Lesson 14: Nature and Environment

Lecture Outline:

1. What is environmental geography?

2. The diversity of natures - Nature as culturally and spatially located creation.

3. Changing nature - Nature as temporally located creation

4. The construction of nature as environment

So, is ‘Nature a social construction’?

‘Nature’ is shaped by ecological conditions culture, politics, and history

Changing nature - Nature as a temporally located creation:

Enlightenment: Nature as a machine:

Francis Bacon: (1561-1626): Science should ‘put nature on the rack and extract her secrets’.

Romanticism: Nature as pure and sublime:

‘Ah dear nature - the mere remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread’ - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Nature as Environment

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring: Idea of how we affect the environment, in this book birds are highlighted = pesticide = no birds = silence = silence in a sign of ecological damage

1960s Onwards: Modern Environmentalism

Nature in risk environment:

1970s Onwards: Global Issues

• Hole in the ozone layer (tackled through Montreal Protocol, 1987)

• Acid Rain (reduction in coal fire power stations)

• Deforestation

The resurgence of nature could indicate the an emerging new way of thinking about environments or nature.

Conclusion:

1. Environmental geography: An Integrative and holistic discipline

2. Nature is a social construction spatially located and with a particular history

3. What we know as the environment is the product of a particular way of understand nature.

4. Extremely linked to the ideas of a Nature in risk, environment and environmental problems can vary over time, reflecting shifts in scientific knowledge but also social, political and economical factors.

Tutor group:

3 Factors:

Income per capita, levels of urbanisation and % of people working in agriculture

“Development is always political”

Political:

• Governments/states

• Ideological

• Power relations

Development:

• 3 factors stated above

• Definitions for example: development is never neutral

• Scale

• Experiences of development: for example growing up poor and in an area unsupported by AID or NGO or government vs an area supported by NGOs or systems.

• Policies/methods

• Development: Development as a goal or process

End Goal: Development is not neutral

Look at the philipines during the cold war: AID NGOs Support from America

BOOKS TO READ:

• The Companion to Development Studies: Emil Dauncey, Vandana Desai , Robert B. Potter

• Africa is not a country

• THe world bank the east Asian miracle