Nature's End

‘Wilderness is a whitefella word’ (p. 203). In a pithy sort of way, the aboriginal bumper sticker which Libby Robin refers to in her Antipodean essay encapsulates the core argument at the heart of this volume. Nature's End at first sight sounds like another rendition of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature (1990) or, by further inference, a dire warning as to biospheric closure on the specifically human experience. Yet what editors Sverker Sorlin and Paul Warde are seeking to argue here is an end to nature where the ‘environment’ begins: in other words an historical context in which the natural world is transformed through humanity's impact upon it. Terms such as ‘wilderness’, or the more prosaic English ‘countryside’, tell us much about the cultural construction of the environment we have produced across time. Or even more keenly, as Timothy Cooper's splendid essay (not least on the very term ‘waste’) reminds us, the ‘metabolic rift’ between humankind and the natural world on the cusp of modernity. But the purpose of environmental history is not to draw a boundary between man and nature or even imagine a world reclaimed for the latter (for which see Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, 2007) but rather (or so this volume implies) to more fully bridge the relational gap between scientific study of the biosphere and the realms of politics, society and culture

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Humanity · Literature · Modernity · Politics · Sociology · Wilderness · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Law · Philosophy