Nature
RIS ID
107815
Abstract
Some of the most exciting, alarming and dramatic developments of our time involve nature (human and non-human).These range from xeno-transplantation to climate change to the Human Genome Project. Geographers have long counted nature among their principal objects of analysis. Indeed, it's fair to say that the nature of geography as a subject is intimately linked to the nature that geographers study. This book offers an incisive introduction to the nature that geographers study and,as a corollary,the nature of geography as a discipline.It is written for researchers, degree students and their teachers. It is the first book to bring the diverse aspects of the nature that geographers examine - and the myriad ways they study it - within a common frame of analysis.The book treats geography as an active producer of societal understandings of nature. Since their veracity can never be established in any absolute way, Nature treats these knowledges as ideas about nature that must battle it out to win the minds and hearts of students,funding bodies,governments and all those other organisations and constituencies who are interested in the knowledge that geographers produce. These ideas, in one sense, create the 'realities'they purport to describe and explain.The knowledges of nature that geographers produce must, therefore, be seen as part of a high-stakes contest over how we understand and act towards those myriad things we label 'natural'.This contest has implications for us all, as well as for the non-human world. Nature is an advanced introduction to its topic. For students, it aims to inform and to challenge by showing that nature is not what it seems to be.For geography teachers and researchers, Nature brings together ideas and arguments hitherto compartmentalised into geography's three main parts (human,physical and environmental geography).In so doing it offers fresh insights into one of the discipline's most familiar, yet elusive, objects of analysis, policy formation and moral concern.
Publication Details
Castree, N. (2005). Nature. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge.