Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 47within a discipline – contextual histories look at how (i) wider currentsof thought and (ii) wider social, cultural, economic and political circumstancestogether shape academic subjects over time and space. In short,a contextual approach explores the reciprocal relationship betweendisciplines and the wider context in which they are embedded.By situating the changing ways geographers have studied nature withinsuccessive contexts we will see how the ‘nature of geography’ has rarelybeen stable. My main thesis is twofold. First, I’ll argue that geography hasalways had a ‘problem’ with nature. Disagreements over what is and isnot natural, and how best to study nature, have, I argue, been flash-pointsfor the successive reconstitution of geography as an academic enterprisesince the discipline’s inception. Second, I want to suggest that contemporarygeography has come full circle vis-à-vis nature from where itstarted more than a century ago – but with a twist.Victorian and Edwardiangeographers sought to bring the study of the environment and humannature within one intellectual framework. In a sense, many of the earlygeographers were interested in ‘outer’ (non-human) and ‘inner’ (human)nature at some level.After a long post-1945 era where the study of naturewas squeezed out of human geography, we are once again in a periodwhere it is ‘on the agenda’ for an awful lot of geographers. Here’s thetwist though (to be explained in more detail later): in the main, humangeographers take an emphatically de-naturalising approach to those thingsthat are often thought to be natural – be they non-human species oreven the human mind and body. Meanwhile, environmental and physicalgeographers are careful to limit their research to nature as environmentand do so, in the main, in order to disclose its ‘real character’. Consequently,we find contemporary geography ‘divided’ over its understandings ofnature, with no prospect of a new grand theory to match that of geography’slate-nineteenth-century founders.This, I conclude, is a good thing. It isneither practical nor desirable to comprehend those things we call naturalwithin one or other overarching theoretical, methodological or evaluativeframework.BEGINNINGSHistorians of geography often trace the subject back to the likes ofHerodotus and Ptolemy – an attempt, no doubt, to impress upon readershow ancient, and therefore important, geography is. My own story starts in