Nature - autonomous learning

42 strange naturesone’s view of its causes and solutions alters drastically. One might look at aperson’s lifestyle or what kinds of foods match a person’s budget givencurrent prices. One might note that in Western societies obesity ispronounced among lower-income families. And one might conclude thatobesity has social, cultural and economic causes such that medical solutionsare misplaced or only partially valid.The relevance of this to geography isthat, as we’ll see later in the book, many geographers have sought to recategorisethose things that appear to be natural or to have natural causes.Thisattempt to establish the non-natural character of that which seems naturalis an important part of determining where the boundaries between thenatural and the social lie. Human geographers, in particular, have expandedour sense of where and why social processes, relations and structures areimportant. In many cases, they argue, nature is a social construction and thusnot, in fact, natural at all (see Box 1.5 again).SUMMARYAt this point it should be very clear what my approach to the naturegeographers study is. I am not going to recommend one or other of understandingsof nature that I discuss in this book – whether they come fromhuman, physical or environmental geographers. Rather, I am going to treatthese approaches as equally vigorous interventions in the importantbusiness of shaping wider understandings of, and practices upon, thosethings we call natural. I argue that we should evaluate these interventionsless for their truth-value and more because of the kind of practical, moralor aesthetic projects they engender. For instance, I will ask what is to begained in believing the claims of some human geographers that nature isa ‘social construction’? Likewise, we will ponder what is lost if we treatthe ‘scientific’ claims about nature made by many physical geographers withunbridled scepticism or else with uncritical enthusiasm. I hope it’s nowclear why I titled this introductory chapter ‘Strange natures’.The way I’vediscussed nature in the preceding pages will have been triply strange forsome readers. First, I have not discussed nature in the sense only of theenvironment (or non-human world). Second, this means that I intend, inthis book, to discuss more than the nature investigated by physical andenvironmental geographers. Finally, the nature that geographers study(in all senses of the term) is not, I argue, to be confused with the thingsthe term describes. Nature, I insist, is a concept or idea, not the real world