Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.

"New Visions of Nature" focuses on the emergence of these new visions of complex nature in three domains. The first selection of essays reflects public visions of nature, that is, nature as it is experienced, encountered, and instrumentalized by diverse publics. The second selection zooms in on micro nature and explores the world of contemporary genomics. The final section returns to the macro world and discusses the ethics of place in present-day landscape philosophy and environmental ethics. The contributions to this volume explore perceptual and conceptual boundaries between the human and the natural, or between an ‘out there’ and ‘in here.’ They attempt to specify how nature has been publicly and genomically constructed, known and described through metaphors and re-envisioned in terms of landscape and place. By parsing out and rendering explicit these divergent views, the volume asks for a re-thinking of our relationship with nature.

"This volume, which includes a number of Haeckel's drawings and watercolours which have never been published before, is the first detailed overview of the scientist and artist's vast output and provides a lively picture of his exceptional talent."--BOOK JACKET.

"Visions of nature" are the ideas that people hold of what nature is and how we should relate to it. These visions are important for the design of democratically grounded landscape and nature policies. These contributions were presented at an expert meeting at Radboud University, June 2001

Naturebot: Unconventional Visions of Nature presents a humanities-oriented addition to the literature on biomimetics and bioinspiration, an interdisciplinary field which investigates what it means to mimic nature with technology. This technology mirrors the biodiversity of nature and it is precisely this creation of technological metaphors for the intricate workings of the natural world that is the real subject of Naturebot. Over the course of the book, Barilla applies the narrative conventions of the nature writing genre to this unconventional vision of nature, contrasting the traditional tropes and questions of natural history with an expanding menagerie of creatures that defy conventional categories of natural and artificial. In keeping with its nature writing approach, the book takes us to where we can encounter these creatures, examining the technological models and the biotic specimens that inspired them. In doing so, it contemplates the future of the human relationship to the environment, and the future of nature writing in the 21st century. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of biomimetics, environmental literary studies/ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.

Richly illustrated 1996 collection on how Pacific plants and peoples were depicted by European explorers.

Visions: Earth's Elements in Bird and Nature Photography contains a varied collection of more than 450 bird and nature photographs that reflect the personal visions of the three authors and eight other wildlife photographers. The theme of the book is set by the elements of the planet (earth, fire, air, and water) and includes an assortment of nature photographs, from exciting action and moody contemplation, are connected to these elements. Throughout the book, each two-page layout tells a story that relates to the subjects or habitats shown on the pages, or creates a mood using color themes that connect with one of the earth's elements. Relevant quotes about nature are interspersed throughout the book, and personalized captions share interesting information about each photograph.