We study changing relations between people and nature, loosely framed as how people have perceived nature and reshaped it to suit their own ideas of good living. Our subjects include how communities have altered natural systems for fields, villages, and cities, how they have represented nature in painting, literature, and oral traditions, and how organisms and ecosystems respond to social changes with unforeseen biotic shifts, new disease environments, or other developments requiring people to reshape cultures, economies, and politics. We study the social frictions and unrest - - from fence cutting to clean air litigation - - that flow from these processes. We are equally intrigued with material environmental change and cultural perceptions, customary and legal arrangements for apportioning nature and with social conflicts over those arrangements, with the use of natural symbols to legitimize and critique social and political systems, and with the ways societies know and fail to know natur