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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
How is it that, in the course of everyday life, people are drawn away from greenspace experiences that are often good for them? By attending to the apparently idle talk of those who are living them out, this book shows us why we should attend to the processes involved. * Develops an original perspective on how greenspace benefits are promoted * Shows how greenspace experiences can unsettle the practices of everyday life * Draws on several years of field research and over 180 interviews * Makes new links between geographies of nature and the study of social practices * Uses a focus on social practices to reimagine the research interview * Offers a wealth of suggestions for future researchers in this field
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Unsettling Outdoors
Environmental Estrangement in Everyday Life
Russell Hitchings
This edition first published 2021
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Contents
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: A Wager and a Strategy
Chapter 2: Taking an interest in the everyday lives of others
Chapter 3: Forgetting the Outdoors: Inside the Office
Chapter 4: Avoiding the outdoors: on the treadmill
Chapter 5: Succumbing to the outdoors: in the garden
Chapter 6: Embracing the Outdoors: At the Festival
Chapter 7: Conclusions
Marketing materials for The Unsettling Outdoors RGS/IBG Book Series
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Marketing materials for The Unsettling Outdoors RGS/IBG Book Series
Index
End User License Agreement
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Series Editor’s Preface
The RGS-IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The Series places strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS-IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.
For details on how to submit a proposal please visit: www.rgsbookseries.com
Ruth Craggs, King’s College London, UKChih Yuan Woon, National University of SingaporeRGS-IBG Book Series Editors
David Featherstone,University of Glasgow, UKRGS–IBG Book Series Editor (2015–2019)
Acknowledgments
Whilst carrying out the four projects on which this book draws, I have benefitted from many supportive academic friends over the years. This started during my PhD research, which shapes Chapter 5. At that time, I shared an office with, and learnt a lot from, peers including Caroline Bressey, Jason Chilvers, Robert Doubleday, Tara Duncan, Andrew Harris, Elaine Ho, Jason Lim and Bronwyn Purvis. Gail Davies and James Kneale were consistently wise and encouraging supervisors too. Since then, a further series of colleagues, in particular Chris Bear, Rosie Day and Alan Latham, have taken turns in helping me to figure out the nature and scope of my academic work. Alan was also my collaborator on the project that shapes Chapter 4. Those who did their PhDs with me were pretty good at exploring the big picture too. Elizabeth Shove and Gordon Walker have been sources of inspiration from the north. Further afield, colleagues in Australia have always provided refreshingly honest exchanges about how we work whenever I came to visit (whilst also being very welcoming and a lot of fun). Two further Australians, Alison Browne and Tullia Jack (along with a rogue Yorkshireman), were part of cooking up the project that is discussed in Chapter 6. Alongside all these academic friends, many others (and more excellent research trips) have helped me to refine the ideas that I present in this book. Cecily Maller gave thoughtful comments on an earlier draft and so did Paul Harrison. The editors and reviewers for the RGS book series were a pleasure to work with too – striking a very welcome balance between encouragement and critical engagement. My thanks to all.
This book would have been impossible without the financial support that allowed me to undertake the four studies that provide it with a backbone of empirical evidence. The studies that are considered in Chapters 3 and 5 were funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000-22-21-29; PTA-026-27-0465), the project discussed in Chapter 4 was supported by UCL’s ‘Bridging the Gaps’ fund, and the field research on which I draw in Chapter 5was supported by both UCL and the ESRC (RES-597-25-003). It is also definitely true to say that this book could not have been written without the help of all the different people who took part in these studies (for whom I should say upfront that pseudonyms have been used throughout). I enjoyed meeting them all and was frequently delighted by their willingness to talk with me about the detail of their everyday lives.
Alongside them, my family and friends have supported me in all sorts of ways.So thanks to you too!
