Nature - autonomous learning

90 the ‘nature’ of geographymany human geographers have looked at those things that are often thoughtto be natural and argued that they are, in fact, wholly or partly social, culturaland economic.The philosopher Kate Soper (1995) has called this a ‘naturesceptical’stance. Simplifying, in relation to the environment this denaturalisingmanoeuvre had two elements. First, some human geographersargued that representations of nature – whether held by environmentalists,ordinary people or anyone else – typically say more about those whoadvocate them than the ‘nature’ they supposedly depict. These representationsmight be verbal (e.g. in everyday speech), written (e.g. innewspaper articles) or visual (e.g. in wildlife documentaries or landscapeart). An early example was Cosgrove and Daniel’s (1988) path-breakingwork on one of nature’s ‘collateral concepts’, landscape.Taking landscapedesign and landscape painting as foci, they argued that power relationsbetween different social groups found expression in the way landscapeswere both physically arranged and subjectively viewed.They thus questionedthe belief that landscapes were simply picturesque scenes or sourcesof sensory delight for all to enjoy equally. Another early example wasJacquie Burgess’s (1992) research into a conflict over the use of RainhamMarshes, a conservation area near London. Burgess showed how MusicCorporation of America and those opposing its planned development ofthe marshes both passed off highly specific and conflicting depictionsof the area as ostensibly ‘correct’ ones.Second, other human geographers examined the social relations, valuesand norms that led to certain transformations of the non-human world.This more material focus was not, however, inspired by a belief that certainenvironmental usages were ‘anti-ecological’ or ‘unnatural’. Rather, thesuggestion was that a good deal of the environment has not been ‘natural’for a very long time. Indeed, the Marxist geographer Neil Smith (1984)felt compelled to talk about the physical production of nature in capitalistsocieties – a claim that now seems prescient in light of the ‘biotechnology’revolution in agriculture, forestry and aquaculture. In sum, since the early1990s many human geographers have shown that, in both representationaland physical terms, the non-human world is in some measure a socialconstruction. 5This de-naturalising focus on the non-human world may seem perversegiven the apparently pressing environmental problems that now confronthumanity. In questioning the ‘naturalness’ of an external nature it may seemto undermine the claims of environmentalists and to hold out little hope