Property law is increasingly confronted with limits and modifications arising from environmental and social contexts. The objective of this chapter is to highlight how property law can provide answers to environmental challenges, by adapting several of its fundamental concepts to the polymorphism of environmental and social issues. Starting with a study of the theoretical movement of Earth jurisprudence, the chapter suggests that it is possible to consider Nature as a subject of legal interests, allowing it to acquire legal standing. It also suggests that it is necessary to reconceptualise property and its narrative to develop, in both civil and common law, a more limited, relational and functional conception of property. In addition, the polymorphic heritage of property law makes it possible to call upon the civilian concept of patrimony, in its symbolic or technical function, to protect the environment.

Roman law is often considered as an intellectual matrix of contemporary laws and in particular French civil law. However, even if the vocabulary persisted, some legal concepts went through great changes across history as law was step by step related to a subject’s power. The notion of ‘thing’ originally meant the trial, the case, the litigious situation managed by the legal process. In this way, the thing was understood as a res iuris. In contemporary law systems, the thing (res as a legal category) ordinarily specifies some goods on which the subject applies his property power. This view is understandable considering the evolution due to the theorisation of subjective law which led to the promotion of a strong and exclusive separation between persons and things, while Roman law could imbricate these legal categories. This difficulty is at the heart of the problem when jurists aim to categorise Nature in legal taxonomy.

Pope Francis raised the alarm about ecology in his encyclical letter Laudato si’. On care for our common home (24 May 2015). He gathers all the aspects of the ecological crisis, which leads to the concept of ‘integral ecology’, in which the different sides of ecology are bound with human life, and in particular with the plight of the poor. The chapter explores this document and discusses its implications for the rights of and representation of nature. After an analysis of the situation and an evaluation of the ecological needs, the Pope adds paths of action and ways of contemplation. He stresses the fact that everybody is able to do something and to discover the joy in a new relationship of contemplation with his brothers and sisters, with the cosmos and with God. The encyclical is completed by the analysis of the Final Document of the Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region, held in Rome in October 2019. The Document proposes a concrete application of the encyclical Laudato si’ in the world of today.

I ask how sensory models are established and operate across different cultures, including their variant ethnographical nuances. This problematises the interplay of the senses whereby sensory conjunctions or amalgams form part of everyday life and ritual practices in many societies, as opposed to the broader compartmentalisation of the senses in Western aesthetics. The chapter compares a range of categories that delineate different senses, as well as the varying modalities per sense. This is accomplished through an investigation of linguistic descriptors of senses as a starting point. How a particular culture names the senses that wield cultural importance is however not merely an exercise in description or enumeration. I analyse sensory nomenclatures in a three-fold manner to unveil the phenomenological epistemology of the senses. First, I engage with the numbers of modalities per sense in order to acknowledge alternate sensory models beyond the hegemonic Romano–Grecian five-sense categorisation. Second, I query the social significance of the nuances of each sense. Third, I raise examples of how two or more senses may be employed synaesthetically. By focusing on cultural interpretations of sensory practices, pairings, and intersections, this approach sheds analytical attention upon everyday orderings of sensory categories and their cultural significance.

In the Introduction the three interwoven theses of the book are presented. The first of these concerns the Anthropocene era and contends that a more accurate understanding of the history of natural law and its impact on the development of modern Europe, which, significantly, focuses and draws on previous transformations of the concept of nature, will facilitate the addressing of key current issues in respect of that era. The second concerns the metaphysics of human nature and nature more broadly and contends that the sceptical denial of the light of moral nature and of its epistemological freedom is related to the disappearance of nature as a sacred space. The third thesis concerns the modification of natural law in England during the seventeenth century and contends that the most important seventeenth-century scientists/natural lawyers buttressed their liberal politics by means of philosophical and ethical necessitarianism.

Within a general modernist discourse of the phantasmagoria of the city, Le paysan de Paris stands out as a characteristic case of surrealist urban mythology. The book is seen as exemplary of the surrealists’ dedication to Paris, both as an urban reality and as a condition of possibility for their movement, in large part because of Walter Benjamin’s early focus on it. Benjamin’s reading of surrealism has largely oriented contemporary critical discourses, and one result of this is the invocation of an unbreakable association between surrealism and the city. However, in the middle of the ’movable feast’ that designated 1920s Paris as the Cosmopolis par excellence, it is to a ’peasant’, a non-urban figure, that Aragon gives Paris, and through whom Paris is given to us. This surrealist representation of the city breaks away from prevalent modernist accounts that pitch the ’city’ vs. ’country’ and ’urban’ vs. ’natural’. This chapter argues that the surrealist narratives which focus on the city undo prevalent tropes associated with the representation of the urban in modernity to ultimately subvert the genre of the novel as it was formed in the realist tradition.

