Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 171However, as we’ve seen in this chapter, critical human and environmentalgeographers have shown that claims are made about the essence of thenon-human world or the human mind and body are rarely innocent.For instance, the practical actions that follow from the neo-Malthusianreasoning criticised by David Harvey in 1974 are population control orelse inaction (i.e. let those who ‘breed too much’ starve). For left-winggeographers such policies are oppressive and callous. Likewise, when representationsof black men as ‘inherently athletic’ circulate in society theycan have pernicious effects.As Peter Jackson’s (1994) analysis of Lucozadeads starring Olympic decathlete Daley Thompson showed, these representationscan tacitly support policies where black men are offered littlesupport in their quest for mental as opposed to manual occupations (seeLewis 2001). The flip side of this critique of essentialist claims is thatconstructivist geographers have highlighted the potential alterability of manythings in our world which appear unchangeable.As Demeritt (2002: 769)puts it,‘[One] ...objective of denaturalisation is to show that somethingis bad and that we would be better off if it were radically changed, whichbecomes conceivable once we realize it is socially constructed and withinour power to change’.The cognitive, moral and practical intentions behind social constructionistarguments are not above criticism (see Box 3.6). But they nonethelessamount to a powerful and distinctive stance on what nature is, how it is(or should) be valued, and what to do to those things routinely designatedas ‘natural’.Where many in academia and the wider society predicate theirviews about nature on the assumption that nature is separate from ordifferent to society, social-constructivist geographers adamantly resist thisseparation.These geographers have little time for ontological, causal, moralor other references to an asocial nature. For them such references aremisguided, if not downright dishonest and dissimulating (see Box 3.7).SUMMARYThis chapter has surveyed de-naturalising approaches to nature in contemporarygeography.After a discussion of the precursors to these approaches,the chapter explained the representational and material variants of socialconstructionism and subvarieties thereof. This led to a discussion ofthe reasons why so many present-day geographers are keen to producede-naturalising understandings of those phenomena normally thought to