Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 135With this very general discussion of discourse in mind, we can identifyfour main versions of the idea current in human geography that nature isdiscursively constituted. Since I do not have the space to illustrate all four,I shall present case studies for just two of the versions discussed below (seeBarrett [1992] for a good discussion of the notions of ideology, hegemonyand discourse; most introductory books on ‘cultural studies’ also discussthese three concepts).Cultures of natureTo begin, some human geographers have argued that discourses aboutnature are culturally fabricated, culturally specific and culturally variable. Here,discourses are more or less equated with the realm of culture.‘Culture’ isan even more complex term than ‘discourse’ (and arguably as complexas the term ‘nature’). Following the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in humangeography (and several humanities and social-science disciplines) duringthe late 1980s, it has come to denote ‘the medium through which peopletransform the mundane phenomena of the material world into a worldof significant symbols to which they give meaning and attach value’(Cosgrove and Jackson 1987: 99). On this basis, some human geographershave identified the shared understandings of those things we designate asnatural that are characteristic of particular societies. A good example ofthis kind of research is William Cronon’s (1996) essay ‘The trouble withwilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature’. Cronon is a geographerand historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his severalresearch interests is a fascination with how the environment is interpretedin regions where different cultural groups come into contact. One ofthese regions is North America, where waves of immigrants (from Europeinitially) displaced indigenous peoples from the seventeenth centuryonwards.As its title suggests, Cronon’s essay examines one of the most potent ideasin American culture, the idea of wilderness. I say idea because Crononinsists that wilderness is not what it appears to be, namely ‘an areauntouched by humans’ (as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it). For him,wilderness is a culturally specific notion that has been applied to manynatural environments in ‘settler societies’ like the USA, Canada and Australia.Of course, this claim that nature is a cultural construct rather than ‘untamednature’ is a counter-intuitive one for many environmentalists. In the USA,