The Nature of Nature: Thetus Smith

Posted At : June 16, 2008 1:00 AM
Related Categories: Science & Social Science

Excerpted from "The Nature of Nature" by Dr. Rebecca Bushnell, part of an ongoing series of 60-second lectures featuring faculty from the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. Used by permission of the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences and the author.

Read by Thetus Smith: "When I edited environmental documents for the National Park Service, I became much more aware of the contradictions in Nature." Thetus, an Alaskan for 38 years, is a retired National Park Service - Alaska Region editor who lives in Anchorage. She never tires of seeing the Chugach Mountains in their daily changes of visual grandeur and the wildlife that transits the Chester Creek Trail and Greenbelt while surrounded by the roaring sounds of the city. A favorite web site: Alaska Professional Communicators.

Dr. Rebecca Bushnell spoke on "The Nature of Nature" as part of an ongoing series of 60-second lectures featuring faculty from the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences.

"So what is nature? One statement about nature always summons up its own contradiction. So, on the one hand, Neil Evernden says where there can be nothing that is not nature, it has no opposite. DDT and a tulip are both made of the elements that constitute nature.

But on the other hand, is there anything that is really purely natural? Some people have defined nature as that which is not interfered with, while culture is the product of interference. But, as C.S. Lewis has observed, in the real world, everything is continuously interfered with by everything else. Nothing is untouched. Everything is thus unnatural.
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So when we talk about nature, are we always talking about culture as much [as] about what lurks in the woods?"

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