21
Nature and Society
INTRODUCTION
How are society and nature related? How and
why do the relationships vary over time and
across space? Together, these questions vir-
tually defined the focus and raison d’être of
academic geography when it first gained a
toe-hold in Western universities over a cen-
tury ago. Today, they remain key questions
for many geographers – and the stakes are
not purely academic. When, in 1864, George
Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, or
Physical Geography as Modified by Human
Action he was in a distinct minority. In the
early twenty-first century, by contrast, his
warnings about humanity’s capacity to cause
irreversible changes to ecosystems and habi-
tats are hardly out of place. Indeed, Marsh’s
concerns about our treatment of the bio-
physical world are today echoed by those
anxious about the way we are altering human
as much as non-human nature. Ours is the era
of genetically modified foods, ‘designer
babies’, artificial life (AI), cloned mammals,
accelerating species extinctions, global cli-
mate change, the deforestation of the Amazon
Basin, oil and water scarcity, and much more
besides. Such is modern humanity’s capacity
to transform natural processes and phenomena
Chapter_21.indd 287
Noel Castree
that the Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen calls
our time ‘the anthropocene’. In his view, it is
akin to a new geological era and a distinct
phase of earth history. What is to be done
about the ‘human impact’? This is among the
defining questions of our time.
In this chapter I describe the changing and
diverse ways in which geographers have
interrogated society–nature relationships over
the last century or so. This is a grand ambition
given the word constraints imposed by writ-
ing for this Handbook: as we will see, it
involves discussing geography as a whole
rather than a few select parts of the field. This
reflects the continued centrality of the ‘society
–nature problematic’ to geography’s iden-
tity, even during the long post-1945 period
when its human and physical components
drifted progressively apart. My review reveals
some stark intellectual and ethical differences
in the approaches taken by geographers past
and present. There has long been little con-
sensus about what dimensions of society–
nature relations should be studied, how and to
what ends. I speculate on the causes of dis-
sensus, and also consider whether a lack of
unity is problem or a plus-point. Throughout,
I focus on Anglophone geography – in part
because it is quite influential within the
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 288 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
broader landscape of academic geography
globally, in part because I know far less about
the subject beyond the Anglophone world.
Because I cover so much ground in so few
pages, my discussion is necessarily sweeping
and lacks the usual subtleties and qualifica-
tions. I hope the simplifications made do not
amount to misrepresentations. Although I
take a chronological approach in what fol-
lows, I am in no way assuming that what is
newest is, intellectually speaking, intrinsi-
cally better or worse than what came before.
I’ll explain why towards the end.
FOUNDATIONS: GEOGRAPHY IS THE
STUDY OF SOCIETY–ENVIRONMENT
RELATIONS?
On the evening of Monday, 31 January 1887,
Halford Mackinder delivered a now famous
address to London’s Royal Geographical
Society. In his lecture – entitled ‘On the
scope and methods of geography’ – he
explained how and why geography should
take its place alongside other disciplines
within the academic division of labour. His
strategy, at once simple and audacious, was
to call that division of labour into question.
Geography, Mackinder argued, can ‘bridge
one of the greatest of all gaps’; namely, that
separating ‘the natural sciences and the study
of humanity’ (1887: 145). He was not alone
in defining geography as ‘the science whose
main function is to trace the interaction of
man [sic] in society and so much of his envi-
ronment as varies locally’. At points east and
west others were doing much the same, such
as William Morris Davis in America, Paul
Vidal de la Blache in France, and Friedrich
Ratzel in Germany. The four men soon occu-
pied important university positions, and were
followed by similarly vigorous prosleytisers
who quickly built on the foundations their
forebears had laid.
So began geography’s career as a univer-
sity subject and what this book’s co-editor
David Livingstone (1992: 177) called ‘the
Chapter_21.indd 288
geographical experiment’. This was the
attempt to keep nature and society under ‘one
conceptual umbrella’ in the face of ‘the
incipient Balkanisation of knowledge that
accompanied the professionalization of
scientific specialities’ (ibid.). There were two
aspects to this. First, the likes of Mackinder,
de la Blache, Ratzel and Davis saw the need
to study nature as a whole not as a set of
discrete parts. Where subjects like chemistry,
physics and botany specialised in investigat-
ing select elements of the natural world,
geography would study all these elements in
combination (as Alexander von Humboldt
had famously sought to do early in the
nineteenth century). This is what ‘physical
geography’ was, according to its nineteenth-
century proponents like Mary Somerville. In
her 1849 book of this name, she defined it as
‘a description of the Earth, the sea and the air,
with their inhabitants the distribution of these
beings, and the causes of their distribution’
(Somerville 1849: 1). Her successors, influ-
enced in part by Charles Darwin’s path-
breaking theory of evolution by means of
natural selection (1859), were sometimes
given to discussions of ‘human nature’ and
how it varied geographically in response to
the conditions of regional physical environ-
ment. Second, this commitment to studying
nature as an integrated, multifaceted system
was accompanied by a desire to explore its
two-way relationships with human societies.
