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The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, published in 1980, presented a view of the Scientific Revolution that challenged the hegemony of mechanistic science as a marker of progress. It argued that seventeenth-century science could be implicated in the ecological crisis, the domination of nature, and the devaluation of women in the production of scientific knowledge. This essay offers a twenty-five-year retrospective of the book's contributions to ecofeminism, environmental history, and reassessments of the Scientific Revolution. It also responds to challenges to the argument that Francis Bacon's rhetoric legitimated the control of nature. Although Bacon did not use terms such as "the torture of nature," his followers, with some justification, interpreted his rhetoric in that light. I N 1980, the year The Death of Nature appeared, Congress passed the Superfund Act, ecofeminists held their first nationwide conference, and environmentalists celebrated the tenth anniversary of Earth Day. The Death of Nature, subtitled "Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution," spoke to all three events. The chemicals that polluted the soil and water symbolized nature's death from the very success of mechanistic science. The 1980 conference "Women and Life on Earth: Ecofeminism in the '80s" heralded women's efforts to reverse that death. Earth Day celebrated a decade of recognition that humans and ecology were deeply intertwined. The essays in this Isis Focus section on the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Death of Nature reflect the themes of the book's subtitle, and I shall comment on each of them in that order. I shall also elaborate on my analysis of Francis Bacon's rhetoric on the domination and control of nature.

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