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ness, compassion, cooperation, play as new forms of political (and ethical) action.
The aim is to engineer increased capacitates for affi rmative life drawing upon 'an
ethics of intelligence' that includes wonder, modesty, trial, and error (pragmatism),
proliferation, and embracing of plurality, uncertainty and difference. Together
these make up a 'non-representational geographic ethics of knowing'. Thrift (2005,
p. 472).
The challenge for after nature politics and ethics is to take these micro-dynamics
of the body, and bodies in action in space, and see how they connect to the larger
entanglements of relational life, spun out around the world in ecologies, and net-
works that are at once cultural, economic, technological, organic, human, and
non-human. The aim is not simply to represent these networks, but to creatively
intervene in them as they unfold in always novel arrangements, seeking to build
capacity of human and non-human fl ourishing.
Final Thoughts: Destructive or Creative Entanglements?
If we understand the world as a huge entanglement of entanglements in ceaseless
motion, within which bodies, places, landscapes, ecologies and cultures form for a
while, before dissolving or moving on, then we must consider, as best we can, those
various entanglements in terms of their desirability. Depleted resources, degraded
land, fi shed out oceans, and environmental injustice, these are undesirable entangle-
ments in action. Cities with rich and wild ecologies, sustainable agricultural systems
that produce food and ecologies simultaneously; these are desirable entanglements
in action.
We need to learn how our maps of those entanglements might also become posi-
tive interventions for good. This vision of theory and research as creative interven-
tions
in
the world as much as maps of it lies at the heart of emerging
non-representational geographies of nature. For example Hinchcliffe (2007) pleads
in the conclusion of
Geographies of Nature:
rather than offering interpretations of nature, or analytical concepts, the injunction
must be to join the doings, to experiment, to engage in the doings of environments, to
environ them in better ways (p. 191).
Such a perspective is diffi cult to enact if we retain the modernist framework of seeing
nature as separate and given, and cultural contact with it as inevitably corrosive.
Just as Latour suggests that we have been blind to the proliferation of monstrous
formations spanning the nature/culture dualism, we have also been blind to the
many often commonplace burgeonings of relational life in the same zone.
Enriching entanglements within which life (human and non-human) can and
does fl ourish are all around us, if we only know how to look. Some of the richest
habitats in the UK for biodiversity have been adaptive landscapes, such as chalk
downland grazed by domestic animals and coppiced woodlands (Adams, 1996).
Here economic production has gone
hand in hand
with the production of rich
ecologies. Other happy nature-culture mixings are evident in urban settings. There
are persistent claims in the UK that urban bees are fairing better than their rural
counterparts and that they make better honey (Norman, 2006)! This is because,
somewhat counter intuitively, there is more 'nature' - a wider range of plant
