Merchant's argument is historical, but its implications run forward into the present. The mechanistic worldview she describes is not a seventeenth-century relic, it is the operating system of contemporary industrial civilization. It shows up in the language of "natural resources," "ecosystem services," "environmental management," and "sustainable yield." All of these phrases treat nature as a stock of assets whose value is exhausted by their utility to humans. The living, self-organizing earth of pre-modern thought has been replaced, conceptually, by a balance sheet.
Ecofeminism, the tradition Merchant helped found, argues that environmental philosophy cannot be separated from feminist philosophy, because the ideological structures that authorize the exploitation of nature are the same ones that authorize the exploitation of women and other marginalized groups. This is not just an analogy; it is a structural claim. Hierarchical dualisms, culture/nature, reason/emotion, mind/body, man/woman, operate together as a system. To challenge one is to challenge all.
This has practical stakes. Merchant points out that environmental degradation falls disproportionately on women in the developing world, women walk further for water as aquifers drop, women bear the health costs of agricultural chemicals in their bodies and in their breast milk, women are displaced when forests are cleared. The Chipko movement in 1970s India, in which women physically hugged trees to prevent commercial logging, is a vivid example of women defending the organic relationship with the land against mechanistic extraction. The movement arose not from abstract environmentalism but from a community-based, embodied knowledge of what the forest actually provided.
Merchant also develops a concept of partnership ethics as an alternative to both the dominion model (nature is ours to use) and the stewardship model (nature is ours to manage responsibly). In a partnership ethic, humans are participants in a community of life that has its own value independent of human utility. This is not mysticism, it is a philosophical reorientation with real policy implications: rather than asking "how much of this ecosystem can we take sustainably?" you ask "what does this ecosystem need to flourish, and how do we adjust our needs accordingly?"
Critics, including some feminists, have pushed back. Does identifying women with nature risk reinscribing the very essentialism that has historically oppressed women? If woman = nature, and nature = exploitable, then the equation is dangerous even when you try to run it in reverse. Merchant is aware of this tension. Her response is not to celebrate the feminine-natural link as eternal truth, but to explain it historically, to show how it was constructed, how it functioned, and therefore how it can be dismantled. The goal is not a world where women are especially connected to the earth; it is a world where the hierarchical dualisms that placed both women and nature at the bottom are dissolved entirely.