Nature - autonomous learning

124 de-naturalisationthat nature is a re-presentation are trying to further by writing books likethis one.In contemporary geography there are, broadly speaking, three mainvariations on the idea that our conceptions of nature are just that: conceptionsthat we routinely confuse with the things they denote. First,some have focused on ‘myths’ and ‘orthodoxies’: that is, false beliefs thatnonetheless become influential. Second, other geographers have shownhow ideas of nature are woven into the process of hegemony: that is,rule by consent rather than coercion (see Box 1.4 again). Finally, still othergeographers maintain that what we call nature is an effect of discourse,wherein representation and reality ‘implode’. I want to preface my discussionof this trio with a brief comment on representation.There are manyways in which we re-present nature to both ourselves and others.There isspeech, there is writing, there is imagery and there is also sound. In society,people convey understandings of nature through everything from songand poetry to film and novels.When it comes to those things we classifyas natural, these various forms of representation all arguably have two thingsin common. First, because nature cannot speak for itself – be it our bodies,a dolphin, a tree or microbe – we must speak for it. In other words,we routinely re-present nature in the sense of being its representative, justas a politician stands for his or her constituents. Second, any act of speakingfor those things said to be natural inevitably involves a second elementof representation: a speaking of.This entails depicting, framing or stagingnature in ways that the person doing the representing thinks is mostfitting. For instance, where a marine biologist might represent a minkewhale in purely cognitive and factual terms, an Earth First! activist mightprefer a morally charged depiction of the whale’s dignity, beauty andmajesty. In sum, what literary critics call the ‘double session’ of representationinvolves nature’s representers serving as both proxies (representativesof it) and stage-managers (selectively depicting nature’s ‘actual character’– see Woods [1998] for an example of this double session in action).Withthese two points about the representation of nature in mind, let us nowturn to the three ways nature-representations have been understood incontemporary human and environmental geography.