Nature - autonomous learning

94 the ‘nature’ of geographyBox 2.5 THE GEOGRAPHICAL LEFTSince the late 1980s, left-wing human and environmental geographershave become an increasingly important force in geographyresearch and teaching. Though it is difficult to generalise, twothings that these geographers have in common are (i) they exposepower, domination, inequality, oppression and injustice and(ii) they wish for a future world in which these five things areeliminated or at least ameliorated. One of the peculiarities ofgeography’s left-wingers (so-called ‘critical geographers’ or ‘radicalgeographers’) is that there are few ecocentrists or biocentristsamong them. Unlike the disciplines of sociology, philosophy andgovernment/politics, geography’s left-wingers rarely preach a‘nature-first’ morality – whether in relation to the non-humanworld or aspects of the human body that might be considered‘untouchable’ (like our stem cells). This does not mean that thesegeographers do not care about what we call ‘nature’. Many of themdo, but they either (i) seek to balance a concern with the nonhumanworld with a concern for people’s well-being (as in thedoctrine of ‘sustainable development’) or (ii) insist that what wecall nature does not have inherent rights. In the latter case, theargument is that a nature-first morality is a social choice that wemake, not something dictated to us by the facts of nature (as inmoral naturalism, see Box 3.2). For the most part, though, left-winggeographers are not ‘greens’ (preoccupied with the well-being ofthe environment) nor are they defenders of the ‘natural body’against the ‘intrusions’ of, say, recombinant DNA technology.Instead, they focus on social, economic, cultural and politicalissues affecting marginalised or oppressed groups in society – likehomosexuals, women or people who suffer from racial discrimination.A graphic illustration of this is Blunt and Wills’s (2000)Dissident Geographies. This excellent introduction to left-wingthinking in human geography contains no chapter on the environment,while the discussion of identity and corporeality is foldedinto chapters on constructions of sexuality, class and gender.