Today’s environmental crisis is not new in kind, only in degree.

Evidence

The disruption of the forest ecosystem by the rise of early modern industry, coupled with the careless use and mismanagement of resources, bears striking parallels to current environmental issues and is illustrative of the fact that today’s environmental crisis is not new in kind, only in degree. As in the sixteenth century, we must look to alternative sources of energy. One of these is coal, with its concomitant air pollution, the same alternative available to our sixteenth-century predecessors. Another, alien to an age wedded to the ideology of progress, is to return to the renewable resource economy of the preindustrial period. Water, wind, sun, wood, and intermediate labor-intensive technologies could help to restore the ecological balances disrupted by modern industrialization. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 334

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes ch17 (renewable resource economy of peasants) and ch21 (capitalism’s renewable-to-mineral shift) — Merchant closes the loop with a present-tense diagnosis. — connects to: Interpreters must address emerging environmental crises, not just park facts. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 12; Ecological crisis is systemic to modernity, not contingent
• DEFINE: Contrasts the renewable-resource economy against the coal/market economy — foundational anti-progress vocabulary for the ecofeminist reading.

Broader Connections

• Ecological crisis is systemic to modernity, not contingent #expands (0.85)