Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

This is a thought-provoking collection of essays edited by environmental historian William Cronon. In this book scholars such as Carolyn Merchant, Richard White, Kenneth Olwig, Donna Haraway, and others “contribute to an ongoing dialog about the environment.” The book has its roots in an interdisciplinary seminar on “Reinventing Nature,” held at the University of California, Irvine’s Humanities Research Institute in 1994, and is similar in scope to another Reinventing Nature project entitled Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern Deconstructionism (Island Pr., 1995). This work explores our ideas of nature in a cultural context, for “if we hope for an environmentalism capable of explaining why people abuse the earth as they do, then the nature we study most become less natural and more cultural.”