ABSTRACT
This chapter views current conflicts over heritage, the countryside and tourism as part of a complex set of trends in modern society, which John Urry characterized in terms of a visualization of culture, a collapse of stable identity and a compression of time and space. John focuses on the pedigree of sociological thought, which had presumed a preoccupation with the domain of society, rendering ultra vires a focus on the domain of nature due to a tacit division of labour demarcated between social facts versus natural facts, the latter of which had been given uncritically to the natural scientists. John then moves to an analysis of how nature is intrinsically temporal and of the different times in and of nature. While John, for his part, developed an interest in complexity moving to his highly exceptional contribution to mobilities research and theory.
