What do you think?
Rate this book
The Story of Nature: A Human History
The story of humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world from pre-history to the present day
Nature has long been the source of human curiosity and wonderment, and the inspiration for some of our deepest creative impulses. But we are now witnessing its rapid impoverishment, even destruction, in much of our world.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Jeremy Mynott traces the story of nature—past, present and future. From the dramatic depictions of animals by the prehistoric cave-painters, through the romantic discovery of landscape in the eighteenth century, to the climate emergency of the present day, Mynott looks at the different ways in which humankind has understood the world around it. Charting how our ideas about nature emerged and changed over time, he reveals how the impulse to control nature has deep historical roots.
As we reach an environmental crisis point, this vital study shows how human imagination and wonder can play a restorative role—and reveal what nature ultimately means to us.
Nature has long been the source of human curiosity and wonderment, and the inspiration for some of our deepest creative impulses. But we are now witnessing its rapid impoverishment, even destruction, in much of our world.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Jeremy Mynott traces the story of nature—past, present and future. From the dramatic depictions of animals by the prehistoric cave-painters, through the romantic discovery of landscape in the eighteenth century, to the climate emergency of the present day, Mynott looks at the different ways in which humankind has understood the world around it. Charting how our ideas about nature emerged and changed over time, he reveals how the impulse to control nature has deep historical roots.
As we reach an environmental crisis point, this vital study shows how human imagination and wonder can play a restorative role—and reveal what nature ultimately means to us.
376 pages, Hardcover
Published October 29, 2024
7 people are currently reading
233 people want to read
About the author
Jeremy Mynott
6 books6 followersJeremy Mynott is Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has contributed to the Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought and Cambridge Reader in the History of Political Thought and is also the author of several publications in natural history and ornithology.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 27, 2025
I wanted to like this book, but there are some parts that just seem to be glaringly oversimplified. the first few chapters are the strongest (granted, they are also the topics I am least familiar with) where the later chapters come off as whelming as best. I think there are good arguments being put forward as Mynott categorizes our changing relationship with nature, but there are so many snippets of the book where I left margins going "why??????" or "....." to justify more than 3.5 stars.
November 13, 2025
“They all have in common the assumption that nature has some intrinsic value for us, that it is something to be cherished for its own sake”
“It’s easy to agree about the wild birds and mammals (there’s a fox in the Brueghel, if you look carefully), but what about the domesticated ones? And how would you categorise the human inhabitants in these scenes, which may be the only live animals visible? As to the landscapes they inhabit, how about the farmlands, gardens and other parts more obviously shaped by human activity? And the landscapes less obviously, or less recently, so shaped for human benefit? Then features like rivers, skies, clouds and the sun itself, all crucial in sustaining the living landscapes – what about those? Or should one say the whole of such a scene is natural, just because it represents the physical environment that in some sense supports and embraces all these other categories? But if everything is natural, don’t you then end up with a vacuous notion that no longer selects anything deserving special attention or concern?”
“individual species in the natural world. Those have an ecology, a relationship with their home surroundings, and to understand them fully you have to be sensitive to a whole range of other factors like habitat, behaviour, related species, local variations and evolutionary history; and each species affects in turn the ecology of the other species with which they interact”
“Individual words have an ‘ecology’, too. They acquire their meanings within larger units of discourse, in the arguments and exchanges in which they are deployed, in often subtle or changing distinctions with other related words, and in their resonances with the reader or listener”
“different contraries assumed in different uses of the word ‘natural’. They include: supernatural, deviant, abnormal, artificial, acquired, affected, manufactured, inanimate, unreal, human, and so on”
“Terms like ‘environment’, ‘ecosystems’ and ‘biodiversity’ now jostle for semantic space alongside ‘nature’”
“The success of science since the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in understanding the workings of the natural world has meant that we have progressively also acquired the means to control it – and now radically to change it, or even destroy it.”
