Animist vitalism functioned as an ethic restraining exploitation of nature

Evidence

Popular Renaissance literature was filled with hundreds of images associating nature, matter, and the earth with the female sex. The earth was alive and considered to be a beneficent, receptive, nurturing female. For most writers there was a mingling of traditions based on ancient sources. In general, the pervasive animism of nature created a relationship of immediacy with the human being. An I-thou relationship in which nature was considered to be a person-writ-large was sufficiently prevalent that the ancient tendency to treat it as another human still existed. Such vitalistic imagery was thus so widely accepted by the Renaissance mind that it could effectively function as a restraining ethic. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 158

Categorization

• SEED: An angle: ‘restraining ethics’ built from animist belief vs. epistemologies that license extraction — could tie eco-justice pedagogy to the power of worldview-shaping stories.
• XREF: connects to: Enslaving and impoverishing nature is no more tolerable than enslaving humans — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 72; Modernity preserved the opposition to nature while discarding the afterlife — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 387; Mechanism removed the moral barrier that had made controlling nature seem impious — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 419 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Vitalism’s monistic worldview inherently restrains the exploitation of nature #corroborates (0.90) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 933
• Mechanism stripped away the organic view’s ethical restraints on nature exploitation #contradicts (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 480