For Mackinder and the other early geogra-
phers, it was important that nature be studied
in context, as something that forms the basis
of (and is affected) by human practices of an
economic, cultural and political kind. In this
sense, the study of human geography was to
be deeply materialist with its roots – quite
literally – in the soil. The resulting investiga-
tions of ‘human–environment’ relations could
be conducted at a range of geographical
scales, from the local right up to the global.
Clearly, geography had high ambitions in
its fledging years as a university subject: it
was, in terms of subject matter and scope,
very much a ‘world discipline’. But it became
increasingly clear that its ‘bridging’ aspirations
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 NATURE AND SOCIETY
were difficult to realise satisfactorily. The
major problem was a practical one.
Geography’s perspective on the world was so
comprehensive, and its subject matter so
compendious, that it proved very difficult to
demonstrate causal connections between the
component parts of the non-human world, let
alone all these parts and various societies
worldwide. Some, like Mackinder and Ratzel,
had hoped that a geographical equivalent (or
version) of the theory of evolution might be
developed. But this hope was in vain. It was
time consuming enough to provide mere
descriptions of different societies and their
physical environs, never mind plausible
explanations. As a result, most early research
publications by geographers were beset by
what – with hindsight – were serious intel-
lectual weaknesses. For instance, monographs
that focused on specific places or regions
were often impressionistic by present-day
standards, and filled with unverified specula-
tions about how and why nature and human
society were as they were in given situations.
At worst, this shaded into what we would
now regard as racism founded on supposed
‘natural differences’. For instance, in the US
geographers like Ellen Semple and Ellsworth
Huntington were apt to argue that certain
physical environments produced human
‘races’ less intellectually or physically capa-
ble than Europeans. Such beliefs were con-
sistent with certain versions of evolutionary
theory – such as the work of Jean Baptiste
Lamarck – but not with Darwin’s.
As a result, by the 1920s gaps began to
appear between the stated ideals of geogra-
phy’s founding figures and the subject as
practised by their successors. On the one
side, physical geography began to fragment
into sub-fields and these specialisms, in turn,
focused more and more on biophysical phe-
nomena as such (rather than their two-way
relationships with human societies). For
instance, the regional-scale study of land-
forms (geomorphology) was fairly well
developed by the 1920s, and climatic geogra-
phy was also becoming more sophisticated.
On the other side, a relatively free-standing
Chapter_21.indd 289
289
human geography began to take shape, with
its emerging sub-branches usually lacking
any deep grounding in physical geography.
For example, the economic geography of
George Chisholm in Britain and the political
geography expounded by Isaiah Bowman
in America were ‘systematic’ rather than
‘synthetic’ in nature. That is, they
abstracted specific features of human prac-
tice (economics and politics respectively)
and focused on their spatial variation across
the earth’s surface. The biophysical basis of
human activity was not ignored by either
geographer, but there was no pretence of
offering a robust and in-depth account of
physical geography, or of demonstrating its
causal influence on human activity in a con-
vincing way.
These developments presaged a wide-
spread turn to specialisation, and a fragmen-
tation of academic geography, that set-in
after World War II. The weakening of its
holistic ambitions was no doubt aided by the
increasing sophistication, precision and
rigour of other university subjects – such
as physics and economics which both pro-
duced notable theoretical breakthroughs by
the 1930s, underpinned by mathematics,
controlled experiments and logic. Even so,
geographers’ commitment to study human–
environment relationships at a range of
scales did not entirely disappear. Instead, it
was finessed and narrowed somewhat so that
it could be delivered on more readily. For
instance, American geographer Carl Sauer’s
influential 1925 publication The Morphology
of Landscape argued that many natural envi-
ronments were the products of specific cul-
tural practices, such that culture is the agent,
the natural area is the medium, the cultural
landscape the result. This research agenda
focused many geographers’ attention on dif-
ferent cultures and the physical landscapes
they created over time, licensing careful
fieldwork and archival study – typically in
rural settings. The Sauerian cultural geogra-
pher would need to know some physical
geography germane to their chosen cultural
landscape, but the emphasis was on people’s
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 290 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
land-use practices not the intricacies of
biophysical processes or events per se.
POST-1945 FRAGMENTATION
World War II was a turning point for geography
and its approach to the study of nature–society
relations. Many who would subsequently gain
positions in university geography departments
served in the military between 1939 and 1945.
The experience was formative for most, instill-
ing a belief that precision, measurement and
rationality were virtues to be aspired to. At the
same time three other developments were sig-
nificant. First, academic geography had failed
to produce major books or intellectual innov-
ations comparable to, say, John Maynard
Keynes’ 1936 General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money. This became a cause for
concern. Second, many outside geography had
successfully argued that the physical sciences
and the social sciences (with the humanities)
had to be different by virtue of their subject
matter. There could be no overarching theory
or analysis of people and nature, it was argued,
because the former possessed ontological
properties quite different from rocks, rivers or
ravines. For instance, humans are self-reflex-
ive, linguistic, tool-making beings able to
make their own history and geography – so
argued philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, among
others. This argument drove a wedge between
the two spheres – society and nature – that the
original geographers had sought to bring
together in a single intellectual frame. Finally,
the embarrassment of ‘environmental deter-
minism’ – the pre-war argument made by
Semple, Huntington and others that some
human ‘races’ were mere reflexes of climate
and resources – made some geographers deter-
mined to ‘raise their game’ intellectually.
