Nature Performed : Environment, Culture and Performance

This innovative book examines the use and usefulness of ideas of 'performance' for understanding human-nature relationships. It is the first publication to gather together an extensive range of approaches to performance, nature and culture, and to subject them to systematic critical discussion. Drawing on different intellectual traditions and on different conceptions of 'performance' and 'nature', the contributors explore domains as diverse as allotments and bioinvasion, fox hunting and green politics. Between them, they challenge and expand existing theories of performance and apply them to new fields of inquiry, often through original empirical research. Taken as a whole, the book makes a distinctive contribution to the current 'cultural turn' in environmental research.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Lecturer in Environment and Culture at the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster University. He is the author of The Sacralization of Nature: Nature and the Sacred in the Global Age (Blackwell Publishing, 2004) and co-editor of Re-ordering Nature: Theology, Society and the New Genetics (2003) and Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology (1996).

Wallace Heim is a doctoral student. She has exhibited sculpture internationally and designed for the theatre, television and film.

Claire Waterton is Lecturer in Environment and Social Policy at the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster University.