Nature - autonomous learning

NOTESPREFACE1 This said, there’s no doubt that geographers have had little influence on otheracademics who study human and non-human nature. For instance, a new ‘keythinkers on the environment’ book lists not a single geographer among its fiftyentries (Palmer, 2001). This may reflect the unoriginality of geographers’thinking about nature! But it may also reflect a hard-to-alter prejudice amongnon-geographers that geography is a purely empirical discipline that producesonly descriptive or classificatory knowledge.1 STRANGE NATURES1 Source: ‘IVF Mix-Up and the Wrong Dad’, the Guardian, 23 August 2003.2 Source: ‘A Bleak Corner of Essex is Being Hailed as England’s Rainforest’, theGuardian, 3 May 2003.3 Sources: R. Thornhill and C. Palmer (2000) A Natural History of Rape(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press); 4 Sources: ‘Cloned Foal Romps into Record Books’, the Guardian, August 2003;‘How Noah Could Clone a New Ark’, the Observer, 7 January 2001.5 Sources: ‘Fish Don’t Scream’, the Guardian, 31 July 2001; Stephen Wise (2000)Rattling the Cage (New York: Profile Books).6 Sources: ‘Southern Ocean Hunt for Ship’, the Guardian, 19 August 2003;‘Kazakh Dam Condemns Aral Sea’, the Guardian, 29 October 2003; ‘IceRetreats to Open North-West Passage’, the Guardian, 11 September 2000;‘Vanishing Herbal Remedies in Need of Cure’, the Guardian, 14 August 2001;Bjorn Lomborg (2001) The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press); 7 Sources: ‘Revealed: The Secret of Human Behaviour’, the Observer, 11 February2001; ‘The Science Behind Racism’, the Guardian, 10 May 2000; John Entine(2000) Taboo (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Publications).