Customer Reviews

Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture

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This book is an exposition of two contrasting forms of reclaiming Eden, one through restoring Nature, the other through creating a technological Eden. I agree with Amazon's review from Publishers Weekly. The final chapter is flawed, but to see why, we need to go back to Merchant's other work, one that leads to this one: The Death of Nature. Here she shows the history of the transformation of the European view of Nature from organic to mechanistic. Her view in both of these books is predominantly mechanistic. This is because that a partnership ethic is mechanistic rather than holistic. You cannot have a partnership between a part and the whole. The farthest one can go in that direction is, perhaps, to be a "team player". This book is better for those who are following Merchant's work than as general reading. Merchant has a generally linear view of history with "infinite" possibilities. This leads to a much more superficial narrative than in The Death of Nature.

The "Garden Of Eden" was a paradise lost, and mankind has spent centuries searching for it. Reinventing Eden reveals how the image and myth of Eden has actually led to further degradation of the planet, revealing its origins, its influence on political and social thought, and related issues concerning man and nature. Human manipulation of the environment in search of Eden has led to an erosion of nature: Reinventing Eden documents exactly how.

What a horrible book. I don't recommend it at all. She basically blames Christians and the bible for all the world's problems and does so by misrepresenting bible verses. A waste of money and time.

This book is a book that will be appreciated by ecologists and environmentalists alike but likely denounced by everyone else.

The book implies that ever since man was expelled from Eden, it has been trying to regain Eden through a series of processes, none of which have worked. As you can tell from that sentence, this book is a huge pile of crap for anyone that does not believe in the creation story. It is this point that really made the book less acceptable in my mind. Her basic assumption, that we are all striving to recreate Eden, is also a very extreme stretch. I severely doubt if the Buddhists could give a crap about mankind remaking a new Eden. I know it's not something I think about when planting trees or going to work. However, if you can accept her radical assumption, this book may be for you.

Nevertheless Merchant does have arguments that are very logical. The history of man's changing views towards nature holds a lot of water. In addition, her ideas on environmental partnership are very reasonable and may give us insight into what future practices may save this earth.

Unfortunately for me, that is where my love of this book dies. After reading a few chapters, I just got annoyed. Her chapters follow no linear argument and have no structure that I could find. Some of her arguments are extremely flimsy. At one point in the book, she completely misrepresents the laws of thermodynamics and then proceeds to argue a point from a second law that she states as nearly the opposite of the actual second law. I'm not sure if she ever took any science classes but she needs to do some research next time.

The book also suffers from a great amount of repetition. She repeats things over and over and over. The book should have been a hundred pages shorter. Her constant mention of feminism as it relates to the environment really got on my nerves. That argument does not belong in this book and feels completely out of place. Sometimes her arguments even argue against themselves.

So if you are a radical environmentalist like her, you may just like this book. For those of you that would rather follow a more logical approach to environmentalism (to avoid global warming), you best look elsewhere. As for me, I'm going to focus more on how to fix the earth rather than who's fault it's state is.