The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), by Thomas Cole, 1836.

The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (detail), by Thomas Cole, 1836. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908.

Book of Nature

Volume 1, Number 3 | summer 2008

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Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer, by Kano Eino, late seventeenth century.

Preamble

Messages in a Bottle

By Lewis H. Lapham

Nature is the only artist, the wonder of her collected works formed by their reflections in the mirrors of the human imagination.

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Factories at Asnieres, seen from the Quai de Clichy, by Vincent van Gogh, 1887.

Pattern Recognition

By Steven Stoll

Economic growth partakes in this magical thinking: the capacity of the environment remains constant at infinity.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

Mining gold, chopping timber, tapping oil, fishing oceans.

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1872 | New York City

Defending His Park Against the Philistines

Parks and recreation by Frederick Law Olmsted.More

c. 1628 | England

Manifest Destiny

“The whole earth is the Lord’s garden & He hath given it to the Sonnes of men...”More

1902 | Congo River

Time Travel

Joseph Conrad travels to a land before time.More

Charts & Graphs

Cost of a Fur Coat

The number of animals involved in the making of a coat.

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English poet and satirist Alexander Pope.

Portrait of Francis Bacon in sixteenth-century armor.

Jules Verne

Color photograph of writer and editor Garret Keizer.

Smiling man with thin hair sticking out at a podium

Novelist and psychiatrist Daniel Mason.

I always think of nature as a great spectacle, somewhat resembling the opera.

—Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

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