Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

It may seem strange to include a chapter on the production of nature in a volume about economic geography. After all, according to common-sense understandings of the term, “nature” is the antithesis of society and thus, by definition, incapable of being “produced” by humans within their economic systems (as opposed to, say, being altered or disturbed). Indeed, as if to confirm this, economic geographers have traditionally had relatively little to say about the question of nature. Although geography has long been concerned with human-environment relations, the postwar division of the discipline into human and physical, divided in turn into various thematic specialisms, compartmentalized geographical inquiry. Economic geographers thus pushed to the margins the putatively “non-economic” and, as Martin (1995) notes in a recent survey, organized their research around the twin themes of industrial location dynamics and processes of uneven development, drawing variously upon the theoretical resources of neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian economics. Where nature appeared at all, it was usually as part of (an ongoing) minority interest in the spatial and organizational structure of particular resource industries (see, for example, O'hUallachain and Matthews, 1996 , on the topic of copper mining). From the perspective of post-war economic geography, then, questions of nature and environment ... log in or subscribe to read full text