Natural Artefacts

Our world suffers from the rigid separation of nature and culture in politics, theology, architecture, art and law. The frontiers between the human and non-human have always been heavily policed and defined, leading us to consider ourselves separate from - and superior to - the context from which we emerge, by which we consider it our prerogative to artificially modify without constraint. What if - as this groundbreaking study proposes - nature is as much of a craftsman as we are, a force that fashions the world to its needs, making its own kind of artefacts? And, moreover, what if we and nature have already been working together, hand in hand, productively and positively for millennia, making hybrid natural artefacts, but without acknowledging or describing this collaboration? If this is true, we need a new, richer, more engaged definition of rules that define our relations with the non-human - especially for situation in which we are called upon to restore natural environments. This book - in outlining a first approach to such rules - does nothing less than propose better-adapted intellectual tools for our survival and flourishing on earth. Our world suffers from the rigid separation of nature and culture in politics, theology, architecture, art and law. The frontiers between the human and non-human have always been heavily policed and defined, leading us to consider ourselves separate from - and superior to - the context from which we emerge, by which we consider it our prerogative to artificially modify without constraint. What if - as this groundbreaking study proposes - nature is as much of a craftsman as we are, a force that fashions the world to its needs, making its own kind of artefacts? And, moreover, what if we and nature have already been working together, hand in hand, productively and positively for millennia, making hybrid natural artefacts, but without acknowledging or describing this collaboration? If this is true, we need a new, richer, more engaged definition of rules that define our relations with the non-human - especially for situation in which we are called upon to restore natural environments. This book - in outlining a first approach to such rules - does nothing less than propose better-adapted intellectual tools for our survival and flourishing on earth.