Nature - autonomous learning

112 de-naturalisationera tried to reinvigorate the disciplinary middle ground by focusing onnatural resource exploitation, Harvey argued that the supposed ‘environmentalcrisis’ of the early 1970s was a fiction. Somewhat later, KennethHewitt’s (1983) Interpretations of Calamity sought a less biophysical explanationof what seemed to be a quintessentially natural phenomenon: namely‘environmental hazards’. In this section I want to explore Harvey’s andHewitt’s early interventions because they focused attention on two broadissues that preoccupy contemporary researchers in human and environmentalgeography: namely, the power of representations of nature and,second, the relative causal importance of natural and societal processes(Whatmore 1999).Ideologies of natureAs the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, population historywas made. In mid-1999 the world’s populace numbered 6 billion for thefirst time. Shortly thereafter India became the second country on the planetto contain over 1 billion inhabitants. Looking ahead, the United Nationspredicts that the global population will number some 9.3 billion by 2050,a 200 per cent increase on the 1950 total. Though one rarely hears theterm in official circles these days, such figures lead some to worry about‘overpopulation’.This notion can be traced back to the influential writingsof English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus (1798). Malthusmaintained that while resources can only be increased in an arithmeticalprogression (2, 4, 6, 8 etc), population numbers can increase geometrically(2, 4, 8, 16 etc.). In the modern era, overpopulation thinking is associatedwith the neo-Malthusians of the early 1970s.As mentioned in the previouschapter, alarmist books like Blueprint for Survival (Goldsmith et al. 1972),The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1970) and The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al.1972) predicted a dire future where a finite natural-resource base wouldlimit the numbers of people who can live on the planet. Following Malthus’sthinking, these books argued that ‘preventative checks’ (like limitingchildbirth through increased contraceptive measures) were the only wayto avoid ‘positive checks’ like starvation.The context for these and otherneo-Malthusian analyses was rapid post-1945 population growth in thedeveloping world – notably in Africa and Asia.The stark practical implicationsof neo-Malthusianism were well captured in a 1974 essay by Americanbiologist Garret Hardin. In ‘The ethics of a lifeboat’ Hardin allegorically