“Women challenged this hierarchy and demonstrated that women were saving the earth from destruction.” “Ecofeminism challenged the idea that men were identified with culture and hence were superior to women who were identified with nature,” she explained in an email. In this field of study, Merchant’s contributions are as important as those of her idols. Ecofeminism identifies the exploitation of nature in connection with the oppression of women.

Merchant, along with various other female academics, is responsible for integrating these two concepts - environmentalism and feminism - into a study known as ecofeminism. In a work equally as historically pivotal, “The Feminine Mystique,” Friedan encouraged women to look outside of their traditional societal roles for fulfillment - a concept that would initiate the second-wave feminist movement. It was one of the first literary works that identified humans’ undeniable and irreversible impact on the environment by linking the indiscriminate use of pesticides to detrimental health effects. Merchant was inspired by two notable women whose works eventually shaped her career - Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring,” and Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique.” These two pieces of literature - published in 19, respectively, while Merchant was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison - formed the foundation of ecofeminism in the 1970s.Ĭarson’s “Silent Spring” is often seen as the spark that ignited the modern environmental movement. Although Merchant will retire at the end of this semester, she leaves an impressive legacy at UC Berkeley and in the field of environmental sociology as a whole. She is well-established as one of the most influential contributors in the studies of ecofeminism and environmental history. But there is a rising field of study that analyzes these environmental issues from an entirely different perspective: the sociological.Įnvironmental sociology seeks to understand the implications of the different meanings we assign to nature, investigating how these connections shape humans’ interaction with their immediate, nonhuman environments.Ĭarolyn Merchant, a professor of environmental history, philosophy and ethics, has researched and taught environmental sociology at UC Berkeley for the past three decades. Climate change is considered one of the most pressing yet divisive issues of this century, and though political in nature, it is indisputably scientific at its foundation.

Carolyn merchant the death of nature