Nature - autonomous learning

after nature 241will be ultimately extinguished as a species by the ‘blind’ mechanisms ofbiophysical self-regulation that will ensue. None of the relational approachesexplored in this chapter are holistic in this super-organic and homeostaticsense. In fact, all of them would oppose this kind of holism on the groundsthat it potentially licenses the kind of authoritarian ethics that David Harveycriticised back in 1974: an ethics of dictating to people what they can andcannot do by appeal to supposed ‘natural imperatives’. Thus, far fromovercoming a human/non-human dichotomy, this kind of holism wouldbe seen as maintaining it in order to discipline people’s actions regardingthe earth’s environmental systems.CONCLUSIONI argued in Chapter 1 and at the end of Chapter 4 that the ‘geographicalexperiment’ is over in all but name.The ‘after-natural’ thinking discussedin the previous pages can, despite this, be seen as a minority attempt torenew that experiment while superceding the vocabulary of ‘society’ and‘nature’ that underpinned it during Mackinder’s time. If taken seriously, thechallenge of post-natural thinking is a profound one for geography, as wellas for everyday conceptions of nature in the world outside. It involvesnothing less than a questioning of the division of academic labour currentlyorganising geography as a research and teaching discipline. If pursued toits logical conclusion it means that human geographers could no longerstudy ‘human’ phenomena alone, nor physical geographers biophysicalphenomena alone. In effect, environmental geography – currently thesmallest of the discipline’s three main branches – would colonise the wholespace of the discipline but in a way different to how it is currently practised.Geographers of all stripes would be obliged to study ‘social’ phenomenathat are never simply social and natural phenomena that are neither asocialnor simply products of social representation and practice alone. For all sortsof reasons this geography – one attuned to a world seen as hybrid, impure,messy and mixed up – is unlikely to transpire.Advocated by a minority inthe discipline, it is unlikely to alter the research and teaching practices ofthe majority, despite its merits. Even so, there are some reasons for optimism.These days, both the wider public, research-funding bodies and universitystudents are keen to know more about issues where the interfusions ofthe human and the non-human are as apparent as they are important. Forinstance, in Western countries there is a growing interest in organic or ‘slow