"Along with God, we have murdered nature", in Henry Lefebvre's words, and we have been forced to give birth to a Second Nature, a hybrid made up of decomposing bits rescued from the old. Lefebvre goes on to say that we need a new way of situating ourselves in this new nature. A natural world that is no longer the other, the unknown, the counterbalance of culture.
We have created a new reality that we have moulded for ourselves, for our species, and in turn it moulds us. Second Nature can be best observed where it has been completely re-created from scratch: in landfill sites that now resemble meadows, gravel quarries turned into lakes, beaches created and maintained by diggers, rivers that have been steered through new ways, plantations that are now called woods, and woods reduced to groves for picnics. In these sites, an uncanny vision sometimes forces us to stop to think twice, as if a spell was temporarily broken. But soon, it re-forms and closes the gap.