Nature - autonomous learning

228 after natureactants are not free agents. Instead, they are both the cause and consequenceof all the other entities connected to them.What is more, no two networksare necessarily the same, which is why it is important to attend to thespecific conjunction of phenomena in any given situation.This may sound very abstract, so let’s apply the network ontology to theCanvey Island site. Clearly, the site is not a ‘natural ecosystem’ since it wouldnot exist in its precise form without the actions of Thames dredgers, theOccidental oil company or children playing. But neither is the site a socialconstruction because the biophysical character and actions of non-humanspecies at some level escapes the intentions of human actors. So what is thesite? From a network perspective it is a particular alignment of human andnon-human actants.Take any of them away and the site would not be whatit is today. Thus the wildlife species at the site undoubtedly exists elsewherein the world but – and it’s a crucial but – they do not exist in the same wayor with the same effects on proximate flora and fauna.The silts dumpedover former fields and marshes, the disused buildings and equipment, thetracks and trails created by playing children and bikers: these and otherinterventions have inadvertently created opportunities for a uniquelydiverse array of wildlife to not merely co-exist but co-depend. The 1,300species at the site are, in various ways, reliant upon each other for survival,just as they have afforded opportunities for tactile play and enjoyment forhuman actors over the years by virtue of their material properties. In reality,the various actants are so thoroughly stitched together that it is arbitraryto group them into two major categories, imagining that the domains socategorised ‘come together’ like two separate pieces of a jigsaw. In sum,then, a network approach to the world is ‘post-natural’ because it eschewsbig ontological categories for a micro-level focus on the specific actors andthe relations between them that constitute our world.THINKING RELATIONALLYMy use of a network metaphor above speaks to one of the four majorvariants of post-natural thinking current in geography (‘actor-networktheory’, which I will discuss below).This thinking has been advocated byhuman geographers for the most part. Interestingly, physical geographershave not made more of the potential for overcoming the society–naturedualism latent within complexity theory, chaos theory and affiliatedontological positions on the biophysical world. In the main, physical