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

Coates, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745616550 ISBN 13: 9780745616551

Publisher: Polity, 1998

Synopsis

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 humaninduced changes in the material environment. And few others take a supranational perspective, or cross the divides between historical eras. A distinctive unifying theme is Coatess 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 warming, advances in genetic engineering and research on animal behaviour. Assuming no previous knowledge, Nature provides the reader with an accessible synthesis and introduction to some of environmental historys central features and debates, confirming its status as one of the most enthralling current pursuits within historical studies. This will be essential reading for secondyear undergraduates and above in cultural history and environmental history, as well as to the general reader interested in environmental issues.

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Review:

Every civilization has high ideals for personal and social conduct; every civilization regularly violates those ideals. So one might conclude after reading Peter Coates's wide-ranging study of environmental ethics in Western society, populated by Roman women who cry at the death of beloved pet birds and lap dogs after watching humans being tortured in the Coliseum, by 19th-century travelers who exalt the virtues of so-called primitive societies while participating in their destruction. All cultures are susceptible to the error of mistreating the land, Coates argues. Citing the work of recent historical geographers, for example, he believes that the North American landscape bore more signs of the human presence before 1492 than it did in the mid-1700s, largely as a result of destructive Native American farming practices. He also notes that Chief Seattle's famed speech ("How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?"), one of the classics of environmental thought, was in truth the invention of an Anglo screenwriter in the 1970s. While questioning the usefulness of the widely held, Western sense of shame over the sins of the past, Coates does reckon that we have a long way to go in aligning our ethics with our practices in this age of biotechnology and widespread extinction. "I am tempted," he writes, "to conclude that no matter what shape our tomatoes and frogs assume, the polarity of nature and culture will endure a good deal longer." --Gregory McNamee

From the Inside Flap:

"I am very impressed with this book. It offers much more depth on most of the historical periods than any other book I've read. . . . I couldn't stop reading it."—Michael Barbour, University of California, Davis

"This stimulating book covers a great deal of ground—from Classical and Christian theories to the Enlightenment and Romanticism and up to modern times—without overloading the reader in mere detail."—Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute

About this edition

• Publisher: Polity
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0745616550
• ISBN 13: 9780745616551
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256