ABSTRACT
In contrast to concepts such as landscape and nature which have a currency throughout the historical period covered by this book, the environment is a relatively recent coinage. The new meaning and scope of the environment from the 1960s as a global natural system, was informed by international scientific expertise, mathematical information, future policy thinking, and planetary processes of geo-physical degradation. The harder scientific meaning of environment has proved resistant in academic discourse. Art history, particularly British art history, has taken more time than many humanities subjects to undergo an environmental turn, and this has proved to be an interestingly complicated process, as the varying chapters of this book reveal. A feature of the recent environmental turn in British art, and a hallmark of this book, is the consideration of both present and past art practice, as part of a longer-term, wider-ranging cultural history.
