Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a great lover of the world, which is something quite different. Nature is a figment of the Romantic imagination, and a very insidious figment at that. There simply is no such thing as nature—in the sense of a realm of being from which humans can distinguish themselves. It just doesn’t exist. The nonhuman world? There’s no such thing as a nonhuman world—not here and now at any rate. The world that we have is the world that has humans in it, just as the world that we have is the world that has air and water and insects and birds and reptiles in it. Every aspect of the world was changed by our appearance in it three million years ago, just as every aspect of the world was changed by the appearance of plant life three billion years ago. We’ve breathed in and out here for three million years, we’ve taken the substance of the world and made it into human flesh for three million years, and willy-nilly the world has taken that flesh back for three million years and redistributed it through the entire web of life on this planet.
