REPRESENTING NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 47

these multiple discourses, 'nature' and its collateral concepts can feature in
their cognitive, moral or aesthetic aspects and in complex ways. Equally,
these discourses can deploy and flesh out 'ambivalent concepts' in a spe-
cific manner, thus troubling - rather than simply relying on - the antonyms
listed in Figure 1.5 . Indeed, some epistemic communities (or some of their
members) intentionally challenge existing mindsets, values and practices:
they go against the grain of convention (more on this in the latter part of
Chapter 5 ). Regardless of the exact case, metonymic references from partic-
ular biophysical entities to a wider 'nature' are commonplace in the various
discourses employed (as I suggested earlier in Box 1.2) . 10
I want now (in general terms) to consider what otherwise different
epistemic communities do when they represent nature to us. The term 'rep-
resentation' is both a verb and a noun: it refers to a process and its various
products. It involves acts of translation and replacement in which different
epistemic workers make sense of the world in various ways and then con-
cretise these sense-making acts in forms that can be shared with others. As
Michael Shapiro once said, despite frequent appearances to the contrary,
'Representations do not “imitate” reality but are the practices through which
things take-on meaning and value

' (Shapiro, 1988: xi). These practices
can be visual (book, film, map, comic strip, photograph); they can be oral
and aural (lecture or guided tour); they can be quantitative (e.g. a graph
of mean atmospheric temperatures or a computerised Global Circulation
Model) or qualitative (e.g. the words and pictures in an issue of the National
Geographic magazine); they can be tactile (think of an interactive museum
display); they can be purely linguistic; they can involve some combination
of discourse and (ostensibly) wordless communication (such as instrumen-
tal music); they can be obviously 'physical' (e.g. a sculpture); they can invite
silent consumption (e.g. reading an ecotourism brochure when planning a
holiday); they can demand active participation (e.g. hiking through a nature
reserve with a field guide in hand); they can be communicated using a
rhetoric of certainty and precision, or be hedged around with qualifications
and caveats.
Some representational forms are relatively durable and can 'travel'
through space and time (e.g. a book or a website). Others are relatively
durable over time but fixed in space and so must physically attract con-
sumers and users (e.g. the Eden Project in southwest England, whose
miniature ecosystems represent 'real' ones). Still others are transient or rel-
atively ephemeral (e.g. the daily news on the radio, a billboard advert or a
documentary on the Discovery Channel). Some representations command
small audiences, others very large ones that are spread across several coun-
tries or continents. Many representations are inconsequential, but some are
hugely influential in the short or longer term.
Clearly, my definition of 'representation' is as ecumenical as my
definition of epistemic communities. As David Runciman and Monica
Vieira note in their book on the subject, representation 'encompasses an

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