Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 89development geography becoming more left-wing, and rural geography(including agriculture) left as a rather marginal subfield. Overall, humangeography’s strong engagement with social-science (and especiallysociological) thinking during the 1980s cut it off from any concern withnature. Issues of the environment and ‘human nature’ were, in the main,left to other disciplines.Human geography during the 1990s: the rediscovery of natureSince the early 1990s human geographers have performed something ofa volte-face regarding nature. For over a decade it has been ‘on the agenda’in a way one would scarcely have anticipated in the 1980s. But it has(re)appeared in unconventional and unexpected ways. Let me explain.The United Nations’ Earth Summit was symptomatic of a resurgenceof environmental concern among governments, the public and evenbusiness during the 1990s. Unlike 1970s environmentalism – which oftenhad resource exhaustion and ‘overpopulation’ as its major foci – 1990senvironmentalism was preoccupied with anthropogenic environmentalchange. Global warming, ozone-layer thinning and ‘acid rain’ were justthree examples of humanity’s new-found power to create not merely localbut also global environmental problems.Another difference from the 1970swave of environmental concern was that, by the 1990s, philosophers,historians of ideas and political analysts had had two decades in which tofashion coherent moral doctrines for the conservation and preservationof the non-human world. Key figures like Arne Naess, Holmes Rolston IIIand Warwick Fox had helped to establish well-argued ecocentric positionsthat challenged the anthropocentrism of the ideas and practices typical ofmost societies worldwide. As a subset of this sophisticated ‘nature-first’thinking the philosopher Peter Singer (and others) had made great stridesin explaining why animals should have rights.In this context, one might reasonably have expected a green humangeography to emerge that was focused on people’s attitudes towards, anduses of, the non-human world. As I observed earlier, such a geographydid not emerge in the 1970s but could well have done two decades later.Morally, this green human geography might have been mildly or strongly‘pro-environment’ and critical of environmental degradation in its variousforms.Yet, in reality, 1990s human geography took a ‘de-naturalising turn’that was focused on human as much as non-human nature. In other words,