‘Nature’ is a complicated word: it has different meanings and these meanings affect each other. To discover how nature has been represented in Western culture, it may help to distinguish three very basic meanings: (1) the essential quality or character of something (the corrosive nature of salt water); (2) the underlying force which directs the world (nature is taking her course); (3) the material world itself, often the world that is separate from people and human society (to re-discover the joys of nature at the weekend).

If nature is usually taken as referring to the world ‘out there’ – from the smallest grasshopper, through the Grand Canyon, to the most distant galaxy – it is also believed that there is a force at work, that nature is working according to certain principles and that if we study nature we can deduce a moral lesson.

And that is why nature has a history. Nature cannot simply be regarded as what is out there – a physical universe which preceded the world of human values, and which will presumably outlive the human race – because what is out there keeps changing its meaning. Every attempt at describing nature, every value attributed to Nature – harmonious, ruthless, purposeful, random – brings nature inside human society and its values.

This essay is about how views of nature have changed through the centuries, and what these changes tell us about human history.