nature’s secrets.
So if we think about the rise of the experimental, um, method, uh, what is Bacon is suggesting is that we have a questioner or a scientist, we would later call them, um, or an inquisitor who, uh, sets up the question and, um, dictates the conditions for the procedure. The objects then should be manipulated in order to extract an answer. And most importantly, you need witnesses or observers in order to, um, compare, uh, the observations, uh, of each of them.
Data need to be recorded, and then it needs to be repeated in other, uh, places and times. Now, Bacon wasn’t there yet. He did not put this procedure in the way I have just done it, but he was, through vivid meva- metaphor and language, he was moving in that direction.
So I want to talk about three settings out of which his concept of experiment emerges, and therefore the idea of the possibility of controlling, and therefore having dominion over nature. So, um, the first setting is the courtroom. Bacon, uh, was a, um, attorney general and the Lord Keeper, and ultimately, uh, the Lord, uh, Verulam.
And, uh, Baker- Bacon rose up through the court system. Um, he was the Clerk of the Star Chamber early on in his career, where, um, uh, criminals were, uh, questioned under, um, very tightly controlled, uh, conditions. Um, so the courtroom becomes an example of this idea, this nascent idea of the contained, controlled experiment.
You have a room that is set in inside, um, where only the people who are privileged are allowed to enter, like the privileged, uh, scientist. Um, those who have passed the bar can move in front of the bar and be allowed to be the judge or the lawyers, um, or the jury. And so in this case, we see nature on trial, uh, in these two images.
Um, and we could think of the court case as science v. nature, um, where you have a scientist, an inquisitor or a judge, um, versus nature as the witness. The importance of the witness, um, is clear here. Now nature must testify, and nature must be able to recognize the questions that are asked of it or her.
Um, so one has to devise a language and ask questions that nature is capable of asking. So this was an important consideration in the, um, 17th century and a move away from what the alchemists and natural, uh, magicians were doing. Nature must be able to repeat the same answers again and again, not just, um, uh, one time and a different answer, uh, the next time.
A second setting, which is similar to the courtroom, which is an enclosed space where only privileged people are allowed to be, is the anatomy theater. And an example of the anatomy theater, um, that Bacon was well aware of was that of, uh, Vesalius, uh, in his, um, uh, fifteen forty-three, um, corpus, uh, hu-humani– De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Uh, or, um, the, um, picture here which shows a, a, a corpse being dissected on a table in front of a great crowd of people.
The early anatomy theaters, uh, sloped downward to the central table, and the, um, anatomist or the barber surgeon stood at the table and did the dissection in the view of all those witnesses around it, and opened up the corpse to reveal the secrets of nature that were contained by the body. In this particular example of the anatomy theater of Vesalius, the female body is being dissected here. The womb is cut open just as if this were the womb of the earth being mined by, um, the, uh, miners and smiths.
And Vesalius, as the surgeon, is standing erect over the supine body of the female, um, or what Bacon would later term the corpse of nature. And he argued that we must have– we must build an anatomy of the world, and we must attempt to dissect nature. So although Bacon did not, um, talk specifically about the anatomy theater, he did use the language of the anatomy theater in his effort to portray a method for extracting secrets, uh, from the natural world.
A third setting is that of the, um, alchemical laboratory, and, uh, Bacon was very influenced by the magical and the alchemical traditions. Um, there were books in the sixteenth century on the secrets of nature, and Bacon wanted to take those ideas of the alchemists and make them public knowledge for the benefit of humankind. And so in this picture, you can see all the kinds of apparatus in this enclosed space, which we would now term a laboratory.
Bacon did not use the word laboratory, although it was introduced by Ben Jonson in his play, The Alchemist, during the time that, uh, Bacon was at, at the court of, uh, James I in the, uh, 1610. So experimentation, um, in an enclosed space is exemplified by the alchemical laboratory. A question is asked by the scientist.
The scientist devises ap- an apparatus to answer the question, records the data, and that data, uh, is verified by witnesses. So Bacon termed this nature in constraint.
He said nature in constraint is molded and made new by art in the hand of man. This is his third state of nature or nature in bonds. In the New Atlantis, which, um, was Bacon’s Utopia, which was based on Plato’s, uh, description of Atlantis in his dial– uh, in his, uh, monologue, actually, the Critias.
