ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between the geographies of fear and nature. It argues that studies of fear have incorporated the idea and the practical realities of nature in complicated, confused and often contradictory ways. The chapter suggests some of the ways in which nature and fear are intertwined in rural settings. Humanistic and feminist geography has sought to encourage a greater emphasis on people's feelings about place in understandings of experience and identity, it is through more recent non-representational approaches that geographers have been encouraged to focus specifically on emotions. The relational aspects of nature, rurality and emotion are evident as the examples show, our fears are not simply a response to the kinds of nature we encounter in rural areas, but are also part of a construction of rurality that demands and valorises a particular way of seeing nature. In today's global world, however physically remote, nowhere was really safe from urban values and culture.
