Nature - autonomous learning

after nature 237MORALITY AFTER NATUREClearly, the post-natural approaches discussed above challenge the conventionaldescriptive and explanatory habits of most professional geographers.They disbar attempts to isolate out ‘social’ and ‘natural’ phenomena, to studythem separately or to link them causally in more or less direct ways usingmotifs like ‘interaction’ or ‘construction’. But it also follows from this thatpost-natural approaches challenge the moral and ethical habits of mostprofessional geographers.This is, of course, immensely important. Moralclaims about a supposedly asocial ‘nature’, in both academia and the widerworld, remain as widespread as they are potent.As we have seen in previouschapters, when considered at the broadest level, these claims fall into threemain kinds. First, most physical geographers insist (or imply in theirresearch) that the ‘facts’ about nature (in their case the non-humanworld) can and should be kept logically distinct from any moral claimsabout nature. Second, most critical human geographers insist that this firstposition is naïve because real-world actors constantly link facts andvalues in their discourses about nature. James Proctor (2001) provides anexample. He analyses how a piece of scientific research on freshwaterspecies in North America (Ricciardi and Rasmussen 1999) was reportedin a ‘pro-environment’ news website, . Thereport’s first sentence reads:‘Some freshwater species in North America arebecoming extinct at a rate as fast or faster than rainforest species, but theirplight is largely ignored, according to a recent study out of Canada’. AsProctor observes, the facts of species loss are here reported in a highly valueladenway that is so familiar that it risks being taken for granted. It is implicitin the reporting that species loss is morally unacceptable and should behalted forthwith. This is another example of the ‘moral naturalism’explained in Box 3.3. Finally, following on from this, most critical humangeographers would argue that we never derive our ethics directly from thefacts of nature (human or non-human). Rather, we construct our ethical codesand these codes vary from person to person and society to society for thisreason.Despite the differences between these stances on ethics and nature, therelational approaches I’ve outlined take issue with all of them.Why is this?One reason is that all the stances seek to ground themselves in one or otherontological domain. For example, both moral naturalism and moralconstructivism claim that our ethical stance on ‘nature’ is mandated either