Nature - autonomous learning

256 notes4 Few in geography have used Foucault’s ideas to make sense of how the nonhumanworld is discursively constructed. An edited book by Darier (1999)examines environmental discourses, though no geographers contributed tothis volume. In his more recent work Braun (2000) draws upon Foucault moreexplicitly, while Demeritt makes use of his ideas in an analysis of how forestsare subject to ‘scientific management’ (Demeritt 2001a).5 In the main, research by critical human geographers into material constructionsof nature has drawn upon political economy for theoretical inspiration. The term‘political economy’ describes a cluster of theories which offer a criticalunderstanding of how economies work, focusing on power and the unequaldistribution of wealth among other things (see Caparaso and Levine 1992).Marxism is a political-economic theory of prime importance within and beyondhuman and environmental geography. I mention this because critical humangeographers have largely ignored social theory in their investigations of nature.The term social theory describes a cluster of approaches that analysis theconstitution of societies in terms of their characteristic social relations, principalsocial groups, and main forms of power and resistance. Though politicaleconomy and social theory overlap, they are not synonymous (see Goldblatt1996). Outside geography, critical researchers have adapted social theory toquestions of the environment (especially in sociology) – quite why criticalgeographers have ignored these researchers’ work is unclear.Though I examine material constructionism in this section of the chapter,a small number of Marxists in geography have analysed the construction ofnature at the level of both representation and materiality. This is not to say thatrepresentations aren’t material (this, after all, is my main argument in thisbook). What I mean is that some Marxist geographers have sought to linkrepresentations of nature to an understanding of how the ‘real natures’ theyrefer to are transformed in the interests of certain economic classes. Forinstance, using the a ‘regulation theory’ framework, Gavin Bridge has shownhow businesses and state institutions put a very particular ‘spin’ on the way thenatural environment is utilised in capitalist societies (see Bridge 1998; Bridgeand McManus 2000). Meanwhile, George Henderson (1999) has used aspecific conception of ‘ideology’ (see Box 3.1) to analyse how the transformationof the Californian environment in the early twentieth century was refractedthrough novels, pamphlets and other written media of the time.4 TWO NATURES? THE DIS/UNITY OF GEOGRAPHY1 Unless otherwise specified I am thus not using the term ‘realism’ in the highlyspecific sense meant by transcendental or critical realists (as discussed inChapter 2).2 In this chapter’s discussion of physical geography I do not want to create thefalse impression that the field is somehow coherent or unified in the way itinvestigates and understands the non-human world. Contemporary physicalgeography is a diverse, some would say fractured, field of research and