Surrealism’s disdain for Western civilization has increasingly come to encompass its mistreatment of animals and the environment. The surrealist critique of the exploitation and domination of other species and the planet frequently recognizes the way in which these are bound up with repression along the lines of both gender and epistemology. This chapter examines how two novels by women surrealists from different generations thematize the nexus of environmental destruction, animal exploitation, and the triumphal march of scientistic rationalism. The British-born, naturalized Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and the American artist and writer Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) are caustic, humorous, and wildly adventurous interrogations of ecological catastrophes and conjurations of new modes of being that may be able to counteract them. This chapter reads The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland in relation to a broader surrealist critique of environmental destruction and exploitation, and as at one and the same time eulogies of extinction and tributes to the magical potential of transformation.

This chapter examines Nature's ultimatum at On the Nature of Things 3.931-962 as a contribution to the much-discussed problem of “deprivation”. This is the problem that death may be bad after all, despite the elimination of sensation, because it deprives us of the opportunity to complete projects that are worthwhile. As I try to show, Lucretius personifies Nature in order to have her argue, in her own words, for a message that Lucretius develops throughout his entire poem: this is the necessity of accepting the natural conditions of our existence. Nature underscores this necessity with the harshness of her words. At the same time, she shows that the conditions themselves are not harsh. Instead, she has provided us with ample opportunity to achieve happiness within a finite lifetime. In sum, she does not deprive us; for she has made it possible for us to flourish fully within the limits she has placed on us.

Stoic virtue relies on the judgment of internal impressions. This aesthetic and ethical process echoes Shakespeare’s theatrical art, which frequently focuses on its own artifice and capacity to affect reality. While early modern dramatists frequently mocked Stoicism as stuffy and impractical, a closer look at fundamental texts by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius reveals their interest not in attaining perfect sagacity but instead in the day-to-day reality of attempting to live better. Stoicism, thought of in this way, becomes what Pierre Hadot calls “a way of life,” and allows us to read Shakespeare’s drama more charitably as a mode of philosophical exercise. This chapter surveys Stoic understandings of virtue before turning to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to examine how the play’s testing the imaginative powers of theatricality mirrors the Stoic’s internal processes of judgment. Drawing on key Stoic texts as well as the 1581 translation of Seneca’s Hippolytus, a source for Midsummer, I propose that the play reveals the potential for imaginative impressions to become mere fantasy — but also admits to their power over our consciousness. While this may appear anti-Stoic, Midsummer in fact mounts its apology for the imagination by practicing mercy, a key Stoic virtue.

When Hamlet instructs Gertrude to “assume a virtue if you have it not,” since “use almost can change the stamp of nature,” his counsel echoes Aristotelian ethical concepts such as “nature” and “habit” (hexis). Those concepts supplied terms used in English Protestant pastoral guidance but took on new freight given Reformation revaluations of human effort. By 1600, religious concerns – the fallen person’s capacity to perform virtuous acts, the relationship between inward disposition and outward appearance – put pressure on Aristotelian ideas. Protestant clergy rejected Aristotle’s teaching on habit because it made virtue the result of human effort and yet their recommendations for devotional practice called for the cultivation of dispositional habits in all but name. While habit as formation of character finds little representation on stage, since drama rarely shows the slow formation of character, Hamlet’s preoccupation with custom allows us to listen in on someone thinking about what the springs of action and change are, in terms fully alive to the public discourse of late Elizabethan England, and the pastoral inflection he places on hexis shows us how an inherited ethical idea can take on a fresh livery in Shakespeare’s plays.

