ABSTRACT
This book’s been predicated on a seeming paradox: there’s no such thing as nature, I’ve argued, but ‘nature’ matters all the same. As one of the major concepts used in Western discourse, what we call nature continues to organise thought and action in a plethora of arenas. This is because we’ve naturalised the concept to the point that it appears a necessary part of our collective vocabulary. I’ve sought to help you make sense of what we call nature by denaturalising it, along with its collateral terms. In so doing, I’ve followed in the footsteps of many social scientists and humanities scholars writing over the past 40 years. Despite these scholars’ considerable efforts, nature’s apparent naturalness remains ‘common sense’ in early twenty-first century-Western societies – at least outside the academy. This being so, my principal claims have been as follows and were elaborated in summary form in Part I.
