Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 123control of their traditional food sources. Second, now reliant on earningenough money to buy food and pay colonial taxes, households foundthemselves subject to the vagaries of international commodity markets. Ifgroundnut and cotton prices fluctuated then Hausa peasants could findthemselves lacking the monetary means to buy enough food. Finally, theprevious moral economy was eroded as former village and district headsused their wealth to become money-lenders to peasants in need of loansto tide them over.As time passed, former relationships of reciprocity werethus superceded by commercial relationships where loan repaymentswere expected with interest. As Watts concluded, the Hausa became morevulnerable to drought not because this ‘natural hazard’ was unavoidablebut because of changes in the constitution of the real and moral economies.As with Harvey,Watts wasn’t denying the reality of drought (or any othernatural hazard). Rather, he saw it as a ‘trigger’ for problems that were fundamentallysocio-economic and political in origin rather than environmental(see Abramovitz 2001; Pelling 2001).RE-PRESENTING NATUREI have dwelt upon the ideas of Harvey, Hewitt and Watts at some lengthbecause they were insightful precursors to the present-day research bygeographers that aims to de-naturalise that which seems natural. Inthis section I want to focus on claims that what we call nature is nothingmore than a set of ideas or representations. In the next section I willfocus more on the ‘real nature’ that these ideas and representations denote.As will become clear, my overall argument in this book that knowledgesof nature are not reducible to the material things they refer to resonates withthe work of several authors I discuss in the three subsections below. Butthis does not mean that I take sides and uncritically endorse these authors’ideas. Though I am obviously sympathetic to the notion that what wecall ‘nature’ (either directly or by way of the term’s collateral concepts) saysas much about our ways of thinking as it does about nature itself, it wouldbe inconsistent of me to champion those who have promulgated thisnotion.After all, the claim that we often confuse representations of naturewith their referents is itself a knowledge-claim: a claim about other people’sclaims about nature. Accordingly, it is incumbent upon me to remainas impartial as I can be. Among other things, this involves an honest lookat the intellectual, moral and aesthetic agenda that those (like me) who insist