The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Alongsidespaceandplace, the question of

nature is one of the most central and enduring

of geographical concerns (Fitzsimmons, 1989).

As every undergraduate knows, geography

stakes its disciplinary identity on being uniquely

concerned with the interface between natural

environments and human cultures. Nowhere is

this better epitomized than in the work of Carl

Ortwin Sauer in the 1920s and the legacy of

theberkeley school, with its emphasis on

cultural landscapein which ‘culture is the

agent [and] the natural area the medium’

(Sauer, 1963b [1925], p. 343). However, even

here, it is evident that this definitive geograph-

ical concern has tended to be cast in terms that

engage the world as if it were already divided

up into things belonging either to nature or to

culture, a division entrenched in the very

fabric of the discipline and reinforced by the

sometimes faltering conversation between

human and physical geographers (seegeo-

graphy;physical geography).

In consequence, as human geographers set

about trafficking between nature and culture,

a fundamental asymmetry in the treatment of

things assigned to these categories has been

smuggled in to the enterprise. Geographies,

like histories, become stories of exclusively

human achievement played out over, and

through, a seemingly indifferent medium of

matter and objects made up of everything

else. Such stories percolate through diverse

currents inhuman geography. These include

marxistaccounts which advance the appar-

ently contradictory idea of the ‘production

of nature’, arguing that more and more of

the things we are accustomed to think of as

natural – fromresourcestolandscapes–

have increasingly become refashioned as the

products of human labour (e.g. Mitchell,

1996; Gandy, 2002). Such accounts identify

this intensifying social capacity to produce

nature assecond nature, a distinct phase in

the historical development of nature–culture

relations that supersedes its original or

‘God-given’ state –first nature(Smith, 1990).

Equally, they include cultural accounts that

explorepostmoderntheories to understand

better the ways in which our ways of seeing

nature are always mediated and shaped by

representational practices and devices – from

cartographic surveys to wildlife film-making (e.

g. Wilson, 1992). These accounts emphasize

the politics ofrepresentation, recognizing

that representational processes are instrumen-

tal in constituting our sense of what the natural

world is like, rather than merely a mirror image

of a fixed external reality. In consequence, such

accounts suggest, multiple and often incom-

patible representations of the same natural

phenomena or event can and do coexist (e.g.

Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988).

Whether their emphasis has been on

nature’s material transformation or on its

changing meaning, these are geographies

whose only subject or active inhabitants are

people, while everything else is consigned to

nature and becomes putty in our hands. In

this, human geography’s long march from

environmental determinismtosocial con-

structionismseems to have brought us to the

same place as that identified by the environ-

mentalist Bill McKibben as the ‘end of nature’

(see Castree, 2005a). Thishumaniststance is

premised on two working assumptions (see

humanism). The first is that the collective

‘us’ of human society is somehow always al-

ready removed from the rest of the world, for

only by placing ita prioriat a distance can

human society be (re)connected to everything

else on such asymmetrical terms as those be-

tween producer and product, or viewer and

view (Ingold, 2000). The second is that in

different ways the generative energies of the

Earth itself, in rivers, soils, weather and oceans

and the living plants and creatures assigned to

‘nature’, are effectively evacuated from the

terms of these analyses (Haraway, 1991c).

Such assumptions do not square with the an-

guish and infrastructure of existential concern

that characterize the twenty-first century. In

unimaginable and unforeseen ways, the force-

fulness of all manner of things has come to

make itself felt in our social lives and political

agendas. From climate change to mad cow

disease, there is a growing sense that our

worldlyinteractionswith,and indifference to,

more-than-human forces and entities are

returning to haunt us. Since the last edition

of thisDictionary was published (2000), a

major thrust of work in human, particularly

cultural, geography has been to challenge

these premises and rethink the ‘human’, and

the status of the ‘non-human’, in the fabric of

human geography (Whatmore, 2002b).

Much of this work has drawn inspiration

frompost-structuralist philosophies rela-

tively new to geography, through intermediar-

ies such as science and technology studies

(STS) (see Hinchliffe, 2007). The argument

advanced here is that what we are experien-

cing is less a ‘crisis of nature’ and more a ‘crisis

ofobjectivity’, in which the things ascribed

to nature are refusing to stay passively in their

boxes and are assuming their irrepressible

part in the possibilities and achievements of

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_N Final Proof page 493 31.3.2009 3:13pm Compositor Name: ARaju

NATURE