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It is heartening to see that so many of the scholarly and personal contributions of our special issue should have addressed the complex collisions between culture and nature manifested today within Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics Rainforest World Heritage Areas.

It is heartening to see that so many of the scholarly and personal contributions of our special issue should have addressed the complex collisions between culture and nature manifested today within Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics Rainforest World Heritage Areas.

Throughout the first year of the French Revolution The Timesnewspaper could not decide who was the madder, Lord George Gordon or Edmund Burke. The former as a violent incendiary and convicted libeler had fortunately been safely locked in Newgate the previous year, but Burke was still loose. The newspaper had no doubt that he belonged in Bedlam; there could be no other explanation for his obsessive campaign to impeach Warren Hastings long after everyone else had lost interest in the case. A stream of reports suggested variously that he had checked himself into a lunatic asylum, been forcibly confined in a straitjacket, or become temporarily deranged through physical and mental exhaustion. On first reading The Reflections on the Revolution in Francepublished in November the following year, many of his friends, as well as his foes, felt forced to agree.Even those who found things to like in the book were puzzled that Burke should have produced such a work. In the first place, how did one explain what Thomas Jefferson called “the revolution of Mr. Burke,” an abrupt political tack from advocating parliamentary reform, religious toleration, and American liberty to denouncing France's fledgling efforts at liberty. Why had he turned so violently against the Dissenters and radicals with whom he had often cooperated in the past? Why did he believe that the apparently innocuous revolution in France was unlike anything that had gone before? And even when events in that country began to move more in line with his predictions, there remained something embarrassing about the tone of the book.