Introduction

The different ways in which people understand nature have been at the heart of struggles over what kind of discipline geography ought to be. Recent years have seen the emergence of a range of critical approaches to the study of nature that seek to critique and change it.

Nevertheless, conceptually, nature remains notoriously difficult to define, and as will become clear, definitions often reveal much more about an overall political position—and a view about what geography ought to be—than they do about plants, animals, landscapes, and the many things we think of as nature.

Constructing Nature

If the overarching thrust of critical work has been to undermine the authenticity of the natural, this has tended to be through a focus on historically and geographically varying constructions or representations of nature. Different meanings are shaped by dominant representations of nature in a particular place at a particular time, as well as an individual's place within a particular social structure.

In spite of these particularities, it is possible to isolate three common understandings. Thus, nature is (1) the nonhuman world (and occasionally the human and nonhuman worlds together), (2) an inherent force directing the human or nonhuman world, and (3) the essence of something (as in a thing's “natural properties”).

Landscape painting, as one dominant mode of representing the beauty of a particular environment, has been presented as a representational practice that enables everything from property rights to gender relations to appear as natural or authentic expressions of the way the world ought to be. Both property rights and gender are social constructions, but associating them with the natural world appears to give them a much stronger legitimacy (Bosco, Myerson, pp 69).

They come to be dominated by a force outside human control. Because of this, work on the social construction of nature ...