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This year's Reith lecturer is the British social anthropologist Professor Edmund Leach. Currently serving as Provost of King's College, Cambridge, he has previously lectured in Social Anthropology at the University and at the London School of Economics. His notable writings on his field research from Kurdistan, Burma, Borneo and Ceylon have challenged received notions about cultural change.

In his Reith series entitled 'A Runaway World?', Professor Leach explores the notion of 'relational structures' and in this lecture entitled 'Men and Nature', he contemplates Man's relationship with his environment.

He argues that man is almost equivalent to God in the way that he manipulates himself and his surroundings, so why, he asks, are we afraid to accept and assert our own divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and yet it also leaves us fearful. Why should this be? How might these worries be resolved?