How to Know Nature

Geography, as a discipline, has been shaping people's broad understanding of nature since its emergence. Today, the consequences of climate change are being felt in more dramatic ways: wildfires, hurricanes, heavy rains, floods, extreme heat, extreme cold... All this, or in the news, or in front of us, has formed a great pressure and challenge to us. Therefore, the relationship between man and nature has become a topic that people often think or discuss.

1. Break the definition of nature

In the 1970s, an oil company excavated thousands of tonnes of silt from the Thames estuary and deposited it on Kenvey Island in an attempt to lay the foundation stone for a pier extension. But the project was never carried out and the site was abandoned. Children love to play and light fires, and cyclists visit frequently to create new cycling trails. The fertile soil gives rise to vegetation, which is unable to take root due to constant human disturbance, but weeds, wildflowers and shrubs flourish, enabling a variety of animal and insect species to thrive. The 100-hectare site is home to more than 1,300 species, including endangered species such as bumblebees and emerald damselflies.

Who would have thought that an abandoned oil terminal would become one of the most biologically diverse sites in Western Europe? Nature has thus manifested itself in the most unexpected of places. The site would not be like this without the Thames dredgers, the oil companies' proposed projects, the children's play and the cyclists' arrival. Silt, abandoned buildings and facilities, playing children and bicycle wheels roll out paths that create opportunities for a unique and diverse mix of wildlife. More than 1,000 species depend on each other in many ways and have provided opportunities for contact, play and enjoyment for many years. The dilemma for the British government is: redevelop Kenvey Island to provide space for the overcrowded City of London to expand? Or preserve the unique ecosystem here?

By definition, you're exercising power. It is power to say what nature is, how nature works, and how nature should or should not be treated. It is the right to have one's intellectual claims taken seriously by the majority of people in a given society. A person with this power can have a substantial impact on the lives of billions of people, and a profound impact on the multitude of living and inliving phenomena that surround humanity. But the word "nature" is so complex, with so many layers of meaning, that no one can really say.

The case of Kenvey Island in London confirms what the British geographer Neil Smith said about nature: "Nature is both material and spiritual; Both natural and man-made; Both pure and mixed. Nature includes order and disorder, sublimity and worldliness, frustration and victory. Nature is a whole and a part; It is both mother and object; It's both a creature and a machine."

Smith uses a bunch of antonyms to describe the word "nature," which only goes to show that defining "nature" is a very difficult task. Abandoning the effort to define makes it easier to agree that nature knows no boundaries. It is everywhere, encompassing all things; Man is not the opposite of nature, but in nature. It may be possible to break through definitions of nature and challenge conventional thinking.

"Man and nature" has always been on the lips, but this kind of saying virtually puts man and nature in opposition. Out of the here and now, especially in the modern metropolis, to look at the distance, to look at the past, "born and bred" is the most simple recognition of man's belonging to nature. If you fly over the plateau, you will see endless snow-capped mountains, rivers cut their way between the mountains, and occasional villages and towns in the valley, which you need to look closely to identify. Even without a view from above, the farmer bent over the field and the mountain dweller did not doubt that he was a part of it. To place oneself within nature rather than against nature is the starting point for man to understand nature and to decide how to treat nature.

2. "Nature without People"

Nature cannot "show itself"; someone must "speak" for it. And all expressions about nature inevitably involve "telling" -- the expressor will describe, construct or render nature in the way he thinks best.

The Canadian province of British Columbia is economically dependent on timber exports, but it is also where Greenpeace was born. The province's Clicquot Bay is home to old temperate rain forests that have been reduced by deforestation. In the 1990s, environmentalists raised strong objections to the government granting logging licenses to forestry companies. Environmentalists and logging lobbyists, in their own words, "tell the story" of the trees in Clicquot Bay. Forestry company launched a book entitled "cut down outside publications, described the kerry kuo, trees as Canada's precious resources, whereas their resource managers are responsible, on behalf of the Canadian people's management of the forest, for the people to create jobs, careful management, cut down trees in environmentally responsible manner. Environmentalists are introduced, the kerry kuo: with natural publications, including many pictures, the kerry kuo, as "noble, complex and fascinating sights, full of power and the intricate even subtle relationship", emphasize the value of the region is not only the scarcity of trees, more is unspoilt. The comparison is already very interesting. But more interestingly, the two sides of a forest with intentions and motives aside, logging lobbyists and environmentalists are actually the same discourse mode to the non-human world - whether as a precious timber resources, is the rare pristine wilderness, all the kerry kuo's true character as "without" naturalness, The absence of native inhabitants. Such "colonial discourse" dates back more than a century, when the British colonized the area, removing indigenous people from their native forests and mountains.

