Nature is a deceptively simple and ahistorical term, suggesting intrinsic, unchanging reality. Yet nature has a history too, both in terms of human attitudes and human impacts. This text outlines the major understandings of nature in the western world since classical times, from nature as higher authority to its more recent meaning of threatened physical space and life forms. It places the history of attitudes to nature within the story of human-induced changes in the material environment. A distinctive unifying theme is Coates's interest in how green writers over the last thirty years have...