Explores the "politics of nature", the demarcations drawn through the concept and its contested status. This book reveals both the reactionary tendencies of a Green politics which ignores the historic and cultural dimensions of "nature", and the incoherence of cultural politics which denies its extra-discursive reality.

This is a work offered to all those who have felt the need for a discussion which registers both the independence of the non-human world and the instability and political effects of the ways it is conceptualized and culturally represented. "What is Nature?" is designed to appeal to students across a wide range of disciplines, and to give pleasure to anyone who has occasionally pondered on the nature of "nature".

Introduction.
1. The Discourses of Nature.
2. Nature, Human and Inhuman.
3. Nature Friend and Foe.
4. Nature and Sexual Politics.
5. Nature and 'Nature'.
6. The Space and Time of Nature.
7. Loving Nature.
8. Ecology, Nature and Responsibility.