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18 2 What Is nature? has burdened and complicated the concept throughout its linguistic history. At the same time, the reality that it tries to grasp has changed too, due to its own material history and to its ever-increasing intermingling with society. Nevertheless, there is a reasonable starting point for defining what nature is: nature is that what is not artificial. The concept of nature would thus cover all those entities and processes that come into being or exist without any human inter- vention. Natural entities are not the result of human intentions, but rather they exist independently from human designs or purposes. Therefore, we can under- stand nature, as John Stuart Mill does, as "all the powers existing in either the outer or the inner world and everything which takes place by means of those pow- ers" (Mill 1998: 8). In Pollini's words: The environment is, by definition, an anthropocentric concept, in contrast to nature, which refers, by definition, to an otherness, or to the otherness, the mysteries, within ourselves. The environment, as well as its representations, are socially constructed, at least in part, whereas nature, by definition, is not socially constructed (only its representations are) (Pollini 2013: 39). Nature can then be characterized as a self-generating and self-sustaining entity defined by its telos, i.e. by its ability to maintain its organisation in the presence of external forces and to exert its own force on its environment while trying to maintain its integrity (Heyd 2005: 4–5). According to this teleological view, nature is autonomous from human beings. The autonomy of nature derives from its very existence. Nature is thus what has come into existence, continues to exist, and finally, disintegrates/decays, thereby going out of existence, in principle, entirely independent of human volition or intentional- ity, of human control, manipulation, or intervention (Lee 2005: 59). In this view, it is a teleology that has not to do with mankind, but with nature's own goal-orientedness, which at the same time is the trait that would demonstrates it intrinsic value. So that ontology would matter more than history. But is this a sensible way of defining nature? Or is it just an easy escape from its intricacies? Although there is a sense in which nature certainly consists of the casual powers that exist independently of human beings, this definition is too lim- ited. It does not pay attention to the actual way in which the relationship between nature and humanity unfolds. Natural history is also social history—one that has spread human influence in so many ways, in such a scale, that it is now difficult to tell whether humanity is absent or not from a given natural process or a cer- tain natural entity. In fact, it will most probably not. Goethe was already aware of this, as he cautioned that the nature that we face "is not nature anymore, but a completely different entity than the one ancient Greeks had been occupied with" (Goethe 2006: 15). We have kept the word, but the world that it refers to has vanished. Are domesticated animals, man-designed rivers, or managed ecosystems still 'natural'? If we stick to a strict distinction between the natural and artificial, they are not, since they have been mixed up with society and they remain autono- mous only in a literal sense, i.e. their core components have not been created by