Acknowledgments

Merchant, Carolyn

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Acknowledgments

Carolyn Merchant

Description: The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of...

The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability

Acknowledgments

Author

Carolyn Merchant

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23417

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the many people who have contributed ideas and conversations to the materials that make up The Anthropocene and the Humanities. I am particularly grateful to Jennifer Wells, my coauthor on an earlier work, “Melting Ice: Climate Change and the Humanities,” that appeared in Confluence (2009), portions of which are included here. I likewise appreciate comments offered by University of California, Berkeley (UCB), colleagues Carolyn Finney, Robert Hass, Alastair Iles, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Garrison Sposito, Kimberly TallBear, and David Winickoff. UCB students Marley Pirochta and Rachel Rombardo provided invaluable assistance with manuscript preparation and permissions through a grant from UC Berkeley, College of Natural Resources, Sponsored Projects for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) in the fall of 2018.

An award from UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities provided support for a course in the spring semester of 2016: “The Fate of Nature in the Anthropocene.” Six faculty members and twelve graduate students read numerous books and articles and met weekly for robust discussions about the concept of the Anthropocene and its impact on the environment and humanity. Research support was also provided by a Futures Grant from the University of California at Berkeley and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Stanford University, in the fall semester of 2017. I thank the members of the class of 2017 for insightful and inspiring conversations and everyone at CASBS for assistance in obtaining books and articles and providing a congenial place to read, think, and write.

This book draws on and synthesizes ideas from my earlier books, especially The Death of Nature (1980; 2e, 1990; 3e, 2020). In it I discussed the transition from the living, organic world of the sixteenth century Renaissance, in which the earth was a nurturing mother, to the mechanistic world of the seventeenth century, in which matter was dead and inert and God was an engineer, mathematician, and clockmaker. In the present book, I refer to a “second death of nature” in the Anthropocene—the period from the invention of James Watt’s steam engine in 1784 to the present—which allowed greenhouse gases to accumulate in the atmosphere resulting in “climate change.” I also integrate ideas from my other books, bringing together concepts from history and new ideas that help us look toward the future and toward a New Age of Sustainability.

My colleagues and former students Kenneth Worthy, Elizabeth Allison, and Whitney A. Bauman have published a volume on my work titled After the Death of Nature: Carolyn Merchant and the Future of Human-Earth Relations (Routledge, 2019). I am honored and extremely appreciative. I thank them and Routledge for granting permission to use portions of my “Afterword” in this book. I am likewise grateful for the helpful suggestions offered by the reviewers of this book, Edward Melillo, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and an anonymous reviewer. I especially thank my editor at Yale University Press, Jean Thomson Black, her assistant, Michael Deneen, production editor Jeffrey Schier, and indexer Fred Kameny for their excellent help in preparing the book for publication.

Most of all, I thank my husband, Charles Sellers, for stimulating conversations, ideas, and moral support during the research and writing of this book.

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