Cultural Geography

prehistorical first nature that inhabits Cronon’s

(1991) writing of Chicago (if not his later

collective work, see Cronon, 1996, or even

his introduction to Nature’s Metropolis) is

informed by bio-energetics and a trophic-

dynamic model of ecosystems – which are

themselves wrapped up in a broad political

nexus (see Demeritt, 1994a). So much so that

Demeritt quite rightly questions the degree to

which this first nature exists as ontologically

prior to human history:

Ecosystem ecology got its start as radiation ecology,

but the insistent press of the outside world upon the

modern science of ecology hardly stops there. Integral

to the metaphor of ecosystem are cybernetics, the

mathematics of command and control, first developed

to control automatic anti-aircraft guns and now used to

guide the US Navy’s Cruise missiles and the automatic

trading program of institutional commodities bankers.

(1994a: 177)

This is, it is important to add, not to say that this

science is necessarily flawed, nor is it to say that

another acultural position or god-like viewing

platform is possible (see Haraway, 1991).

Rather, it is to say that the natures that we (possi-

bly rightly) want to include in landscape histories

and geographies are unlikely to be innocent. Nor

are they likely to be accessible as a set of

unmediated (or even mediated) primary properties

(a matter to which I will return). To be sure,

‘INHABITING’ – LANDSCAPES AND NATURES 209

Figure 10.1 Alan Sonfist, ‘Time Landscape’, New York, 1965. A fenced area of Manhattan is meant to evoke a

sense of what the island might have looked like before colonization. Good fencing keeps out the rubbish and most

street people (photo and caption text in Napier 1992: 46, copyright of the author)

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