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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Plums and Apricots, by Emilie Preyer (1849-1930), date unknown.

The Art of Nature

By Frederick Turner

Human art, fiction, invention, and technology are not unnatural forces that have suddenly erupted into nature, but rather the natural continuation of nature’s own evolutionary processes.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

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

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1902 | Congo River

Time Travel

Joseph Conrad travels to a land before time.More

1865 | Brooklyn

Parade Music

Walt Whitman’s paean to town and country.More

1798 | Tintern Abbey

The Life of Things

William Wordsworth loves the meadows and the mountains and the woods.More

Charts & Graphs

A Pound of Flesh

Resource consumption required to produce one pound of food.

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Photograph of American biologist Edward O. Wilson.

Image of medieval traveler Sir John Mandeville.

Portrait of Francis Bacon in sixteenth-century armor.

Black and white photograph of former chancellor and Führer of Germany Adolf Hitler.

Men argue, nature acts.

—Voltaire, 1764

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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