Nature - autonomous learning

100 the ‘nature’ of geographyincinerators) compared to wealthier or more influential social groups (e.g.Pulido 1996).These injustice studies focused on what Beck (1992) called‘manufactured environmental risks’, not ones that are wholly natural, andwere especially evident in US geography. Second, in Britain, at around thesame time, several geographers became interested in how environmentalexperts communicate their findings to a wider public and how, in turn,the public can democratically inform environmental-policy formulation(e.g. Eden 1996). This research into expert and lay knowledges of theenvironment was an attempt to challenge the post-war ‘linear model’ whichpresumed that scientists and policy-makers know best, with the publicpositioned as a mere recipient of policies fashioned on its behalf butwithout its active input.This research showed that environmental knowledgesare plural and often conflicting, and it impinged on the issueof ‘environmental citizenship’ among ordinary people (e.g. Burgess et al.1998).Third, rural and agricultural geography became radicalised in the1990s and also ceased to be the intellectual backwaters they had been sincethe Second World War. Agricultural geography, in particular, becameenergised by the application of radical ideas from economic geography tothe analysis of changes in modern farming – like the move to factoryfarming of certain livestock in industrialised societies (see Goodman andWatts 1997). Fourth, several geographers developed critical perspectives onhow national and local states regulate societal uses of the environment (e.g.Bridge 2000).This research into environmental regulation and governancetreated the state as a non-neutral actor interposing itself between business,the public and the natural environment. Finally, some (mostly human)geographers called for an ‘animal geography’ that would examine thechanging character and ethics of people–animal relations over time andacross space (Wolch and Emel 1998).In contrast to all of the above, a less politically radical tradition ofresource geography continued to operate through the 1990s, one that canbe traced back to the aforementioned early 1970s scares about resourceexhaustion.This kind of resource analysis was concerned with how bestto use resources given their often finite nature, competing demands for theiruse, and uneven access to them within and between societies (Rees 1990).Politically, it tended not to ask fundamental questions about the socialcreation of resource scarcity, the social restriction of access to resources orthe widespread belief that resources are but means to human ends (Emeland Peet 1989).This said, a few resource analysts in geography – no doubt