This chapter considers the network of poets orientated around the Georgian Poetry publications that appeared in a series from 1912 to 1922, edited by the influential literary and artistic champion Edward Marsh. It discusses the innovations advanced by contributing writers even as they consciously adhered to a lyric inheritance that stressed continuity over rupture. With some exceptions, it argues that these poets relied on a pastoral palate to articulate complex emotional and sensical realities while they contended – implicitly and, more rarely, explicitly – with the jarring physical and psychological assaults of the First World War. Finally, it addresses the ways in which the editors and established contributors used the publication as a platform to promote emerging and important literary voices, including the likes of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

Tolstoy’s biography embodied the fundamental Romantic mythology of the modern age, which synthesizes the biblical myths of the Lost Paradise and the Prodigal Son with the classical myth of the Golden Age. His was full of abrupt ruptures perceived both as an exile and as an escape. He longed to leave behind the confines of his social upbringing, his earthly pursuits and fame, his family, and finally his mortal body in an ardent desire to return home to the eternal and universal unity of “general life.” His vision of this unity underwent many changes but his urge to join it was always unwavering. He searched for it in the recollections of childhood, wild life in natural environment, romantic love, marriage and family life, literary and pedagogical pursuits, peasant lifestyle, and an escape from everything he cherished.

Sandra Shapshay looks at the joy Schopenhauer acknowledges us to feel in the presence of natural beauty. Many commentators subordinate this theory of pleasure to the cognitive aspect of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic. Shapshay resists this interpretation. But she also resists its opposite but still reductive or unifying strategy that minimizes the cognitive for the sake of the hedonic. Rather, she discards the notion that Schopenhauer had a unified aesthetic theory as not only false but undesirable. Instead, she shows that Schopenhauer develops two, mutually irreducible spectrums of aesthetic value, based on two different criteria. The spectrum that commentators acknowledge in Schopenhauer is the hierarchy of the arts, which puts architecture and fountainry at the bottom (as revealing the lower Ideas) and literature at the top, as a display of the higher, more complex ideas. The spectrum that is overlooked, but becomes visible if we take his more formalist views of natural aesthetics seriously, is the spectrum of the beautiful and sublime, where the beautiful – and botanical beauty in particular – lends itself more readily (than experiences at the sublime pole) to a state of mind that is not only tranquilizing but (in a departure from his usual attitude) positively joyful.

This chapter brings together the main threads of the book, reflecting on the role of English marine protected areas and the extent to which they are sites for commoning or uncommoning and the extent to which they support the conservation of common-pool resources. It also offers broader critical observations on the way English marine protected areas law and regulation construct the relationship between nature and society.

Tolstoy’s day-to-day engagement with nature shaped who he was and how he conceived of himself; it is reflected, abundantly, in what he wrote. But while the natural world remained an essential touchstone for Tolstoy for the whole of his life – a reservoir and measure of what was authentic and good – as he grew older this regard was tinged with ambivalence. He came to believe that not everything that was natural (war, violence, predation, sex) was necessarily good, and he appears to have doubted whether humans could live in a way that was at once fully natural and fully moral. This essay explores this central paradox of Tolstoy’s thinking, and focuses particular attention on the following aspects of his relationship with the natural world: the "green" creation myth that Tolstoy self-consciously fashioned about himself; the close link between nature and Tolstoy’s sense of the divine; Tolstoy’s presciently ecological conception of life in nature as a realm of both ceaseless "struggle" (war) and overarching harmony (peace); Tolstoy’s environmentalism.

Chapter 7 explores ways in which people’s perceptions of the actual risks posed by climate change can be elevated adequately to motivate them to engage in individual and collective action to counteract it.

This chapter asks what it means to read Darwin in the middle of what appears to be the seventh mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first caused by the actions of a single species, our own. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that the Anthropocene marks the point at which “the wall between human and natural history has been breached,” thus mounting an unprecedented challenge to the foundations of humanism. However, one could make a similar claim for Darwin. On the Origin of Species arguably ruptured the divide between human and natural history by revealing that we are not, and never have been, fully separate from the web of life. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that the Anthropocene crisis has been brought about precisely by the failure to adequately internalize this central Darwinian insight. Reading Darwin in the Anthropocene means understanding both the degree to which our intellectual milieu is indebted to his work and the fact that his world was profoundly different from our own precisely because of the greater scope and power of what Carolyn Merchant calls “autonomous nature” within it. The historical distance separating us from Darwin marks not only a profound shift in the idea of nature, but in the ontological state of nature itself, which is to say the configuration of existing (and/or vanishing) species and ecosystems completely apart from our ideas of them. We need to reckon with both sides of that equation, and the relationship between them, if we are to understand Darwin’s relevance for our own efforts to forestall mass extinction in the present.