Introduction

Summary

To give a collection of essays the title Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland raises tricky conceptual questions that must be confronted. As a string of recent publications make clear, scholars in the environmental humanities find the notion of ‘nature’ as a referent for an objective material phenomenon problematic. In some respects, this is nothing new. In Keywords, Raymond Williams famously stated that ‘nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language’. He distinguished three general but overlapping usages, namely ‘the essential quality and character of something’, the ‘inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both’, and the ‘material world itself, taking as including or not including human beings’. As he developed his argument, Williams made it clear that the usage of the term ‘nature’ needs to be historicized, perhaps more pressingly than any other.

Twenty years after Williams's intervention, Peter Coates undertook this exercise in historicization, developing Williams's thinking into a book-length study. As befits his specialism, Coates gave particular space to American writers, concluding with a discussion of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature (1990), probably the most influential work of environmental history written in recent times. McKibben's thesis, in Coates's summary, is that ‘we have so thoroughly domesticated the earth and modified natural processes that it is no longer possible to speak of nature as something with a separate existence’. Writing about the ecological crisis caused by damage to the ozone layer then uppermost in people's minds, McKibben argued that ‘by changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial’.

Given the more recent but widespread acceptance of the claim that we inhabit the Anthropocene, a geological epoch formed by the agency of human beings and galvanized by the carbon economy, McKibben's arguments seem at once prophetic and relatively muted. His influence, however, cannot be doubted. A host of academic works have heralded ‘nature's end’ or positioned themselves as ‘after nature’, although the response by historians is often less rigidly materialist than this language suggests. The environmental historians Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, for instance, reify nature as a phenomenon of which human beings are a component part but not the determining factor. Nature exists without us, and, if it comes to it, will do so after us.