Nature - autonomous learning

38 strange naturesmanifestly not a case of identifying its ‘proper meanings’ and its ‘properreferents’.This is something that the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williamsappreciated many years ago.As he put it:Some people, when they see a word, think that the first thing to dois to define it. Dictionaries are produced . . . and a proper meaning isattached. But while it may be possible to do this, more or less satisfactorily,with certain simple names of things, it is not only impossiblebut irrelevant in the case of more complicated ideas. What matters inthem is not the proper meaning but the history and complexity ofmeanings . . .(Williams 1980: 67)Following Williams, we can now see that all three main meanings (signifieds)of the term ‘nature’ are purely conventional not once and forall ‘correct’. Likewise, there is nothing ‘natural’ about the fact that theterm refers to all the particular things it does and not to others. If wewant to know what nature is and why we value it in the ways we do wemust look not to nature itself but to our ideas about nature. A tellingexample is provided by John Takacs (1996) in his book The Idea of Biodiversity(Box 1.8).This discussion further confirms a point made in the previous section ofthe chapter.The claims that geographers make about nature are part of anongoing process whereby the very meaning/s and referents of the term‘nature’ are up for grabs. It’s important to dispense with the idea that theterm ‘nature’ innocently describes certain things that geographers then goout and study in detail. Rather, geographers’ research and teaching is a partof the process where the meaning/s and referents of the term ‘nature’become ‘solidified’ or ‘fixed’ at the societal or subsocietal level. Definitionsof ‘nature’ do not precede the efforts of geographers and others to determinewhat nature is and how, in practical, moral or aesthetic terms, touse it.At this point I need to deal with a potential problem facing any authorwho wishes to analyse nature as one of geography’s key concepts. Theproblem is this: many geographers prefer not to use the term ‘nature’ intheir writing! For instance, many physical geographers favour the term‘environment’ because, for them, the word ‘nature’ has quasi-romantic ormystical connotations of a ‘higher power’. Likewise, many geographers are