ABSTRACT
This chapter first introduces a vibrant and ambitious research field that revolutionised and reorientated the sciences and the humanities simultaneously. It includes an introduction to the more-than-human field of research, identifies its origins, defines its principal characteristics, variants, scope and objectives, and provides a concise introduction to the book’s global coverage and authors. But this research field was called into existence by a previous dawn that occurred in the sixteenth century – a major philosophical revolution often referred to as The Bifurcation or The Separation – when humanity and nature were cast into strictly separate spheres after millennia of composing a common world. Drawing on a case study of England, the second half of the chapter gives an account of why it happened, how it happened, who enacted it and how it changed the future of the earth. But the chapter also considers how the old ways, that preceded or dodged The Bifurcation, offer us hope and clues as to how humanity might live better with nature once again.
