ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that disrupting the binary terms in which the question of nature has been posed implies a radical re-cognition of the intimate, sensible and hectic bonds through which people, organisms, machines and elements make and hold their shape in relation to each other in the business of everyday living. Human geography finds itself at an important juncture in its critical engagement with the question of nature in which neither the 'bracketing off' of an environmental sub-field common in other disciplines, nor the threadbare promise of a reintegration of physical and human geography, will suffice. In a controversial intervention questioning the North American reverence for wilderness, the environmental historian William Cronon signals the importance of geographical imaginations both to keeping 'nature' and 'society' in their proper place and to liberating them from this binary world. Accommodating non-humans in the fabric of social life requires more intimate, lively and promiscuous geographies than these quarantined fragments of a too precious nature.
