ABSTRACT
As human influence on the Earth and its processes increases, we face the profound paradox that most of our intellectual weapons in the environmental area have maintained a separation of humans and nature. Can we rethink people into nature in such a way that we can better manage the Earth? Clear distinctions between cultural and natural landscapes have been challenged by recent work in both the sciences and the humanities. There are grounds for optimism in the convergence of independent lines of evidence about human interactions with environment. This convergence will be summarized in the umbrella concepts of contingency and construction.
