The Death of Nature: A Retrospective

Abstract

In this chapter, the author elaborates on her analysis of Francis Bacon&s;s rhetoric on the domination and control of nature. When The Death of Nature appeared in 1980, the concept of ecofeminism was just emerging. Ecofeminism linked the domination of women with the domination of nature and recognized the values and activities associated with women, including childbearing and nurturing. Ecofeminism, however, faced a critique by academic women during the 1980s and 1990s that it was essentialist in its conflation of women with nature, implying not only that women&s;s nature is to nurture, but also that women&s;s role is to clean up the environmental mess made by men. Historian of science Thomas Kuhn noted that Bacon&s;s method of interrogating nature through constraint influenced seventeenth-century experimenters: The attitude towards the role and status of experiment is only the first of the novelties which distinguish the new experimental movement from the old.