MES 301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Petrochemical Industry, Carolyn Merchant, Marine Biology

• School: University of Maine
• Department: Maine Studies
• Course: MES 301
• Professor: Daniel Soucier

Document Summary

What type of power was/is held by scientists and "experts": gender discourse showed changing ecological thought threatened cultural roles and the scientific process (see smith and hazlett). Environmental inequities are connected to social inequities (smith and nash). Silent spring marked a movement away from a controllable, mechanistic nature to a nature that is chaotic and uncontrollable. New ideas of nature also caused nature to return to people"s homes and enter their bodies. We see this in the debates over the accepted validity of laboratory science versus the uncertainties of field science (nash). This relates to the first point regarding scientific power and who in a culture gets to decide on scientific truth (hazlett, nash, smith). As nature can enter bodies, lines between the two genders blurred (see hazlett in particular). Who gets to decide what is harmful? (see smith and nash). These points are related to what counts as true scientific knowledge.