Читать книгу The Unsettling Outdoors - Russell Hitchings - Страница 14

I’m a geographer. And the reason why I became interested in this topic is partly because, in recent years, some of those working in my field have been pioneering some original ways of looking at human experience that I figured could be helpful here. My thinking was that, if we stand to benefit from a closer examination of greenspace experience in everyday life, they had something useful to say. This is because a number of my colleagues have become increasingly focused on the detail of how people and environments interact. This fits with a longstanding focus (some would say this is what defines a geographical approach) on how human societies and physical systems come together in specific contexts (and how these relationships change over time) – the kind of processes that can often end up lost in the cracks between disciplines, which have been more avowedly focused on either ‘social’ life or the ‘natural’ world. In recent times, this branch of geography has become especially interested in how exactly that ‘coming together’ happens within particular encounters in particular places. This has been an exciting time to be a geographer working on ‘nature–society relations’ as an expanding menagerie of creatures and concepts has been called forth in our conferences and articles in an attempt to get to grips with how exactly these relationships take shape (see, for overviews, Ginn and Demeritt 2009; Castree 2014).

The approach from human geography to which this book is indebted stems from how some of my colleagues have sought to think afresh about how the nominally ‘natural world’ is best studied. I’ve put it in inverted commas now because many of these scholars have been increasingly suspicious of the term. This is partly because ‘nature’ is such a powerful concept (think about how when we say something is ‘natural’ it suddenly becomes quite hard to argue against) in a way that makes it worth questioning how that power is wielded in different contexts. It is also because as soon as something is labelled as part of ‘nature’ it immediately becomes imbued with certain positive qualities that might not always apply. Few would say that they don’t like ‘nature’ because of these associations. However, even though we may like to think that we appreciate ‘nature’ (and linking back to the different ways of characterising greenspace experience highlighted above), when out walking in the woods, for example, were we to be suddenly stung by a bee, we might find ourselves appreciating it rather less. With such examples in mind, the contention of some of my colleagues has been that it is not at all clear that the various phenomena we often find ourselves lumping together as ‘nature’ have all that much in common at all. Perhaps we might do better to sidestep the idea of ‘nature’ altogether and instead look afresh at the various phenomena that were previously subsumed under this unhelpfully general heading. Doing so, many have now argued, allows us to get a better handle on how exactly people live with the different ‘entities’ involved (or the ‘nuts and bolts of nature’, if you like).³

There has been a keen interest in animals here. This is partly because this work has focused on exploring the individual capacities of creatures in ways that were previously downplayed when they were unhelpfully bundled together and seen as belonging to ‘the natural world’ – namely their ability to act, to make their presence felt, to do things that we might not always expect or want. If this was the suggestion that these geographers wanted to acknowledge and explore, animals presented an obvious focus for their studies because their ‘agency’ was immediately apparent. In other words, animals are clearly and self-evidently ‘alive’ as individual lifeforms. And they have accordingly served geographers well in exploring the truth of these claims: how people manage an octopus in an aquarium in North East England and how the octopus itself has a hand in fostering certain relations (Bear 2011); how the actions of certain birds help us to understand the practised appeal of birdwatching (Lorimer 2008); and the specific cultural narratives associated with sharks and how well that matches up to the reality of co-existence in Australian waters (Gibbs and Warren 2015). These are just a few examples from the subfield of ‘animal geographies’ (see Gibbs 2019, for a recent review) that continues to grow as the troupe of creatures encouraged into the ark of geographical examination continues its march onwards.

If we were to start questioning ‘greenspace’ in this way, the first thing that we might do is to set about smashing this rather broad idea into pieces so that we can start our inspection of its components in earnest (or, as Phillips and Atchison (2018) nicely put it, we should make the effort to ‘see the trees’ for the forest). In other words, what some of those working in this field would immediately ask is what is this ‘greenspace’ idea composed of in terms of its physical materials and how exactly do people handle specific elements? By thinking in the comparatively distanced, and predominantly visual, way implied by the very idea of ‘greenspace’, these geographers would worry about how we may be missing out on much of how it actually is to experience greenspaces. Perhaps we should examine trees as physical, growing, living individuals – as dynamic creatures that provide shelter, fruit, leaves, opportunities to climb, hide, and to gather people around them (Jones and Cloke 2002). In this sense, they are like the above greenspace researchers in that they are interested in how people respond. The difference is that they would explore these issues by looking at how exactly life goes on in specific contexts. Another strategy would be to allow our attention to drift down to the ground and consider the ways in which people live with plants. This has been the subject of some geographical interest, sustained in part by colleagues who have set out to emphasise how plants have distinct capacities (that are different from their more evidently active animal cousins, but nonetheless there). They point to what they have called the ‘vegetal politics’ (Head et al. 2017) of how we manage plants in contexts that range from vine growing to weed control. This book draws inspiration from this work in terms of looking closely at lived experience with components of the nominally ‘natural’ world.