Nature - autonomous learning

244 conclusionminority of other geographers have sought to transcend the society–naturedualism that arguably underpins the different approaches to nature favouredby those located on different ‘sides’ of the discipline.The upshot, as I’veindicated in previous pages, is that the ‘geographical experiment’ inauguratedover a century ago has arguably come to an end. In the current period,there is no disciplinary consensus on how to bring society and naturewithin one explanatory framework – not least because authors like SarahWhatmore, Nigel Thrift and Jonathan Murdoch reject the dualistic terms inwhich the experiment was set up in the first place.Geography, then, produces a diversity of knowledges about nature. Itis, I would argue, an unusually wide diversity – a breadth that can be tracedback to the discipline’s late-nineteenth-century origins as a ‘bridgingsubject’. In keeping with my argument in Chapter 1 that ‘there is no suchthing as nature’, geography’s nature-knowledges should be seen as partof a wider process of determining the why and wherefore of those thingsdenoted by the concept (or one of its collateral concepts). It is important,I argued in Chapter 1, not to take these knowledges at face value. It is tooeasy to assume that physical (and many environmental) geographers produce‘objective’ knowledge of the environment because they are scientists.Equally, it is important to ask why so many human and environmentalgeographers insist that what we call nature is often a social product. Finally,we need to ascertain what motivates those who argue that ‘nature’ is neithera social construction nor a relatively autonomous domain – which iswhy I devoted a section of the previous chapter to this issue. Clearly, eachof geography’s various research constituencies believes that their knowledgeof nature tells us something important and worth knowing. Butit would be naïve to defer to the claims of these constituencies simply onthe grounds of their ‘expertise’ as groupings of highly educated universityresearchers. Instead, it is worth asking how that expertise is used to advanceparticular claims about what is (and is not) natural.That sentiment applies,incidentally, to this book. I have made my own argument about nature hereand used my position as a professional academic to do so. But it would beinconsistent of me to scrutinise the views of other geographers on naturewithout acknowledging that my own deserve equally close examination.This last comment bears directly on student readers of this book. Ifyou’ve made it this far your understanding of how and why geographersstudy nature will, I hope, have been challenged. Many students opt for ageography degree because of their love of nature, their fascination with