nature

"Our Culture abhors the world.
Yet quicksand is swallowing the duelists; the river is threatening the fighter: earth, waters, and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a decor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now own thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and maneuvers. They burst in our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vagues, and cosmetic idea of them: nature.
what was once local -- this river, that swamp -- is now global: Planet Earth."
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, p.3