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22 2 What Is nature? Euripides and historians like Herodotus. As Glacken claimed, the notion of nature as the result of a conscious design that actually fits human needs will become a key element in Western constructions of nature (Glacken 1967). Nothing would then be vain in the latter, everything would make sense. This is already explicit in Aristotle and was later infused with an almost parodic undertone in thinkers like the Stoic Chrysippus, who claimed that the fly is useful because it wakes up the lazy. Inside this culture, though, a non-teleological view of nature's order was also developed by Epicurus, whose De rerum natura laid the foundations for a mate- rialistic conception of nature later refined by Marx and Engels (see Foster 2000). Notwithstanding this moral orientation, Greek thinkers linked their reflections to practical life. Their speculation about the environment was naturally accompa- nied by a material intervention in it. After all, the human species impulse towards survival and self-betterment is expressed even in the most apparently peaceful relations to the environment. As Hugues (2009: 21) notes, even the primal tradi- tion of the human race—the culture of hunting, fishing, and gathering—does not leave nature undisturbed. Let us add to that the impact that cities had on the human perception of nature and thus on the relationship with it. Apart from their environmental impact, cities created the impression of a human separation from nature, seen as a detached realm—an orderly one, as opposed to the chaotic outer nature. Nevertheless, maybe this was not just an impression, but the beginning of a simultaneous human move away from nature and into nature. Nature's desacralization is reinforced by the Christian narrative. In the Old Testament, a distinction between the divine and the natural is to be found, sig- nalling that the Christian God is not immanent but transcendent: He has created nature, but He is not nature (Passmore 1974). This belief is absent in other Middle- East religions. A later scholastic distinction between God as natura naturans (cre- ative nature) and the World as natura naturata (created nature) is already present here. It reinforces the gradual human detachment from nature and serves as a theo- logical justification for material practices (mainly agricultural) already firmly in place. Origen, an early Christian theologian, draws on the Psalm 104 to support the purposefulness of nature: "You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate". Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers per- petuated this view, which however suffered subtle but important variations, paving the way for the modern understanding of nature. In fact, it is the Medieval insist- ence on the divine rationality of the world that arguably lies behind the Western belief in the existence of hidden natural laws that can be scientifically discovered (Whitehead 1997). A thread that connects theology, science, and even alchemy. Yet again, every tradition leaves room for alternatives. As White (1967) famously pointed out, figures such as Saint Francis of Asisi, Hildegard de Bingen or even Teilhard de Chardin are representatives of a more holistic view of nature, one that looks for some kind of mystical communion with it and defends the need to protect it from human action. Their roots can be found in the Bible, too—an open text if there ever was one. It can thus be argued that the Jewish-Christian tradition includes both an instrumental and a non-instrumental view of nature, a reflection of the complex inheritance of the European cultural code (Eder 1995).