Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
humans, who were conceived either as having dominion over it, or as called to care
for it. Natural theology, in turn, took as its task understanding God's design. For
Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes, the human subject was conceived to
be different in kind from animals, since animals did not have the capacity for reason.
Human reason, in turn, was exercised upon nature as if from a position outside of
nature - a 'brain in a vat', as Bruno Latour (1999) has famously put it. And, of
course, in the eyes of Romantic poets, nature existed as an external realm in which
humans could glimpse an eternal, transcendental order, should they bother to
immerse themselves in it. This sublime nature, seen to be at risk from the depreda-
tions of industrial modernity, still beckons to us today in the form of national parks
and wilderness preserves, where the last vestiges of pristine nature are imagined to
exist, and the promise is held out of a return to a more original and more authentic
existence. Romanticism teaches us that we are no longer natural, although perhaps
we once were - that at some point in the past we managed to extract ourselves
from nature into an entirely different realm called society, which now places nature
at risk.
Clearly, the relation between 'nature' and 'humanity' has had a tumultuous
history. In geography today, however, it is virtually a truism that the separation of
the world into two distinct ontological domains - nature and society - is a habit of
thought that demands to be challenged, both on conceptual and ethical-political
grounds. Hence, any inquiry into the status of 'nature' in geographical thought
today must necessarily take up the question of dualism and attempts to overcome
it. Before proceeding further, however, I should note that the question of nature
and its relation to humanity has been a more pressing one among human geogra-
phers than physical geographers. At fi rst blush this may seem counterintuitive, for
is it not physical geographers who study nature? And have not human geographers
been accused of too often
ignoring
nature, labouring under the false impression that
society followed its own rules and logics, entirely separate from nonhuman nature?
While both statements are certainly true, there are a number of intellectual and
historical reasons why human geography has been the side of the discipline more
preoccupied with the question.
One very simple reason is that physical geographers, and others in the environ-
mental sciences, rarely work with such grand abstractions as 'nature'. The concern
of fi eld scientists and lab workers alike is to understand specifi c physical processes.
How is fl uvial gravel entrained, transported and deposited in different kinds of
rivers? And how is this different in humid and arid environments? To answer ques-
tions such as these, a geomorphologist like Marwan Hassan has no need of such
baggy concepts as 'nature' or 'society' (Hassan et al., 2006). On the other hand,
many physical geographers
do
work with an implicit and largely unquestioned
nature/society dualism. As Urban and Rhoads (2003) explain, most physical geog-
raphers understand their task to be to ascertain the physical processes or events that
have shaped the earth's biotic, geomorphological and climatological systems, and
have conceived humans to be separate from and external to these 'natural' systems,
which are assumed to be independent from, prior to, or unaffected by humans (see
Gregory, 2000). At most, humans enter physical geographers' accounts in one of
two ways: either as scientifi c practitioners (with all the attendant questions about
method), or, as an external force that 'disturbs' or exerts an 'impact' on physical
processes. While more recent work by some environmental geographers has begun
to study human activities among the processes shaping physical landscapes, the
