'The work of literary scholars, anthropologists, cultural historians and critical theorists over the past several decades has yielded abundant evidence that 'nature' is not nearly so natural as it seems.  Instead, it is a profoundly human construction.  This is not to say that the nonhuman world is somehow unreal or a mere figment of our imaginations- far from it.  But the way we describe and understand the world is so entangled with our own values and assumptions that the two can never be fully separated.  What we mean when we use the word 'nature' says as much about ourselves as about the things we label with that word.  As the British literary critic Raymond Williams once famously remarked "The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history"