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[email protected]. ©Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society and other rightsholders Feature Articles Nature Is Dead. Long Live Nature! Our view of what constitutes the natural world has evolved and, as restorative conservation efforts on the island of Hawai’i show, must continue to do so Robert J. Cabin An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, The years since the publication of restore Hawaii’s remaining “natural” just like an animal or a plant. The idea The End of Nature have proved Mc- areas. Environmentalists can be under- in this case is “nature,” the separate Kibben’s prescient warnings about the standably impatient with people they and wild province, the world apart escalating consequences of human- perceive as slow to act on conservation from man to which he adapted, under induced climate change depressingly issues: How can they while away their whose rules he was born and died. accurate. But was his vision of the time pondering esoteric topics such as death of nature similarly prophetic— the nature of nature while our planet is —Bill McKibben or greatly exaggerated? going down the tubes? After spending Hawaii’s many paradoxes provide a more time in what often felt like the tri- n his best-selling and influential 1989 globally important microcosm in which age room of Hawaiian conservation, I I book The End of Nature, Bill McKib- to examine this question.