Chapter One A Wager and a Strategy
A Wager
If we want to understand the likelihood of future societies having regular beneficial contact with living greenspace, we should examine how outdoor experiences are handled by people in their everyday lives today. This is the first wager of this book. My suggestion is that, if we ignore how widespread social practices can serve to discourage people from a fuller engagement with the outdoors, a certain kind of environmental estrangement could become increasingly entrenched.
The Argument
This first chapter tells the story of how I came to make the above wager. It begins with some reasons for encouraging greenspace experience in everyday life. Then it considers why, despite the various benefits that have been linked to this experience, many people may be turning away from it. With that prospect in mind, I consider how a particular combination of concepts could shed a useful light on how this process is embodied. This chapter is therefore partly about existing studies of beneficial greenspace experience and how they handle the social trends that stand to shape the future of this experience. But it is also about how a particularset of ideas might help us to reconsider the challenges involved in tackling these trends. Here I am interested in how certain strategies for studying the relationship between humans and nature could be combined with a focus on how people are drawn into patterns of everyday living. The overall aim is to set the scene for a battle between the various apparent benefits of spending time with plants and trees and a series of commonplace social practices that could be separating people from them.
Greenspace as Home
Being near plants and trees appears to provide people with various benefits. One of the most arresting and influential studies to suggest this compared the recuperation rates of hospital patients with different views. The required information was already being collected by the hospital, but by looking at it with a fresh pair of eyes, Ulrich (1983) found that those patients who looked out onto areas of greenery recovered more quickly. Though this study couldn’t tell us too much about the mechanism involved, clearly there was something about seeing living vegetation through the windows of their wards that helped some patients to get better sooner. Another well-known study suggested this experience can also benefit those who are not yet ill. Moore (1981) found that prisoners with cells facing internal courtyards use medical facilities more often than those overlooking fields further beyond. So, being able to see greenery may prevent health problems as well as speeding recovery once they have been medically addressed. We have also seen how, for residents of city estates, being able to see trees and grass from their apartment windows appears to help them handle the various challenges they are facing in their lives and even reduce aggression levels (Kuo and Sullivan 2001). Other field tests have shown how contemplating vegetation can reduce blood pressure (Van den Berg, Hartig, and Staats 2007) and improve mood and self-esteem (Pretty et al. 2005). A recent study to build on what is now a fairly well-established tradition of identifying and enumerating the benefits that greenspaces can bring to people suggests that spending time in these spaces can reduce the cravings of those who are trying to overcome various addictions (Martin et al. 2019). These are just a few examples (see Keniger et al. 2013, for many more). The point, however, is that, if we allow ourselves to see humanity as a collective whose members continue to share the same essential attributes, there is a lot of evidence for the benefits of being around greenspace.
Why is this? One of the leading arguments is that being near to living vegetation provides a valuable form of psychological restoration (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Kaplan, Kaplan and Ryan 1998). The suggestion here is that simply looking at greenery can help people to mentally recharge themselves since contemplating the intricacies of vegetation can temporarily beguile us in a manner that allows us to transcend our immediate worries before returning to our tasks refreshed (Kaplan 1993; Han 2009). Another possibility is that this experience naturally neutralises the stressed feelings that many of us may otherwise increasingly harbour (Ulrich et al. 1991). Some even work with the assumption of a fundamental connection between humans, plants and trees such that our history of co-existence instinctively inclines people to seek out the reassuring familiarity of environments that contain living vegetation. This leads directly to the ‘biophilia’ hypothesis (Kellert and Wilson 1993), understood as the innate attraction to natural processes that humans may possess. The contention here is that dwelling within, and profiting from, certain living landscapes was fundamental to our development as a species. We should therefore be unsurprised to observe a positive response from people today. For example, some have explored how this filters through into a preference for looking at particular species of tree and how, within that, the trees that helped us to prosper in earlier evolutionary times are those that we still most like to see (Summit and Sommer 1999). We could take this to mean that a desire for greenspace experience is hardwired into humans. Either way, and regardless of whether we buy into this idea or not, these studies, when taken as a whole, suggest that people can benefit in all sorts of ways from exposure to these environments, if they are given the chance.1
