“To Civility and to Man's Use”: History, Culture, and Nature^*

* An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the Carl O. Sauer Memorial Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, on 2 April 1998. Transformation of my lecture notes to a written text meant losing most of the discursive material—including references to individuals such as Carl Sauer and James Parsons—my occasional attempts at humor, and some of the illustrative matter.

Abstract

An attempt is made to give a 10,000‐year perspective on the relations of history, culture, and the nonhuman world called nature. A Holocene narrative of processes separates human societies and their cultures: things that individuate and pull apart to the point of fragmentation versus those that are binding. These tendencies toward convergence may coalesce, as with the natural sciences or global electronic technology. Equally, they may involve centrifugal processes, as in the creative arts or in forms of representation accessible only to certain groups or cultures. The environment resonates in a series of segmented channels, considerably complicated by a binary Western culture, often with 1 as acceptable and o as the Other. Is a purposeful path laid down by someone else and followed to its predetermined end in Utopia, or do we cherish something more open and contingent?

• contingency
• environment
• Holocene
• identity
• nature

Additional information

Notes on contributors

I. G. Simmons

Dr. Simmons is a professor of geography at the University of Durham, Durham, England DHI 3LE.