Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 167Box 3.5 IS NATURE A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION?The debate over whether or not nature is a social constructionextends way beyond the discipline of geography. Sociologists ofenvironment and the body, environmental historians, sociologistsand anthropologists of science, environmental anthropologistsand philosophers (among others) have all recently jousted over theissue. The debate is a complex and often heated one. Any reasonedanswer to the question ‘Is nature a social construction?’ wouldhave to carefully identify which ‘nature’ is being discussed, whatkind of ‘social constructionism’ is being discussed (representationalor material) and what degree of constructionism is at issue(‘strong’ or ‘mild’: see Demeritt 2002). In geography, the debateabout the social construction of nature has focused mainly on theenvironment. (See Proctor 1998; 2001; Demeritt 2001b; Peterson1999 and several essays in Cronon 1996. Outside geography,the essays by Lease, Shepard, Hayles and Soule in Soule andLease 1995 are useful, as is the collection edited by Bennett andChaloupka 1993; see also Bird 1987; Burningham and Cooper 1999;Gifford 1996 and Greider and Garkovich 1994). However, it hasalso spiralled out into a debate over the social construction ofreality (or knowledge about that reality). Here ‘realists’ haveconfronted ‘relativists’. One of the best examples of this confrontationis that between the transcendental realist Andrew Sayer andhuman geographers of a more postmodern and post-structuralpersuasion (see Sayer 1993 and the references therein toStrohmayer and Hannah). Within particular branches of geographythe debate over nature’s social construction has also been evident.For instance, many geographers interested in the disabled havequestioned whether ‘disability’ is a bodily and mental fact asopposed to a social construction of certain peoples’ bodily andmental condition (see Butler and Parr 1999, Kitchin 2000 and Imrie1996). Likewise, in recent years rural geographers have questionedthe view that the countryside is more inherently natural than townsand cities (see Bunce, 2003 and the references cited therein; seealso Castree and Braun 2005). For general introductions to social