Nature - autonomous learning

174 de-naturalisationmodes of behaving. In its crudest form, socio-biology is biologicallydeterminist and has found expression is racist tomes such asHernstein and Murray’s (1996) The Bell Curve. However, it wouldbe a mistake to think that all attempts to explain social phenomenain terms of human and non-human nature are reactionary andconservative. The radical sociologist Ted Benton (1994), for example,argues that the biological needs of human beings can offer usa reference point for criticising the harm that we do to the nonhumanworld and our own bodies in advanced capitalist societies.For introductory, and sometimes critical, discussions of the newnaturalism in the social sciences see Barry (1999: ch. 8), Benton(1994), Dickens (2000) and Ross (1994: ch. 5).be natural. I have refrained from offering an assessment of whether‘nature’ really is a social construction.Though this is an important issue thatreaders should consider (see Box 3.5), my aim has been to focus on howand why many geographers produce knowledges that are ‘nature-sceptical’.In the next chapter, I want to examine a very different set of knowledgesabout nature.They are knowledges of the non-human world (rather thanthe human body) but ones unlike those presented in this chapter.These knowledges are produced by physical (and many environmental)geographers.These geographers, as we’ll now discover, argue that theirrepresentations of nature can and do represent a natural world that isirreducible to people’s ideas or their practices. By denying that nature is (oris only) a social construction, these geographers are trying to persuadepeople within and beyond universities that their knowledge is preferableto that promulgated by those whose work I’ve discussed in this chapter.Here, then, we have a contest – one almost entirely implicit than explicitit must be said – between knowledges of nature: a tussle over whoseknowledge is the most accurate and appropriate.EXERCISES• List some of the problems that arise if one accepts the impossibilityof ever talking about nature ‘as it really is’.To start you off, one problemis that if we can never confidently identify environmental problems