Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 109‘real’ domain that is not, in either degree or kind, a ‘social construction’.After concluding this chapter with an examination of the ‘human–physicaldivide’ in geography, the penultimate one looks at the work of those whowould do away with the idea that nature is either a social construction ora reality irreducible to social representations and practices. In effect, thiswork transcends the commonplace dualisms of ‘nature’/‘society’,‘human’/‘non-human’. In each chapter, I try to use case studies andvignettes in order to illustrate how geographers are studying nature in theways they are and why it matters. I draw these examples from the publishedliterature so that readers can see exactly how nature in the ‘real world’ hasbeen analysed by geographers. My trawl of this literature is deliberatelyselective since I do not want to sacrifice depth for a broad-brush discussionof the knowledges of nature in question.As I said, this chapter describes and explains how several contemporarygeographers have de-naturalised nature. As we’ll see, this involves one orboth of the following theses, depending on which geographers are doingthe arguing: (i) that nature is less important as a causal factor in humanaffairs than was previously thought and (ii) that those things that seemto be natural are, in fact, social through and through. In its strongest form,the de-naturalising argument suggests that nature is not natural (i.e. onlyapparently natural).This amounts to a reversal of environmental determinismover a century after geography’s constitution as a university subject. 2It suggests that societies, whether they realise it or not, hold the key tounderstanding what nature is and what happens to those things we thinkof as natural things. Geography’s de-naturalising thrust has been led bycritical human geographers and by a cohort of left-wing environmentalgeographers. In this light, my chapter title can be seen as an ironic one.For these geographers have ‘rediscovered’ nature as a topic in a subversiveway: namely, by questioning its very naturalness. As we’ll see, this questioninghas not been absolute.There are several human and environmentalgeographers who still believe that what we call ‘nature’ matters in abiophysical sense. But for the most part, present-day human geographersand several environmental geographers hold to a ‘nature-sceptical’ (denaturalising)stance.It is interesting to compare this stance with that held by others in thesocial sciences and humanities. For the most part, economists have jumpedon the ‘human-impact’ bandwagon.This is no doubt because anthropogenicenvironmental problems appear to be proliferating and also because a good