This book surveys trends in environmental thought in the US from the mid-19th century to the present day. Its author's chief interest is in ecocriticism — a new field of inquiry that focuses on environmental literature — and some key premises of which he calls into question. His perspective is, however, interdisciplinary: he considers literary alongside popular, philosophical, sociological, political, and scientific approaches to understanding the natural world, and attempts to weigh the relative strengths and weakness, and identify the biases of each approach. He also addresses a variety of more specific topics, including the shortcomings of arguments for the social construction of nature, the difference between literary and scientific realism, the supposed conflict between nature and culture, the American preoccupation with individual experience as reflected in the nature writing tradition, the difficulty of resolving ecological crises in light of the great complexity of nature, and the challenge of understanding all these issues from an interdisciplinary viewpoint that draws inspiration from both the arts and the sciences.