‘Nature is never spent’ (Gerald Manley Hopkins).
‘One day soon, maybe . . . there will be no more Nature’ (Prince Bernhard, at a Wildlife Fund dinner).
‘There is no more Nature’ (Samuel Beckett, Endgame).
‘Nature fights back’ (Rachel Carson).

The disappearance of Nature is a central theme of modem fiction,. Among those novelists who tend to see it as an accomplished fact already, two responses seem to prevail. The first is typified by Robbe-Grillet’s verdict that modern man feels no deprivation at the loss of Nature, for Nature was never more than an illusion, comforting perhaps in a meaningless world but no less illusory for all that. To be rid of Nature is to be at last free. The second response is typified by Beckett’s verdict: there is no more Nature, and the loss is tragic and the deprivation catastrophic. To be rid of Nature is to be in the realm of the lost ones, in a world of sheer ‘lessness’. A third response, however, has to be considered. This is latent in Mailer’s identification of the source of our troubles about Nature in the triumph of what he calls corporation-land: that combination of technology, materialism and exploitative brutality towards the environment which is most evident in the cities of America. However, in Mailer’s case there is also a certain fascination for, as well as hatred of, this massive agglomeration of brutalities : there is pride, energy, vitality in it, as well as regimentation, pollution and despair. Mailer’s ambivalence is characteristic of a general uncertainty about ‘the big plot being hatched out by Nature’.

This uncertainty is evident enough elsewhere, in the utterances of people speaking from many different viewpoints.