It is perhaps because we are so used to thinking and writing indoors that we find it so difficult to imagine the inhabited environment as anything other than an enclosed, interior space. What would happen if, instead, we were to take our inquiry out of doors?

First and foremost, we would have to contend with those fluxes of the medium that we call weather (Ingold, 2005). (5) Compared with the amount of attention devoted to the solid forms of the landscape, the virtual absence of weather from philosophical debates about the nature and constitution of the environment is extraordinary. This absence, I believe, is the result of a logic of inversion that places occupation before habitation, closure before movement, and surface before medium. In the terms of this logic, the weather is simply unthinkable (Ingold, 2006, page 17). Between what the archaeologist Brnar Olsen calls "the hard physicality of the world'' and the realms of abstract thought in which "all that is solid melts into air'' (2003, page 88), no conceptual space remains for the circulations of the actual air we breathe and on which life depends. In the alternative view I propose "a view from the open" what is unthinkable is the idea that life is played out upon the inanimate surface of a ready-made world. Inhabitants, I contend, make their way through a world-in-formation rather than across its preformed surface. As they do so, and depending on the circumstances, they may experience wind and rain, sunshine and mist, frost and snow, and a host of other conditions, all of which fundamentally affect their moods and motivations, their movements, and their possibilities of subsistence, even as they sculpt and erode the plethora of surfaces upon which inhabitants tread. (Ingold, "Bindings against Boundaries" 2008, p. 1802)