It is often said that it is since Darwin that we know of our natural history. This is unconvincing, because countless cultures before ours knew very well that they were related to animals and that they were, first and foremost, members of a wider biotic community; they simply did not have testable hypotheses as to […]
Month: February 2017
Land Abandonment in Europe
We usually think of the American and African continents as the places of big, untouched, wilderness. Whatever the merits of this view (amply and ably disputed), it at least serves to make a negative point: in Europe, the kind of nature that superficially looks untouched doesn’t really exist. What Europeans call nature is a deeply […]