Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times [Hardcover]

Peter Coates (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520217438 | ISBN-13: 978-0520217430 | Publication Date: November 23, 1998 | Edition: 1

In an advertisement for water filter cartridges, we see a tumbling waterfall. The caption reads, "Like nature, Brita is beautifully simple." What kind of thinking is this? Is nature an objective reality that, in its beautiful simplicity, is unaffected by time, culture, and place? The word nature itself: what do we actually mean by it? These are some of the riveting questions examined by Peter Coates as he demonstrates that nature, like us, has a history of its own. Beginning with Roman times, Coates investigates the ideological and material factors that have influenced human perceptions of, attitudes toward, and uses of nature--notably religion and ethics, science, technology, economics, gender, and ethnicity. Nature is seen among its rich panoply of meanings as a physical place, as the collective phenomena of the world, as an essence or principle that informs the workings of the world, as an inspiration and guide for people and a source of authority governing human affairs, and as the conceptual opposite of culture. By examining these aspects of nature, Coates leads us on a spectacular tour of the central intellectual forces of Western civilization. The book is essential reading for those who seek an understanding of the history of ideas and the role of nature in that history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Every civilization has high ideals for personal and social conduct; every civilization regularly violates those ideals. So one might conclude after reading Peter Coates's wide-ranging study of environmental ethics in Western society, populated by Roman women who cry at the death of beloved pet birds and lap dogs after watching humans being tortured in the Coliseum, by 19th-century travelers who exalt the virtues of so-called primitive societies while participating in their destruction. All cultures are susceptible to the error of mistreating the land, Coates argues. Citing the work of recent historical geographers, for example, he believes that the North American landscape bore more signs of the human presence before 1492 than it did in the mid-1700s, largely as a result of destructive Native American farming practices. He also notes that Chief Seattle's famed speech ("How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?"), one of the classics of environmental thought, was in truth the invention of an Anglo screenwriter in the 1970s. While questioning the usefulness of the widely held, Western sense of shame over the sins of the past, Coates does reckon that we have a long way to go in aligning our ethics with our practices in this age of biotechnology and widespread extinction. "I am tempted," he writes, "to conclude that no matter what shape our tomatoes and frogs assume, the polarity of nature and culture will endure a good deal longer." --Gregory McNamee

Review

Centered in intellectual history but looking out on ecological history, Nature is written for college students and for boomer grads who wish the subject had been taught back when they were at school. -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Eric Zencey

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (November 23, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520217438
• ISBN-13: 978-0520217430
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #607,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Readable Synthesis, Fascinating Introduction, March 25, 2006

By 

Whitney Hampson "radical history nerd" (Indiana, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Paperback)

In Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times, historian Peter Coates aims to highlight the vast diversity of meanings that various Western cultures have ascribed to their relationships with nature. His book is a synthesis of existing work on historical attitudes and ideas, written for those with little previous knowledge of the subject. The underlying message is one of the fundamental presumptions of the study of thought and culture within the field of environmental history: the way people view nature changes over time.

Nature is, in part, an overview of the intellectual history of the Western world since the Greeks. Coates admits to a relatively limited definition of the West, using mostly British and American sources with brief forays into other regions of Europe. The first half of the book is organized by period, starting with ancient Greece and Rome and going on thorough early modernity. The second half, while still chronological, is organized thematically, exploring questions such as gauging the impact of European thought and action on other regions and the intellectual roots of modern-day conceptions of nature. Coates synthesizes a wide variety of secondary sources, utilizing both modern day historical and ecological studies as well as work from earlier disciplines that explored similar questions.

At the same time, the book is an argument in defense of the complexity of human-nature relationships. Coates subtly but frequently argues against interpreting the past as a series of great watershed moments bracketed by centuries of stasis. Rather, he advocates for understanding history as a dynamic process. The ways that people understand and define nature shift constantly, with existing practices inspiring new ideas and dialectically creating new practices. This is mirrored in Coates' historiography, which often highlights inconsistencies and disagreements among existing historical interpretations.

Coates' synthesis is both readable and nuanced. It is an excellent introduction to the thought and culture wing of environmental history, although it is unclear how representative the book is of anything broader than the United States and Great Britain. While I'm not sure the book truly lives up to the promises of its title, it was clearly necessary to limit the scope of the project in some way. Coates is very cautious about conflating similarities with influences, which occasionally leaves the reader wondering about how ideas are connected at all and making the book less like history and more like a textbook. But more often it helps emphasize how hard we must work to not take out cultural assumptions for granted when looking at the histories of others.

Because Coates seeks to elucidate questions rather than answer them, the book grazes over a number of topics and ideas that whet the historical appetite beginning student of environmental history. Coates articulates with clarity the "big questions" of environmental history while covering a lot of the specific research. Nature is a useful introduction to the many ways in which people in the West have understood the world and their place in it, as well as a compelling defense of the field which seeks to illuminate that history.