UNCOMMON GROUND: Toward Reinventing Nature. Edited by William Cronon. Norton. 561 pp. $29.95

Pristine, balanced, wild. These are some of the terms we apply to the natural world. Yet there is nothing natural about our use of such terms, according to the 14 essays collected in this volume. Both Cronon, an his- torian at the University of Wisconsin, and his contributors assert that our ideas about nature are "culturally constructed."

Several essays are illuminating forays into what might be called "construction sites”--the Amazon rain forest, Sea World, Central Park--where popular ideas about nature are formed. Cronon, Candace Slater, and other contributors point out that the notion of an Edenic natural world, unsullied by human presence, is a myth that fosters unrealistic environmental policies.

Yet these strong points are undermined by the tendency of many contributors to treat nature as a mere linguistic bauble whose meaning can be constructed--and deconstructed--at will. More useful than some of these essays would have been a serious discussion of the new, and presumably more accurate, "constructions" of nature now being developed by science.

--Steven Lagerfeld