#649: Natural History Reading List #28 - 'The Story of Nature'

This is an academic and lengthy read, and a heavy dense book by Jeremy Mynott.

I have been reading it slowly for the last year or so, one chapter at a time.

This review has some useful details.

We talk about ‘nature’ all the time, but what exactly is it? Does nature include physical processes such as rocks and rivers, as well as life? Is humankind part of nature or is there now a clear separation between the artificial and the natural? And if the latter, when did that divorce take place? Nature has a deep history, and what we think about it today may be different from how it was viewed in the past (there have been changes in perception even in my own lifetime). Who invented nature anyway?

There's another useful review of the book here.

It explores some of the early relationships that people had with nature and how those relationships have changed. I was interested in the chapter on cave paintings for example, and the relationship that we had with nature in those times.

Introduction:

What is ‘nature’? Has it always meant the same thing? Are we a part of it?…This is a huge subject, of course, and it would be impossible to write a comprehensive and systematic account of it in a book of this length — or indeed any length. But…stories offer a different way of finding routes through such a vast, varied and difficult terrain and my story is only one among many possible ways of tackling this theme.