After the Death of Nature ─ Carolyn Merchant and the Future of Human-nature Relations

Carolyn Merchant stands as one of the most influential scholars in all of environmental studies. A pioneer in two fields—environmental history and ecofeminism—who has produced groundbreaking work in a number of other far-flung fields including the history of science and art history, Merchant has published a coherent body of thought in a dozen books and over a hundred articles. Her work is foundational. Scholars in the environmental humanities and related fields have been forced to contend with it for decades due to its great import.

After the Death of Nature studies Merchant’s impact both on environmental thought and on other scholars’ careers and research agendas. But it does not simply celebrate Merchant’s scholarship. Rather, this volume critically assesses Merchant’s work and then builds upon it by bringing it into conversation with existing and new work in the environmental humanities.

The proposed volume brings together leading scholars, colleagues, former students, and friends from throughout Merchant’s career to reveal her importance to various academic fields, to serve as a retrospective on her work, and to apply her thinking to new and fresh ways of understanding human-earth relations. The contributors include leading scholars in the fields of Environmental History, Ecofeminism, Environmental Philosophy and Ethics, and Religion and the Environment.

The breadth of the book and its consideration of major theoretical problems in human-environment relations will make it useful for graduate and upperdivision undergraduate environmental studies courses.

Kenneth Worthy is research associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley; St. Mary’s College of California; and New York University. His research explores the cultural, psychological, philosophical, and phenomenological aspects of the nature-culture divide in modern society. His book Invisible Nature: Healing the Destructive Divide between People and the Environment was published?by Prometheus Books in 2013, and he writes The Green Mind blog at Psychology Today. He earned his Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley in 2005 under the direction of Carolyn Merchant.

Elizabeth Allison is Associate Professor of Ecology and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where she founded and chairs the graduate program in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion. Her research and teaching explore connections between religion, ethics, and environmental practice, with particular attention to biodiversity, waste, ecological place, and climate change. The Earth Charter and the World Bank’s Development Dialogue have cited her research on the religious response to climate change. Her articles appear in WIREs Climate Change, Mountain Research and Development, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture,? and in edited volumes on Bhutan, religion, and geography. She is working on a book entitled The Political Ecology of Happiness: Religion, Environment, and Development in Modernizing Bhutan. A former Fulbright scholar, she holds degrees in environmental management from the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University, and in religion from Yale and Williams College.

Whitney Bauman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University in Miami. He teaches and lectures on science and religion, religion and nature, and religion and queer theory. His books include Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (Columbia University Press 2014), Theology Creation and Environmental?Ethics (Routledge 2009), with Lucas Johnston Science and Religion: One Planet, Many Possibilities (Routledge 2014), and with Kevin O’Brien and Richard Bohannon, Grounding Religion: A Fieldguide to the Study of Religion and Ecology (Routledge 2010). He is currently working on a manuscript that examines the religious influences on Ernst Haeckel’s understanding of the natural world.