Nature - autonomous learning

46 the ‘nature’ of geographywithin a long tradition of geographical inquiry into that which we call‘nature’. I should remind readers at the outset that this chapter – indeed thisbook – focuses on English-speaking geography. I have neither the space northe expertise to discuss the history of university geography elsewhere inthe world.A discussion of how geographers have understood nature is, inevitably,a discussion about the ‘nature’ of geography.This is more than a wordplay.In this chapter we shall see that geographers’ changing understandings ofnature have been hard-wired to changes in the nature of their discipline.Paradoxically, this will lead us to appreciate that geography does not have(and has never had) a ‘nature’, if by that word we mean (in this context)a fixed character or identity (see Rogers 2005). I should warn readers thatthey will have to proceed slowly and carefully if they’re to properly graspthe claims I make in this chapter. When I use the word ‘nature’ in thepages ahead it is always contextually. Depending on what’s being discussed,the nature in question will be one or more of the term’s principal meanings.In addition, readers will need to be alert to when I’m discussing nature inthe cognitive, moral or aesthetic sense, and also when I’m talking about itdescriptively or normatively.This is a lot to ask, I know! It’s likely to inducethe semantic equivalent of seasickness. But my excuse is that geographershave studied ‘nature’ in so many and varied ways that the one wordinevitably changes its meanings depending on whose work I discuss. AsI argued in Chapter 1, nature appears in geographers’ work not only in itsown name but also in the form of numerous collateral concepts. Henceforthin this chapter, I shall refrain from draping the word nature in scare quotesand simply leave it to reader to decipher its specific meaning in any givensentence.Before I begin my potted history, I should confess that it is inevitablya partial and biased one. It is also too ‘tidy’, ignoring numerous looseends and a good deal of complexity. In one sense this is the inevitable resultof me having to cover human and physical geography, as well as themarchlands between them, in just one chapter. But even if I could write atgreater length, Livingstone (1992: 5) is surely correct that all intellectualhistorians ‘stage-manage’ the facts of a discipline’s past so that they neversimply speak for themselves. Like Livingstone, I prefer ‘contextual histories’.Such histories refuse to see academic disciplines as domains of purerationality isolated from wider circumstances. As opposed to ‘internalist’histories – which explain intellectual change only with reference to debates