Nature - autonomous learning

24 strange naturescommunity than do environmental geographers. Like environmentalgeographers, the ‘nature’ that physical geographers study is very much thatdenoted by the first meaning of the term: that is, the non-human world.Physical geographers’ distinctive contribution to understanding nature isthat, unlike the laboratory sciences, they investigate dynamic real-worldenvironments. If you like, they borrow laws, theories and models fromthe physical sciences (chemistry, physics etc.) and operationalise them in‘live settings’.So far so good. But the assumption that only physical and environmentalgeographers study nature, while human geographers focus on other things,is misplaced. To be sure, human geographers do not study the physicalenvironment in any direct way. In other words, almost by definition, theirresearch does not seek to comprehend how the non-human world ‘reallyworks’. But an increasing number of human geographers are interestedin how different sections of any society interpret the environment. Inother words, they analyse the knowledges of the non-human world thatcirculate within and between real-world groups and organisations.Take theresearch of Bruce Braun, for example, my sometime co-editor. His bookThe Intemperate Rainforest (2002) examines the conflicting ways in which theforests of British Columbia have been cognitively, morally and aesthetically‘framed’ since the province was colonised by the British in the midnineteenthcentury. His concern is not with the details of forest ecologyor, say, the environmental de/merits of clear-cut logging. Rather, he isinterested in how the same forest lands are interpreted in different ways bythe several groups who have sought to determine their fate over the decades.His question is: who defines the forest in what ways and for what ends? 9In a sense, human geographers like Braun produce knowledge aboutother peoples’ knowledges of the environment.This type of research has along pedigree, even if the theories and methods used to do it have changedconsiderably. For instance, as far back as 1947, the geographer J.K.Wrightdiscussed the role of imagination in human understandings of the materialworld.Ideas, of course, influence peoples’ practices – but the latter are notreducible to, or wholly determined by, the former. I mention this becauseother human geographers have taken a keen interest in how different formsof social organisation lead to different practical engagements with theenvironment.These geographers examine how certain ways of organisingeconomic, cultural, social or political activities have specific environmental