Man’s fraught relationship with nature extends back to prehistory

It is now almost a prerequisite of any dispute among environmentalists to recall a judgment offered by the literary critic Raymond Williams – that ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. Attempts to unravel its meaning are fraught with challenge. Does it signify just the living elements of the biosphere, or does it include inanimate parts, such as mountains and rivers? The extreme heat of the Sun at its core makes it the place least hospitable to life – yet it is equally the source of the whole process. Perhaps the greatest of all associated questions is whether humans are subsumed within, or inexorably separated from, the Sun’s operations.

Jeremy Mynott’s book does an exceptional job of teasing out most of nature’s multiple meanings. In case we imagine that such issues are the preoccupations of a marginal sect, the author points out that climate change and the Sixth Extinction arise almost entirely from actions that assumed we are outside nature’s living fabric. Today,94 per cent of the mammalian biomass is either human or our livestock, while two-thirds of wildlife has vanished in just half a century.

Mynott is a philosopher and classicist by training, and a translator of Thucydides. He is also a naturalist, and the author of Birds in the Ancient World (2018). His main contribution in this latest book could be his detailed survey of Greek and Roman thought on nature, and the links between classical speculations and the 2,000-year tradition of western ideas. He concludes that in many ways the Greeks invented the idea of nature and mapped its areas of confusion.