With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the
seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the
environment itself underwent radical alterations as human
relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all
changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the
nineteenth century, when New England's industrial production
brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology,
economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In
Ecological
Revolutions, Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major
transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and
1860.
In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas
about narrating environmental change based on gender and the
dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates
New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization
and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to
the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and
achieving sustainability in the future.