Nature - autonomous learning

strange natures 25consequences. Unlike environmental geographers, these researchers do notexplore those consequences in much geophysical or biochemical detail.Rather, they study the human practices that give rise to those consequences.An example is the research of Gavin Bridge, a colleague of mine. Bridge’swork on the modern mining and forest-products industries shows howtheir embedding within a distinctively capitalist economic system leads tospecific ways of mining and managing timber that give rise to particularforms of environmental damage (e.g. Bridge 2000).But human geographers’ contributions go further than this. If we considerthe second definition of nature – namely, the essence of something– it’s possible to identify two further ways in which human geographersinvestigate nature. First, all societies, economies, cultures and polities havean essence as much as physical environments do – if by that term we simplymean a definite ‘character’ or way of operating. In this broad sense, humangeographers investigate the spatial ‘nature’ of social, economic, culturaland political processes, practices and events. Likewise, physical and environmentalgeographers also study nature in this second sense, since theyare concerned with the ‘nature’ of environment and the ‘nature’ of society–environment relationships respectively. But this very general sense of natureas essence, it’s readily apparent, potentially takes us a long way from theconcerns of this book. In effect, it would make Nature a book about everythingthat geographers say and do!However, a second implication of the definition of nature as ‘the essenceof something’ is more helpful for our understanding of the ‘nature’ thatcontemporary human geographers study.This definition, recall, implies thathumans – as biological beings – have a nature just as much as the nonhumanworld does. In recent years, human geographers have questionedwhether and how such a nature exists. Unlike many researchers in themedical and psychological sciences, several human geographers have shownthat what we call ‘human nature’ (bodily and mental) is not simply natural.Books like Places Through the Body (Nast and Pile 1998), Mapping the Subject (Pileand Thrift 1995) and Body/Space (Duncan 1996) have taken issue with theidea that our physical and mental ‘natures’ are asocial,‘given’ and ‘fixed’. Ineffect, they attempt to ‘de-essentialise’ that which seems natural. To deessentialiseis to show that what seems fixed in nature is either changeableor else was never really fixed in the first place.This is contentious becausemany eminent thinkers – like the neuroscientist Steven Pinker (2002) –believe humans have natures that help explain the kind of people we