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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Scroll of a river passing through mountains covered in clouds.

The Great Bend

By Simon Winchester

What if the Yangtze River had turned south instead of east?

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

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

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1964 | Washington, DC

Free Range

Defining the wilderness.More

1866 | Atlantic Ocean

State of Nature

For Jules Verne, the sea is everything.More

1836 | Concord

All Things Are Moral

Ralph Waldo Emerson sees the unity of all things.More

Charts & Graphs

A Pound of Flesh

Resource consumption required to produce one pound of food.

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Color photograph of American writer Annie Dillard.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.

Photograph of British writer and journalist Simon Winchester.

Portrait of third president of the United States Thomas Jefferson.

Portrait bust of Roman poet Virgil.

Photograph of American novelist Jack London.

Black and white photograph of a young H.G. Wells with a mustache.

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

—George Eliot, 1857

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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