Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 119and rural labourers who were often dispossessed so that urbanelites could enjoy their picturesque views of a seeminglyharmonious, well-ordered rural environment. By ‘naturalising’ theview, landscape painting thus, for Cosgrove, both arose from andreproduced the social relationships of a nascent, class-dividedcapitalist society. In his estimation, landscape was a class-specificway of seeing akin to ‘ideology’ in the Marxist sense of the term.Along with Stephen Daniels, Cosgrove went on to pioneer thegeographical study of ‘symbolic’ and ‘iconographic’ urban andrural landscapes. This research opened the door for the ‘culture ofnature’ thinking I discuss later in this chapter. It also pointed to theimportance of visual constructions of nature, as much as writtenand spoken ones.Unnatural hazards: de-emphasising the physicalenvironmentAside from showing that ideas about nature are constructed (rather thanbeing ‘mirrors of nature’), Harvey’s essay also questioned the relative causalimportance of the environment in understanding human–environmentrelationships. In other words, once one had penetrated behind the veils ofideology, Harvey argued that the environment is not as important a factoras is often supposed in the environment–society relationship. Specifically,his critique of neo-Malthusianism implied that what appear to be naturallycaused problems (like starvation) are,in fact,socially caused problems.This attempt to deemphasisethe physical environment was central to Interpretations of Calamity(Hewitt 1983).The importance of this book is that it sought to de-naturalise‘natural hazards’ – which, by definition, appear to be thoroughly nonhumanand non-social in their origins. What, it might be asked, can benon-natural about droughts or tornadoes or floods? Or rather: why do weroutinely think that natural hazards are just that,‘natural’?