This book examines the embodied nature of people's experience in, and of, the modern world. It is therefore part of the deep-seated 'turn towards the body'. However, it is partly critical of this development in as much as it affirms that

the sociology of the body has downplayed the extent to which the body is located in, and involved with, nature, the countryside, the outdoors, landscape and wilderness.

The book argues that bodies in nature are subject to novel, complex and contradictory opportunities of freedom and escape, surveillance and monitoring. The book guides readers through the various ways in which these bodily opportunities and constraints are temporally and spatially organized and managed.

Bodies of Nature - Phil Macnaghten and John Urry
Introduction
¿Botanizing on the Asphalt¿ - Nigel Clark
The Complex Life of Cosmopolitan Bodies
Still Life in the Nearly Present Time - Nigel Thrift
The Object of Nature
The Climbing Body, Nature and the Experience of Modernity - Neil Lewis
Walking in the British Countryside - Tim Edensor
Reflexivity, Embodied Practices and Ways to Escape
These Boots Are Made for Walking... - Mike Michael
Mundane Technology, the Body and Human-Environment Relations
Naked as Nature Intended - David Bell and Ruth Holliday
Action and Noise over a Hundred Years - David Matless
The Making of a Nature Region
Bodies in the Woods - Phil Macnaghten and John Urry
Perceiving the Environment in Finnish Lapland - Tim Ingold and Terhi Kurttila