Nature - autonomous learning

74 the ‘nature’ of geographyanimal-rights activists believe that animals have rights justas humans do (see Wise 2000 for a sophisticated case), whileinterventionist-technocentrics are happy to genetically modifyanimals for research and nutritional purposes.Knowledges of natureAs the previous two subsections make clear, there’d been something ofa sea change in geography’s approach to understanding nature by thelate 1960s. First, the ‘nature’ in question was almost exclusively the nonhumanworld, biotic and abiotic, animate and inanimate. Second, the studyof this nature became the preserve of physical geographers, a smallishcohort of human–environment geographers and a smattering of regionalgeographers.Third, physical geographers were also interested in nature inthe sense of both ‘essence’ and ‘inherent force’.Their agenda was to disclosethe true character of environmental processes and the effects they had onand at the earth’s surface.This was greatly facilitated by the tendency of thesegeographers to favour highly empirical, small-scale, case-study researchbased on careful field and laboratory analysis. Finally, the relatively youngbut fast-growing field of human geography was largely non-naturalistic bythe late 1960s. Its subject matter was people and the spatial organisationof their activities. Human geographers during the spatial-science yearsavoided talk of ‘human nature’ – except in those models and theories thatassumed universal human characteristics (like ‘rationality’ and the desire to‘minimise effort’) in order to generate testable hypotheses about real-worldspatial patterns.This was the start of a four-decade process of making humangeography a social science as distinct from a natural one, as well as ahumanities subject too.How do we explain this shift in the nature geographers studied, inthe geographers who studied it and in how they studied it? The aspirationto make physical geography a science had obvious appeal during themid-twentieth century. Science, after all, had the image of being morerigorous than any other knowledge-producing activity. By employingprecise measurement techniques, the scientific method, and theories, lawsand models, physical geographers could gain respectability as analysts ofthe non-human world. They were to be field scientists, paralleling the