“Nature,” wrote the Marxist critic Raymond Williams, “is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” Though we intuitively understand appeals to nature when we hear them, Williams insisted, the many senses of the word are “variable and at times even opposed” to one another. Nature comes from a Latin root meaning “to be born,” so it has something to do with origins, with processes of becoming; but when it names “the essential quality or character of something,” nature slips from etiology to ontology (what something was is not necessarily what it is; things, as we say, change).[1] Nature’s ontological Read more