Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 111in a relatively objective way, and (iii) we can derive (though not necessarilydirectly) moral (and aesthetic) judgements about nature from an understandingof the ‘facts’ of this world. Physical geographers, as we’ll see in thenext chapter, hold fast to (i) and (ii) above, leaving a small number of othersin the discipline to focus on (iii). If we’re to evaluate the claims of thesegeographers – who insist that their knowledge of nature is more or lessaccurate – we need first to understand the nature-sceptical stance of manyothers in the discipline. I begin by discussing the precedents for thede-naturalising knowledge of nature I explore in this chapter.Thereafter,I use case studies to explore the key claims of geography’s present-daynature-sceptical researchers.PRECEDENTSIn the previous chapter I noted the inverse correlation between widersocietal concerns with nature and the level and character of geographers’interest in nature. Since the late 1960s there have been two waves ofenvironmental concern, the latter (beginning in the early 1990s) coincidentwith increased anxiety about science and technology’s new-found powerto remake human nature.Yet only parts of geography have embraced the‘human-impact’ agenda, while very few geographers seem alarmed bythe recomposition of the human person prefigured by molecular genetics,nanotechnology and the like.This is not to say that geographers don’t (intheir professional capacity) care about what’s happening to those thingswe call natural things. But it does raise the following question: why, whenso many people are worried about the possible ‘end of nature’, do manygeographers seem relatively unconcerned? The answer is, I think, twofold.First, as I’ll explain in the sections to follow, these geographers doubtwhether there is a ‘nature’ whose end is nigh. Second, these geographersargue that when nature-talk proliferates in a society we should inquireinto who is doing the talking and what they have to gain (and lose) fromdiscussing nature in the ways they do. In Chapter 1, I argued that the wordnature has three principal meanings. As early as 1974, during the firstwave of environmental concern in the West, David Harvey argued that thepowerful in any society wield the definition of keywords like nature to theirown advantage. His essay ‘Population, resources and the ideology of science’was unorthodox in its time and set a precedent for the current attemptsby geographers to de-naturalise nature.Where many geographers of this