how much they respected the glories of nature.
In fact if anything it's surely the other way round. No doubt it's something of an over-simplification to say that before the Romantics people used to shun mountains and wild nature as ugly and frightening, but there's surely some truth in it. Only we moderns go off in search of the world's most desolate places, and only we moderns spend vast amounts of time and effort setting up national parks, trying to preserve endangered species, making films about the beauty of our world – and then build up decadent romantic fantasies about how nasty modern life is, and how our noble ancestors used to live in harmony with nature.
Baz Edmeades has a book, Megafauna, First Victims of the Human-Caused Extinction, out next year.
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