“science has tended to objectify the natural world as something separate that we can inspect, analyse and increasingly manipulate”
“science is also giving us a growing understanding of the connections and interdependencies between human and other life forms”
“some of the capacities we thought of as distinctively human – intelligence, reasoning, language – are shared, or at least have their analogues, through a wide range of other species”
“in terms of the Earth’s larger biosystems and cycles we are all inextricably bound together”
“Is our view of the world inescapably anthropocentric? Can nature (or, if you like, Nature) be said to have any rights independently of our human interests in it?”
“They had been born, not on to a planet, but into animal life. They were not animal keepers: animals were the keepers of the world and of the universe around them, which never stopped”
“Are we one animal alongside these others and so an intrinsic part of a larger scheme of nature? Or do our special characteristics give us a separate status?”
“We also have a huge number of small ‘portable’ sculptures, decorated tools and ornaments. These illustrate a far larger repertoire of subject matter, techniques and imaginative representations than do the cave paintings”
“clear testimony to deeply creative human impulses”
“Taking this portable art with the cave paintings together, they seem to exemplify a new phase in human evolution, in which we first developed the power to represent and communicate ideas through images and symbols. This is a basic and distinctive characteristic of the species Homo sapiens, deriving from the same complex brain capacities that gave us self-consciousness – of a kind, or at least to a degree, not shared by other animals”
“what relationship did these Ice Age people have with the natural world; and how, if at all, did they differentiate themselves from the other animals in it?”
“The most frequent animal subjects in these artworks are the large mammals typical of the open, steppe grasslands over which these nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers roamed”
“Humans were, inextricably, a part of nature and by no means the dominant part for much of this period. The human population of Europe 24,000 years ago, for example, is estimated to be only about 130,000. They survived through having the closest possible knowledge of the natural environment they lived in”
“The Lion Man from Hohlenstein-Stadel, dated to about 40,000 years ago, is the first but not the only example we have of a therianthrope, a human-animal hybrid. Does that indicate that these hunter-foragers felt not just an intimacy but a deeper identity with the animals they lived among?”
“If anthropomorphism is the projection of human attributes onto animals, then this theriomorphism would be its mirror opposite. Both are dependent on erasing the boundary between humans and other animals, or at least treating it as porous and emphasising the continuities over the differences.”
“Since every form of life is wild, there can be no concept yet of the ‘wild’ as a distinct category. Humans were only one species among others, equal in their wild status, unequal in their capacity to adapt and survive. They lived on the edge the whole time, just outcompeting other hominids and predatory mammals through their superior intelligence, technology and their social skills – all gifts of the cognitive revolution that had given them language and their creative powers of abstraction, imagination, story-telling and communication.”
“Domestication involved a deliberate de-wilding of certain key species, in which some of them actually became the technology, as living machines.”
“Homo sapiens had reached Australia by at least 40,000 years ago, probably island-hopping from Asia. Australia then was a land of giants – with a 2.5-ton wombat called Diprotodon, a 12-foot kangaroo and a flightless bird Dromornis (the thunder-bird) that weighed four times as much as an ostrich. Yet within a few thousand years these and nearly all the rest of the local megafauna had become extinct”
“It was the same story in the Americas. The human immigrants who began streaming down in large numbers via the land bridge with Siberia from around 15,000 years ago soon spread throughout the whole continent; and within a couple of thousand years most of the large mammals had disappeared, including such monsters as the fearsome sabre-toothed cats and the giant ground sloths weighing up to 8 tons”
“their images of it still have the capacity to inspire awe, wonder and something of their sense of connection and belonging, even if that is a fading memory we now need to recover and restimulate. We were nature once.”
“They pictured a world in which they were not separated from nature so could not be responsible for it.”
“As our weary Pleistocene ancestors settled into a more sedentary way of life . . . Homo sapiens turned increasingly inwards, preoccupied with a world filled with its own creations: the species that had domesticated itself.”
“the momentous human adaptation we know as the agricultural revolution, when humans started living in more settled communities and began to cultivate crops and domesticate animals.”
