Excerpt
“Ideas about nature are famously malleable. Take a peek, and Shazamm! — you have opened what Casey Stengal once called ‘A box of Pandoras.’ The word nature can mean ‘everything that is,’ a conception that clearly contains us, along with our fiber optics, jazz riffs, and hybrid fuels. Just as often, nature is used in contradistinction to culture, to mean the given world, all those aspects of the earth not created by humankind…And, sometimes nature will mean what the ancient Stoics meant by the word physis — an active, guiding force, more verb than noun.”
Read the full introduction.
