Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Themes in History)

'Nature' is a deceptively simple and ahistorical term, suggesting intrinsic, unchanging reality.Yet nature has a history too, both in terms of human attitudes and human impacts.Coates outlines the major understandings of 'nature' in the western world since classical times, from nature as higher authority to its more recent meaning of threatened physical space and life forms. Unlike many others, this book places the history of attitudes to nature within the story of human-induced changes in the material environment. And few others take a supranational perspective, or cross the divides between historical eras. A distinctive unifying theme is Coates's interest in how 'green' writers over the last thirty years have interpreted our past dealings with nature, specifically their efforts to diagnose the roots of contemporary ecological problems and their search for ancestors.He concludes with a discussion of the future of nature in the context of developments such as the 'new' ecology, global