Unit 3 Enviroment I 环境
Passage(2/4)


Hints:

Keith Thomas

Man and the Natural World

 

It enables the rural lobby to characterize itself as an indigenous culture, its native traditions and pastimes, hunting and fishing, threatened by an oppressive urban majority. And the underlying message lines in that the countryside is best managed by country people. After all, they know about such things. Unfortunately, too often, they don't. As the historian Keith Thomas showed in his study, Man and the Natural World, the growth of our knowledge about nature has come by collecting the vulgar errors of country people. And although Thomas was writing about the period between 1500 and 1800, that process continues today, what country dwellers take for granted is till being confounded by the careful observation of reality.