Mechanism, Development, and Ecological Knowledge: Rethinking Ecofeminism through Carolyn Merchant and Vandana Shiva

Abstract

Ecofeminist scholarship routinely pairs Carolyn Merchant and Vandana Shiva as complementary critics of the joint domination of women and nature, but existing treatments juxtapose them rather than comparing them, and the juxtaposition conceals a disagreement about how the woman–nature association should be handled. This article compares Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980) and Earthcare (1996) with Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988) and Ecofeminism (Mies and Shiva) across five dimensions: the genealogy of ecological domination, the conception of science, the woman–nature relation, political economy and agency, and proposed ecological ethics. The two differ in where they locate the origin of ecological domination, Merchant in the epistemic and metaphorical transformation of European modernity and Shiva in the material appropriation of subsistence bases under colonial development, and their prescriptions follow from that difference. Merchant degenders nature, dissolving the woman–nature equation through a partnership ethic that distributes responsibility across genders; Shiva revalues it, treating women’s subsistence knowledge as an epistemic resource. The article argues that these positions stand in a tradeoff rather than a contradiction. At the level of propositions they are combinable, and the article combines them; at the level of theoretical priority they are not, because each thinker treats her chosen emphasis as generally rather than locally correct. Merchant’s ethic achieves gender symmetry without building differentiated responsibility into its structure, though she identifies production and North–South inequality as decisive; Shiva builds that asymmetry in but remains exposed to the essentialism critique. Contemporary feminist political ecology is read as an attempt to hold both commitments.