Nature - autonomous learning

strange natures 37Habgood (2002: 118) provides us with a useful analogy. In the sentences‘James had a fast car’,‘James had a fast wife’,‘James had a fast’, one wordmeans three quite distinct things and refers to very different phenomena.The word ‘nature’ is similarly promiscuous (Box 1.7). Strictly speaking, thismeans that geographers and others do not produce knowledge of naturein the singular but, rather, natures in the plural. Understanding the word isBox 1.7 THE COMPLEXITIES OF A CONCEPT: NATUREThe following are a set of key quotes about the familiarity yetcomplexity of the term ‘nature’:• ‘It’s complexity is concealed by the ease and regularity withwhich we put it to use in a wide variety of contexts. It is at onceboth very familiar and extremely elusive . . . an idea which mostof us know, in some sense, to be so various and comprehensivein its usage as to defy our powers of definition’ (Soper 1995: 1)• ‘The word nature is perhaps the most complex in the [English]language’ (Williams 1983: 219)• ‘An immediate problem with the word “nature” is that it hasmultiple and overlapping meanings . . . Context can tell us agreat deal about the shade of meaning intended’ (Habgood2002: 1).• ‘We cannot fall into the trap that this word has laid for us’(Cronon 1996: 36)• ‘Nature is a word which nowadays must be compulsively drapedin scare-quotes’ (Eagleton 2000: 83)• ‘The concept of nature has accumulated innumerable layers ofmeaning . . . Nature is material and it is spiritual, it is given andmade, pure and undefiled; nature is order and it is disorder,sublime and secular, dominated and victorious; it is a totalityand a series of parts, woman and object, organism and machine’(Smith 1984: 1)• ‘The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinaryamount of human history’ (Williams 1980: 67)