“From around 9,500 bc the first cereal and pulse crops were being cultivated in the Levant – including the emmer and einkorn wheats that could be hybridised with wild grasses to produce that most valuable of all ancient crops, bread wheat”
“In a parallel process, the main livestock animals in Eurasia were domesticated: probably sheep and goats first, from about 7000 bc, followed by cattle and pigs around 6000 bc, and quite a bit later – around 3500 bc – by the horse.”
“few mammals have all the physiological and behavioural attributes necessary to be bred as livestock, and it is striking how few others have been subsequently added to that initial list of five”
“The Victorian polymath Francis Galton is best known for his role in promoting ‘eugenics’, a programme for improving the genetic stock by selective breeding. But he had published in 1865 a more specific essay on the domestication of wild animals, as an example of the conflict of ‘nature versus nurture’, another phrase he popularised,* which has since become shorthand for the continuing debate about the relative importance of environmental and genetic factors in determining behaviour”
“In terms of biomass, some 96 per cent of all land mammals are now either domesticated animals or people, while just 4 per cent are wildlife.”
“the species had to be a social animal, accustomed to a dominance hierarchy within their own flocks and herds, so that they could accept human dominance in an analogous structure”
“Domestic goats (Capra hircus) and sheep (Ovis aries) were descended from the indigenous wild species in Western Asia, respectively Capra aegragus and Ovis orientalis. Both species have a herd structure that makes them amenable to leadership by a human herdsman, who is able to marshal them in relatively compact groups. One imagines that their domestication proceeded in a series of stages, involving first the herding of wild flocks, which would become gradually habituated to a human herdsman, and then the rearing of young animals, which would imprint on their human minders. Shepherding would from early on have involved tending as well as controlling, and the familiar metaphor of the ‘good shepherd’ is one with ancient roots.”
“pigs came to have this dual role as much-valued domestic familiars for some and symbols of filth and abomination for others.”
“selective breeding did eventually produced more tractable cattle, and archaeology records a related dramatic decrease in the size of cows in the Neolithic period as Bos primigenius was eventually converted into the domestic European cow, Bos taurus, whose advantages could then be fully exploited.”
“There are now both wild and domesticated animals of various kinds; there is private property, in both land and animals; there are settled habitations; and there are class divisions and gross inequalities in wealth, leisure and power.”
“the agricultural revolution was, as Jared Diamond put it, ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’, which created the conditions for new forms and levels of disease, warfare and inequality.”
“The foragers, by contrast, lived in a world where the changes that mattered were the changes in the day between dawn and nightfall and in the year between the seasons. These natural cycles regulated the lives of the plants and animals on which they depended and therefore also their own lives. Farmers, too, depended on the same recurring cycles in managing their stock and crops, but farmers also had to look ahead and create surpluses to store for future needs. They were thereby discovering linear as well as cyclical time.”
“It was not until later (about 700 bc) that the first alphabetised languages like Greek used abstract symbols to represent the sounds of speech and combined these to make words and sentences. This was a revolutionary advance that made it possible to express much more complex thoughts in writing but that no longer pictured the world in a direct way”
“they are all naturalistic explanations. There are no gods”
“the title of this work has come down to us as Peri Phuseos, ‘On Nature’.”
