Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Ecological Revolutions
ISBN: 9781469603896
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / The University of North Carolina Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Human ecology; Indians of North America; Human ecology;

With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England's industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In Ecological Revolutions , Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860.



In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future.