In my 2006 book Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, I read between the lines of Rachel Carson's texts--especially Silent Spring (Carson 1962)--in order to develop an epistemological approach I call ecological naturalism. I begin by showing how the dominant theories of knowledge of affluent post-Industrial Revolution societies have been complicit in perpetuating a rhetoric of mastery and possession: of knowledge "acquired" for manipulation, prediction, and control of nature and human nature; of knowledge as a prized commodity that legitimates its possessors' authoritative occupancy (and sometime abuse) of positions of power, as they recast "the natural world" as a resource for human gratification. The ecology movement's critical stance with respect to an energy-fetishized society's unquestioning reliance on a simplistic, unreconstructed scientistic methodology for acquiring knowledge is well known. In the early twenty-first century, critiques of scientism have become a focus of revisionary social-political praxis and contestation, both feminist and other, beyond anything Carson could have imagined.
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