LAUSR

This special issue of Annals of Leisure Research provides an opportunity to critically consider social relationships with nature as they are constituted in, and through, leisure settings, practices and discourses. ‘Nature’, at its most elemental understanding, the biophysical world that comprises the interlinked relationships of water, atmosphere, geology and soils, and living organisms, is a difficult and slippery concept to grapple with ontologically and epistemologically. Our understandings of nature and the meanings that we attach to it are contested and contingent; they vary across time, space and culture. Nature as an epistemic realm is as much a product of history, society and culture as it is a product of biophysical and ecological processes. As environmental historian, William Cronon (1996) has suggested