Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 75laboratory scientists and applying some of the latter’s insights (see Chapter4). Meanwhile, if human geography was to study the spatial patterningof what the social sciences and humanities studied ageographically, then itcould ill afford to study the environment too.To place this in context, it’simportant to note that in the West the post-war state apparatus increasedin size enormously. National governments played a major role in publiclife after 1945, not least through elaborate welfare-state provisions for theircitizens.They took on management functions in relation not only to societybut to the environment also (for instance, the US Environmental ProtectionAgency was created by President Nixon in the early 1970s).This created aniche for both human and physical geographers, as well as those occupyingthe zone between the two. For instance, many human geographers becameactively involved in transportation policy, urban and regional planning,and industrial location policy.They could use their models and theories toanalyse and plan the spatial organisation of societies. Physical geographerswere likewise able to use their scientific credentials to attract state fundingfor ‘pure environmental research’. Finally, human–environment geographerscould contribute to resource and environmental managementwearing their fact-based, technocratic hats.By the early 1970s, then, the knowledges of environment beingproduced by geographers possessed the following characteristics. First,in keeping with the scientific paradigm that had swept through geography,much of this knowledge was claimed to be realistic. In other words, itwas knowledge about a non-human world whose characteristics, it wasbelieved, could be accurately described, explained and possibly predicted.This sort of realistic knowledge was contrasted sharply with the sometimesspurious assertions of the determinists of an earlier generation and withthe evocative prose of many regional geographers. Second, geographers’knowledges of environment at this time were largely cognitive ones.Questions of morality, ethics and aesthetics vis-à-vis the non-human worldwere left largely to philosophers, poets, and historians of ideas.Third, thiswas linked to a belief that geographers’ research on the environment wasvalue-free for the most part.This meant not only that researchers bracketedtheir own values so that the facts of nature could ‘speak for themselves’.It also meant that the knowledges of environment that geographersproduced were believed to be ‘neutral’.Values were supposed to be exteriorto scientific research not bound into it. Finally, a good deal of geographers’research about the environment at this time was intended to be instrumental.