After 1945 academic geography progres-
sively splintered into two major halves
(human and physical), with each fragment-
ing into relatively discrete ‘systematic’ sub-
disciplines. The turn to specialisation was
undertaken in the hope that human and
Chapter_21.indd 290
physical geography could become ‘spatial
sciences’. They would discover – through
careful measurement, hypothesis testing and
use of statistics – laws explaining spatial pat-
terns (such as the common tendency of rivers
to meander or migration flows to be inversely
proportional to the size of destination cities).
This implied a splitting of geography’s sub-
ject matter into two, with intellectual unity
(many hoped) maintained at the level of the
perspective taken on the subject matter.
Accordingly, human geography increasingly
abstracted the analysis of political, economic,
social and cultural practices from their bio-
physical integument. The pre-war fondness
of some geographers for discussing ‘human
nature’ (in the biological sense) was also
quickly abandoned. On the other side, physi-
cal geographers produced increasingly ‘sci-
entific’ descriptions, explanations and even
predictions of earth surface phenomena.
Specialisation, new databases, new remote-
sensing capabilities and new computer tech-
nologies made this possible. But the price
paid was intellectual disunity: physical geog-
raphers divided nature (in the sense of the
physical environment) into the five areas that
comprise the field to this day (geomorphol-
ogy, biogeography, climatology, hydrology
and Quaternary environmental change).
There was also a move towards small-scale,
short time horizon studies because hypothe-
sis testing was very difficult for macro-scale
analyses of (say) whole ecosystems or river
basins. Where macro-scale physical geogra-
phy persisted, it was often hived-off to other
academic subjects – as happened with mete-
orology and climatology. Finally, all of the
above meant that the study of human–envi-
ronment relations became a minority pursuit,
with ‘spatial analysis’ and the search for gen-
eral laws, models and theories becoming
geography’s new modus operandi.
These changes together bolstered geogra-
phers’ intellectual self-esteem and improved
their external image within the world of
higher learning. Ironically, though, geogra-
phy was effectively abandoning the study of
human–environment relations at the very
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 NATURE AND SOCIETY
moment when the title of William Thomas’s
1956 edited book, Man’s Role in Changing
the Face of the Earth, was becoming as obvi-
ous as it was profound. C.P. Snow’s famous
complaint about the estrangement of ‘the two
cultures’ – one literary–humanistic, the other
scientific–rational – was (ironically) applica-
ble to post-war geography, the one subject
that had made intellectual unity its raison
d’être. Some purposeful efforts to maintain
the earlier unity of geography were made,
with ‘systems theory’ and ‘models’ two of
the suggested ways in which human and
physical geographers might make common-
cause by the early 1970s. But these efforts
could not prevent a growing schism between
human and physical geography, with nature
effectively erased from the former’s intellec-
tual preoccupations. At the same time, phys-
ical geography’s major branches bled into
cognate subjects, such as ecology in the case
of biogeography. This made them increas-
ingly interdisciplinary, and reflected their
inability to police their own turf once the
idea of a unified physical geography was
progressively abandoned after 1945.
WHITHER SOCIETY–NATURE
STUDIES?
The developments recounted above meant
that the study of society–nature relations was
no longer synonymous with geography tout
court by the late twentieth century. From the
mid-1970s, the terms ‘environmental geogra-
phy’ and ‘people–environment geography’
signified a relatively small and heterogene-
ous body of research situated in the middle
ground vacated by geography’s two increas-
ingly estranged halves. This research had to
somehow negotiate the ontological, episte-
mological and methodological differences
between human and physical geographers, as
well as the presumption that ‘nature’ was dif-
ferent in kind from ‘society’ – even though
the two domains were joined together in
practice. I will describe some of its principal
Chapter_21.indd 291
291
strands below, and seek (in brief) to explain
their provenance. As we’ll see, these strands
were and are largely ‘asymmetrical’; that is,
they focused more on the ‘human’ side of the
society–nature relation for the most part.
Natural hazards geography
After World War II, many Western govern-
ments adopted a more hands-on approach to
public welfare. This included a new determi-
nation to protect people from the effects of
natural hazards, such as hurricanes, droughts
and landslides. In this context, the American
geographer Gilbert White pioneered an
approach in which peoples’ perceptions of
hazards became the major focus. White
argued that many individuals and communi-
ties living in high-risk locations did not
necessarily perceive themselves to be vul-
nerable, and so failed to take adequate meas-
ures to mitigate the effects of hazard events.
In this way, peoples’ cognition was granted
a degree of independence and flexibility
rather than being assumed to bear the ‘objec-
tive’ imprint of their environs. Ian Burton
and Robert Kates, among others, built on
White’s approach and sought to identify
different forms of ‘cognitive rationality’
specific to certain groups in certain hazard-
ous locations (Burton et al. 1978). The pre-
sumption was that people’s perceptions of
hazards – however inaccurate or distorted –
could be rationally explained, leading to
tailored policy solutions that might better
protect them and their livelihoods. This kind
of geographical research was important
in United States and Canadian geography,
with natural hazards researchers being heav-
ily involved in public policy agendas for
hazardous regions in both countries.