And Bacon wrote The New Atlantis, um, and it was published, uh, posthumously a year after his death in sixteen twenty-seven. And in it, he describes a s-set of laboratories or what we would now think of as a scientific institution, which he called Solomon’s House. And in it, he describes, uh, perspective houses where one would use lenses to understand light, engine houses, furnaces, sound houses, mathematical houses.
All these would be separate laboratories in, uh, the New Atlantis. And he talks about gardens and mines and caves, uh, pools, streams, and fountains, which can be studied by the, um, apprentices who are working in the, um, uh, laboratories. Dissections and surgeries are carried out, um, just as we saw in the, uh, previous illustrations, experiments with medicines, and most importantly, creation of new animals and plants.
Animals that would, um, uh, bear young earlier in their, um, uh, period of, uh, m- of, uh, ma-maturation. Plants that would come to fruition earlier in the season. Um, he could study, um, weather and, uh, basically this is what we would now think of as a form of genetic engineering.
And the goal of all this, Bacon said, was, “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible.” So this is the grand vision which Bacon prepares by the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and which is to inspire his followers. Um, the Academy del Cimento in Italy, the Royal Society in, uh, England, the French Academy of Sciences in France, all were modeled on this vision of Bacon’s, uh, New Atlantis and Bacon’s vision of dominion.
The c– idea of the contained, controlled experiment toward which Bacon was tending but was not there yet is epitomized by a cl– by the 1660-60s by Robert Boyle. The air pump is shown here in these illustrations, and science is pointing upward to the heavens, um, with her fingers, but downward to Robert Boyle with her elbow. And on, uh, one side, we have the alchemical laboratory.
This is the place from whence science has come. And on the other side, the bell jar, which is the, uh, epitome of the scientific experiment, uh, by the 1660s. Now, one could put a living animal or a plant or a bird inside the bell jar and evacuate the air, and then study, uh, what happened.
So the bell jar is to us today, um, as the cyclotron was to the twentieth century, or as the Large Hadron co- Uh, Collider is to the twenty-first century. Um, this was the epitome of, uh, science.
It was not without its critics, however, and the bell jar is shown here in an experiment by Joseph Wright of, uh, Derby, in which he, uh, shows an experiment on a bird in the air pump. And, uh, you can see here how the experimenter, uh, the scientist, uh, has taken the, uh, bird, the cockatoo, uh, from the cage, um, up here, and the cockatoo is now in the bell jar, and he holds in his hand the power of life and death, uh, uh, the ability to turn the stopcock and evacuate the air and kill, uh, the bird in the bell jar. Now, if you look at the gendered, uh, responses of the men and women here, the men are looking right at the experiment or contemplating as the, uh, older man down here, contemplating death by looking at a skull.
Um, but the women are looking at the men ex-experiencing the experiment vicariously, um, or hiding their eyes, uh, from the experiment. So the men are witnessing the emergence of a scientific truth, but the women are experiencing a, um, a visceral reality. By the end of the seventeenth century, we have the experimental tradition coming into conjunction with the mathematical tr-tradition.
The mathematical tradition being revived, um, by, uh, philosophers such as Descartes, uh, and Hobbes, and by, um, scientists, uh, in the, in the, uh, late seventeenth century, um, epitomized by Newton. Um, Newton’s philosophy of the mechanical universe brought together the heavens and the work of Kepler and Copernicus, and the terrestrial world with the work of Galileo, and, uh, put- pulled them together in a world that is a con- contained, controlled space in which there are ideal spheres. The planets must be conceptualized as ideal spheres with their point of uh, gravitation at the center and of a frictionless world, uh, no air resistance in order for the mathematical laws, um, to hold.
So the mechanistic view of nature is the result of the period between Copernicus and, uh, Newton at the end of the century. The worldview changes from an organism to a machine. Nature now, as a machine, is made up of parts of hard, glassy atoms, um, or particles, as Newton called them, that can be rearranged from outside by a scientist or an engineer.
The world becomes a clock-like universe as opposed to a nurturing mother. God, uh, becomes an engineer and a mathematician. Mathematics becomes the source of valid knowledge or truth of the external world, and it is through mathematics that one is able to solve equations, and therefore to predict, and if you can predict, therefore you can control, and therefore dominate nature.
