Shifting metaphors converted restraint on exploiting the earth into sanction for it

Evidence

Whereas the nurturing earth image can be viewed as a cultural constraint restricting the types of socially and morally sanctioned human actions allowable with respect to the earth, the new images of mastery and domination functioned as cultural sanctions for the denudation of nature. Society needed these new images as it continued the processes of commercialism and industrialization, which depended on activities directly altering the earth—mining, drainage, deforestation, and assarting (grubbing up stumps to clear fields). — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 78

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels eco-justice and settler-colonial course threads: how ideology licenses resource extraction of land. — connects to: The earth-mother metaphor survived as a legal argument against mining into the 1490s — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 202; Metaphors materially shape intellectual and political practice.; Metaphors destabilize when the practices they describe change (+3 more)
• SEED: Angles toward an essay on how one era’s ‘ethical constraint’ becomes the next era’s ‘ethical sanction’ via metaphor change — applicable to contemporary environmental discourse.

Broader Connections

• Metaphors materially shape intellectual and political practice. #expands (0.85)
• The machine world view removed ethical scruples against destroying nature #corroborates (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 852
• The earth-mother metaphor survived as a legal argument against mining into the 1490s #expands (0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 202
• Metaphors destabilize when the practices they describe change #corroborates (0.80)
• The Scientific Revolution’s death of nature licensed nature’s manipulation #corroborates (0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 761