ABSTRACT
Understanding how nature becomes resources is predicated on how we conceptualize such categories as nature, resources, and nature-society metabolism. Thus, knowing what questions to ask—that is, what questions yield the most liberatory or just answers—requires a theoretical engagement with the intellectual context of our own inquiry. In this chapter, I suggest that the intersection of geography and humanities, as recently reincarnated under the moniker “geohumanities,” provides the tools and insights to do this. In doing so, I review some of the contributions that geohumanistic inquiry can and has made for our thinking about epistemology, ontology, and methodology in critical resource scholarship. Geohumanities, that is, does not so much “explain” nature-society metabolism as it enables a metacognitive understanding of how we come to understand it. I contend that this helps hold open space for new lines of inquiry, which is necessary for producing critical scholarship.
