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Environmental issues always involve nature in some way, but ‘nature’ is not a simple word with a single meaning. In fact, dictionary definitions describe around twelve distinct meanings of the word. Raymond Williams (1987) says that nature is one of the most complex and difficult words in the English language because its dominant meaning has changed often, along with the development of societies.

‘Nature’ can mean something that is essential to a person, an animal or a thing. Why do some birds build their nests at the same time every year, for instance? We may be told that this is instinctive behaviour and an essential part of the ‘nature’ of the birds. In fourteenthcentury Europe, however, a new dominant meaning began to emerge. Nature came to be seen as a series of forces that directed the world and ultimately explained why things happen. For example, even today many people consult astrological charts, looking for their birth-date-based ‘star sign’ and the life guidance it can offer. When they do this, they implicitly draw on this same idea of ‘natural forces’ – in this case, the movement of stars and planets – directing human affairs.

By the nineteenth century, the dominant meaning of ‘nature’ had changed again. This time nature was seen as the whole non-human material world rather than as a series of forces. The natural world was a world full of natural things: animals, fields, mountains, and much more. For instance, there was a trend towards looking at ‘scenery’ as landscapes and pictorials, with nature literally framed for our appreciation and enjoyment. Similarly, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists collected and classified natural ‘things’, creating plant and animal taxonomies that are still in use today.

Two major and related causes of this latest change were industrialization, which shifted people away from working the land, and urbanization, which led to larger human settlements and new living environments largely divorced from working the land (Thomas 1984). Nature was now seen as an obstacle that society had to tame and master in order to make progress. Humans can now fly (in planes), cross oceans (in ships) and even orbit the planet (in spacecraft) despite their having no innate ability to do these things. Catton and Dunlap (1978) argue that the technological advances of the industrial age produced an ideology of ‘human exemptionalism’ – the widely accepted idea that, unlike all other animals, the human species was practically exempt and could overcome natural laws.

From the seventeenth century, high-status groups in Britain began to take pleasure in landscape scenes, which became the focus of the early ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 2002).

Yet, for a minority of people, nature was not in any need of taming. Instead, industrial society was the problem, polluting and wasting nature to feed new urban lifestyles. Wild nature needed protection, not domestication. Nevertheless, for both the tamers and the protectors, society and nature were now seen as separate things. Nature was that which society was not, and vice versa. This meaning remains the dominant one today, though more people would probably agree with the nature protectors than did so in earlier periods.

Since the 1950s, use of the word ‘nature’ started to give way to another term: the environment. Dictionary definitions of ‘environment’ suggest that it is the external conditions or surroundings of people, especially those in which they live or work. David Harvey (1993) notes that this definition can apply to a number of situations. For example, we have a working environment, a business environment and an urban environment. But most people would probably expect this chapter to discuss pollution, climate change, and so on, indicating that the environment has taken on a widespread and special meaning. The environment is assumed to mean all of those non-human, natural surroundings within which human beings exist – sometimes called the ‘natural environment’ – and in its broadest sense this is planet Earth as a whole. We will use this as our working definition throughout this chapter.