Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 103on the eve of the Earth Summit, Billy Turner et al. published The Earth asTransformed by Human Action (1990) – a sort of agenda-setting follow-up toThomas’s (1956) volume edited out of Clark University (where GeorgePerkins Marsh had plied his trade). In addition, if Gregory (2000: pt IV) isright, physical geography is likely to continue the trend towards appliedresearch.Turner (2002: 61) has thus recently asked:‘Is the discipline poisedfor another moment in which the human–environment identity ascends todominance?’ (see also Liverman 1999). For several reasons the answer isprobably ‘no’. Internally, geography remains too diverse and fragmentedfor a wholesale return to the ‘bridging’ function envisaged by Mackinderand Davis. Externally, I suspect Gardner’s right that geographers ‘have beenleft standing at the bus stop as the ecologists, earth scientists andenvironmental scientists have rushed to board [the “human impact” bus]’(Gardner 1996: 32). I will say more about geography’s human–physicaldivide in Chapter 4. For now, though, it’s worth noting that at the teachinglevel geography’s ‘human–environment’ identity is much stronger than itis at the research level. Pre-university students are often drawn to geographybecause of its perceived role as the study of humanly caused environmentalproblems, and many university teachers and textbook writers cater to thisstudent audience (see, for example, Middleton 1995 and Pickering andOwen 1997).All this said, in the past five years or so, a cohort of geographers havecalled into question the ontological distinction between the ‘natural’ andthe ‘social’ domains.This distinction, as explained earlier in the chapter, isfundamental to the differences between human and physical geography.It is a distinction between linked, but putatively different, orders of reality.Recently, some have suggested that reality is not, after all, separated intothese two ontological domains.They claim that we have always lived in a‘post-natural’, ‘post-social’ and even ‘post-human’ world.This claim, inrather different ways, has been made by (mostly human) geographersenamoured with actor–network thinking, non-representational theory,process dialectics and the so-called ‘new ecology’. I will examine these nondualisticapproaches in this book’s penultimate chapter.These approacheshave, as we will see, been applied to understandings of the human body andthe non-human world.They challenge the ontological division that holdshuman and physical geographers apart but do not, I shall argue, do muchto unify geographers’ understandings of nature.This, I will further argue,is a good thing.