As climate change becomes an increasingly important part of public discourse, the relationship between time in nature and history is changing. Nature can no longer be considered a slow and immobile background to human history, and the future can no longer be viewed as open and detached from the past. Times of History, Times of Nature engages with this historical shift in temporal sensibilities through a combination of detailed case studies and synthesizing efforts. Focusing on the history of knowledge, media theory, and environmental humanities, this volume explores the rich and nuanced notions of time and temporality that have emerged in response to climate change.

'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 human-induced changes in the material environment. And few others take a supranational perspective, or cross the divides between historical eras. A distinctive unifying theme is Coates's 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 history's central features and debates, confirming its status as one of the most enthralling current pursuits within historical studies. This will be essential reading for second-year undergraduates and above in cultural history and environmental history, as well as to the general reader interested in environmental issues.

This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity. It is exact and patient in its probing for nuance and detail, but also bold, wide, and original in its scope. It combines the study of Virgil with the study of attitudes to nature throughout antiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century BC as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry should be a book about life, it combines scholarship and precision with a sense of the importance of literature and its capacity to enhance our understanding of our past and of ourselves.

As climate change becomes an increasingly important part of public discourse, the relationship between time in nature and history is changing. Nature can no longer be considered a slow and immobile background to human history, and the future can no longer be viewed as open and detached from the past. Times of History, Times of Nature engages with this historical shift in temporal sensibilities through a combination of detailed case studies and synthesizing efforts. Focusing on the history of knowledge, media theory, and environmental humanities, this volume explores the rich and nuanced notions of time and temporality that have emerged in response to climate change.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.

Over the past century, our species has made unprecedented technological innovations with which we have sought to control nature. In A Natural History of the Future, biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life's overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life's future flourishing is not in question. Ours is. A Natural History of the Future sets a new standard for understanding the diversity and destiny of life itself.

Autonomous Nature investigates the history of nature as an active, often unruly force in tension with nature as a rational, logical order from ancient times to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Along with subsequent advances in mechanics, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism, nature came to be perceived as an orderly, rational, physical world that could be engineered, controlled, and managed. Autonomous Nature focuses on the history of unpredictability, why it was a problem for the ancient world through the Scientific Revolution, and why it is a problem for today. The work is set in the context of vignettes about unpredictable events such as the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, the Bubonic Plague, the Lisbon Earthquake, and efforts to understand and predict the weather and natural disasters. This book is an ideal text for courses on the environment, environmental history, history of science, or the philosophy of science.