Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 153street in old Cairo but an image or prejudice that the putative reality seemedto confirm.As Mitchell (1988: 10) put it,‘despite determined efforts withinthe exhibition to construct perfect representations of the real world outside,the real world beyond the gates turned out to be rather like an extensionof the exhibition’.To bring things back to Bartram and Shobrook’s work,the nature depicted in the Eden Project can, for them, be seen not as a firstnature nor even a ‘second nature’ (i.e. one physically modified by humanintervention) but, rather, a ‘third nature’ (Wark 1994).This third nature ispurely discursive and collapses any divide between simulation and reality(and it relates to the ‘non-representational theory’ I discuss in Chapter 5:see Smith 2003).REMAKING NATUREThe argument that nature is ‘constructed’ at the level of representation mayseem to ignore the biophysical world to which representations of naturerefer. A second main branch of constructionist research in human andenvironmental geography focuses precisely on this world.This researchis preoccupied with material constructionism: that is, the process wherebysocieties physically reconstitute nature so that it is no longer natural.Thisis the second kind of social constructivism Demeritt (2002) identifiesin his review of human geographers’ recent research on the topic. In itsstrongest form, this research argues that nature is a physical constructionthrough and through so that it makes little sense to call it ‘natural’ any more.In spirit, if not always in theoretical substance, it builds on the earlier workof people like Hewitt and Watts which, as we discovered, argued that thephysical capacities of nature must always be defined relative to specific formsof societal organisation. In this section of the chapter I identify two mainways in which the biophysical capacities of nature have been taken seriouslyby contemporary human and environmental geographers (see Bakker andBridge 2003 for a more refined discussion).As we move to the second wesee that these capacities are regarded as ontological products of social relations,processesand actions. In order to focus the discussion, I concentrate on research byMarxist geographers in the subfields of agro-food studies (or what usedto be called agricultural geography) and natural-resource analysis.This isnot the only research into nature’s physical reconstitution in human andenvironmental geography (see Box 3.4). But it does have the virtue of beingone of the major strands of inquiry into the topic. 5