Nature - autonomous learning

178 the dis/unity of geographyunbiased analysis. Likewise, the environmental geographer Bill Adams takesit as axiomatic that nature is, wholly or in part,‘natural’. Adams’s (1996)book Future Nature reflects the views of many in geography’s ‘middle ground’.It argues that geographers should study human uses and abuses of theenvironment so as to fashion more effective conservation and restorationpolicies – effective because they are based on accurate understanding.The suspicion about social constructionism evinced in the quotes fromSlaymaker, Spencer and Adams seems intuitively legitimate for severalreasons. First, one can argue that many aspects of the non-human world(and, for that matter, the human mind and body) exist regardless of howwe represent them – like continental plates or Mount Everest. Likewise,even though we actively fashion our knowledge of nature this does notnecessarily make it false, inaccurate or untrue. As Slaymaker and Spencerargue, our representations of nature may be constructed but they mayalso be accurate constructions if arrived at using appropriate procedures.Third,while Marxist geographers (among others) may be right that societiescan physically produce some parts of what we call nature ‘all the way down’,even these produced parts arguably have a ‘nature’ that is irreducible tothe social processes that gave rise to them in the first place. Finally, we canchallenge the metaphor of ‘construction’ when applied to many aspectsof nature.Take acid deposition, for example.This environmental problemhas undoubtedly been created by human action. But it’s a phenomenonthat is an unintentional consequence of our activities and which has acertain life of its own (by virtue of our inability to control the atmosphericdynamics transporting various oxide pollutants across oceans andland masses).Acid deposition is thus, perhaps, best thought of as a ‘manufacturedrisk’ (Beck 1992) rather than a ‘social construction’. In the eyesof some geographers, the latter term implies a degree of intentionality andcontrol that is absent in this and many other cases where people alterthe environment.For these four reasons (and others not mentioned), physical geographersand many environmental geographers are more ‘nature-endorsing’ thantheir social-constructionist counterparts. They take it for granted that(i) the non-human world exists independently of our representationsof and actions upon it, and (ii) that, in both principle and practice, it canbe understood in more or less accurate ways. In this chapter I wantto explore why and how physical geographers adhere to this belief in thereality of the non-human world and its capacity to be understood more or