Originally published: Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1994.

In Modern Nature,Lynn K. Nyhart traces the emergence of a “biological perspective” in late nineteenth-century Germany that emphasized the dynamic relationships among organisms, and between organisms and their environment. Examining this approach to nature in light of Germany’s fraught urbanization and industrialization, as well the opportunities presented by new and reforming institutions, she argues that rapid social change drew attention to the role of social relationships and physical environments in rendering a society—and nature—whole, functional, and healthy. This quintessentially modern view of nature, Nyhart shows, stood in stark contrast to the standard naturalist’s orientation toward classification. While this new biological perspective would eventually grow into the academic discipline of ecology, Modern Nature locates its roots outside the universities, in a vibrant realm of populist natural history inhabited by taxidermists and zookeepers, schoolteachers and museum reformers, amateur enthusiasts and nature protectionists. Probing the populist beginnings of animal ecology in Germany, Nyhart unites the history of popular natural history with that of elite science in a new way. In doing so, she brings to light a major orientation in late nineteenth-century biology that has long been eclipsed by Darwinism.

This book presents ten essays about environmental communication. Chapter one introduces the concept of environmental communication and the ways in which it was conceived, imagined, and developed as a form of interdisciplinary enquiry. Chapter two explores the concept of green communication and education for the sustainable development movement. Chapter three is concerned with one of the major underlying socio-cultural influences of the human/nature divide: that of anthropomorphic or anthropogenic reasoning. Chapter four takes an ecological view of economics and develops an argument for the place of economic intangibles in the modern political economy. Chapters five and six explore specialist aspects of environmental communication practices: Chapter five is concerned with the contexts of psychologists' client and practitioner relationships, and chapter six with the communication domain of the expert courtroom witness. Chapter seven is concerned with exploring the phenomenon of 'social presence' within virtual environments. Chapters eight, nine and ten explore communication practices that are essential within the workplace and organizational environment: Chapter eight frames issues involving understanding ambiguity toleration in business communication; chapter nine explores leadership, management and self-esteem in the organizational communication context; and chapter ten discusses the environmental communication contexts of decision-making and organizational trust. The author has written this book for both general and specialist audiences, for students and teachers of environmental communication, and anyone with an interest in the prevalent concerns of 'modern nature' - the current orientation and practices of human communication in natural, virtual and professional spheres. It will also interest students and teachers of workplace organizations, including non-governmental organizations and business practitioners.

The most forward-looking spaces designed for rustic living in the twenty-first century. Across the globe, architects are creating innovative houses for country living, reimagining the way we escape into the natural world. Some combine industrial materials like metal and concrete with traditional wood. Others create sophisticated essays in off-grid living, employing the most technologically ambitious green-living strategies. Still others place discreet structures on remote, almost-unbuildable locations. This unique volume profiles new and recent projects that illustrate the inexhaustible potential of the modern house to enter into a dialogue with nature in sustainable yet stylish ways. The collection spans the globe, from the Pacific Northwest to the forests of Japan. Today’s architectural vanguard is represented, as well as established architects working at the forefront of twenty-first-century design, including Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Rick Joy, Olson Kundig, and Marcio Kogan. These rustic retreats—with comfortable and appealing modern interiors—will resonate with readers of shelter magazines, while the cutting-edge reputations of their architects will interest professionals and students.

Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World. --

From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or "honzogaku." Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by "honzogaku" practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the study of nature. In this pioneering social history of knowledge in Japan, Marcon shows how scholars developed a sophisticated discipline that was analogous to European natural history but formed independently. He also argues that when contacts with Western scholars, traders, and diplomats intensified in the nineteenth century, the previously dominant paradigm of "honzogaku "slowly succumbed to modern Western natural science not by suppression and substitution, as was previously thought, but by creative adaptation and transformation.

If natural law arguments struggle to gain traction in contemporary moral and political discourse, could it be because we moderns do not share the understanding of nature on which that language was developed? Building on the work of important thinkers of the last half-century, including Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, John Finnis, and Bernard Lonergan, the essays in Concepts of Nature compare and contrast classical, medieval, and modern conceptions of nature in order to better understand how and why the concept of nature no longer seems to provide a limit or standard for human action. These essays also evaluate whether a rearticulation of pre-modern ideas (or perhaps a reconciliation or reconstitution on modern terms) is desirable and/or possible. Edited by R. J. Snell and Steven F. McGuire, this book will be of interest to intellectual historians, political theorists, theologians, and philosophers.