Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 125Truth, falsity and natureIn the previous section I presented Harvey’s thesis that ideas about natureare often ideological. In Box 3.1 I discussed the notion of ideology andnoted that for some analysts it connotes false or deceptive beliefs aboutthe world. In a recent essay explaining what ‘the social construction ofnature’ means, the environmental geographer David Demeritt (2002)identifies two kinds of ‘construction talk’ in contemporary human andenvironmental geography. The first he calls ‘construction-as-refutation’(I’ll come to the second later in the chapter).The geographers who talkabout nature in this first way seek to expose erroneous and misleadingbeliefs about the ‘nature of nature’. In this sense, these geographers continuethe tradition of ideology criticism inaugurated in Harvey’s essay, even ifthey rarely use the term ideology themselves. For these critics (who, likeHarvey, are often left-wingers), nature is ‘constructed’ not so much physicallyas at the level of representation. For them representations conditionhow we understand the nature of nature and, in this sense, even erroneousrepresentations are influential if they go unchallenged for long enough.Therefore, when these geographers show that certain representationsof nature are simply wrong, they are refuting them by exposing the socialbias distorting their accuracy. In this context, then, the term ‘construction’refers to the way that knowledge of nature is manufactured by certainpeople rather than being a passive reflection of reality.Good examples of this exposure of false representations of nature are nothard to find in geography. In environmental geography,Third World politicalecologists have done much to debunk what they term ‘environmentalmyths’ and ‘environmental orthodoxies’.According to Tim Forsyth (2003:38), of the London School of Economics, these myths and orthodoxiesare ‘generalized statements . . . [about] environmental degradation or thecauses of environmental change that are often accepted as fact but whichhave been shown by field research to be biophysically inaccurate . . .[while] leading to [misguided] environmental policies’. Desertification,de-forestation and soil erosion are just three well-known ‘environmentalproblems’ in the developing world that, according to Forsyth and others,have been profoundly misunderstood.This raises two questions: first, whydo environmental myths and orthodoxies catch on?; and second, howcan their inaccuracy be exposed and environmental policies based on themaccordingly dismantled? Detailed answers have been provided in the