So the control of nature through experimentation, which was Bacon’s vision, and through mathematics, leads to this idea of the domination of nature through controlled spaces and closed mathematical systems. Now, this vision accompanies the spread of Europe and the rise of the nation states into the New World, and it’s through the rise of science and technology that Bacon’s vision of the recovery of Eden begins to be, uh, played out. Eden can be reinvented or recreated on Earth, and as the New World is settled and, uh, pe-people move westward, First, the forests of the east, um, eastern states of the US are cut down and turned into farms and managed gardens, and then the western deserts are irrigated and turned also into gardens.
So the biblical idea of not only, um, recovering Eden, but of making the desert blossom as the rose, occurs in the process of the settlement of the United States. Nature now can be thought of as a garden, very much like the controlled, contained spaces that Bacon was, uh, working toward. Nature as a garden surrounded by fences in which one, uh, puts fertilizers, whether it’s manures or later chemical fertilizers and, uh, still later, uh, pesticides.
Now, what about the challenges to this mechanistic view of the control and management of nature which we, um, inherit from the seventeenth century? The first, uh… One of the first challenges is that of ecology. Um, the word, uh, devised by Ernst Haeckel, it comes from the Greek wor-Greek word oikos, meaning household, the root of both the word ecology and economy, and he, uh, wrote in 1866 about the science of the relations of living organisms to the external world.
Now, this is not the contained, controlled system. Um, this is now relationships of all organisms to each other and to their environment. In 1869, he, um, wrote that the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature is, uh, what he means by the oikos, the study of the complex interrelations in the struggle for existence.
He was influenced here by Darwin’s work. And he used the word, um, ecology, spelled O-E-K at this point, in, um, 1873. Now, the person who introduced ecology from Haeckel into the United States was a woman, and her name was Ellen Swallow Richards.
Uh, Ellen Swallow attended Vassar College, and then she went on to MIT as a special student, where she married a chemist, uh, by the name of Richards. And in 1892, she gave a talk to the Boston Boot and Shoe Club in which she, um, christened a new science, which she called ecology. And it was, um, reported in the newspapers the next day, “A new science: Mrs. Richards names it ecology.
Uh, it, uh, so she introduced the term into the United States. Um, we have to credit her with that, and also using the term human ecology, the concept of human ecology, uh, which she, uh, developed in nineteen oh seven in her book, uh, The Sanitation in Daily Life. Here she is shown slightly before her death with an honorary doctorate which she received from Smith College.
Ecology introduced by men was a little later, and, uh, one of those who, um, used the word, um, was Frederic Clements in nineteen five, and he developed this science of, uh, plant succession. W- Some of his ideas have been cr- uh, criticized in, um, recent years, but he moved us back toward the idea of the organism, the living organism or the organismic character of the community and ecology. So during the early 20th century, we have the emergence of ecology, of ecological systems which are based on relationships and which are open systems rather than closed systems, in which matter and energy are exchanged across, uh, boundaries.
Another challenge to mechanistic science was at the level of the, um, very minute, um, and the very large. Einstein’s, uh, special theory of relativity followed, um, later by his general theory and And especially his ideas, um, about the p- uh, quantum structure of light or is light made up of photons?
So Einstein challenged, uh, mechanistic science at the level of the very small and at the level of the speed of light. But on the– in the everyday world, a major challenge came through the development of the science of chaos, um, followed later by the idea of complexity science. Edward Lorenz, um, in nineteen seventy-two, uh, wrote a foundational paper entitled Can the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Result in a Tornado in Texas?
Um, known later as the butterfly effect. The idea being that the a-atmosphere is fundamentally irregular and unstable, and that weather patterns are chaotic and unpredictable, and the best you can do is the one-day, uh, prediction. Similarly, most environmental and biological systems are nonlinear systems and chaotic.
Chaos is the usual situation. It is the very unusual situation that we can think of as the closed, contained, uh, world where we can, uh, predict the outcomes. So all of this to me means that we need to rethink the, uh, foundations of our ethical systems, of our relationship to the natural world.
We are part of the ecosystem, we are part of nature, and we are in a relationship with other, uh, organisms and non-living things as well. How do we get then from the control of nature and the management of nature, which was so powerful by the end of the 19th century, and which was really the underlying ethic of, um, the settlement of the New World, to the idea of a partnership ethic, and in terms of a different relationship, uh, between humanity and nature. Where did it come from, and how can it help us?
