The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), by Thomas Cole, 1836.

The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (detail), by Thomas Cole, 1836. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908.

Book of Nature

Volume 1, Number 3 | summer 2008

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Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer, by Kano Eino, late seventeenth century.

Preamble

Messages in a Bottle

By Lewis H. Lapham

Nature is the only artist, the wonder of her collected works formed by their reflections in the mirrors of the human imagination.

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Factories at Asnieres, seen from the Quai de Clichy, by Vincent van Gogh, 1887.

Pattern Recognition

By Steven Stoll

Economic growth partakes in this magical thinking: the capacity of the environment remains constant at infinity.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

Mining gold, chopping timber, tapping oil, fishing oceans.

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1783 | Weimar

Goethe in Love

Falling for a natural beauty.More

1734 | London

Great Chain of Being

“Whatever is, is right.”More

1620 | Cape Cod

A Hideous and Desolate Wilderness

Colonists survey their new home. More

Charts & Graphs

Nature’s Calling

A brief history of the toilet.

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Smiling man with thin hair sticking out at a podium

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

Portrait of English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton.

British author Mary Shelley.

Color photograph of American writer Annie Dillard.

Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

—Chinese proverb

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

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