“Anaximander’s book does not survive, alas, but we know from later quotations and summaries that it was something quite new – a prose work setting out his theories about the physical world in a form that could be read, discussed and disseminated. In short, the first non-fiction work in European literature”
“They were using this word phusis to denote the whole domain of natural phenomena, which for them certainly included humankind, as one among its many life forms”
“Phusis is derived from a verb meaning ‘to grow’ or ‘to be’ – so suggesting an early connection between the idea of nature and animate life”
“We think of the English word ‘nature’ as a noun, and therefore as a kind of thing, but suppose we were to think of it as a process that might be better represented by a verb”
“A related preoccupation of the Presocratics was explaining the source of change and motion in the world. Where did the motive force come from and how did it relate to the source of life itself? The Presocratics inherited, and may to some extent have shared, an earlier animistic world-view, in which ‘soul’ or ‘spirits’ might be quite widely distributed in the natural world”
“two of Aristotle’s most lasting legacies from his investigations into the natural world. First, his interest in species as an object of scientific study. Aristotle identified and distinguished over 500 different species in his biological treatises”
“Secondly, however, Aristotle wasn’t just interested in the accumulation of data about individual species. He sought to devise taxonomies to compare and connect these species in larger explanatory schema”
“He organises his biological works not by species but by those aspects of anatomy or behaviour that differentiate species (for example, in the class of birds: wings, legs, beaks, diet, habitat and voice). He then asks in each case the functional question – what is the biological purpose of these differences?”
“James Lovelock, at any rate, drew on some of these resonances in adopting this name for the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ he propounded in 1979 – the idea that the Earth is a complex, self-regulating system that maintains the conditions for life on this planet. Lovelock’s vision of the Earth as itself a living organism is very different, however, from the anthropocentric assumptions of theories like those of the Stoics, since for Lovelock the processes involved are completely automatic; they are not the result of a benign creator and are not even designed to support human life as such.”
“Anaximander speculated that humans had evolved with or from other animals and shared various capacities with them. Some, like Anaxagoras (c.500–c.428 bc) and Empedocles (c.495–35 bc) even thought this extended to plants, which they said ‘are sentient and feel pain and pleasure’ and ‘have mind and intelligence’.”
“He conceived the natural world as a continuum that ‘proceeded by small steps’* from the inanimate to the animate. He posited a scale of increasing complexity running from the inanimate through plants, simple marine organisms, the ‘main kinds’ of animals (insects, fishes, birds, mammals), and finally to humankind, which was distinguished from these lower animals by differences in intelligence, language and culture.”
“Literacy, in that sense, changed humans’ perceptions of their world”
“the act of writing them down itself stimulated and shaped the ideas”
“Writing also distanced them from the natural world they were describing and objectifying through these abstract symbols.”
“what they cannot do is self-consciously script their imaginings and thoughts to transcend the limitations of time and place”
“It was in this sense that the Greeks can be said to have invented nature. That is, they invented the concept”
“it became a category that could be used to describe something and could be contrasted with other categories”
“We had become a different kind of animal and had now made ourselves aware of it.”
“wonders of nature are to be valued for their own sake rather than in terms of human purposes: Therefore, it is not with respect to our comfort or discomfort, but with respect to their own nature, that creatures give glory to their creator.”
“Aristotle’s dictum: The purpose or end for which the works of nature have been constructed or come about has its place in our idea of beauty.”
“Humankind occupied an intermediate position in the cosmic hierarchy between God and the animals, with authority from the former to exploit and control the latter at will”
“The biblical texts are to be read in their context, with an appropriate hermeneutic, recognising that they tell us to ‘till and keep’ the garden of the world (cf. Gen 2:15). ‘Tilling’ refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while ‘keeping’ means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.”
“the Old Testament has no word even for ‘nature’ as a general category of things with which humans could be said to have a relationship, whether benign or exploitative.”
“uses instead specific expressions to denote natural phenomena”
“The hunter-gatherers of the prehistoric period had depended for their survival on killing other animals; and their agricultural successors later felt no inhibitions about domesticating them to support their own livelihoods. What was different now was that this human domination could be given an explicit theological explanation and justification.”
“I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring to you the clear remembrance of the creator.”
“These early Church Fathers produced no original science, though they could be said to have encouraged an active observation of nature and a habit of curiosity about its workings”
“Albertus’s goal in his writings was ‘to compose a complete exposition of natural science’, which would take the form of a commentary on all of Aristotle’s treatises on the subject, correcting them where necessary and attempting to harmonise them with Christian doctrine”
“After the Bible itself, the two most widely read and influential books in the medieval period were the Etymologies by Isidore, Bishop of Seville (c.560–636) and the Physiologus, an anonymous Christian work (probably compiled in Alexandria sometime between the second and fourth century ad)”
“the powerful metaphor of nature as a book.”
