ABSTRACT
The first epigraph, taken from Physical Geography and Global Environmental Change, is a sideswipe at the de-naturalising approaches to nature explored in the previous chapter. Like virtually all physical geographers, Slaymaker and Spencer see themselves as scientists: people who are in the business of producing accurate knowledge about the workings of the non-human world (they leave investigations of the human body to others within and beyond geography). While these two leading geomorphologists do not deny that what we call nature is often at some level ‘unnatural’, they nonetheless maintain that it has distinct ways of working that need to be comprehended objectively. In other words, they see it as irreducible to particular social representations and practices and as amenable to relatively
unbiased analysis. Likewise, the environmental geographer Bill Adams takes it as axiomatic that nature is, wholly or in part, ‘natural’. Adams’s (1996) book Future Nature reflects the views of many in geography’s ‘middle ground’. It argues that geographers should study human uses and abuses of the environment so as to fashion more effective conservation and restoration policies – effective because they are based on accurate understanding.
