Natural.

The historian William Cronon writes about this sense shared by many of the Romantics that we “aren’t nature.” He writes that this underlies our creation of national parks as a space almost quarantined off from civilization, in a false dichotomy. One of the things that happened just before industrialism, I mean it was already there, was this anxiety creeping in about the connection with nature. Up until then, the natural world is taken for granted, even in spite of Christianity and Hebraism and all of that, the Book of Genesis, the Western assumption—which I think is deadly. There’s this idea that comes up—and is reinforced in the Renaissance—of the animism underlying mythology, with the nymphs and dryads and all that. I mean, they overbeat the drum until it was corny, but that’s what it was. You were not separate from it. They understood that. Shakespeare certainly understood it. Look at As You Like It. And you know, a figure like Prospero, in The Tempest, is a sort of summary of all that. The magic is all there. It’s not something spooky that is supernatural. It’s natural. 

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