Nature - autonomous learning

154 de-naturalisationBox 3.4 CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY AND THE MATERIALCONSTRUCTION OF NATUREAside from Marxist geographers who study the transformationof the physical environment there is at least one other cluster of leftwinghuman geographers preoccupied with material constructionism.So-called ‘environmental injustice’ researchers examine thedistribution of ‘environmental bads’ (like toxic waste dumps) vis-àvispoor and marginalised groups of people. Here environmentalhazards are seen as ones actively (though often unintentionally)created by industrial societies. Aside from environmental injusticeresearchers and Marxists, there are other human geographers whoare interested in the material impacts of the non-human world uponpeople. These geographers would not necessarily describe the nonhumanworld as a physical ‘construction’ but neither do they thinkit is a domain wholly separate from human intervention. An exampleis the research of British cultural geographers Jacquie Burgess andCarolyn Harrison (1988) into everyday attachments to urban parksand green spaces. Burgess and Harrison acknowledge that theseparks and spaces have been designed by planners, but they also showhow the material properties of these sites – in terms of colour, smelland physical layout, for example – matter immensely to how localresidents use and value them. Likewise, many Third World politicalecologists show how the physical environments produced throughhuman action have an active role to play in both enabling andinhibiting the needs of different individuals and groups at the localand extra-local levels.Intellectually, this Marxist research has emerged in the wake of animportant essay written by the University of California geographer MargaretFitzsimmons. In ‘The matter of nature’ (1989), Fitzsimmons reprimandedleft-wing geographers for having ignored the ways in which societiesare transforming the physical environment. Fitzsimmons insisted thatthe biophysical properties of the non-human world ‘mattered’ in the doublesense that they were materially important for societies and should,