I formulate the idea of the partnership ethic as the following: A combination of utilitarian ethics and ecological ethics. The greatest good for the human and non-human communities is in their mutual living interdependence. And I argue that we– in order to, um, actuate a partnership ethic, we need to think about, um, five additional precepts.
First of all, that we have equity between the human and non-human communities. Uh, we are living in an urban community here in Berkeley, but we are dependent on an ecological community, a natural world, uh, in which we are in a Vital relationship. Um, we need to give moral consideration not only for humans, but for other organisms, for other species.
We need to respect both cultural diversity and biodiversity, and we need to include women, minorities, and non-human nature in the code of ethical accountability. So in order to bring this out, we need a new kind of management, not the domination and control of nature, but an ecologically sound management that is going to maintain the health of the human community and the non-human community. So why do we need it?
Because we are in the midst of a global ecological crisis. We are experiencing climate change, um, ozone depletion, deforestation, soil erosion, loss of our forests, and the endangerment of, uh, thousands of species, um, on the planet. And because population is still growing, although its growth rate is tapering off, but we now are, uh, close to seven billion people.
In another year or two, we will be at seven billion, and perhaps by 2040, somewhere between eight and twelve billion, depending on the rate of, um, decline. Um, so or- the origins of partnership ethics come about with the rise of conservation, with the conservation and then followed by the environmental movements. The forest reserves, uh, created in the nineteenth century, uh, rangelands and the conservation movement of the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century.
George Perkins Marsh in 1864 argued for what I think of as a partnership relationship. He said, “Man should become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the damaged fabric.” He argued that we could restore the waters and forests and the bogs that were laid waste by human improvidence or malice.
And then in the middle of the twentieth century, um, we have the work of the ecologist, um, originally wildlife biologist, Aldo Leopold, and he uses the word partnership. He says, “When land does well for its owner and the owner does well by his land, when both end up by better of reason of their partnership, Then we have conservation. Women also have been instrumental in helping to formulate and move us toward the idea of partnership based on relations, based on relationship between men and women, between men and men, between women and women, and between humanity and the natural world.
Val Plumwood, an Australian philosopher, wrote Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, and she said that relation must be the basis for a new ethic, an ethic of care. And the relational self is based in friendship and respect and care for the other. So my idea of the partnership ethic is grounded in the idea of relation, not in the ego, not in society, not in the land, as Leopold had said, but in the idea of relationship, of non-dominating interactions that allow the Earth to flourish.
How do we get in touch with nature in a different and new way? One idea is proposed by David Abram, uh, the philosopher who wrote The Spell of the Sensuous, and he argues that we can hear nature’s voice in a different way. Nature speaks differently to us if we listen, if we smell, if we taste, if we be in nature in a different way than Francis Bacon would have wanted us to.
By hearing the rustling of leaves in the oak tree, or by listening to the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape. So nature is fundamentally unpredictable, and what are unpredictable? Hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, um, earthquakes.
These are the aspects of nature that make it necessary for us to rethink our relationship to it. And here, um, is an example from, uh, uh, Yellowstone National Park of simulations of what the land looked like when fire suppression began in 1872 and when, um, fires, uh, took over and transformed, uh, Yellowstone Park in 1972. So how do we work in partnership with nature?
Landscape architects, um, urban planners have devised ways to think about nature in partnership with humans through design. And in this illustration, um, it shows how the river has continually been straightened, straightened, over time, channelized between 1912, 1925, 1945, and 1965, and then how we can restore the meander in the river and restore the wetlands, which will allow us now, instead of controlling, uh, and dominating nature, to become a partner, uh, with it. Another example here in, um, Oakland and the University of California is the work of Louise Mozingo in, um, landscape architecture, who has worked with a culturally diverse group of citizens in the Oakland Hills.
Um, European Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, working together to devise a new landscape for the area in which they live. And in Los Angeles, another example, uh, from California, uh, Achva Stein and Norman Millar, um, worked out a plan for using the spaces under freeways, uh, for gardens or having, um, f- vegetable gardens on the roofs of, uh, m- parking structures. and of using the neighborhood, uh, which is also culturally diverse, to grow, um, food and to transform it from, uh, concrete structures into a living, organic, um, revitalized system.
