ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the ideas of nature, whether physical or human, are socially constructed. To say that ideas of nature are socially shaped is not to say that they can be anything at all. Yet this is the relativist charge that is often leveled at those who have tried to account for the social construction of perception. The myths of nature are the simplest models of ecosystem stability that when matched to the different ways in which the managing institutions behave, render those institutions rational. There are five possible myths of nature: Nature Benign, Nature Ephemeral, Nature Perverse/Tolerant, Nature Capricious, and Nature Resilient. By making man self-seeking and unmalleable, individualists can justify a way of life that attempts to channel existing human nature rather than change it. The hermit, in subsuming all the rival myths of human nature, inevitably withdraws himself, to some extent, from the ravening desires that variously fuel the engaged ways of life.