“Athanasius (c.296–373) describes the world’s creatures as ‘like letters’ combining to proclaim the harmony and order of the creation. John Chrysostom (c.347–407) adds that whereas physical books can only be read by the literate and in the language in which they are written, there is a universal appeal in the works of creation, ‘which utters this voice so as to be intelligible”
“viriditas (‘greening power’), which connected the health of the natural world with that of the individual patient”
“It’s easy to agree about the wild birds and mammals (there’s a fox in the Brueghel, if you look carefully), but what about the domesticated ones? And how would you categorise the human inhabitants in these scenes, which may be the only live animals visible? As to the landscapes they inhabit, how about the farmlands, gardens and other parts more obviously shaped by human activity? And the landscapes less obviously, or less recently, so shaped for human benefit? Then features like rivers, skies, clouds and the sun itself, all crucial in sustaining the living landscapes – what about those? Or should one say the whole of such a scene is natural, just because it represents the physical environment that in some sense supports and embraces all these other categories? But if everything is natural, don’t you then end up with a vacuous notion that no longer selects anything deserving special attention or concern?”
“individual species in the natural world. Those have an ecology, a relationship with their home surroundings, and to understand them fully you have to be sensitive to a whole range of other factors like habitat, behaviour, related species, local variations and evolutionary history; and each species affects in turn the ecology of the other species with which they interact”
“Individual words have an ‘ecology’, too. They acquire their meanings within larger units of discourse, in the arguments and exchanges in which they are deployed, in often subtle or changing distinctions with other related words, and in their resonances with the reader or listener”
“different contraries assumed in different uses of the word ‘natural’. They include: supernatural, deviant, abnormal, artificial, acquired, affected, manufactured, inanimate, unreal, human, and so on”
“Terms like ‘environment’, ‘ecosystems’ and ‘biodiversity’ now jostle for semantic space alongside ‘nature’”
“The success of science since the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in understanding the workings of the natural world has meant that we have progressively also acquired the means to control it – and now radically to change it, or even destroy it.”
“science has tended to objectify the natural world as something separate that we can inspect, analyse and increasingly manipulate”
“science is also giving us a growing understanding of the connections and interdependencies between human and other life forms”
“some of the capacities we thought of as distinctively human – intelligence, reasoning, language – are shared, or at least have their analogues, through a wide range of other species”
“in terms of the Earth’s larger biosystems and cycles we are all inextricably bound together”
“Is our view of the world inescapably anthropocentric? Can nature (or, if you like, Nature) be said to have any rights independently of our human interests in it?”
“They had been born, not on to a planet, but into animal life. They were not animal keepers: animals were the keepers of the world and of the universe around them, which never stopped”
“Are we one animal alongside these others and so an intrinsic part of a larger scheme of nature? Or do our special characteristics give us a separate status?”
“We also have a huge number of small ‘portable’ sculptures, decorated tools and ornaments. These illustrate a far larger repertoire of subject matter, techniques and imaginative representations than do the cave paintings”
“clear testimony to deeply creative human impulses”
“Taking this portable art with the cave paintings together, they seem to exemplify a new phase in human evolution, in which we first developed the power to represent and communicate ideas through images and symbols. This is a basic and distinctive characteristic of the species Homo sapiens, deriving from the same complex brain capacities that gave us self-consciousness – of a kind, or at least to a degree, not shared by other animals”
“what relationship did these Ice Age people have with the natural world; and how, if at all, did they differentiate themselves from the other animals in it?”
