Reflection: Nature and Domination

Prompts to consider

• Merchant argues that even well-meaning environmentalism often reproduces the mechanistic worldview, framing nature as a resource to be 'sustainably managed.' Can you identify a moment in your own thinking or language where you treated the natural world as a stock of assets rather than a community you belong to?
• The organic worldview gave the earth moral status by calling it alive and female. Is that a sound strategy, grounding ethical protection in personification, or does it introduce philosophical problems of its own? What other grounds for nature's moral status might be available?
• Merchant traces a structural link between the domination of nature and the subordination of women. Does that connection feel historically convincing? What would it change, in environmental policy, in feminist theory, in your own practice, if it is right?