Letting go of one's fear of death, however, means releasing the fear of which 'side. According to Lucretius, this is how most people view death. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book 3 (English Text) LUCRETIUS ON THE NATURE OF THINGS Translated by Ian Johnston Vancouver Island University Nanaimo, British Columbia 2010 Minor Revisions 2017 For Table of Contents and information about this translation, including copyright, please use this link: Contents.

He writes that during these horrific wars, everyone lived in fear of which side would triumph and who would subsequently rule them. In Book Three, Lucretius explains that there is no reason to fear death, using an illustration from the Peloponnesian Wars to make his point.

Describing the occurrence of accidents, he introduces the story of Helen of Troy and the Trojan War that resulted from her abduction. Lucretius frequently uses war imagery to illustrate scientific points about atoms and nature. He carries out these twin themes in De rerum natura, painting dreadful, gruesome pictures of war and pleasant pictures of people enjoying each other's company and supporting each other. In the Nature of Things is an indispensable map of emerging formations in the new worlds of nature and artifact called the environment.As an Epicurean, Lucretius opposes war and values friendship and cooperation. Informed by notions of rhetoric and discourse, the essays collectively ask how the stakes in what can account as nature at the end of the twentieth century are worked out for different actors in the contentious, worldly practices of green consumerism, wilderness preservation, genetic technologies, political theory, science fiction films and fiction, agrarian research and pesticide use, post-colonial and anti-racist social movements, and the new story-telling strategies in science studies. The essays foreground the complex implications for environmental politics when nature can function neither as raw resource nor as transcendent ideal. Drawing on a wonderful array of popular, political, and scientific locations an practices, the essays examine how and why the distinction between nature and culture, which has grounded both management and holist positions on the environment, has eroded. Reissued to accompany Stephen Greenblatts The Swerve: the epic poem that changed the course of human thought forever. Beginning with the prospect of eating a TV dinner or shopping in an organic food store, this important collection of essays explores the many contested meanings of nature in contemporary Western discourses.

On the nature of things book