HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 11

nature, or in some sense superceding it. Hence, there's a tension between the
ideas of nature as universal and as not: 'if “natural” describes everything in
the universe, including

...

people, it follows that it's impossible for anything
to be unnatural' (Poole, 2007: 68).
In addition to combining the word nature's several meanings without
(hopefully) tying ourselves in knots, we are also apt to do so with subtlety.
For example, we might say that the English Lake District and Siberian tundra
are both natural landscapes in the first sense of the term 'nature'. But we'd
want to acknowledge that the former bears the imprint of human activity
far more obviously than does the latter. This illustrates our belief that there
are degrees of naturalness (in the third and fourth senses of term), and a
grey area between what is deemed natural and 'unnatural'. 9 We can thus,
and routinely do, distinguish 'anthropogenic' from (variously) 'pristine',
'untouched' and 'wild' nature.

Where is nature?

So far, so good. But to fully understand what nature means for us, we also
need to ask where it is. Addressing this question reveals our propensity in
Western societies to spatialise (or delimit geographically) those things we
consider to be natural.

Study Task: When you think about nature, which sorts of places, countries
or landscapes come to mind? Are any of the four meanings of nature iden-
tified previously less applicable than others when you think about where
nature is? If so, then why?

We typically spatialise 'nature' understood in the first and third senses
of the word. As an object (or 'other') possessed of distinctive qualities, we
think of it in terms of specific locations. Some of these are iconic: think
of Alaska, safari parks, the Sahara Desert, volcanoes, the countryside, coral
reefs, the high Andes, the polar ice-caps, the deep ocean, atolls, Australia's
Great Barrier Reef, Niagara Falls or the Galapagos Islands. We also think
of nature as located in specific countries, such as Costa Rica. Today, the
Amazon rainforest is perhaps the most recognisable 'natural space' of all.
It's nothing less than a 'verdant poster child' (Slater, 2003: 21) for all that is
deemed to be worth protecting against 'the human impact'.
Where what we call nature is threatened or vanishing, we as often create
ex situ sites in which to concentrate it as we do ring-fence natural spaces and
species in situ - think, for instance, of zoos, botanical gardens or the Millen-
niumSeedBank in London (metaphorical arks all). So, we routinely consider
nature to be somewhere else : it's something we travel to, visit or dwell in prior
to returning to our 'unnatural' towns and cities. Thus, when science histo-
rian Donna Haraway insisted that 'nature is not a place to which one can