So I would like to propose in, uh, concluding that we have come a long way from the world of Francis Bacon. We’ve come a long way from the idea that we need to dominate and control nature in order for humans to survive on the planet. And we are now at the point where we need a new ethic for our survival, and that is an ethic of partnership between humanity and the natural world.
Thank you very much.
(audience applause and cheering)
[00:51:46] MARGARET CHOWNING:
Great. Thank you very much.
(applause)
Um, so before we entertain questions, I just want, before I forget, to invite everyone here to a reception in, uh, just down the hall, three thirty Wheeler, after the questions are exhausted. So please, yes.
[00:52:09] STAFF MEMBER:
Right behind you.
[00:52:11] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Uh, since, uh, Meg Whitman is, uh, planning to roll back, uh, the law after Governor Schwarzenegger signed AB 32, maybe you could have a tape of this, since it’s recorded, uh, sent to her staff.
[00:52:26] CAROLYN MERCHANT:
Thank you very much. I like that idea.
[00:52:38] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
In t- in terms of the degradation of nature and the attitude, um, you, you, you, you got as far as, um, science and technology and the mechanistic. But what about sort of the corporate mentality, the whole corporatization of the world, how that’s affecting, you know, the ecological imbalance and, and, and that’s another human being, as it were, you know, has the status of a person. How do we deal with that?
[00:53:02] CAROLYN MERCHANT:
Right. Well, the egocentric ethic is, um, what is good for the individual or the corporation acting as an indivi-individual is good for society as a whole. So the egocentric ethic, which I want to move away from, is exemplified, um, potentially in our, uh, oil spill off the, uh, Gulf.
Um, and that is a attempt to make nature into a con- a closed confined space, um, and now that it has, uh, blown up, the forces of nature have come through to the surface. They are trying to cap it off and close it off with a tube and then a, uh, top over it. That is a mechanical system, and that is a mechanical system devised by corporate capitalism, which goes hand in hand with mechanism.
Um, we live in a corporate capitalist world that has, um, an ethic of mechanism and the egocentric approach to ethics. So I would, uh, argue that a partnership ethic can sometimes work with respect to, um, corporations. Uh, there are numerous examples where a company wanting to develop, um, a new research site on a large piece of land will need to negotiate in partnership with the, uh, community to create wetlands and open spaces and, uh, migratory, uh, bird flyways through the place that they are working.
They need to have green architecture and recycled, uh, water systems and so on. So we don’t have to give up corporate capitalism, but we need to be able to work with especially small businesses in a partnership relationship.
[00:55:16] SPEAKER 1:
Thank you for a very powerful argument and a beautiful set of illustrations from the extraordinary early modern past to the present. Sixty years ago, Lynn White Jr. gave a wonderful talk, essay, in which he proposed some of what you’re proposing now to overcome the anthropocentric vision of the conquest of nature, to go back to a different kind of Christian ethic, which was Franciscan in effect. Some critics at that point said, “This is creepy stuff.
“It’s lovely stuff, but it will never work.” “Twenty years after that, when Earth Day began, there” seemed to be a breakthrough into corporate capitalism. Forty years on, it seems to me that we haven’t made that breakthrough yet.
How do we make the breakthrough? It seems to me that we have the ethics, we have the understanding, we have the ecological nous. How do we get it to be adopted?
[00:56:31] CAROLYN MERCHANT:
Well, that, of course, is the question for the future and for our human survival. How we get it to, uh, be adopted is because the current system isn’t working, and it’s undermining our very existence. Um, and we need the political system, uh, in which we are currently embedded to be able to bring that about.
We need green economics and we need, um, incentives to, uh, move in, uh, new green directions and new forms of agriculture. We need especially to deal with climate change. Um, i-it’s going to go by fits and starts.
I call it an ecological revolution, a global ecological revolution, which I think of as beginning really with Earth Day, and perhaps by 2050, we’re halfway there now, we will have a different world. We will have a world that is much more sustainable, much greener, and a world of partnership ethics, a world where population growth has leveled off and we are on the way toward, uh, pretty much, uh, stabilization. The possibility that, um, we can have a, a sustainable world.
So that would be my, uh, preferred outcome for, um, the global crisis in which we are now finding ourselves.
[00:58:13] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hi. Um, so with the new eco-feminist movement, I find it problematic that with such slogans as like, “Love your mother,” it becomes like essentializing and basically re-articulating the same patriarchal oppression from which they’re trying to liberate themselves in the world. How would a partnership ethic, uh, remedy the ill effects of these current trends in ecofeminism?
