Nature - autonomous learning

5AFTER NATURE‘it’s terribly important to overcome these divides . . . and it’s terribly hardto find a language to do so’.(Harvey and Haraway 1995: 515)INTRODUCTIONIn this final, relatively short chapter, I present the ideas of geographers whomight be described as ‘after-’ or ‘post-natural’ in their outlook. This growingcohort of geographers take issue with the society–nature dualism thatunderpins most of the thinking reviewed in the previous two chapters.Deeply ingrained in Western thought, this dualism leads us to divide theworld ontologically into halves. Even though these halves are connected,we tend to think of them as different. Thus, in Chapter 3, we saw that socialrepresentations and forces were the key to understanding nature for manygeographers. Meanwhile, in Chapter 4, we saw how physical geographersfocus on environmental ‘realities’ that, in their view, are irreducible topeople’s discursive or material practices even though they may be affectedby them. Despite the different approaches to nature discussed in theprevious two chapters they arguably have one thing in common. Theyeither emphasise a set of phenomena classified as ‘social’ or they emphasisea set of phenomena classified as ‘natural’ (whether ‘first natural’ or ‘secondnatural’). In each case, one of two domains supposedly comprising our total