This chapter examines the ancient school fable as an introductory exercise in fiction. I argue that Imperial educators framed fables (especially animal fables) as paradoxically overt fictions that nonetheless model real-world hierarchies and social behavior. Drawing on Greek and Latin rhetorical treatises, such as Quintilian and the progymnasmata, I show that school fables were designed to teach students how to decode enigmatic speech, distinguish credible from incredible fiction, and conform rhetorical speech to “natural” character types. But verse fabulists like Phaedrus and Babrius weaponize this pedagogy, challenging the premise that fiction can be safely decoded. Through close readings of fables like “The Wolf and the Lamb” and “The Lion in Love,” I show how the verse fabulists subvert the educational aims of the fable, reconfiguring it as a vehicle for disillusionment rather than instruction. In doing so, they reveal the fragility of pedagogical ideals in the face of rhetorical deception. The chapter thus situates the school fable at the intersection of fiction, power, and reader competence in the Roman world.

This chapter discusses the dazzling array of creativity that is language and metaphor in Pindar, in terms of its impact on us as its consumers and in terms of the questions that aspects of lyric diction and style ask of us. The discussion reaffirms the importance of close reading from the inside out as the key to appreciating the nature and challenge of Pindaric lyric. It assesses the powers and risks that come with lyric language in detail and across time, as readers and audiences are stopped in their tracks. The chapter discusses the experiential potential of a representative selection of examples taken from across the corpus, in three sections. Section 1, ‘Options’, investigates how Pindaric lyric fosters both a freedom of expression and an encouragement to audiences and readers to keep their minds open in response. Section 2, ‘Colours of Desire’, explores the sustained intensificatory effects of marked imagery in one extended example from Olympian 6. Section 3, ‘Access and Appropriateness’, explores how the hyperbolic nature of lyric imagery may raise further questions about our commitments to the sentiments that Pindaric lyric finds itself able to project.

This chapter explores the constructed nature of environmental understanding through colonial, neocolonial, postcolonial and ecofeminist lenses. It begins by dissecting the binary opposition of nature versus civilisation as shaped by colonial narratives, revealing how this dichotomy justified the exploitation of Indigenous populations, women and natural resources. The analysis extends to neocolonial practices – such as land-grabbing and neoliberal economic expansion – and their environmental repercussions. Through literary and filmic examples like Robinson Crusoe and Cast Away, the chapter highlights how survival narratives reinforce human supremacy and commodify nature. It then critically examines the idealisation of Indigenous peoples as ‘noble savages’ and the romanticised notion of nature as a Garden of Eden. Moving towards constructive alternatives, it foregrounds postcolonial and ecofeminist approaches that challenge anthropocentrism, promote interconnectedness and embrace Indigenous cosmologies centred around earth goddesses like Pachamama and Papatūānuku. The chapter concludes with a case study on Brendon Grimshaw’s ecological restoration of Moyenne Island, advocating for grassroots conservation and ethical environmental care. Ultimately, the chapter urges readers to reassess dominant narratives and join collective efforts to protect and regenerate nature.

The principle of popular sovereignty allows for only democracy as a form of government. But democracy produces the political factions that can corrupt government unless constrained. Beginning with the corrupting influence of factions in the state governments after the Revolution, the chapter discusses the Framers’ understanding of why human nature leads to factions.

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

As climate awareness intensifies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, theatre and performance studies continues to reflect on and revise the depth of its engagement with ecology, understood broadly as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments. ‘From Ecology to Ecocriticism’ covers the rise of ecology first as a science then its gradual shift to the humanities and onto theatre and performance studies. The question of the relationship between humans and nature now animates much of the scholarship on ecology, theatre and performance. Hence, if ecology is the study of the interrelations between organisms and environments, then ecology in theatre studies focuses on the interrelations of the theatrical and its referents in the politics of sentence at climate change. The chapter concludes by arguing that ecocriticism in Australia expands to encompass the impact of settler colonialism and the continuing dependence on fossil fuel consumption and exports.

Rydenfelt begins by considering how some classical pragmatists approached the question of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. With that background in place, Rydenfelt proceeds to argue that pragmatism provides a unique perspective on questions within contemporary environmental philosophy and ethics. Influenced by idealism but rejecting its invidious distinction between humans and nonhumans, appropriating the worldview of post-Darwinian science but refusing to see philosophy as just another one of the special sciences, pragmatism makes room for a distinct approach to philosophical questions about the environment. One of the most important of those questions is that of the value of nature, and environmental pragmatism understands the pursuit of such normative questions as empirical and experimental, thus attempting to connect normative theory with social practice. Still, it offers no quick and easy solutions but instead recognizes that the pursuit of philosophical questions about nature, like philosophical inquiry generally, and like scientific inquiry even more generally, is a long-term endeavor.

The naturalism of Alvar Aalto is set against the philosophy of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. There is a discussion of what a ‘thing’ is, prolonged by a foray into the concept of Mingei and its refinement and transformation in the hands of Theaster Gates. The chapter goes on to to discuss aesthetics, form and the philosophy of Amercian pragmatism, coupled to the ongoing debate between digital and analogue in media philosophy.

Pablo Neruda’s Nobel lecture “To the Splendid City” was a summary of his poetic practice as well as a consummate presentation of his literary persona to the world stage. Although highly conscious of the political context of his utterance, and hugely laudatory of the recently elected socialist Allende administration, Neruda devoted most of his lecture to evoking the breadth and beauty of the Chilean landscape and the creativity and the imagination of the Chilean people. Evoking the panoramic and eulogistic register of Canto general, Neruda proffered a buoyant and empathetic vision of his homeland, even though some aspects of his approach might seem insufficiently critical to a twenty-first-century literary sensibility. Neruda used the platform of his lecture to give a convincing statement of his identity as a Latin American writer.

