This text offers a reading of the story of Eden that seeks to open up a new understanding of the history of our relationship with, and attitudes to, nature. The book shows how the contradictions in the relationship of the human and the natural define the central controversy of ecology: the conflict between the deep ecologists, who dream of returning to Eden, restoring a state of harmony in which wilderness reclaims the Earth; and the managers, who dream of a man-made paradise, one that presumes a harmony between the best interests of humans and their planet.