Nature - autonomous learning

238 after natureby nature itself or by specific societies and cultures. Another reason is thatthe three stances offer us the polar choices of moral absolutism and moralarbitrariness.The former is a characteristic of many attempts to ground ourethics in supposedly ‘given’ facts of nature – a sort of ‘nature knows best’ethics which leaves human actors little choice but to obey. In Nature’sGeography:New Lessons for Conservation in Developing Countries Zimmerer and Young(1998) offer compelling examples of how much is at stake here. Untilrecently, they show, the environmental conservation ‘wisdom’ in manydeveloping countries reflected the values of the ‘old ecology’ and alsoromantic views of the non-human world exported by colonial administratorsand scientists from the late nineteenth century onwards.This ‘peopleversus parks’ wisdom justified the frequent removal of peasants, tribes andindigenous communities from their lands in order to conserve ‘naturallandscapes’ that were supposedly threatened by human land-use practices.In contrast to this, moral arbitrariness is a potential weakness of the firstand last of the three ethical stances outlined above. Here our moralperspectives on ‘nature’ are seen to have no firmer basis than that peoplehave decided to adopt them, regardless of the physical ‘realities’ of the naturein question.What, then, would a ‘relational ethics’ look like – one where ‘nature’ isseen neither as a construction of society with no independent moral statusnor as a separate domain to which we should extend moral considerability?Thus far, it’s probably fair to say that relationally minded geographers havefailed to provide concrete answers. On the whole, they have furnished onlythe philosophical outlines of a post-natural ethics rather than a discussionof substantive moral principles (like justice, rights and obligations). Evenso, we get can get a sense of what this different moral universe might looklike by examining Sarah Whatmore’s reflections on the matter.Sarah Whatmore is author of Hybrid Geographies (2003) and several influentialessays on post-natural thinking (e.g.Whatmore 1997). A professorof environmental geography at Oxford University, she has drawn uponANT, certain strands of feminism, and the philosophy of Deleuze, Guattariand Stengers to map the contours of a relational ethics. How does ‘nature’figure in this ethics? It is clearly not, in Whatmore’s view, a discrete classof entities (human and non-human) that either do or do not deserve ethicalconsideration by people. We must, in her view, do away with the moralcodes typical of environmentalists (who focus on the non-human world)and bioethicists (who focus on human physiology and psychology). Like