Nature, women, blacks, and laborers became resources legitimized as rationality.

Evidence

Between 1500 and 1700 an incredible transformation took place. A “natural” point of view about the world in which bodies did not move unless activated, either by an inherent organic mover or a “contrary to nature” superimposed “force,” was replaced by a non-natural non-experiential “law” that bodies move uniformly unless hindered. The “natural” perception of a geocentric earth in a finite cosmos was superseded by the “non-natural” commonsense “fact” of a heliocentric infinite universe. A subsistence economy in which resources, goods, money, or labor were exchanged for commodities was replaced in many areas by the open-ended accumulation of profits in an international market. Living animate nature died, while dead inanimate money was endowed with life. Increasingly capital and the market would assume the organic attributes of growth, strength, activity, pregnancy, weakness, decay, and collapse obscuring and mystifying the new underlying social relations of production and reproduction that make economic growth and progress possible. Nature, women, blacks, and wage laborers were set on a path toward a new status as “natural” and human resources for the modern world system. Perhaps the ultimate irony in these transformations was the new name given them: rationality. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1064

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The synthesis paragraph of the book’s whole thesis: organic to mechanical cosmos, living nature to dead money, and the four subjugated resource groups — the reader’s core ecofeminist payload.
• XREF: Directly parallels the polyad’s threads on environmental racism (nature and blacks as resources) and the reader’s focus (domination of nature/women under mechanism). — connects to: Scientific quantification of nature parallels society’s reduction of humans to abstract labor power. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 583; Throughout history, conceptions of nature justified political hierarchies and racism. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 653; Labor economics drove the legal invention of Blackness as property. (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Throughout history, conceptions of nature justified political hierarchies and racism. #exemplifies (0.92) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 653
• Extreme racisms treat racialized people as extractable natural resources #exemplifies (0.88)
• Labor economics drove the legal invention of Blackness as property. #expands (0.85)
• Scientific quantification of nature parallels society’s reduction of humans to abstract labor power. #corroborates (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 583
• Either divine or natural origin claims transform peoples into animal species. #exemplifies (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 595
• Animist vitalism functioned as an ethic restraining exploitation of nature #complicates (0.70) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 158