“Capitalism mystifies by converting living nature into dead matter and by changing inert metals into living money. To the capitalist puppeteers, nature is a doll-like puppet controlled by the strings of wheat trade that changes money into interest-earning capital. Male minds calculate the motions that control the inert matter below” (Merchant 152).

This description on how we capitalize on the natural world struck me while reading this piece. The idea that we are puppeteers and nature is the puppet emphasizes how we manipulate nature for our benefit.

“Nor are nature and culture, women and men, binary opposites with universal or essential meanings. Nature, wilderness, and civilization are socially constructed concepts that change over time and serve as stage settings in the progressive narrative. So too are the concepts of male and female and the roles that men and women play on the stage of history. The authors of such powerful narratives as laissez-faire capitalism, mechanistic science, manifest destiny, and the frontier story are usually privileged elites with access to power and patronage. Their words are read by persons of power who add the new stories to the older biblical story. As such the books become the library of Western culture. The library, in turn, functions as ideology when ordinary people read, listen to, internalize, and act out the stories told by their elders-the ministers, the entrepreneurs, newspaper editors, and professors who teach and socialize the young” (Merchant 153).

I thought this commentary on where the thoughts and ideas we listen to and abide by come from was very interesting, and that these people of power created the “library of Western culture”.

Environmentalism, like feminism, reverses the plot of the recovery narrative, seeing history as a slow decline, not a progressive movement that has made the desert blossom as the rose. The recovery story is false; an original garden has become a degraded desert. Pristine nature, not innocent man, has fallen. The decline of Eden was slow, rather than a precipitous lasidarian moment as in the Adam and Eve origin story” (Merchant 155).

This passage stood out to me as it explained modern day environmentalism as compared to the “recovery” narrative. While in the past humanity may have seen the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to be the fall, environmentalists see the fall to be a gradual decline since Eden. There has been no recovery, but instead the “original garden has become a degraded desert”.