title: The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination
author:  Donald Worster 
description: <br />"The most ambitious and wide-ranging of all of Worster's essay collections to appear so far....A most stimulating book whose positions remain consistent with what Worster has written before. Historians ought to read it and ponder it. Environmentalists ought to send copies to every un-reconstructed capitalist and fundamentalist on their Christmas list and then disconnect the phone."--<em>Montana, The magazine of Western History</em>
zlib_text: ![Cover.jpg](../Images/Cover.jpg)
  
  
  # Autonomous Nature
  
  
  In this ambitious history of ideas, Carolyn Merchant calls attention to the
  ancient idea of nature as unpredictable, rebellious, and impossible to
  understand and control completely. She urges us to recover that older idea for
  the foundation of a new ecological ethic. Wide-ranging, original, and
  provocative.
  
  
  Donald Worster, author of “Nature’s Economy:  
  A History of Ecological Ideas”
  
  
  Merchant has written a key history of ideas for evaluating two of the big
  questions today: how did we get into this mess, and how can we get out of it.
  Western thinkers, who gave us the scientific method, also fell short of the
  truer, fuller view of reality, dynamical and chaotic. It is against this
  richer backdrop that we can grasp today’s emerging complexity paradigm, and
  find hope and insight for restoring our planet’s beautifully ‘rambunctious
  gardens.’
  
  
  Jennifer Wells, California Institute of Integral Studies,  
  author of Complexity and Su