Geoscience Reference
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racist conclusions drawn by proponents. Against calls for 'lifeboat ethics' or the
'culling' of human populations in the face of a looming 'environmental crisis',
radical geographers found themselves compelled to explore different ways of con-
ceptualising human-environment relations, and the social and political causes of
environmental change and so-called 'natural disasters'. The second was a growing
critique in the 1970s and 1980s of dualist thought in general, which was taken by
some to lie at the core of many of modernity's pathologies, including its instrumental
relation to the nonhuman world (see, for instance, Merchant, 1990). The problem
for geographers, then, was to move beyond dualist conceptions of nature and
society, a concern that they eagerly took up over the next two decades.
Beyond Dualism? Marxist Geography and
the Production of Nature
One of the most infl uential efforts by human geographers to conceptualise the
matter of nature has been that of Marxist geographers who sought to develop an
understanding of nature consistent with the tenets of historical materialism.
2
Key to these efforts were a number of close readings of Marx's scattered refl ections
on the topic, the fi rst by the Frankfurt School author, Alfred Schmidt (1971), and
the second by the geographer Neil Smith (1984). As Smith explained in his topic
Uneven Development
, although Marx's writings on nature were far from system-
atic, it was possible to identify within them a strong challenge to ontological
dualism, since he consistently situated humans
within
nature, as one of its constitu-
ent parts. As Marx famously put it in his
Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts
:
Nature is man's inorganic body. . . . Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and
he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's
physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself.
(1975[1844], p. 328)
Elsewhere Marx would emphasise labour
as that which mediated the relation
between society and nature:
Labour is, in the fi rst place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and
in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions
between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces,
setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in
order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By
thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own
nature. (1967[1887], p. 173)
It is not diffi cult to see why such a view was immensely attractive and yet at the
same time jarring to readers fed a steady diet of ontological dualism. On the one
hand, it pulled the rug out from beneath those who claimed that nature named an
external realm separate from humans, governed by immutable laws to which humans
must conform. Against the Malthusian discourse of 'natural limits', and the biologi-
cal reductionism of socio-biologists, for instance, the return to Marx presented both
an analytical provocation and a political intervention, for if society and nature were
presented as an internal relation, it was no longer possible to invoke external nature