Cultural ecology
Situated on the marchlands between cultural
anthropology and cultural geography, this
approach to society–nature study became
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 292 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
prominent in the late 1960s – especially in
American geography. Pioneered by Julian
Steward, Andrew Vayda, Roy Rappaport,
Marvin Harris and Clifford Geertz, it was a
critique of anthropology’s mid-twentieth cen-
tury ‘culturalism’ – wherein cultural habits
were thought to be sui generis. Typically
focused on land- and water-based communi-
ties in the global South, cultural ecologists
sought out those aspects of cultural belief
and practice that seemed to be ‘functional’
adaptations to local ecology. In this way they
re-materialised culture to its biophysical base,
without succumbing to environmental deter-
minism. The typical cultural ecologist would
undertake detailed, long-term fieldwork
into environmental usage and modification
in one locality, as well as everyday and ritu-
alistic cultural practices. The result was a
set of holistic studies in which the metaphor
of ‘homeostasis’ – borrowed from systems
theory – loomed large, and in which ‘culture’
and ‘ecology’ were regarded as co-dependent,
mutually adjusted, relatively stable, and inter-
nally complex domains of process, relation-
ship and event.
Political ecology
Cultural ecology, for the most part, adopted a
resolutely local focus and tended to treat cul-
tural groups and their biophysical milieux in
isolation from the national and global scales.
But this began to change from the mid-1980s
onwards. The reasons were presaged in cul-
tural ecologist Barney Nietschmann’s study
of the Miskito Indians of the Nicaraguan
coast. A field-trip in the early 1970s made
Nietschmann aware that his chosen field area
was beginning to be drawn into national and
global commodity markets and was losing
some of its former independence (Nietschmann
1973). A decade later, Piers Blaikie and
Harold Brookfield formalised this insight in
the germinal books The Political Economy of
Soil Erosion (Blaikie 1985) and Land
Degradation and Society (Blaikie and
Brookfield 1987). For them, cultural ecology’s
Chapter_21.indd 292
focus on homeostasis and the relative
autonomy of different cultures were increas-
ingly being rendered unrealistic by two
things: first, the growing reach of state power
at the national level; and second the interna-
tionalisation of commodity production, dis-
tribution and consumption. ‘Political ecology’
was thus tasked with understanding how
local resource use was being affected by
wider social forces, and the accent was on
asymmetries of power between ordinary
people and the various actors (e.g. national
states and multinational companies) affecting
those peoples’ lives. A new generation of
researchers, especially in North America,
were inspired to uncover the complex chain
of connections tying local land and water use
decisions by (say) peasant farmers to global
shifts in commodity prices, trade agreements
and so on. Political ecology was thus ‘politi-
cal’ in that it was critical of the actors and
processes that were destabilising local land
use practices. For instance, land users who
degraded their local resources were typically
seen as relatively blameless victims making
difficult decisions in highly constrained cir-
cumstances explained by ‘external drivers’
beyond their immediate control.
The geography of hazards
vulnerability
If political ecology radicalised cultural ecol-
ogy, and expanded its analytical horizons, so
too did a new approach to natural hazards
geography from the mid-1980s onwards. The
studies of White and fellow travellers tended,
like cultural ecology, to bracket the local scale
off from its wider geographical context. They
also abstracted people’s perceptions of hazards
and the process of cognition from any broader
consideration of social relations and social
identity. This began to change when Kenneth
Hewitt – a former adherent to the White
approach – edited Interpretations of Calamity
(1983). A decade later, Ben Wisner and col-
leagues published the important book, At Risk:
Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and
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 NATURE AND SOCIETY
Hazards (1994). These texts had an interna-
tional impact on Anglophone hazards geo-
graphy. They suggested that ‘vulnerability’ to
hazards was not simply a question of living in
a naturally hazardous location: it was also a
question of wealth, power, identity and social
location. Drawing, like the political ecologists,
on the radical ideas that flowered in the
Western social sciences from the early 1970s
onwards, Hewitt, Wisner and others argued
that vulnerability was (i) variable in degree
and kind within populations, and (ii) explained
by the positions people occupied in regional or
national social structures, and in world politics
and economics more broadly. This kind of
research directed policy makers’ attention
away from peoples’ perceptions of hazards
(with associated public education pro-
grammes), and from ‘technocratic’ policies
like building flood walls to defend against
storm surges. Instead, the attention was focused
on how poverty and powerlessness are socially
produced, and on how vulnerable communi-
ties can be better protected against the prob-
lems triggered when hazard events occur, like
a tsunami. Protective policies should, the argu-
ment went, be focused as much on social
welfare as on physical engineering solutions.
Vulnerability was this seen as a social problem
whose downsides were starkly exposed when
natural hazards occurred.
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY AND
THE ‘REDISCOVERY’ OF NATURE
Regardless of the intellectual attractions of
these four approaches to society–nature anal-
ysis, most Anglophone human and physical
geographers have been happy to separate
‘social’ from ‘natural’ phenomena over the
last 40 years. However, in parts of human
geography this is no longer the case. Since
the mid-1990s, an intellectually and politi-
cally diverse cohort of researchers have
‘brought nature back in’ to their inquiries, but
in some unconventional ways. For illustrative
purposes, I will make mention of three
Chapter_21.indd 293
293
approaches. They share a common determi-
nation to ‘denaturalise’ that which we con-
ventionally regard as ‘natural’, or else to
challenge the idea that ‘nature’ calls the shots
over society.
