Nature - autonomous learning

28 strange naturesTo summarise, the geographical study of nature extends beyond thephysical environment and involves human geographers as much as physicaland environmental geographers. Despite initial appearances, geographers’research on nature could readily encompass most of the issues highlightedin the seven stories with which I began this chapter.This said, ourdiscussion of geography and nature is not quite complete.Attentive readerswill have observed the absence of any mention of the third definition ofnature in this section. So let me now conclude this part of the chapter byquickly making amends.The notion of nature as an ‘inherent force’ maysound very abstract, even metaphysical. In other words, it may seem unlikelyto be of interest to geographers. But appearances can be deceptive. In thefirst place, many physical geographers are interested in the inherent forcesin the natural world that create everything from meandering rivers toglaciers. Far from being abstract and metaphysical, these forces includegravity, the conservation of energy and the increase of entropy, amongothers.They are forces mostly studied by the specialist sciences. Physicalgeographers have written whole books identifying and explainingthe natural forces that are relevant to their research (e.g. Bradbury et al.2002). In investigative and teaching terms, what usually interests physicalgeographers is the way these forces combine in specific real-world timesand situations. For environmental geographers things are a little different.To simplify, an understanding of natural forces is more a part of their‘background knowledge’. It is relevant to their research but not somethingthey would comprehend in the same detail as a physical geographer mightdo.As for human geographers, well things are different again. For obviousreasons, these geographers are not too interested in things like entropy orgravity (except, perhaps, as metaphors)! However, they are interested inthe way some people represent nature as an ‘inherent force’. For example, in2001 Lynne Bezant – a 57 year-old British woman – became pregnant as aresult of IVF.According to one of her critics, this entailed wrongly ‘strayingover nature’s line’ (Weale 2001: 3). Rather than take this criticism at facevalue, some human geographers would look not only at who said it, buthow and why nature was invoked to make the criticism.They would askwhat purposes it serves to depict nature as a force we ignore only at our peril(see Table 1.3 for a summary of this section).