Nature - autonomous learning

240 after natureclearly do believe that they are revealing truths that our normal ways ofthinking and acting conceal from us, as both geographers and citizens (seeMurdoch and Lowe 2003 for an especially clear example). But this is notall they are up to. They are also making conscious intellectual interventionsfor specific reasons. What might these reasons be? One reason, hardlyexclusive to this group of geographers, is the compulsion to innovateintellectually that is part and parcel of Western academia.As David Harvey(1990: 431) has acknowledged, the competitive relationship betweenindividual academics, their departments and their universities makescriticising current intellectual wisdom professionally profitable for thoseable to do it successfully. Less cynically, we can speculate that what we seehere is an attempt to reintegrate a fairly disintegrated discipline and sorenew ‘the geographical experiment’ in a new, productive way that mightultimately benefit most geographers. Third, we can suggest that a newrespect for the world’s complexity and fluidity is here being expressed. Ina challenging essay, Steven Hinchliffe (2001) shows us what is at stake.His analysis of how scientists seek to capture the ontological ‘essence’ ofprions reveals that the presumption that prions have an essence (i.e. thatthey are ‘natural kinds’) hindered rather than helped the resolution of theBritish ‘BSE crisis’ in the 1990s. If these scientists had been more attunedto the motility of prions then, Hinchliffe argues, the BSE problem wouldhave been dealt with more effectively. Finally, we can conjecture thata genuine moral concern is being expressed here: a concern that our dichotomousway of describing, explaining and judging the world is havingbloody consequences for people and non-humans alike. For instance,Zimmerer’s critique of ‘people-less nature conservation’ is precisely anattempt to do justice to displaced communities while attending carefullyto the material qualities and moral rights of the biophysical world.It’s worth noting that the relational thought discussed in this chapterbears some apparent resemblances to ontological holism (see Box 4.4again). Holism has been an important part of environmental ethics outsidegeography, both in academia (e.g. professional environmental philosophy)and the wider world (e.g. among deep green activists). Its most famousexpression is the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ of the British scientist and environmentalistJames Lovelock.According to Lovelock our planet is a huge, highlyintegrated system that has an inherent tendency towards order among itsvarious systems and subsystems. Some environmentalists have used the Gaia(‘mother earth’) idea to argue that if humans abuse the planet then they