Nature - autonomous learning

242 after naturefood’ as an alternative to fast food, packaged food and large-scale, chemicalintensive agriculture. By no means ‘natural’, this more wholesome foodinvolves complex interactions between consumers, food suppliers, foodretailers, farmers, seeds, traditional farm-animal breeds and more besides inlong commodity chains. In relation to this and other issues there is therealistic prospect of environmental geographers occupying more disciplinaryspace within academic geography than is currently the case.EXERCISES• What, if any, problems do you think arise from doing away with asociety–nature dualism? Put yourself in the position of a professionalgeographer wishing to undertake some empirical research with practicaland moral implications. If you are unable to separate ‘social’ and ‘natural’things then will this compromise your attempt to describe, explain andevaluate the world?• What advantages arise from looking at the world relationally i.e. as aseamless continuum of different entities? You may wish to distinguishontological, descriptive, explanatory and ethical advantages.• Attempt to think of yourself as an ‘actant’ within networks that stretchacross space and over time. What networks are you embedded in?What other entities share the network with you? What are some of theways that these entities’ properties are internalised by you? A good placeto start is by thinking of the food networks you are implicated in eachtime you eat.FURTHER READINGThe four relational approaches discussed in this chapter are all now beingdiscussed and used vigorously by particular groups of geographers.Amongcritical human geographers actor-network theory has arguably the mostwidely discussed and debated. See Castree and Macmillan (2001) and theliterature cited therein for a sense of the key issues and disagreements.