The Death of Nature (1980)
History is far shorter than anyone cares to admit. The accelerating catastrophe in which we find ourselves—that we will colloquially refer to as the world—began not so long ago in the witch hunts of the 16th century. At this time of capitalist takeoff certain men in Europe were gripped by the implacable need to own everything; the cursed object of private property is activated for the new mercantile class; lands that had once been communal were enclosed and privatized. The independent woman, persecuted as a witch, becomes the principle heretic and victim of this new era; reproductive power and the “wild nature” of the feminine, must now be enclosed within the holy sacrament of marriage, or else. The giant edifices of philosophy, theology and the new-found empirical sciences were brought to bear upon ecology and the body in equal measure; the subjugation of the feminine and the destruction of the biosphere are the twinned impulses that propel what we now call modernity. Nature must be unfeeling and mechanical in order to justify the ongoing industrial torment that we deal to animals, the environment and those who build our civilization. The “traditional family” is the moral high-ground from which to justify reducing the value of all women to their reproductive capacity. The old pagan worldview of an organic, magic and living earth in which humans are but a part of the larger organism is finally replaced (repressed?) by the rational and scientific view of passive and dead nature to be ruled and abused by man in the violent extraction of value. The mechanical universe is governed by immutable laws ordained by God and that can be known and manipulated by the man of science. Science, as defined by Francis Bacon, continues the old Christian mandate for the total domination of the earth and the womb; all this in the name of progress, knowledge, capital and God. Has anything changed?
