Nature - autonomous learning

NATURESome of the most exciting, alarming and dramatic developments ofour time involve nature (human and non-human).These range from xenotransplantationto climate change to the Human Genome Project.Geographers have long counted nature among their principal objects ofanalysis. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the nature of geography as a subject isintimately linked to the nature that geographers study.This book offers an incisive introduction to the nature that geographersstudy and, as a corollary, the nature of geography as a discipline. It is writtenfor researchers, degree students and their teachers. It is the first bookto bring the diverse aspects of the nature that geographers examine – andthe myriad ways they study it – within a common frame of analysis.Thebook treats geography as an active producer of societal understandings ofnature. Since their veracity can never be established in any absolute way,Nature treats these knowledges as ideas about nature that must battle it outto win the minds and hearts of students, funding bodies, governments andall those other organisations and constituencies who are interested in theknowledge that geographers produce. These ideas, in one sense, createthe ‘realities’ they purport to describe and explain.The knowledges of naturethat geographers produce must, therefore, be seen as part of a high-stakescontest over how we understand and act towards those myriad thingswe label ‘natural’.This contest has implications for us all, as well as for thenon-human world.Nature is an advanced introduction to its topic. For students, it aimsto inform and to challenge by showing that nature is not what it seems tobe. For geography teachers and researchers, Nature brings together ideas andarguments hitherto compartmentalised into geography’s three main parts(human, physical and environmental geography). In so doing it offers freshinsights into one of the discipline’s most familiar, yet elusive, objects ofanalysis, policy formation and moral concern.Noel Castree is a Professor in the School of Environment and Developmentat Manchester University. He is the co-editor of Remaking Reality (1998) andSocial Nature (2001).