Below is a collection of writings by Raymond Williams. I am using this as my approach to develop a concept for my upcoming studio.

Nature is decisively seen as separate from human. Most earlier ideas of nature had included, in an integral way, ideas of human nature. But now nature, increasingly, is ‘out there’, and it’s natural to reshape it to a dominant need, without having to consider very deeply what this reshaping might do to the human.

In our complex dealings with the physical world, we find it very difficult to recognize all the products of our own activities. We recognize some of the products, and call other by-products; but slagheap is as real a product as the coal, just as the river stinking with sewage and detergent is as much our product as the reservoir. The enclosed and fertile land is our product, but so are the waste moors from which the poor cultivators were cleared, to leave what can be seen as an empty nature.

Capitalism, of course, has relied on the terms of domination and exploitation; imperialism, in conquest, has similarly seen both men and physical products as raw material. But it is a measure of how far we have to go that socialists also still talk of the conquest of nature, which in any real terms will always include the conquest, the domination or the exploitation of some men by others. If we alienate the living processes of which we are a part, we end, though unequally, by alienating ourselves.

Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in night. God said, let Newton be, and all was light. – Alexander Pope, Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton
Now o’er the one half world Nature seems dead. – Macbeth, II, i