“The most frequent animal subjects in these artworks are the large mammals typical of the open, steppe grasslands over which these nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers roamed”
“Humans were, inextricably, a part of nature and by no means the dominant part for much of this period. The human population of Europe 24,000 years ago, for example, is estimated to be only about 130,000. They survived through having the closest possible knowledge of the natural environment they lived in”
“The Lion Man from Hohlenstein-Stadel, dated to about 40,000 years ago, is the first but not the only example we have of a therianthrope, a human-animal hybrid. Does that indicate that these hunter-foragers felt not just an intimacy but a deeper identity with the animals they lived among?”
“If anthropomorphism is the projection of human attributes onto animals, then this theriomorphism would be its mirror opposite. Both are dependent on erasing the boundary between humans and other animals, or at least treating it as porous and emphasising the continuities over the differences.”
“Since every form of life is wild, there can be no concept yet of the ‘wild’ as a distinct category. Humans were only one species among others, equal in their wild status, unequal in their capacity to adapt and survive. They lived on the edge the whole time, just outcompeting other hominids and predatory mammals through their superior intelligence, technology and their social skills – all gifts of the cognitive revolution that had given them language and their creative powers of abstraction, imagination, story-telling and communication.”
“Domestication involved a deliberate de-wilding of certain key species, in which some of them actually became the technology, as living machines.”
“Homo sapiens had reached Australia by at least 40,000 years ago, probably island-hopping from Asia. Australia then was a land of giants – with a 2.5-ton wombat called Diprotodon, a 12-foot kangaroo and a flightless bird Dromornis (the thunder-bird) that weighed four times as much as an ostrich. Yet within a few thousand years these and nearly all the rest of the local megafauna had become extinct”
“It was the same story in the Americas. The human immigrants who began streaming down in large numbers via the land bridge with Siberia from around 15,000 years ago soon spread throughout the whole continent; and within a couple of thousand years most of the large mammals had disappeared, including such monsters as the fearsome sabre-toothed cats and the giant ground sloths weighing up to 8 tons”
“their images of it still have the capacity to inspire awe, wonder and something of their sense of connection and belonging, even if that is a fading memory we now need to recover and restimulate. We were nature once.”
“They pictured a world in which they were not separated from nature so could not be responsible for it.”
“As our weary Pleistocene ancestors settled into a more sedentary way of life . . . Homo sapiens turned increasingly inwards, preoccupied with a world filled with its own creations: the species that had domesticated itself.”
“the momentous human adaptation we know as the agricultural revolution, when humans started living in more settled communities and began to cultivate crops and domesticate animals.”
“From around 9,500 bc the first cereal and pulse crops were being cultivated in the Levant – including the emmer and einkorn wheats that could be hybridised with wild grasses to produce that most valuable of all ancient crops, bread wheat”
“In a parallel process, the main livestock animals in Eurasia were domesticated: probably sheep and goats first, from about 7000 bc, followed by cattle and pigs around 6000 bc, and quite a bit later – around 3500 bc – by the horse.”
“few mammals have all the physiological and behavioural attributes necessary to be bred as livestock, and it is striking how few others have been subsequently added to that initial list of five”
“The Victorian polymath Francis Galton is best known for his role in promoting ‘eugenics’, a programme for improving the genetic stock by selective breeding. But he had published in 1865 a more specific essay on the domestication of wild animals, as an example of the conflict of ‘nature versus nurture’, another phrase he popularised,* which has since become shorthand for the continuing debate about the relative importance of environmental and genetic factors in determining behaviour”
“In terms of biomass, some 96 per cent of all land mammals are now either domesticated animals or people, while just 4 per cent are wildlife.”
“the species had to be a social animal, accustomed to a dominance hierarchy within their own flocks and herds, so that they could accept human dominance in an analogous structure”
“Domestic goats (Capra hircus) and sheep (Ovis aries) were descended from the indigenous wild species in Western Asia, respectively Capra aegragus and Ovis orientalis. Both species have a herd structure that makes them amenable to leadership by a human herdsman, who is able to marshal them in relatively compact groups. One imagines that their domestication proceeded in a series of stages, involving first the herding of wild flocks, which would become gradually habituated to a human herdsman, and then the rearing of young animals, which would imprint on their human minders. Shepherding would from early on have involved tending as well as controlling, and the familiar metaphor of the ‘good shepherd’ is one with ancient roots.”
