Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 91for a green geography. But it’s important to understand that in humangeography this de-naturalising move has been seen as morally and politicallyprogressive for the most part.As early as 1974, David Harvey pointedout that those who claim to do things ‘for the good of nature’ are usuallypassing their own interests off as if they inhered in the non-human world.Phrases like ‘nature knows best’ or ‘genetic modification is unnatural’all take a supposedly pristine nature as a benchmark against which certainsocial attitudes or practices are positively or negatively judged. By exposingthe social component of both ideas about nature and uses of it, 1990shuman geographers were trying to ‘de-mystify’ collective understandingsof the environment (see Box 2.4).Box 2.4 FEMINIST GEOGRAPHY AND THE ENVIRONMENTFeminist geographers were among the most important early criticsof the idea that the non-human world ‘speaks for itself’ if only the‘correct’ investigative procedures are used to comprehend it. First,several of these geographers showed how both academic and layunderstandings of ‘natural landscapes’ drew upon highly genderedmetaphors. For instance, Norwood and Monk’s (1987) The Desertis No Lady and Kolodny’s (1984) The Land Before Her, were pathbreakingexposés of the deeply patriarchal assumptions written intodominant views of the US ‘frontier’ during the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. In both books, a close scrutiny of these viewsrevealed that frontier lands were seen as things to be tamed,mastered and domesticated to human needs. In other words,dominant male views about women (as the ‘weaker sex’) were shownto be unconsciously transposed onto views of the natural world – atransposition which further entrenched patriarchy. Second, somefeminist geographers broadened this exposure of the pejorativefeminisation of the non-human world. For instance, in her importantbook Feminism and Geography Gillian Rose (1993) argued thatgeography as a discipline is masculinist. Far from geographicalknowledge being the result of a disembodied, universal, value-freerationality, she argued that it is highly gendered. This gendered gaze