In the Nature of Things is an indispensable map of emerging formations in the new worlds of nature and artifact called the environment. Reissued to accompany Stephen Greenblatts The Swerve: the epic poem that changed the course of human thought forever. Informed by notions of rhetoric and discourse, the essays collectively ask how the stakes in what can account as nature at the end of the twentieth century are worked out for different actors in the contentious, worldly practices of green consumerism, wilderness preservation, genetic technologies, political theory, science fiction films and fiction, agrarian research and pesticide use, post-colonial and anti-racist social movements, and the new story-telling strategies in science studies. The essays foreground the complex implications for environmental politics when nature can function neither as raw resource nor as transcendent ideal. Drawing on a wonderful array of popular, political, and scientific locations an practices, the essays examine how and why the distinction between nature and culture, which has grounded both management and holist positions on the environment, has eroded. Beginning with the prospect of eating a TV dinner or shopping in an organic food store, this important collection of essays explores the many contested meanings of nature in contemporary Western discourses.
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