“pigs came to have this dual role as much-valued domestic familiars for some and symbols of filth and abomination for others.”
“selective breeding did eventually produced more tractable cattle, and archaeology records a related dramatic decrease in the size of cows in the Neolithic period as Bos primigenius was eventually converted into the domestic European cow, Bos taurus, whose advantages could then be fully exploited.”
“There are now both wild and domesticated animals of various kinds; there is private property, in both land and animals; there are settled habitations; and there are class divisions and gross inequalities in wealth, leisure and power.”
“the agricultural revolution was, as Jared Diamond put it, ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’, which created the conditions for new forms and levels of disease, warfare and inequality.”
“The foragers, by contrast, lived in a world where the changes that mattered were the changes in the day between dawn and nightfall and in the year between the seasons. These natural cycles regulated the lives of the plants and animals on which they depended and therefore also their own lives. Farmers, too, depended on the same recurring cycles in managing their stock and crops, but farmers also had to look ahead and create surpluses to store for future needs. They were thereby discovering linear as well as cyclical time.”
“It was not until later (about 700 bc) that the first alphabetised languages like Greek used abstract symbols to represent the sounds of speech and combined these to make words and sentences. This was a revolutionary advance that made it possible to express much more complex thoughts in writing but that no longer pictured the world in a direct way”
“they are all naturalistic explanations. There are no gods”
“the title of this work has come down to us as Peri Phuseos, ‘On Nature’.”
“Anaximander’s book does not survive, alas, but we know from later quotations and summaries that it was something quite new – a prose work setting out his theories about the physical world in a form that could be read, discussed and disseminated. In short, the first non-fiction work in European literature”
“They were using this word phusis to denote the whole domain of natural phenomena, which for them certainly included humankind, as one among its many life forms”
“Phusis is derived from a verb meaning ‘to grow’ or ‘to be’ – so suggesting an early connection between the idea of nature and animate life”
“We think of the English word ‘nature’ as a noun, and therefore as a kind of thing, but suppose we were to think of it as a process that might be better represented by a verb”
“A related preoccupation of the Presocratics was explaining the source of change and motion in the world. Where did the motive force come from and how did it relate to the source of life itself? The Presocratics inherited, and may to some extent have shared, an earlier animistic world-view, in which ‘soul’ or ‘spirits’ might be quite widely distributed in the natural world”
“two of Aristotle’s most lasting legacies from his investigations into the natural world. First, his interest in species as an object of scientific study. Aristotle identified and distinguished over 500 different species in his biological treatises”
“Secondly, however, Aristotle wasn’t just interested in the accumulation of data about individual species. He sought to devise taxonomies to compare and connect these species in larger explanatory schema”
“He organises his biological works not by species but by those aspects of anatomy or behaviour that differentiate species (for example, in the class of birds: wings, legs, beaks, diet, habitat and voice). He then asks in each case the functional question – what is the biological purpose of these differences?”
“James Lovelock, at any rate, drew on some of these resonances in adopting this name for the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ he propounded in 1979 – the idea that the Earth is a complex, self-regulating system that maintains the conditions for life on this planet. Lovelock’s vision of the Earth as itself a living organism is very different, however, from the anthropocentric assumptions of theories like those of the Stoics, since for Lovelock the processes involved are completely automatic; they are not the result of a benign creator and are not even designed to support human life as such.”
“Anaximander speculated that humans had evolved with or from other animals and shared various capacities with them. Some, like Anaxagoras (c.500–c.428 bc) and Empedocles (c.495–35 bc) even thought this extended to plants, which they said ‘are sentient and feel pain and pleasure’ and ‘have mind and intelligence’.”
“He conceived the natural world as a continuum that ‘proceeded by small steps’* from the inanimate to the animate. He posited a scale of increasing complexity running from the inanimate through plants, simple marine organisms, the ‘main kinds’ of animals (insects, fishes, birds, mammals), and finally to humankind, which was distinguished from these lower animals by differences in intelligence, language and culture.”