Widely considered to be a quintessential avant-gardist work, Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1925–35) also emerges from historical, political, and personal events that inform and act as reference points throughout the book. Contrary to prevailing interpretations of this classic book of poetry, his battle with poetic language and vanguardist aesthetic stances coexists with a realist aesthetic that highlights the sociohistorical and individual circumstances in which he is immersed. Written mostly overseas, where he served as low-level consul, the combination of the avant-gardist techniques depicts the poetic subject’s alienation from nature and society. Neruda represents the speaker as using a hermetic poetic language as a way of divulging his own estrangement. He begins to overcome this stage thanks to his relationships with women, his increasing political awareness, and his use of nature as positive force in his poetry and life.

Chapter 9 considers Emerson’s first revolutionary book of 1836, Nature. Even in this first book, Goodman argues, Emerson presents a nascent epistemology of moods. The discussion then turns to the moody swings of “Nature,” from the Essays, Second Series, in which Emerson finds the natural world either bountifully present or just missed, and as taking two opposing forms: a stable finished form he calls natura naturata, and a dynamic form he calls natura naturans. At the end of the essay, Emerson abandons this main set of oppositions in a leap to a metaphysical conclusion. The Coda considers Emerson’s attraction to Michael Faraday’s idea that “we do not arrive at last at atoms, but at spherules of force.”

This chapter is, for the most part, devoted to an appraisal of Greek art as a school of humanity. Herder applies the model of nature’s force to the work of art. The force that produces the human form in the work of art also conditions the possibilities for viewing and understanding art. Art grounds visible categories of humankind and it renders visible the ideas that make these categories intelligible. Greek statuary is seen as a formalization of timeless categories of human life, but these categories are subject to the contingencies of interpretation. He discusses the Greek idealization of childhood, heroism, the gods, fauns, satyrs, and centaurs. He then concludes that there is no such thing as formless goodness and truth. This is followed by an appraisal of allegory. A text by Johann Christoph Berens is cited as an example of practical moral enlightenment. In this connection, the question of public morals is raised with respect to Homer and Montesquieu. Kant’s pursuit of truth is praised. The chapter closes with thoughts on freedom of thought and the state.

As unprecedented as the Declaration was, it was not without intellectual antecedents. The Declaration interacted with and built upon recent expressions of European Enlightenment political philosophy in its focus on “Nature and Nature’s God,” and in its reliance upon the normative principles of “laws of Nature” as well as natural or “unalienable” rights. European Enlightenment political philosophers themselves stood in complex and varied relationships with their ancient and medieval predecessors; sometimes adding to, sometimes transforming, and sometimes rejecting these preceding ideas. The Declaration brilliantly navigates this complex web of intellectual antecedents by treating the ideas of laws of nature, natural rights, the social contract, and republicanism in such a way that the points of tension between their different interpretations are minimized and subsumed within a shared understanding of the importance of nature for political life. In so doing, the Declaration provides an intriguing hint of how the deep fault lines between these political philosophical traditions might ultimately be bridged. The Declaration’s succinct statement of political principles may be viewed as a transformative distillation of a few of its most important European antecedents.

“The Poet” is what Adorno calls a “carpet essay,” which weaves its announced topics of the poet and poetry into a host of other subjects: character and expression; reception and abandonment; beauty and love; the present, new, and near; the Neoplatonic One or “whole”; and a fundamental “flowing” or “metamorphosis.” Chapter 8 focuses on Emerson’s romantic and proto-existentialist pronouncement that “the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression”; his theory that language “is fossil poetry”; and the proto-pragmatic picture of language in his statement that “all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” Other topics treated are the place of what Kant calls “unbounded” ideas in Emerson’s account of poetry, thinking as a mixture of reception and activity, and the connections and differences of “Experience” and “The Poet.”

This chapter examines the changing reception of Charles Harpur’s poetry. Firstly, it considers the valuing of Harpur as a nature poet, and secondly, the impact of literary theory on interpretative approaches. It then outlines a third phase that is text-historical or text-critical, and which is attentive to the poems’ multiple moments of composition and revision. The chapter discusses Harpur’s navigation of colonial readership, and how he experimented with a range of voices. It includes an examination of his translations that are related, in part, to Harpur’s fascination with the role of the poet and with other poets, such as Coleridge.

The epilogue considers one possible future incarnation of the idea of progress in medicine, namely progress as achieving sustainability. Despite the fact that environmental concerns have long been associated with reimagined ideas of progress, aspirations for sustainability remain underdeveloped in medicine. Nevertheless, this epilogue discusses the cases in which the concept of medical progress has been coupled with “sustainable” or “green” medicine. Visions of sustainable medical progress tend to presuppose a multidimensional concept of medical progress, call for expanding the time frame in which progress is assessed, and posit environmental limits as constraints on open-ended progress. At the same time, few of these visions engage with the pluralistic nature of medical progress, preferring to understand measures that support a robust natural environment as intrinsically good for the health of individuals and societies, and broadly aligned with the goals of conventional medicine.

Chapter 2 continues the thread from Chapter 1, moving from objections against Kant in animal ethics to broader concerns in environmental philosophy. I begin with problematic passages from Kant’s critical texts such as the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Pure Reason. While Kant does not discuss the environment, the standard interpretation of Kant suggests that nature has no intrinsic value and that environments are of mere instrumental worth. Environmental philosophers are warranted to suspect that Kant’s critical philosophy may be a nonstarter given its apparent dualism and anthropocentrism. Next, I examine three camps of Kant defenders who challenge these suspicions. Some commentators defend Kant’s system, others modernize him, and some synthesize Kant with other philosophers such as Aristotle. I assess the merits of their arguments, ultimately recommending a move beyond the standard reading to address the climate crisis.