Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 79tative techniques further distanced human geography from its physicalcounterpart. It also questioned the empiricism, observational detachmentand generalising impulses of both spatial science and behavioural geography.Humanistic geographers argued that one had to ‘get inside’ people’sheads in order to tease out the invisible thoughts and feelings that producevisible actions. But because researchers are human too, this meant that alllife-world research involved a ‘double hermeneutic’ – researchers couldonly uncover the ‘realities’ of other people’s life-worlds from the particularperspective of their own. Obviously, this posed a major challenge to the ideathat one could construct general theories and models of human thoughtand behaviour.In principle, humanistic geography was well equipped to link humangeography with the burgeoning environmental movement of the early tomid-1970s. Its focus on values and on the way people create attachmentsto the non-human (as much as human) world, could have led to a ‘greenhuman geography’.This geography might have studied how and why moreand more people in the West were valuing the environment during the1970s. It might have injected a ‘pro-environment’ (or ecocentric) moralityinto geography. And it might also have highlighted ordinary people’saesthetic appreciation of the environment. But this never happened (despiteTuan’s [1974] pioneering study and Seamon and Mugerauer’s [1985]later collection). Instead, humanistic geography was responsible forreintroducing another ‘nature’ into geography.This was the idea of ‘humannature’, albeit in a very abstract, non-biological form that made no referenceto the physical environment or to specific physiological or psychologicalprocesses. For humanistic geography, what all people had in common wastheir innate capacity for complex and changeable thought and feeling.This very general claim about ‘human nature’ had a normative dimension:for what worried many humanistic geographers was that different people’slife-worlds were being assaulted by a homogenising triad of consumerism,industrialism and governmental intervention that was eroding ‘arealdifferentiation’ (see Relph’s [1976] highly moralistic study, for example).Their abstract conception of ‘human nature’ was thus an ethical weapon:humanistic geographers wanted to show that any uninvited encroachmenton people’s life-worlds was, ipso facto, a bad thing.This brings us to a second new approach (or paradigm) within 1970shuman geography that also took issue with spatial science and behaviourismbut which departed from humanistic geography at the same time.This was