Ideas of Nature:

Multiple modes of thinking about nature:

1. Contemporary Western ideas of nature

a. Fall from Grace, Seeking Eden

i. Reclaiming Eden through lifestyle

ii. Eden Lost as Narrative

iii. Destroying Eden to Reclaim it

b. Remaining in nature: rural lives and pastoralism

i. We form a part of nature

ii. Relations with the natural world through pets or farming

A. Clarence Glacken: Traces on the Rhodian Shore

B. Three Classical Ideas of Nature

a. Is the earth a purposefully made creation?

b. Has nature, via climate etc., had an impact upon the constitution of human health, culture, and society?

c. In humankind’s long tenure on the earth, have we changed it from its pristine condition?

C. Divides environmental history into epochs:

a. Classical antiquity

b. Middle ages

c. Renaissance/early modern

d. 18^th century

D. Traces 3 common Themes:

a. idea of a designed earth

b. idea of environmental influence

c. people as a geographic agent

3. Glacken: Ideas of nature (and society) changed more between 1800-1900
than between 1-1800.

a. History of ideas, of progress: history has a history

b. Experience of the earth

c. The dust bowl and the great depression

4. What provoked this remarkable change?

a. Evolutionary idea of nature: chaotic, unplanned,

i. Darwin: idea of evolution: end of teleology

ii. Gaulton: eugenics and the idea of the normative arise in the study of nature

b. The experience of contemporary society: Phantasmagoria

c. Idea of progress:

Golden age and the decline of civilization versus the idea of constant progress

d. Normativity: the problem of determinacy

i. 18^th century: idea of determinacy, that one can find a manner to describe nature completely

ii. 19^th century-to-present: chance, the idea that our existence is simply a matter of chance

iii. teleology: the idea of a ‘final end’ or of a direction to evolution persisted long after it was discarded in the social sciences (though note Einstein: God doesn’t play dice said in context of quantum mechanics)

1. Lamark versus Darwin/Wallace

2. Cones versus ladders: vision of evolutionary change

5. Christian Theology and nature

a. Dominion over the earth and creatures

b. God-like people

c. Wisdom separated from God, accessible to people

d. PARADOX:

i. Nature is a creation of God,

ii. Nature is just a creation: Prohibition of deism

iii. Embrace nature or reject nature as a path to salvation?