It can be seen that when presenting nature, different people will not only use different words for different intentions and motives, but are more likely to regard the label of "nature" as a different kind of politics. All these propositions about nature compete with the audience, shape the audience's understanding of nature, and then guide people's actions towards nature.

Sixteenth-century European landscapes are a more popular example. Landscape as a specific "way of understanding", with the rise of European capitalism synchronous. New urban businessmen and industrialists bought homes in the suburbs and had their properties painted. The exclusion of farmers and helpers, whose work is not visible, reflects a divided social relationship and allows the urban elite to enjoy a seemingly harmonious and orderly rural environment. Today, when the word "landscape" is mentioned, people easily think of the earth, rivers, trees, fields, the sky, livestock. But no one! Landscape used to be the unique "way of viewing" of class, and its influence continues to this day. It can be seen that the visual construction of nature is as important as the construction of discourse.

3. Knowledge of man and nature

There is no equivalence between nature itself and knowledge about nature. Historically, the concept of nature has changed dramatically. What was once a "truth" about nature often seems absurd today. Neo-malthusianism, for example, which became popular in the West in the 1970s, suggested that a limited natural resource base would put a limit on the number of people who could live on Earth. This led to books such as "The Population Bang" and "The Limits to Growth" calling for "preventive suppression" (i.e. limiting the population by increasing contraception) to avoid starvation deaths. Of course, anthropology and geographer David Harvey refuted it, arguing that overpopulation's assumptions about nature were not rigorous enough. Neither the "minimum level of subsistence" nor the definition of "natural resources" can be separated from historical and cultural backgrounds, and the scarcity of resources is not caused by natural causes, but the result of social processes. Based on this, Harvey argues that neo-Malthusianism became popular in the West in the early 1970s precisely because it catered to the interests of Western elites, so it was asserted to be objectively true.

People continue to understand nature in many ways, but the different ways can be contradictory. In fact, in every age, people have struggled to get a "proper" understanding of nature. Numerous organizations, institutions and industries are producers of knowledge about nature. They continue to produce knowledge about what nature is and how it can be properly used, controlled or altered. Geography, as one of the producers of natural knowledge, stands out. First, geography has conducted extensive research on the phenomena covered by the word "nature". In contrast to specialized disciplines such as chemistry, geography studies everything from the movement and distribution of the world's population to the extraction of information based on ice cores and stalagmites to determine ancient climate change. Second, THE THREE BRANCHES OF GEOGRAPHY -- PHYSICAL geography, HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, and ENVIRONMENTAL geography -- offer a combination of natural, social, and humanistic perspectives to the understanding of nature that is hard to FIND any other discipline comparable TO.

Of course, it needs to be clear that other disciplines besides geography are also producing natural knowledge; In addition to academia, there are many non-academic organizations that produce natural knowledge; There is competition among producers of natural knowledge; It is not easy to judge that the academic understanding about nature is true and objective. Based on this standpoint, it is necessary to compare how the three branches of geography -- physical geography, human geography and environmental geography study nature. From the origin of geography, "nature", the most important research object of geography, the development context of geography can be clearly presented. In his book Nature, written by Professor Noel Castelli, a British human geographer, this is summed up in the following three points: geographers have studied an unusually wide range of phenomena covered by nature; Geographers work together to provide natural, social, and humanistic perspectives on nature; The three branches of geography pay attention to completely different aspects of nature in completely different ways, which have obvious differences and neglect each other. In a word, physical geography explores "non-human" nature from the outside, human geography explores "human" nature from the outside and inside, and environmental geography explores the relationship between human and non-human nature. Sometimes the three meet, but more often they separate; Sometimes there is harmony, and there is no lack of collision.