[00:58:43] CAROLYN MERCHANT:
Well, I, um, that- That’s partly why I have come to the idea of partnership, because is female to male as nature is to culture was the problem posed in 1974 by Sherry Ortner. And as women come to the defense of nature or the Mother Earth or use this ethic of nursing or care, do not we as women s- uh, solidify the oppression in a patriarchal society which has been at the root of so many problems?
And so the problem of patriarchy, I think we’ve come a long way since, uh, 1970. Um, I talk to my students, uh, these days, and they tell me that their fathers have raised them and their mothers are working. Um, they tell me that we need ecofeminism.
And I say, “Is ecofeminism dead?” And they say, “No, we need ecofeminism.” My version, my, the way I have, um, come out of this dilemma is to use the word partner, which is neutral.
Um, it can be men or women. It’s certainly anthropomorphic in the sense that we’re thinking of the earth as a partner, which is a living thing. But it is based on the idea of relationship of give and take, not one of domination and submission.
[01:00:22] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, I like the idea, obviously, of partnership with nature, but do you think that nature requires an interpreter or, uh, as, as I think, uh, seems to me you can just listen directly. That, that it’s already communicating. Animals that run away are telling you something.
We tend to ignore that, but…
[01:00:44] CAROLYN MERCHANT:
Yes. Well, we have to… To na-nature speaks in a different voice, and we have to learn to listen to it, as you are doing.
Um, m-many of us ignore those signs. What I think we need, um, is for all the stakeholders to come to the table to negotiate in good faith with each other, and animals and plants will be at the table also. Or the, um, stakeholders will go into the meadow or the forest and spend a day or two experiencing the Council of All Beings, um, which is an idea from deep ecologists in which people take on the identities of other, um, organisms or, uh, inanimate entities and engage with nature in a different way, then come back to the table or move the table outside and come to a, uh, an agreement which will allow the natural community and the human community, uh, to survive together.
Sometimes the needs of the human as for food, clothing, shelter, and energy will need to take precedence. Other times, the needs of nature will need to take precedence because otherwise there isn’t going to be a nature and that, uh, humans, uh, find comfortable to live in.
[01:02:24] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you very much. Um, I have two questions, if that’s okay. And the first one is linked to the area of the world that I’m honored to work in, which is the Bolivian Andes.
And when I go there to work, I work with local, uh, Aymara natives who, uh, live there. And their worldview about nature… They’re farmers.
They’ve been farmers for four thousand years, so it’s not recent. Um, but their view of nature is that it is a relationship that you cannot get rid of. It’s like you’re born into a family and, you know, you can move away, but you always have a, you know, that’s your mother, and that is your relationship.
And so they see it as a partnership, I think, as you’re seeing it, but it’s much more intimate and almost mutually responsible. The concept of responsibility goes both ways for them. And it seems to me that there may be some indigenous views of working with nature, uh, living– that where the humans aren’t so d-different or disparate, which I think is what you’re saying by moving the table out in the forest and having their voices.
That they just don’t see that dichotomy i-in our– I know this is our Western tradition, but there are other traditions where people have been more sustainable. So it seems to me that might be helpful in a new conversation.
And the second thing is, that keeps lurking in my mind, is these, um, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and recently in Bolivia itself, in Cochabamba, there was a meeting just last week. Um, why… are those– are– do you think those are progressing and moving in the right direction? Why do we keep hearing that those are stalling, and how can we merge large m-models that you’re proposing with on-the-ground, not just corporations, but on-the-ground action?
[01:04:15] CAROLYN MERCHANT:
Well, thank you very much for the contribution about, um, the Andes and especially indigenous peoples. And I agree completely with you that there are practices and models for us to engage with. And, um, all people with ideas such as this coming to the table may help us, uh, move toward what you’re asking for, which is to have the people who are doing the negotiations at these meetings take on ideas of partnership in that we come to the table with the expectation that we are going to take a year, two years at the table to try to reach an understanding.
We don’t go to the meeting, and then we go home and, uh, th-things, uh, fall away, but we stay at it until we get to the point of a sustainable relationship. Thank you very much for everything. I appreciate it.
(applause)
[01:05:28] MARGARET CHOWNING:
Thank you again, Carolyn. Wonderful.
