Nature - autonomous learning

after nature 235adapted parts of wider ecosystems or else disruptive forces that failed torespect the integrity of those ecosystems.This second element of the oldecology was particularly evident in post-war environmental geography.Asexplained in Chapter 2, many ‘human ecologists’ sought to describe andexplain the various ways previous and present-day non-industrial societiesutilised their different natural environments in a sustainable way. FollowingThomas’s germinal Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956), this focuson ‘harmonious’ human–environment relationships was supplementedwith investigations of how ‘modern’ people were disrupting the equilibriumof the non-human world more and more.In contrast to all this, the ‘new’ ecology pioneered by biologist DanielBotkin (1990) and others makes two counterclaims. First, it challengesthe old ecology’s equilibrium assumptions and ‘accents disequilibria,instability, and even chaotic fluctuations in biophysical environments, both“natural” and human-impacted’ (Zimmerer 1994: 108). Second, it followsfrom this that when people do make large-scale changes to ‘natural’ communitiesof plants, animals and insects they are not necessarily ‘disrupting’an evolutionary harmony.As Zimmerer argues, this has major implicationsfor geographical research on people–environment relations, as well forenvironmental management. Except where dealing with ‘traditional’societies, the old ecology licensed forms of environmental geography thatplaced people outside of and in opposition to natural environments. Bycontrast, the new ecology’s challenge to the ‘balance of nature’ postulateof its predecessor opens a space for environmental geographers – indeed allgeographers – to regard human actors as always already part of complexand changeable biophysical systems. In terms of managing how people uselocal and non-local environments, the new ecology also challenges thelong-standing beliefs that the human alteration of an apparently stableecosystem is ‘bad’ and thus conservation must proceed by way of little orno human interference.In sum, Zimmerer and other geographers influenced by the new ecologyare apt to talk about ‘nature-society hybrids’ rather than two interactingdomains or spheres. Resonating with ANT in spirit if not letter, the newecology enjoins us to see the world as a mesh of multi-scalar and sometimesunstable knottings of people (with their varied outlooks, economicpractices etc.), plants, animals, soils, water, forests and much more. Herethe job of research is not to judge human actions against some eternalbenchmark of stability imposed by the non-human world. Rather, it is to