New natural resource geography
‘Old’ style natural resource geography was a
fairly atheoretical enterprise, in which the
researcher would seek to describe and explain
the location and character of the industries
based on coal, steel, oil and the like. The
language used was, typically, that of ‘factors
of production’ – such as the costs of labour,
the weight or bulk of natural resources, and
so on. For each industry, a different weight
and mixture of factors would be used to
explain the local, regional or international
geography in question. In additional, the lan-
guage of ‘finite’ and ‘renewable’ resources
was used, along with terms like ‘carrying
capacity’ – all of which pointed to supposed
intrinsic qualities of resources. Since the
early 1990s, this old style form of analysis
has been eclipsed by a newer, theoretically
conscious approach which places considera-
ble emphasis on the social constitution of
natural resource geographies. In other words,
it downplays the ‘natural’ aspects of natural
resources in the belief that these aspects are
by no means central to explaining the geog-
raphies in question. It looks, instead, to the
structure of the economic system in which
‘factors of production’ are defined and
assume varying degrees of importance.
One recent example is Mazan Labban’s
(2008) Space, Oil and Capital. There are cur-
rently concerns that oil reserves will be
exhausted by the mid-twenty first century,
presaging a turn to a post-petrocapital way of
life globally. Labban argues that oil scarcity
is not absolute and that it is, in fact, a
‘normal’ part of the global oil industry over
the last century. He explains the social crea-
tion of oil scarcity with reference to the way
in which land-owners in oil states and big oil
firms together insure against an over-supply
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of oil, which would reduce its price. He also
shows how oil availability is relative to the
technical means available to extract it from
the ground, and to struggles between land
owners and firms over right of access to oil
fields. Labban’s Marxist approach thus
removes the focus from the supposed ‘natu-
ral limits’ imposed on oil producers and
consumers by oil itself. His approach, and
that of geographers like Gavin Bridge, Scott
Prudham, Karen Bakker and Morgan
Robertson, directs our attention to how cer-
tain biophysical entities become resources,
who has material access to them, under what
social conditions and to what purposes.
Cultural studies of nature
New resource geography has a strong focus
on the way commodity production is organ-
ised in capitalist, class-divided societies.
Coincident with its rise, many cultural and
rural geographers preferred to look at ‘nature’
in all its aspects – genes, forests, gardens,
rivers, wildlife and much more besides. They
did so by inquiring into how supposedly
‘natural’ things were represented as natural,
by who and with what effects. Like new
resource geographers, these researchers
sought to de-emphasise the physical proper-
ties of those things we call ‘natural’. Their
focus on representation was motivated by the
conviction that representations are never
faithful ‘mirrors’ held up to the world. Using
the theoretical resources of post-modern,
post-structural and post-colonial theory, these
geographers argued that representations of
‘nature’ – be they written or spoken, verbal or
visual – are socially constructed and are
often a mechanism for the expression of
social power. In effect, these researchers turn
geography’s earlier environmental determin-
ism on its head. Let me offer one of many
examples.
In a now classic essay and related book,
Canadian geographer Bruce Braun (1997,
2002) applied Jacques Derrida’s ideas to
the topic of nature and wedded them to
Chapter_21.indd 294
post-colonial theory. His empirical focus
was the early-1990s clash between environ-
mentalists and a commercial logging com-
pany over whether to fell an area of temperate
rainforest in British Columbia called
Clayoquot Sound. The former saw Clayoquot
as one of the last remaining spaces of ‘pris-
tine nature’, while the latter regarded it as a
valuable economic resource that should be
logged in a responsible way for the good of
the Canadian economy and those communi-
ties dependent on forestry jobs. In a detailed
analysis of both sides’ representations of
Clayoquot, Braun shows how the region’s
‘realities’ were made to appear quite differ-
ent depending who was doing the looking.
There was a clash between representations
that made Clayoquot appear wild, intricate,
threatened and special on the one side, and
those (on the other side) that made it appear
as one more ‘resource zone’ to be rationally
harvested by hi-tech logging firms. In both
cases, the authors of the representations
claimed to be depicting Clayoquot as it actu-
ally was. But Braun’s point was that these
representations – which comprised books,
pamphlets and newsletters – reflected the
specific agendas of those promoting them. In
other words, one could not adjudicate
between them by testing their veracity
against the non-representational actualities
of Clayoquot’s old growth trees.
Arresting though this insight was, Braun’s
research contained a further surprise.
