Nature - autonomous learning

4TWO NATURES?The dis/unity of geography‘We part company with [other geographers] by acknowledging the possibilityof identifying and studying “real” . . . processes’.(Slaymaker and Spencer 1998: 248)‘The naturalness of nature is, in one sense, inherently self-evident’.(Adams 1996: 82)INTRODUCTIONThe first epigraph, taken from Physical Geography and Global Environmental Change,is a sideswipe at the de-naturalising approaches to nature explored in theprevious chapter. Like virtually all physical geographers, Slaymaker andSpencer see themselves as scientists: people who are in the business ofproducing accurate knowledge about the workings of the non-humanworld (they leave investigations of the human body to others within andbeyond geography). While these two leading geomorphologists do notdeny that what we call nature is often at some level ‘unnatural’, theynonetheless maintain that it has distinct ways of working that need to becomprehended objectively. In other words, they see it as irreducible toparticular social representations and practices and as amenable to relatively