Tempting People into Parks
What should be done with this knowledge? If we now consider how societies have most often thought about the right response to these findings, a common next step is to turn to the provision and design of public parks and gardens. This makes sense. If most of us now live in cities, if researchers know that being in and around greenspaces can benefit people, and if one of the tasks of good government is to ensure the inhabitants of a planet whose humans live increasingly urban lives have access to the services that are good for them, then city parks and gardens become an obvious focus for policy. In line with this argument, a lot of effort has gone into thinking about the forms of park provision that stand to produce the maximum social benefit. In doing so, effective landscape design and urban planning has come to seem like the obvious means of putting these ideas into practice. Indeed, the path between studies of greenspace experience and suggestions about what should be done with their findings is now fairly well trodden. And it commonly moves from an argument about benefits to an interest in the most effective means of designing and planning the most visually attractive and welcoming city greenspaces.2
Recent examples include a study in which Chinese citizens were shown urban scenes (from those with lots of concrete to those with more vegetation) in an attempt to identify how public greenspaces could be most effectively designed to reduce stress (Huang et al. 2020). Then there is a consideration of the value of features like colourful flowers based on how people in British parks and gardens respond to different pictures of plants (Hoyle, Hitchmough, and Jorgensen 2017). Another example is an exploration of the extent to which ‘actual’ or ‘perceived’ biodiversity in the greenspaces experienced by French residents impacts most positively on their wellbeing (Meyer-Grandbastien et al. 2020). A fourth study began by tinkering with images of various local cityscapes (adding vegetation to places where it is currently lacking) before seeing how Chileans responded to these pictures (Navarrete-Hernandez and Laffan 2019). The authors took such an approach based partly on the argument that, even though a great deal of work has focused on the visual experience of parks, many cities cannot boast these facilities. Their argument is consistent with the findings of Hartiget al. (2014), who note how parks have been the predominant focus when researchers have thought about what they should do with the suggestion that greenspaces promote public health.
But what if, for other reasons altogether, and which have comparatively little to do with effective greenspace provision and design, people are becoming disinclined to derive these benefits? What, for example, about broader processes of cultural change: the trends that gradually push us to live our lives in some ways instead of others and which, often without us necessarily noticing, are quietly shaping the future of greenspace experience? Scholars occasionally argue for the need to consider such broader sweeps of change. Grinde and Grindal Patil (2009), for example, pursue the contention that, though greenspace benefits appear to exist, we must still stay mindful of their ‘penetrance’. Their point is that we should not forget how various cultural factors may very well be over-riding their apparent draw. Hartig (1993) has similarly argued for studying greenspace experiences in a ‘transactional perspective’, namely alongside, rather than apart from, the broader processes that either push people towards or away from these experiences. His idea is that, though positive responses may be hardwired into humans, the likelihood of different groups seeking out the experiences that produce them is another matter. If spaces containing certain kinds of living vegetation are where we feel most at home, we might imagine that tempting people into such environments shouldn’t be so hard. Not so, according to some others.
The Extinction of Experience
Enter the ‘extinction of experience’ thesis. This is the idea that, despite the various apparent benefits of spending time in greenspace, many lives are increasingly decoupled from regular outdoor experiences with living vegetation, different forms of local animal life, and other natural features. According to Soga and Gaston (2016), fewer and fewer of those who live in modern societies are having enough contact with the natural world. This, according to Pyle (1993), the originator of the term ‘extinction of experience’, sets up a vicious circle of increased alienation from experiences that may very well be beneficial to us, but to which we could be increasingly indifferent – a cycle of growing disaffection that may well have, according to many of these researchers, some fairly disastrous consequences. Zooming out to contemplate the broader history of humankind, Kellert (2002, p. 118) goes as far as to argue that modern US society has ‘become so estranged’ from its natural origins, that it now fails to recognise its ‘basic dependence on nature as a condition of growth and development’. It’s easy to see the problem here. If many people no longer care about, or see themselves as part of, the wider ‘natural world’, humanity could very well be drifting towards a rude awakening, whilst (adding insult to injury) being comparatively unhappy along the way by virtue of how they are increasingly oblivious to the benefits that flow from greenspace experience.
