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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Painting of the flower garden dancing in her garden, surrounded by others

Funhouse Goddess

By D. Graham Burnett

It has never been easy to decipher what nature is trying to tell us, but that hasn’t stopped us from filling in the blanks. A look at the sexual politics of natural law theories.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

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

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c. 4000 BC | Eden

As It Was in the Beginning

God gets down to business.More

c. 1891 | Polynesia

Natural Resources

Paul Gauguin lives differently. More

1933 | South Dakota

Point of Order

The “Wild West” begins. More

Charts & Graphs

Forms Assumed by Zeus

For his rape of mortal women.

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Lewis Lapham at his desk

Photograph of American biologist Edward O. Wilson.

Portrait of Francis Bacon in sixteenth-century armor.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

—Ronald Reagan, 1965

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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