After Nature 12 contrary: that nature was the guarantor of hierarchy and tradition. A century before Rousseau, John Evelyn, the En glish forester and author of the first tract on air pollution (Fumifugium, 1661), praised nature for being terrifying. Terror, he wrote, was a lesson in obedience. Even atheists shuddered when they heard thunder. Crashing storms were reminders that people were sinners in the hands of an unrelenting God. John Ray, a pioneering naturalist a generation after Evelyn, argued that insect swarms were nature’s scourges, reminders that divine order dealt harshly with rebels. The locusts were sure to come for atheists and demo crats, delivering nature’s judgment on their deranged ideas. Where Rousseau and Words worth saw a proto-democratic nature, pregnant with harmonious equality, Evelyn and Ray portrayed a nature made for piety and monarchy. The natu ral order taught discipline, obedience, and “mutual subserviency.” 4 Nature turns out to be flexible like that. It has been the handmaiden of revolutions and the underwriter of kings, proof of divine design and of atheistic materialism, from Athens and Rome down to the age of democracy. It has proved and disproved the justice of slavery. The most “natu ral” of peoples, Native Americans (as Eu ro pe ans imagined them) stood as a rebuke to de cadent civilization—except when the study of nature revealed, as it did to John Locke, that the indolent tribes must give way to “the industrious and rational” Eu ro pe ans. 5 No won der Edmund Burke, attacking certain theories of natu ral rights, announced,“Art is man’s nature”—that is, as social beings, we are what we make ourselves through collective action, not the splendid products of any blueprint. 6

Burke did not deny the existence of natu ral rights but regarded those rights as seeds that yielded different forms in the diverse soils of culture and politics, the art that is human nature. Others were much harsher in attacking Words worth’s idea that nature should be a teacher. John Stuart Mill called all po liti cal appeals to nature