In The Philosophers' Magazine 44 (1st Quarter 2009) David Cooper, author of A Philosophy of Gardens, writes on man's entanglement with nature.

Crucially, the co-dependence between our creative agency and our experience of nature goes all the way down. For, in the total context of life that they presuppose there is, as William James put it, no way of "weeding out" and isolating the contributions of the human and the non-human. And it is a codependence that goes all the way back, as well. For all creative engagement with nature is "always already" informed by a way of experiencing nature, just as the way nature presents itself to us is "always already" shaped by our purposive engagement with it. This is Heidegger's point in the celebrated passage on the Greek temple in his essay on "The Origin of the Work of Art". The temple - more generally, Greek art and craft - gave to natural things, like eagles and rocks, their "look", and enabled "earth" to emerge for the Greeks as it did. But, at the same time, the "look" of things and the emergence of "earth" helped to shape the Greeks' "outlook on themselves," as manifested in their culture, politics and creative ambitions.

It is all too easy, of course, to take for granted not only the purposes and practices familiar in our own culture but our prevailing perceptions of the natural order. And when these are taken for granted, the rich context of co-dependence between purposes and perceptions is forgotten. That is, perhaps, why Heidegger chose an ancient culture to illustrate his point, and why we too, if we are properly to appreciate deep co-dependence, do well to reflect on purposes and perceptions unfamiliar or alien to us; to reflect, for instance, on the design of the Japanese tea house garden, or on aboriginal rock art. Reflection, in both cases, must soon indicate the extent of co-dependence in the context that makes such practices possible - for these are practices that presuppose ways in which nature shows up for people, but ways that themselves owe their possibility to just such practices of design and depiction.

  ¶ 6:54 AM