Nature - autonomous learning

preface xxiiithem? How do they represent nature? What do they exclude? and Whatconsequences follow from these ideas? In a sense, I’m encouraging anysceptical student readers to regard a book about ideas of nature as, in effect,a book about nature in so far as those ideas frame our understanding of the‘real thing’.These ideas are not reducible to phenomena they refer to; in asense, they have a life of their own.Having spoken directly to one of my intended readerships (students),let me now speak directly to another (professional geographers andacademics in cognate fields).This readership will have an intimate understandingof much of the material in this book.Trying to say something newto it is much more difficult than it is to students. I have tried to inject someoriginality into Nature.The book’s originality (if it has any at all) derives notjust from the breadth of material I discuss, but also from the way I organiseand interpret it. Synthesising a wealth of geographical research not usuallyconsidered in the same intellectual space, I believe I’ve shed some newlight on the nature that geographers study and, as a corollary, on the natureof geography itself.In practical terms, the only way I can address two audiences simultaneouslyis to speak to one explicitly and the other implicitly. Academicreaders will, I hope, have little difficulty identifying those places whereI’m trying to ‘add value’ to current understandings of how geographershave studied nature and how this has influenced the nature of geography.But in both the prose style and the level at which material is pitched, Naturespeaks to student readers directly.This book, as befits the series in whichit appears, is an advanced introduction. I’m confident that students will findmuch that is unexpected, exciting and disconcerting in these pages. I’mhopeful too that teachers will want to use the book in modules on natureand environment, on the one side, and those on the nature of geographyon the other.This said, it is symptomatic of how fractured geography teaching isthat a book like Nature, covering the span of the discipline, will not map wellonto many geographers’ syllabi.The problem is heightened here becauseI discuss material not normally considered under the rubric of ‘nature’. Forinstance, I discuss human geography research on social identity and thehuman body in these pages – research that’s a far cry from what physicalgeographers do.Why, it might be asked, do I roam so widely? There are tworeasons. First, the idea of nature is, I argue, a far more pervasive presencein their discipline than geographers have been willing or able to recognise.