Rereading Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature a quarter century after its publication and from the perspective of its contribution to feminist theory is a rewarding process. Merchant’s book has garnered a sustained readership as a foundational text of ecofeminism. Simultaneously, however, ecofeminism itself has been sidelined within feminist theory because of critiques that it is marred by ethnocentrism and by an essentialist identification of women with nature. Rereading Merchant leads to three conclusions. First, Merchant explicitly repudiates ethnocentrism and essentialism, (...) developing instead an archival methodology that grounds the universalizing claims of modern science in time and place, text and ideology. Second, the central claim of ecofeminism—that the domination of women and of nature have shared roots in the logic of science and capitalism—remains a powerful thesis. Third, ecofeminism brought together antimilitarist feminists and others whose voices are underrepresented in contemporary academic feminism. Combining the critiques of recent third‐wave feminisms with a reevaluation of ecofeminism would greatly strengthen the field. (shrink)

Two initiatives in community-based biodiversity conservation are examined. I describe key aspects of the formation in the mid 1990s of the Malpai Borderlands Group of the Southwest US, and the reorganisation of the Kenya Wildlife Service during 1994–6 and their legacies since then. I review how history, ownership, membership, and valuation were appealed to, created, maintained, and contested in defining what should be saved, by and for whom, and how in each. I also suggest the central role of science and (...) relatively mundane technologies in co-ordinating these parameters. Success or 'best practice' as applied to the conjunction of biodiversity conservation and development depends upon this work in contesting and establishing history, ownership, membership and valuation. (shrink)