`One of the central premises of this book is the argument that what we understand by nature is historically dynamic and culturally specific.' 1 In particular, the understanding of nature which I expressed above in my description of the rain forest, with its strongly positive view of the wilderness, is clearly shown by the contributors to be strictly 20th century and Western. In the early nineteenth century, `to be a wilderness ... was to be "deserted," "savage," "desolate," "barren"—in short, a "waste," the word's nearest synonym.' 2 Romanticism coupled the wilderness with the "sublime," but this idea was at that time associated with terror and dismay, while also carrying a religious import of supernatural awe. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did the religious ecstasy experienced in the wilderness take on positive, pleasurable qualities.

Accompanying this transition in the meaning of "wilderness" from negative to positive was a change from the physical to the visual. Initially, `What most deeply engaged these first white [settlers in America] with nature, what they wrote about most vividly, was work: backbreaking, enervating, heavy work. The labor of the body revealed that nature was cold, muddy, sharp, tenacious, slippery." 3 When the first American National Parks were being created in the nineteenth century, however, the emphasis was on the majestic vistas of "scenery," a term derived from theatrical illusion. 4

Thus there seems to be a more complex historical process involved in the shift to our current meaning of "nature" than a simple movement from an incorrect to a correct understanding. Certainly we can applaud the way in which this transition has taken us away from a limited conception of nature seen purely in relation to its convenience for us humans; but we must none the less recognise that all our ethical viewpoints, including our valuation of nature, are still human viewpoints. When we place a high ethical value on rain forest, and perhaps a lower value on, for instance, the rain forest's inhabitants, `it is people who do the valuing; all ethics are, in other words, anthropogenic. But there is no necessity that these values mark human good as the ultimate criterion of worth; that is, they need not be anthropocentric.' 5

While stressing the need to break away from the anthropocentrism of the past, the book reveals a whole constellation of dangers inherent in forgetting the human origins of our valuations, dangers in assuming that what we now call nature is an objective state of the world unrelated to humanity. The principal dangers are bound up with the modern idea of the wilderness which, on one hand, expresses the moral authority of nature; and, on the other hand, is most purely expressive of nature when it is most untouched by humanity. This creates a dichotomy between the Eden-like pure, virtuous wilderness, from which humanity must be rigorously excluded; and the corrupt, tarnished, human domain of farms and cities which is written off as hopelessly unnatural. The wilderness, by definition, cannot be lived in, but only visited for recreation and contemplation of its aestheticised qualities. Like Eden, the wilderness is our spiritual home, bearer of our highest values, but is a home from which we are banished in our normal working life. This makes it impossible to connect the moral values of the wilderness with the environment that we actually live in. `To the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilisation but at the same time pretend that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead.' 6

Further dangers are revealed by the strong strand of social critique that threads the book, concerned with the power issues underlying the question of who it is that defines nature. Where nature is defined by those rich white people who are able to use the wilderness for recreation, then a rigid separation is set up between the indigenous "savages" of wilderness areas, still living innocently in Eden, and the "civilised" people outside, with all that this separation implies in terms of human rights and exploitation. 7

Where nature is defined by the multinational corporations as a spectacle to be visited, we can be manipulated into ignoring the environmental degradation that flows from the totality of their economic activity. In concrete terms, `Items like ... the Glacier Bay CD [on sale at The Nature Company's stores in all the major shopping malls] ... connect me to the lives and working conditions of people worldwide who mine, plant, assemble, and transport the company's materials and products.' 8 The Company, however, takes great care to avoid our being aware of these connections, stressing instead the aesthetic visual connections with the other world of the wilderness.

The most universal message of this book is the avoidance of fundamentalism. In all areas we often crave for the certainty of an absolute standard of reference, and for many "nature" and "the natural" is taking over from the bible as a new fundamentalism, in which a region is either good and totally untouched or bad and lived in. `"All or nothing," says the wilderness ethic, and in fact we've ended up with a landscape in America that conforms to that injunction remarkably well.' 9. While the situation in Europe is more graded, the prevalence of this wilderness ethic in America seems to face people with a choice between moral dogmatism and moral aphasia. 10

There is, however, a way forward between the extremes which echoes the way being argues by many theologians and ethicists today. It is the way of ethical pluralism, which weighs the different sources of our ethical concerns rather than appealing to a single absolute authority. Pluralism does not mean relativism; embracing differing viewpoints does not mean giving each of them equal validity. It means that `environmentalists should leave most of their ecological ammunition at home and instead encourage people to address more fundamental issues: What kind of world do we want to live in? ... What can we do, individually and collectively, to help move our little part of the world in this direction?' 11

The result of such an approach will often be a return to the less visually dominated conception of nature of the past, but without its anthropocentrism; in which nature is `not a spectacle but something to be dwelled within.' 12 Returning an artificially straightened river to its former meandering, for example, is not just a visual matter: `One must also restore the agricultural systems that maintained the meadowlands as a fertile environment for both domestic and wild animals.' 13 In the urban landscape, particularly, it will mean giving full recognition to the diversity of the needs of different ethnic traditions.

1 Giovanna Di Chiro, Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environmental and Social Justice, p 311

2 William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, p 70

3 Richard White, "Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?": Work and Nature, p177

4 Kenneth R Olwig, Reinventing Common Nature: Yosemite and Mount Rushmore—A Meandering Tale of a Double Nature, p 388

5 James D Proctor, Whose Nature? The Contested Moral Terrain of Ancient Forests, p 293

6 William Cronon, op. cit. p 81

7 Giovanna Di Chiro op. cit. p 311

8 Jennifer Price, Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the Nature Company, p 200

9 [Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A gardener's Education, p 188] quoted by Proctor, op. cit. p 286

10 James D Proctor, op. cit. p 274

11 ibid. p 297

12 Kenneth R Olwig, op. cit. p 380

13 ibid. p 405