Notwithstanding the differences in content
and message between the environmentalists’
and forest company’s representations, Braun
argued that they ultimately shared the same
symbolic universe: a specifically Anglo-
North American one that reflects the linguis-
tic conventions and cultural assumptions of
those colonists who spread through the
United States and Canada from the seven-
teenth century onwards. He makes this point
with reference to Clayoquot Sound’s small
groups of remaining ‘native’ or indigenous
peoples. These groups had, historically, lived
a peripatetic existence and had used forest,
river and shore for generations to meet their
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 NATURE AND SOCIETY
material and symbolic needs. Yet both the
environmentalists and the logging company
fighting over Clayoquot’s future assumed
that the region was largely empty. This,
Braun argued, constituted a geographical
expression of a specifically Western belief
that nature and society are two separate
things. Clayoquot’s indigenous peoples, he
concluded, were thus victims of symbolic
violence, even in the supposedly post-colo-
nial conditions of modern Canada. Their
history and present day claims to control of
Clayoquot simply did not register in the
unthinking assumptions made by the
descendents of the original European
colonisers.
Post-natural, post-social
geographies
A third ‘denaturalising’ approach to ‘nature’
is more intellectually radical than the previ-
ous two – so much so that it’s possibly wrong
of me to claim it as part of ‘human geogra-
phy’ because it questions the human–physical
dichotomy that largely organises academic
geography today. This third approach rejects
the ontological distinction between society
and nature that underpins not just new natu-
ral resource geographies and cultural studies
of nature, but much of geography past and
present, including all the work reviewed ear-
lier in this chapter. It has roots in continental
European philosophy and STS (science and
technology studies): thinkers like Isabelle
Stengers, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour
have strongly influenced several erstwhile
‘human’ geographers since the mid-1990s.
The result is two overlapping strands of
research, both prevalent in British geogra-
phy: namely, ‘hybrid geographies’ (closely
associated with Sarah Whatmore’s 2002 book
of that name) and ‘non-representational
geographies’ (closely associated with Nigel
Thrift’s 2007 Non-representational Theory).
Since I don’t have the space to explore their
subtle differences, I will simply describe
their commonalities.
Chapter_21.indd 295
295
Hybrid and non-representational perspec-
tives maintain that dividing the world into
‘social’ and ‘natural’ entities simplifies real-
ity to the point of misrepresenting it. The
suggestion is that there is no neat, Maginot
Line that divides the world into two qualita-
tively different orders that somehow ‘come
into contact’ with each other in various ways
in different contexts. Instead, Whatmore,
Thrift and like-minded geographers insist
that we inhabit one reality not two, and that
supposedly ‘natural’ things and ‘social’
things cannot be separated if we are to under-
stand their character and effects. They further
suggest that human engagements with the
world far exceed acts of ‘representation’:
they also involve touch, smell, hearing and
physical interaction. We are multi-sensual
actors, the argument goes, and what we are
does not precede our relationships with all
manner of other entities.
To flesh out these arguments, there have
been numerous recent studies of the almost
endless ways in which so-called ‘social’ and
‘natural’ things are so entangled as to vari-
ously co-constitute, stabilise or alter one
another (depending on the case). These stud-
ies are highly attentive to the fine details of
different situations, and amount to a cogni-
tive, moral and aesthetic call to attend to
what the society–nature dualism has so long
hidden from view. For example, in some of
her work on wildlife conservation, Sarah
Whatmore has argued that the seemingly
unproblematic category ‘elephant’ needs to
be called into question. Becoming an ‘ele-
phant’ is, Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne
(2000) show, a process that is contingent on
the specific network of actors, institutions
and physical environs in which individual
pachyderms exist. There is thus, they argue,
a notable set of differences between zoo ele-
phants and ‘wild’ elephants, even though
they are conventionally regarded as belong-
ing to a single species possessed of stable
and singular characteristics common to any
creature so-named. Conservationists, they
imply, could usefully pay more attention to
the differentiated character of that which
1/19/2011 10:10:45 AM
 296 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
they’re seeking to conserve, and to the varied
networks through which ‘becoming an ele-
phant’ is achieved. To conserve ‘nature’ one
needs to understand that it is not a discrete
object or space to be protected, but a whole
set of differentiated entities bound into com-
plex relationship that might be very extensive
in space and time. This obliges us to rethink
both what is being ‘conserved’ and how in
all nature conservation policies (see also
Hinchliffe 2008).
THE NATURE OF CONTEMPORARY
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
Before trying to evaluate the intellectual
change and diversity recounted in the previous
pages, let me end this review with some obser-
vations about physical geography, whose vari-
ous branches examine aspects of the ‘nature’
that many human geographers are now apt to
call into question. As I said earlier, physical
geography became topically separated from
its human counterpart after 1945, though both
fields initially sought to maintain a common
intellectual approach – at least up until the
early 1970s. Since then, the approaches have
increasingly diverged, and physical geogra-
phy’s five main sub-fields (geomorphology,
biogeography, climatology, hydrology and
quaternary environmental change) today have
few if any real commonalities with their
human geography equivalents.
To be specific, most physical geographers
regard their field as a ‘science’, a term that
relatively few human geographers would use
as a self-descriptor anymore (unlike 30 years
ago). Typically, the former see themselves in
the business of producing ‘objective’ and
‘truthful’ knowledge of a biophysical world
existing ‘out there’, whose properties can be
comprehended by asking appropriate ques-
tions, by using appropriate field, laboratory
and computer methods, and by drawing well-
evidenced, verifiable, falsifiable and revisable
conclusions. For the most part, physical
geographers take ‘nature’ as an ontological
Chapter_21.indd 296
given: it is presumed to be different in kind
from ‘society’, and to amenable to value-free
analysis. In short, the majority of physical
geographers are ontologically realist about
‘nature’ and epistemically realist about the
knowledge they collectively produce. In this
respect, their outlook is similar to that of
most earth and laboratory scientists, and
roughly fits the public stereotype of ‘people
in white coats’ (or wellington boots in physi-
cal geography’s case!).