“Literacy, in that sense, changed humans’ perceptions of their world”
“the act of writing them down itself stimulated and shaped the ideas”
“Writing also distanced them from the natural world they were describing and objectifying through these abstract symbols.”
“what they cannot do is self-consciously script their imaginings and thoughts to transcend the limitations of time and place”
“It was in this sense that the Greeks can be said to have invented nature. That is, they invented the concept”
“it became a category that could be used to describe something and could be contrasted with other categories”
“We had become a different kind of animal and had now made ourselves aware of it.”
“wonders of nature are to be valued for their own sake rather than in terms of human purposes: Therefore, it is not with respect to our comfort or discomfort, but with respect to their own nature, that creatures give glory to their creator.”
“Aristotle’s dictum: The purpose or end for which the works of nature have been constructed or come about has its place in our idea of beauty.”
“Humankind occupied an intermediate position in the cosmic hierarchy between God and the animals, with authority from the former to exploit and control the latter at will”
“The biblical texts are to be read in their context, with an appropriate hermeneutic, recognising that they tell us to ‘till and keep’ the garden of the world (cf. Gen 2:15). ‘Tilling’ refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while ‘keeping’ means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.”
“the Old Testament has no word even for ‘nature’ as a general category of things with which humans could be said to have a relationship, whether benign or exploitative.”
“uses instead specific expressions to denote natural phenomena”
“The hunter-gatherers of the prehistoric period had depended for their survival on killing other animals; and their agricultural successors later felt no inhibitions about domesticating them to support their own livelihoods. What was different now was that this human domination could be given an explicit theological explanation and justification.”
“I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring to you the clear remembrance of the creator.”
“These early Church Fathers produced no original science, though they could be said to have encouraged an active observation of nature and a habit of curiosity about its workings”
“Albertus’s goal in his writings was ‘to compose a complete exposition of natural science’, which would take the form of a commentary on all of Aristotle’s treatises on the subject, correcting them where necessary and attempting to harmonise them with Christian doctrine”
“After the Bible itself, the two most widely read and influential books in the medieval period were the Etymologies by Isidore, Bishop of Seville (c.560–636) and the Physiologus, an anonymous Christian work (probably compiled in Alexandria sometime between the second and fourth century ad)”
“the powerful metaphor of nature as a book.”
“Athanasius (c.296–373) describes the world’s creatures as ‘like letters’ combining to proclaim the harmony and order of the creation. John Chrysostom (c.347–407) adds that whereas physical books can only be read by the literate and in the language in which they are written, there is a universal appeal in the works of creation, ‘which utters this voice so as to be intelligible”
“viriditas (‘greening power’), which connected the health of the natural world with that of the individual patient”
March 27, 2025
A very readable style for an important topic that could have delved a little deeper into its chosen theme. Ultimately the book rests on an assumption of human free will and hence moves towards the familiar conservationist tropes. To balance this, Mynott mentions in many less words that the world may continue without humans. In not developing this line of thought further I imagine the book will suit a wider market about conservation compared to one that advocates existential acceptance of our ultimate demise. At this time (2025) his book is timely for Western audiences that have developed new fears on all sides, but it will not allay them. I would recommend it for undergraduate reading rather than base any course on it. An informed tutor could use it in a seminar to draw out wider discussion. Thanks for good read. Professor Emeritus Lindsay Falvey
January 10, 2025
My real thoughts on this are forthcoming (I was paid to read and write about this for my job) but: pretty pictures, too big of a task for 300 pages, and also nothing new (imo) in thinking about humans, nature, climate. Interesting if you want an cursory overview of how *certain* (Western, Christian) traditions have thought about the concept of nature across time and *certain* places
January 3, 2025
I amazed there is so little buzz about this superb, thoughtful, and really engaging book. Strongly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews