Our byline is “exploring how culture shapes our relationship to the natural world,” but what exactly is “culture?” Raymond Williams, one of the founders of cultural studies calls culture one of the two or three most difficult words in the English language and nature the most complex.

With the help of Michael Ziser, Associate Professor of English at UC Davis, and Caleb Scoville, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley, I take a deep dive into the history of the word culture and its uses. One of the things to come out of our conversations is a fundamental paradox – culture is often defined as that which is not nature (or not natural) and, yet, the origin of the word and, arguably, the origin of cultural practices, arise out of our relationship to the natural world.