This is an alarming prospect. And we should examine the processes involved before we abandon all hope. The leading villain in this story is often urbanisation. Despite the best efforts of some of the park planners and researchers discussed above, city living is often taken to draw people away from the likelihood of beneficial encounters with greenspace. If the vast majority of humans are now living urban lives, researchers should examine how everyday experience is structured in different cities around the world and see what that tells us about the likelihood of people venturing out into greenspaces (see, for example, Turner, Nakamura, and Dinetti 2004; Fuller and Gaston 2009). Another anxiety centres on how new recreational activities could be replacing outdoor play. The migration of social life online and the ways in which many children are coming to prefer computer games over outdoor activities has been a particular source of worry for some (Pergams and Zaradic 2006; Soga and Gaston 2016). Just how busy many people now are occasionally gets a mention – how it is that many groups, in cities at least, now feel themselves to be too rushed to think about ways of inserting more greenspace experience into their lives (Lin et al. 2014). Ward Thompson (2002) develops this last point by considering the apparent stigma of lingering without purpose within societies whose members feel they should be seen to be doing something. Could it really be that the simple idea of sitting and contemplating greenspace has become too challenging for those who feel they ought to be otherwise preoccupied? This connects to concerns (Duvall and Sullivan 2016) about how our technologies can stop us from reaching the point when we are able to derive greenspace benefits even when we have managed to get there. Smartphones might provide a helpful social crutch if we find it difficult to appear purposeless in a park. But, if we have made it to the park but cannot help but look at our screens when we are there, is being there really doing us so much good?
Others have pointed to how an alternative series of, less frequently discussed but no less important, social trends have also served to discourage people from acting on the suggested desire to be around plants and trees. Bixler and Floyd (1997), for example, make the obvious but crucial point that, if we stopped for a second and allowed ourselves to consider changes in how human lives are most commonly organised (instead of jumping the gun with a premature focus on effective landscape design), we should be unsurprised to see a growing separation between everyday life and outdoor greenspace. Because of how societies have set about making life easier for themselves, natural areas may now be ‘uncomfortable’ for many. As they noted, in the twentieth century, most advances in home design have sought to improve comfort (see also Shove 2003, on these trends). So, whilst central heating and air-conditioning, showers, sinks and other inventions may initially seem like fairly innocuous and attractive technological advances, they have probably, according to them, also resulted in a ‘narrowing of comfort range and lowered tolerance for a wide range of environmental irritants’ (Shove 2003, p. 448). In developing this suggestion, theirs is a very different way of seeing human encounters with the ‘natural world’ when some of the above studies can tend to celebrate greenspace benefits. Could it actually be that many people now see outdoor greenspaces as places of environmental ‘irritation’ (more than enjoyable restoration) when compared to their indoor comforts? Perhaps we should consider what keeps people away from outdoor greenspace as much as what they would ideally experience if they went.
On that point, others have emphasised the importance of acknowledging the continued geographical bias in studies of greenspace benefits. This has led researchers to overlook certain important parts of the puzzle. Specifically, because many studies have been done in relatively temperate climates, the outdoor discomforts that are likely to be more keenly felt elsewhere in the world are often downplayed (Keniger et al. 2013). In other words, these studies tend to picture ‘the outdoors’ as a pleasant environment in which to linger such that those who do so will soon start to reap the restorative benefits provided by greenspace. Sometimes this is even part of the research design when studies have attempted to control for these ‘contextual’ climatic matters in order to study the effects of spending time with greenery in a more scientific way (see, for example, Bamberg, Hitchings, and Latham 2018). Yet, in very many cities around the world, it is often simply too hot, too cold, too sticky or too windy to make it an attractive proposition to sit outside and start accruing the benefits that feasibly flow from living vegetation in parks. It is a straightforward, but no less important, point that, if the people involved are rained on, or they start to sweat, they might soon leave (and potentially resolve never to spend time in such ‘irritating’ environments again).