On the one hand, Noel Castelli skillfully leads the reader to look far away, forward, and from above, thus placing man within nature rather than against it. Nature, on the other hand, explains the different ways in which physical geographers, human geographers and environmental geographers approach nature, but does not attempt to make any judgments about which is better or worse. Castelli treats the knowledge about nature produced by all scholars the same -- as "claims about knowledge" rather than "truths" that compete for attention from students, other scholars, and supporters of all kinds outside academia. Nature is free, and the way people discuss and act on nature is constantly changing. Nature reminds the reader that different approaches lead to different knowledge claims about nature, which in turn lead to different actions towards what is called "natural".

4. The geography of fragmentation

After a slow and tortuous process, geography became a university subject in the late 19th century. At that time, geography was a holistic discipline, and its early advocates did not see a significant difference between human geography and physical geography. Just as Livingston, a famous African explorer in modern Britain, said, "Geography has an independent disciplinary identity precisely because it has the ability to combine those completely unrelated elements in the world and life into a coherent whole." For early geographers, "nature" was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the theme of "nature" is used to determine the uniqueness of the disciplinary perspective. The uniqueness of geography in the academic world lies in its emphasis on the specific relationship between specific natural environments and specific human natural characteristics and social forms. On the other hand, this comprehensive and comprehensive perspective is undoubtedly the greatest weakness of geography -- how can geographers understand everything and how everything interacts causally with each other when the topics are so vast?

Geography, as we know, has developed into a huge discipline including three branches of physical geography, human geography and environmental geography. Physical geography focuses on the study of the "real environment" in the past and present, excluding human factors, and is a "field research discipline". Human geography places its absolute focus on the human world; Among them, environmental geography combines social science and natural science about nature. Most professional geographers label themselves as physical geographers or human geographers. The research focus is different, and the paradigm is also different. Geography is no longer a "whole subject", but a "split subject". The three major geographic research groups approach very different aspects of nature in very different ways, ignoring each other and knowing very little about each other's research. Geography is by no means alone, of course. Most other disciplines are made up of groups of academics who also know little about each other.

Today, geographers need to think about the following:

One: How do you recognize the knowledge about nature that you carry out and produce?

This question can be broken down into: do you always believe that the knowledge you produce is objective and accurate? Do you overemphasize the objectivity and credibility of the knowledge you produce? What is the purpose of this emphasis? Do you agree with the "claim about knowledge" that the knowledge you produce is only to be competed with other knowledge?

Second, as a "divided discipline", the branches of geography have great differences and mutual disregard. For GEOGRAPHERS, HOW TO BREAK THROUGH their indifference TO EACH other, expand the scope of "nature" they study, and break the inherent research paradigm? For geography educators, how to help students overcome barriers and break the boundaries of research scope and thinking mode?

Third, from the perspective of the development of the discipline, geography is a little humble because of its lack of self-confidence. It could have played a bigger role but missed many opportunities. For example, geography in the early 20th century failed to grasp the theme of "human impact" and let slip the opportunity to offer a better approach to the "human-environment relationship" than evolutionary or environmental determinism. In the 1970s, environmental problems became prominent, and geography had another opportunity to make the study of "human impact" mainstream. However, it backfired. On the one hand, geographers fail to pay sufficient attention to local and global environmental problems. On the other hand, from a moral point of view, geography ignores the "pro-nature" (ecocentric) attitude of large-scale environmental movements and focuses on anthropocentric "resource management".

Fourth, the impact of geography teaching and research has been underestimated. Geography plays an important role in shaping the broader understanding of nature and is not a "walk-on" role in academia. Today, how does geography meet the needs of The Times and achieve development and progress? In the face of climate change and great uncertainty, how can geography shoulder a more important mission?

All knowledge is a claim to knowledge that competes for the hearts and minds of its audience. Geographers merely strive to understand the question "what is nature?