September 15, 2002

Nature is a slippery word. What do we mean by it? The OED lists 15 different definitions. Perhaps scientists have the answer; after all, their journal is called Nature. Or is science part of the problem? How natural is a human ear growing on the back of a lab mouse? There are no simple answers, but there are clues in many different disciplines.

Geographer Kenneth Olwig explores the social and political origins of “landscape”. One of the first uses of the word occurs in The masque of blackness (1605), written by Ben Jonson and designed by architect Inigo Jones. Performed for James I, the self-proclaimed King of Great Britain, this masque used landscape to legitimize the Stuart dynasty by forging the “image of the British nation-state as a body politic in a body geographic”. Jonson and Jones created a new political “mindscape” from a theatrical landscape.

The rediscovery of Inigo Jones’s “scenic vision of Britain as landscape” at the beginning of the eighteenth century transformed the English countryside. After the revolution of 1688 the Whig gentry who dominated the parliament wanted to make their mark on the countryside. In the landscaped gardens of their country seats nature became a theatrical space moulded by a surveyor and an architect. These landscapes did not grow out of “culture and custom”. Ancient villages were demolished to create an artificial Arcadia in England. Olwig argues that they were politically motivated landscapes (“Whigscapes”) designed to naturalize the power of the country’s new rulers.

It is hard work cutting a path through the dense undergrowth of Olwig’s academic prose. But his meticulous uncovering of the origins of landscape has important implications: it exposes the phoney link between nature and nation, and undermines naive blood-and-soil rhetoric. Even something as apparently “natural” as landscape can turn out to be rooted in the mind of man.

Nicholas Roe’s subject, in The politics of nature, is the crucial role played by nature in the politics of poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. For Tom Paine, the revolutions in America and France were a new beginning “a renovation of the natural order of things”. It was from nature that Paine and his fellow radicals took the ideas of freedom, equality and a sense that men were “kindred”. In this new, expanded edition, Roe makes a convincing case for the close relationship between revolutionary science and politics in romanticism. Wordsworth’s “sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused” has a scientific resonance for Roe: “The poetry of Romantic transcendence was dependent upon and articulated the materialist principles of contemporary scientific and medical debate.”

Post-structuralism and new historicism have solved the problem of nature by deconstructing it: the Wordsworth scholar, Alan Liu, says “there is no nature”. Are we closer to understanding nature? Society moulds nature in its own image, says Olwig. Roe suggests nature is the spur to revolutionary change. Each has a piece of the answer. In the end nature is a subtle amalgam of matter and metaphor of science and society. Mary Webb was right to say that there will always be “the unknown quantity, the guarded secret” in nature. But still we believe “that there is some deep meaning in it all, if we could only find it”. —Dawn/Guardian news service

Landscape, nature, and the body politic: from Britain’s renaissance to America New World
By Kenneth Olwig
Wisconsin
ISBN: 0299174247. 352pp. £19.50

The politics of nature: William Wordsworth and some contemporaries
By Nicholas Roe
Macmillan
ISBN 0333962761. 228pp. £14.99

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