![]() Merchant was born in Rochester, New York, and raised in "a household of strong women," she says, after her parents divorced when she was 8. ![]() Current president of the American Society for Environmental History, she is the Chancellor's Professor of environmental history, philosophy, and ethics at Berkeley, where she has taught for more than two decades. ![]() Her ninth and most recent work, the Columbia Guide to American Environmental History, came out last month. Merchant, now one of the world's leading environmental writers, is author of the path-breaking and influential The Death of Nature (it has no relation to that prairie incident), her first book, published in 1980. The next spring, we went out there, and it was just a beautiful carpet of prairie wild flowers." Why on earth? "Well," she recalls, "he wanted to burn the weeds and aspen that were threatening to crowd out the native prairie plants, which are adapted to fire. She calls "a baptism by fire." In Madison, Wisconsin, in 1959, on their first date, the man who would become her husband drove her out to a prairie, took out a book of matches, and set fire to the place. Leading environmental historian Carolyn Merchant had a shocking introduction to ecology. 96 A Conservation with Carolyn Merchant, Russell Schoch, California Monthly the filmĪ Conservation with Carolyn Merchant by Russell Schoch ![]()
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