This chapter argues that D.H. Lawrence's relationship with place and nonhuman life is profoundly influenced by underlying tensions and contradictions in his worldview, in terms of his relationships with family, religion, gender and class. Of all canonical modernists, Lawrence perhaps has the deepest sense of connection with place, and it is therefore in his work that one of the fundamental tensions of modernity – between the need for rootedness, and the need to develop and explore – is most acute and problematic. I begin by tracing the emergence of such tensions in Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911), before examining the development of a multiple perspective, dialogue-heavy approach in Sons and Lovers (1913). This style, I argue, hints at the broader potential for such early works to challenge an exclusively human viewpoint. Sons and Lovers is also remarkable for its vivid sense of empathic connection with place, and Lawrence's capacity in this respect is later applied to the landscapes and fauna of Australia and North America. As his focus shifts to nonhuman life, other tensions emerge, between two related pairings: unity versus fragmentation, and the individual versus the communal. New World landscapes are conducive to Lawrence's explorations of fragmentation, which are complemented in certain formal qualities of his later work; and also to the development of Hardy's influence, in terms of animism and the prioritisation of landscape over human narrative. The strain of misanthropy that runs through Lawrence's work lends itself to the development of these themes. In tension with Hardy's influence, however, is Lawrence's profound sense of individual power and possibility, which underlies the aristocrat/herd dualism evident in much of his work. In some ways, texts like Women in Love (1920) reveal a desire to reject the possibilities of a cosmopolitan, multi-voiced openness and liminality that much of Lawrence's work otherwise suggests.