In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 413-414



[Access article in PDF]
Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. By Carolyn Merchant. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xii+308. $25.

Carolyn Merchant's Reinventing Eden begins in prehistory and ends in the present. It rejects the biblical notion of human dominion over nature. Instead, "we should think of ourselves as partners with the non-human world" (p. 6). Most of the book is devoted not to exploring that idea, however, but to "the fate of nature in western culture." Only the last twenty-two pages discuss how Eden might be reinvented.

Merchant focuses on narratives. Part 1 traces the transformation of the idea of Eden into the progressive "recovery narrative," in which human beings will create a new, future garden. Merchant examines the Bible, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and many others, concluding with Locke and Smith. Part 2 is concerned with "New World Edens," focusing primarily on the United States and drawing largely on the classic literature of American studies (Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and familiar landscape paintings), to show the emergence of the male settler as a new Adam, taking possession of an untouched virgin land and colonizing first the continent and then foreign lands, ending with the commodified Eden of the shopping mall and the manipulation of DNA. Part 3, "New Stories," begins by arguing that environmental critiques, from Rachel Carson to Bill McKibben, remain within the tradition of the recovery narrative because they posit a rupture with an early era when people had a sustainable relationship with Nature. Such writers seek a return to Eden, rather than rethinking the story itself. Likewise, feminist and ecofeminist narratives, while praiseworthy for their attacks on "the mainstream Enlightenment Recovery Narrative" (p. 198), ultimately remain trapped in the "linear" Edenic story, whereas what is needed are "non-linear narratives within weblike human and human/ nature partnerships" (p. 199).

Merchant recognizes that deconstruction challenges linear narrative, but rejects its more extreme claims, and concludes "that people can use stories [End Page 413] to understand the histories through which they and others have been formed and by entering into these stories will appreciate their own places in the biophysical world of atoms, molecules, organisms, ecosystems, nations, planets, and galaxies. People will acknowledge their own location within nature and their own destructive and constructive roles in nature's continued existence" (p. 202). In Merchant's future, environmentalists, feminists, and philosophers write new narratives that politicians and economists accept as guiding principles.

Is this wishful thinking? Merchant asserts: "Those who construct and follow new synthesizing narratives will do so by allowing regional peoples to preserve and use their own bioregional environments in ways that counter the environmentally destructive modes of global capitalism" (p. 203). But she does not explain how people embracing these narratives will gain and hold political power, or how they will thwart capitalism. She suggests that nonlinear stories will be accepted because they accord with chaos theory, Ilya Prigogine's "new thermodynamics," and complexity theory. The first two suggest the "possibility of new actors within nonlinear plots." The new science "destabilizes the very concept of nature as a standard or referent. It disrupts the idea of nature as a resilient actor or mother who will repair the errors of human actors and continue as fecund garden" (pp. 211- 12). As for complexity theory, it too "opens possibilities for new narratives with nonlinear plots" (p. 215).

While the first ten chapters examine not historical reconstructions of the past but narratives, the final chapter ignores examples of narratives and instead focuses on environmental action. Merchant suggests what a partnership narrative should contain, and points to examples: preserving open spaces in California, enhancing the salmon's survival in the Pacific Northwest, and creating "wildlife corridors" on corporate land near Charleston.

Merchant leads the reader away from the linear desert of the Enlightenment into the lush narrative complexity of an ecological Promised Land, where chaos theory ensures that humans will be partners with Nature. But to me Reinventing Eden seems a derivative history...

pdf

Share