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say that it is the 'nature' of something to be a certain way. We might even say, for
instance, that the nature of nature is to perpetually change! For others, nature names
that which exists separate from humanity - the 'natural world' studied by physical
scientists, for instance, or the 'nature' that some environmentalists feel needs to be
saved from humans, who, in turn, are imagined as unnatural. For others still, nature
includes humans as part of the ongoing processes by which the physical world is
constituted, including the physical nature of humans themselves. For those who hold
this view, the boundaries between nature and society, or the ecological and the
technological, are indistinct. And then there are those for whom any statement
about nature must necessarily be provisional, since nature, like any sign, is meaning-
ful only within a larger semiotic system, or because each and any knowledge of
nature is situated and partial. What is of interest to 'constructivists', as they are
often called, is how nature comes to be known and represented in certain ways, and
not others, or how certain things come to be gathered under the sign 'nature' at
particular historical moments while others are excluded.
It would be impossible to cover the diverse meanings that this word carries today
in the space of a short essay. Lengthy treatises have been dedicated to the topic,
many of them rich in historical detail and philosophical insight (see Collingwood,
1945; Glacken, 1967; Williams, 1980). My concern here is to focus more narrowly
on a number of debates within contemporary geography about the nature of nature.
The fi rst concerns how we understand the relation between society and nature. Do
these terms name two separate ontological domains, or are non-dualist ontologies
better suited for thinking about the world in which we dwell? The second concerns
what we might call the
temporality
of nature. Does nature name that which is
eternal and immutable or is it chaotic and 'eventful'? The third has to do with our
ability to make the sorts of claims found in the previous questions. Does knowledge
about nature result from detached observation? Is it mediated by culture, language
and images, all of which precede our encounter with things? Or does it result from
our practical activities in the world? I will end the essay by suggesting that how we
answer each of these questions leads to a fourth set of questions about ethics and
politics, or about how we are to live in a world of human and non-human others.
The Matter of Nature
Does nature name a realm external to humanity or is the boundary between human-
ity and nature indistinct? At least within Western thought this question has been
answered in many different ways. For Aristotle man was an animal with the capacity
for politics, a defi nition that created an internal division
within
man between ani-
mality and humanity (see Agamben, 2004). Aristotle also distinguished between
nature and artifi ce: 'natural' things were governed by a fi nal cause (the oak tree the
fi nal cause of the acorn, for instance), while things made by humans were not (a
table from the oak tree, which could just as well have been made into a chair). The
Roman poet and physicist Lucretius, infl uenced by Epicurus, rejected fi nal causes,
and was far less certain about human uniqueness, instead situating humans fully
within the fl ux and fl ow of a tumultuous atomic world. Human life, he suggested,
was characterised by just as much contingency and chance as nonhuman life - in
the 'swerve' of atoms emerged new and wondrous forms, both human and nonhu-
man. Christian theologians, on the other hand, imagined a created order, in which
humans had been granted their own special place. Nature existed apart from
