GEOG 1410 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Vehicle, Oil Reserves, Land Cover
3 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
GEOG 1410
October 19, 2017
What is “Nature”?
An Introduction to approaches in Geography
Observation Assignment
Ask yourself, why have I classified them has happy/older? Are they happy because they’re
laughing/smiling? What kind of assumptions am I making? Make assumptions and draw
conclusions from them.
One of the most political ideas you have is Nature.
● We think of beautiful spaces removed from human beings.
● Refers to the physical world
● “Getting back to nature” leaving big cities to communicate with the physical world
rather than the build one
● Three reasons that nature is political
○ Natural resources are unevenly allocated geographically speaking
○ We need those natural resources, but there has been great damage done to
those resources. How are we gonna fix them?
○ The debates as to what to do about that damage, we have very different
fundamental philosophical differences about how to fix them.
● The word “natural” has a lot of connotations
● Part of the world that is “alive” and can reproduce itself; organic. We must also think
of the part that is not alive, inorganic and cannot reproduce (ex. rocks)
● Nature isn’t natural; what we think of as natural landscapes often is mediated with
human activity. There is no part of the environment that is fully removed from human
activity.
● Nature itself isn’t as much a tangible place, it is an idea. A human idea.
Why is nature political?
● We have decided nature is a resource
● The distribution of resources is uneven across the planet
● Land cover is also unevenly distributed around the world; for pasture for producing
livestock, forests that produce timber; different lands around the world are more
suitable for producing different commodities
● Oil reserves
○ If you have an economy that relies in any way on moving vehicles, oil is
fundamental.
● We have not agreed how these resources should be distributed, so the resources
may go where the population goes
Destruction to nature
● Deforestation, not just harvesting timber, but not replacing it so that you have a net
loss. It totally transforms the landscape, which in turn transforms the ecology.
● Over Harvesting of mangroves can affect the coastline. Damage to the resource
therefore does damage to the land
Document Summary
One of the most political ideas you have is nature. We think of beautiful spaces removed from human beings. Getting back to nature leaving big cities to communicate with the physical world rather than the build one. Natural resources are unevenly allocated geographically speaking. We need those natural resources, but there has been great damage done to those resources. The debates as to what to do about that damage, we have very different fundamental philosophical differences about how to fix them. The word natural has a lot of connotations. Part of the world that is alive and can reproduce itself; organic. We must also think of the part that is not alive, inorganic and cannot reproduce (ex. rocks) Nature isn"t natural; what we think of as natural landscapes often is mediated with human activity. There is no part of the environment that is fully removed from human activity. Nature itself isn"t as much a tangible place, it is an idea.
