Man and the Natural World

"Having read a huge number of books for my research, I find that some books just stand out as just being beautifully researched, or so scholarly that they are revelatory. Man and the Natural World is one of those books. It’s written in that level voice of someone who really knows what they are talking about. The book deals with what it says on the tin: the relationship between man and nature. He actually focuses on a particular period of English history, from 1500-1800, a period which is particularly interesting for me, since it deals with the rise of urbanism, the agricultural revolution, and shifting perceptions of people’s relationship with the land. The way he describes the rise of vegetarianism as a movement which arises when people start to question their relationship with the natural world, is particularly interesting. The view in early modern England, before the agricultural revolution, was that cultivated land was beautiful and that the transformation of the landscape that was taking place in order to feed cities was a good thing. But as the agricultural revolution kicked off, people began to see the encroachment of urban influence on to the natural landscape as a bad thing. He talks about the rise of pastoralism, which is this extraordinary movement that extols the virtues of the countryside, something better and purer than cities. Vegetarianism and early environmentalism are the implications of this. Well, I do think it’s incredibly important that we retain a sense of being part of nature. But I’m interested in why it is that living in cities has been associated with distancing ourselves from nature. It’s not a new thing, if you go back to the Romans, they are already projecting a judgmental view of what kind of natural form is good or bad, projecting an urban view on to the natural environment and setting themselves as something separate from it. And yet they still saw themselves as part of the natural world: that’s what making sacrifices to the god of the underworld was all about. The profound separation between man and the natural environment comes with industrialisation, when it becomes clear that we are actually destroying nature. People then start seeing nature as something which needs to be saved, although this still means we are seeing ourselves as something apart from nature. Where we’ve got to now with environmentalism is good. We have realised that we can’t see ourselves as disassociated from nature because we are part of it. There is this growing consensus in the green movement, which I support, that we have to rethink the city as an organic ecology. It will be interesting to see how this develops in the next few years."