Clearly, this outlook is a far cry from the
second and third perspectives summarised in
the previous section, which are, respectively,
epistemically anti-realist and ontologically
anti-dualist. Even so, there have been recent
attempts to reunite physical and human geog-
raphy around the ‘society–nature question’,
and I will say more about these in the next
section. At the same time, there are signs that
physical geography’s separate branches are
looking for greater common ground. This, in
part, is a response to anthropogenic global
environmental change. A new cross-discipli-
nary initiative called ‘earth system science’, in
which physical geographers have played their
part, is an attempt to understand the complex
dynamics of interlinked environmental sub-
systems. In some ways, it is a modern version
of Mary Somerville’s nineteenth-century con-
ception of what physical geography ought to
be. As the name suggests, earth systems sci-
ence utilises a meta-vocabulary of concepts
derived from systems theory and its more
recent descendent ‘complexity theory’ (which,
unlike systems theory, accents instability and
surprise not order and control). It is the sort of
‘big tent’ approach that would make most
contemporary human geographers intellectu-
ally nervous. This is because it aims to paint a
‘total picture’ of the world by way of a family
of similar concepts, techniques and methods.
EVALUATIONS
I have covered a lot of ground in this chapter.
To talk about ‘society–nature’ relations in
1/19/2011 10:10:45 AM
 NATURE AND SOCIETY
geography is, in effect, to talk about the
whole discipline, past and present – this
much we have seen. We’ve also seen how
little agreement there is among geographers
about such fundamental questions as: What
is nature? What aspects of it should one
study? Should one study society and nature
separately? Does society determine nature,
or vice versa? How should one investigate
society, nature or the two together? And so
on. The varied answers to these questions
define the fault-lines of academic geography
as they have emerged over the last century or
so. Why have these many fault lines appeared?
The answer is simple enough. The sheer
ambition of the original ‘geographical exper-
iment’ and the fact that geography’s subject
matter is shared with so many adjacent disci-
plines always held out the potential for intel-
lectual fragmentation. Geographers have
taken so much inspiration from such a range
of cognate subjects that it was almost inevi-
table that diversity would, in the end, be its
signature characteristic.
How are we to evaluate the evident hetero-
geneity of geographers’ perspectives on the
society–nature relationship? This is clearly a
normative question because it’s asking us to
consider whether the internal organisation of
Anglophone geography is all that it could
and should be. For example, in the introduc-
tion to this chapter I made mention of the
‘anthropocene’ and the threats (and, we
should add, opportunities) posed by every-
thing from climate change to new technolo-
gies of genetic manipulation. Some see these
challenges as a reason to reunify geography
intellectually, not least because significant
amounts of public and private research money
will this century be made available to support
the study of ‘coupled human–environment
systems’. Echoing the ‘joined-up’ agenda of
earth systems science, some have talked
of an even more ambitious ‘sustainability sci-
ence’ (Kates et al. 2001) geared to a holistic
analysis of multi-scalar society–environment
relationships. A reunified geography could,
some believe, occupy an important place in
such a transdisciplinary enterprise. From this
Chapter_21.indd 297
297
perspective, geography should return to its
roots – but in a thoroughly contemporary
way – and rediscover some of the high ambi-
tion of Mackinder, Ratzel and others. At the
very least, it is argued, this would secure the
discipline’s immediate future by demonstrat-
ing its wider relevance to the societies whose
tax revenues support it.
If geography reunified around the study of
society–nature relations (which, in effect,
means that environmental geography grows
prodigiously while ‘pure’ human and physi-
cal geography shrink), it would likely entail
a sharp reduction of the discipline’s current
intellectual diversity. For those who think the
diversity has gone too far, amounting to a
lack of overall coherence or purpose, such a
reduction is clearly to be welcomed. Here
diversity equals fragmentation in a pejorative
sense. But for others, it would recall the old
days when a few major ‘paradigms’ domi-
nated the imaginations of practising geogra-
phers. Here, diversity equals plurality in a
positive sense. If diversity is seen as ‘good’
then the next question is: should it continue
to arise ‘spontaneously’ or be more purpose-
fully ‘managed’ looking ahead (and to what
ends)? If it is seen as ‘bad’ then the next
question becomes: Which approaches do we
foster at the expense of others, and how?
The answer to these and related questions
ultimately depends on a series of others. For
example: What is research for? Whose ‘inter-
ests’ should it serve, if anybody’s? What, if
anything, do geographers do that’s ‘special’
compared to other subjects? These are
weighty questions that speak to the role of
academic knowledge, academic disciplines,
universities and other research institutions in
the early twenty-first century. They are far
too meaty for me to address here. Therefore,
I want to end with a simple caution. In my
view, we need to avoid two fallacies about the
research reviewed in this chapter. The first is
that what is newest is necessarily best (that is
to say, it amounts to ‘progress’ over previous
approaches). The second, by contrast, is that
the present-day intellectual diversity of geog-
raphy – whatever its other virtues – is a sure
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 298 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
sign that the aspirations of the discipline’s
founding figures have been progressively and
fatally betrayed. Let me explain.
