Nature, Social

Abstract

The body of thought labeled 'social nature' emerged in the 1990s, posing fundamental challenges to the philosophy and practice of human geography, and of geography more broadly. The social nature literature highlighted the ways in which a trenchant and pervasive philosophical dualism originating in Kantian and Baconian thought had maintained its grip of geography – a discipline whose 'raison d'etré' supposedly lay in the integration of the natural and social sciences – through its various paradigm shifts throughout the twentieth century. Dualist conceptions of nature and society as materially and logically separate entities of the world could be seen in the environmental determinism of early twentieth century geography; the later cultural geography school led by Carl Sauer; and the spatial science of the post-World War II quantitative revolution. These anthropocentric and technocentric worldviews were challenged by the counter-revolution of Marxian-influenced political economy during the 1970s. Here, nature was brought back into human geography as a product of waves of capitalist accumulation. Nonetheless, this political economy stance drew criticisms that it retained an implicit dualist conception of nature and society (i.e., nature as something produced, and impacted upon, by society and economy).