ABSTRACT
If, in the later twentieth century, the country was once more to be called in to restore and recreate human settlements, much would be found to have changed. Not only have cities spread and a wilderness cult arisen but a new vision of the natural world has taken shape, its roots in history but its overall perspective fresh, vital and highly-often disconcertingly-distinctive. It is this vision, or elements of it, which since the 1960s has fuelled the movement known as environmentalism, and this vision which is reshaping our cities and our ideas of what constitutes the human home, or oikos.