The first fallacy presumes that academic
knowledge improves logically over time,
through trial and error, such that earlier insights
are finessed, reconfigured or rejected. It fur-
ther presumes epistemic commensurability
between older and newer approaches, such
that they are ‘speaking the same language’ and
thus talking about ‘the same world’. The
second fallacy, by contrast, reverses the
‘progress’ fallacy. It desocialises and dehis-
toricises academic knowledge and presumes
that those who created geography hold a
monopoly on its future trajectory – as if
knowledge does not and should not change
according to the wider socio-economic and
political contexts in which it is produced. In
my view – and here I agree with those who
have provided ‘contextual histories’ of geogra-
phy, such as Felix Driver (2000) – academic
knowledge is never produced in a social
vacuum and is always about far more than the
world it ostensibly represents epistemically.
We need, that is, to see different strands of
geographical research of the sort reviewed
here as arising from, and seeking to shape, the
wider societal environment. As part two of
this Handbook shows, this environment also
has a geography, such that knowledge has sites
of production and routes of social circulation.
This perspective on knowledge is broadly
consistent with the philosophical approach
known as ‘pragmatism’. Developed by John
Dewey and William James a century ago,
and revived by the recently deceased
American philosopher Richard Rorty, prag-
matists do not concern themselves with
whether any given body of knowledge is
intrinsically ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘fact’ or ‘fic-
tion’, ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Instead, they inquire
into the goals of knowledge-producers and
the actual effects of their discourses. In its
difference forms and genres, knowledge is
thus seen as ‘performative’ in a range of
ways and to varying degrees. For instance,
pragmatists would argue that ‘scientific’
knowledge is not inherently more ‘objective’
Chapter_21.indd 298
than science-fiction writing. Instead, they
would argue that – for historically contingent
reasons – ‘objectivity’ is the attribute that
self-declared ‘scientists’ have given to the
knowledge they produce. This kind of knowl-
edge is especially good at enabling us to
manipulate our material environment (and
our own bodies) for certain ends. It stabilises
our beliefs about certain things so we can
use, alter or avoid them. The label ‘objective’
allows this knowledge to gain an often far-
reaching degree of societal credibility, and
therefore considerable power.
Seen in a pragmatist light, the variety of
intellectual perspectives surveyed in this
chapter are each purposeful interventions in
the world, not simply alternative ‘representa-
tions’ of it. They cannot, therefore, be com-
pared and contrasted according to some
supposedly timeless, universal benchmark
like ‘truth’, as if material reality provides us
with a means of discerning ‘better’ and ‘worse’
perspectives in some absolute sense. Instead,
they might each be seen as epistemic projects
arising from rather different epistemic com-
munities who co-exist in geography. Each
community – using its own repertoire of
logic, method, evidence and rhetoric – is
seeking to persuade us that its insights are
credible and in some way valuable or useful.
If this pragmatist perspective holds good,
then two things follow. First, the only way to
decide which epistemic communities should
prosper in a discipline like geography is to
stage an open debate about what types of
knowledge are preferable and why – which
will inevitably be a debate about politics,
because even academic knowledge is never
‘above the fray’ but always implicated in
questions of social values and goals. We
cannot look outside our knowledge practices
for answers to the question ‘Which ones are
valid and valuable?’. Second, for such a
debate to be fair and meaningful, it is impor-
tant that the various epistemic communities
extant at any given moment in time have
some real understanding of each other. My
own view is that geographers could do better
here. When it comes to the research surveyed
1/19/2011 10:10:45 AM
 NATURE AND SOCIETY
in this chapter, superficial understanding and
stereotypes abound: too many of us are so
esconced in our epistemic communities that
we don’t really understand what other socie-
ty–nature geographers are doing. We thus
need to foster an ethic of what Sheppard and
Plummer (2007) call ‘engaged pluralism’.
Without this, one can analogise geography to
a multi-cultural nation state which is less a
‘melting pot’ and more a collection of non-
communicating island communities. If we
are to collectively evaluate our epistemic
diversity we must first ensure we actually
understand it.
CONCLUSION
As is plain to see, the topic of ‘nature and
society’ tells us a great deal about what aca-
demic geography was, what it now is, and
what it might be in the future. In my opinion,
geography is one of the most interesting and
exciting disciplines in which to research the
society–nature nexus. With so much philo-
sophical, theoretical, methodological and
topic diversity on offer, there is considerable
room for geographers to exercise their aca-
demic freedom and to make creative contri-
butions out of the many intellectual resources
at their disposal. However, as I have inti-
mated, not everyone sees it this way. If I were
to write this chapter in 20 years time, I may
well have a very different story to tell. After
all, if my survey holds any lessons at all, it is
that intellectual change is the only constant
in geographer’s attempts to make sense of
society–nature relations.
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