If we turn to a different reading of the persistent effects of our evolutionary past, we are encouraged to see another set of reasons to be reticent about lingering for too long in these spaces. Whilst humans may very well be fundamentally attracted to particular vistas and the presence greenery, we should not forget how there have often been challenges and threats concealed within. These range from spiders and snakes to irritating plants and stinging insects (Bixler and Floyd 1997). It might therefore make good sense to recoil from these environments and retreat into the sanctuary that was once provided by caves and other forms of basic shelter and is now more commonly found in houses and apartments. Others have developed this thinking by turning to how greenspaces can feel like unpalatable places of ‘risk’ such that many do not go to them because of a background sense that they are insufficiently safe or, returning to the less intense feelings of aversion that Bixler and Floyd point towards, insufficiently sanitised (Skår 2010). Another study has considered how we might feel more relaxed if we can see for a good distance without potential assailants seeing us – viewed in this way, being immersed in vegetation that can also conceal threats is understandably unappealing (Gatersleben and Andrews 2013).
How to Respond?
What should be done about this? If we accept that there is more to this issue that providing attractive urban parks, what other solutions are there? One novel response is to think about how comparable experiences and benefits could be provided indoors. Could getting people to look at greenery on screen (or experience it through virtual reality) have the same effects? Perhaps for older people in ageing societies this could be a particularly good idea when the real-world equivalents can be physically daunting for this group (Depledge, Stone, and Bird 2011)? However, such a strategy could also push those involved even further away from the outdoors by giving them everything they need from nature inside. Presenting dramatic natural environments on screen might furthermore make the local outdoor reality increasingly dull by comparison (Ballouard, Brischoux, and Bonnet 2011). Building on the idea that we need to engage with, rather than ignore, the changing ways in which people are living in cities, another suggestion is that policymakers might do better to focus on making greenspace easier for people to encounter without making active choice to go to parks and gardens. Perhaps we should focus on the ‘incidental’ interactions associated with where they already walk, work and live (Cox et al. 2017a).
In a study that suggests those Australians who go to urban parks are doing so because of their personal affinity with these places more than the proximity to their homes – what they call the tension between ‘orientation’ and ‘opportunity’ –the logical conclusion is that we should encourage the affinity (Lin et al. 2014). For these authors, that means potentially undertaking a kind of ‘nature awareness training’ for young people so that this affinity is established in these early years. The hope is that this will stand them, and wider society, in good stead as they grow up. Indeed, children have been a particular target for this kind of argument, connecting to anxieties about what others have called ‘nature deficit disorder’ (Louv 2005) – the idea that, because many modern children don’t play outdoors as previous generations apparently did, they are already suffering as a result. Soga and Gaston (2016), for example, float the suggestion that parents should perhaps be making the effort to force their children outside (once there, they’ll soon get used to it, and soon start to like it). Could that eventually turn the tide on the broader cultural turn away from greenspaces that these studies worry about? And if we succeeded, as a number have considered, then benefits may not only be accrued by the individuals involved. Indeed, there is, in fact, some evidence that the result could be a greater sense of care for the natural environment, a stronger commitment to conservation and an increased interest in the health of the planet. Staying with the focus on contemporary young people, if one of the biggest challenges relates to how attractive ‘screen time’ has become to them (Larson et al. 2018), perhaps smartphone apps could help (Dorwood et al. 2017)? Either way, the concern here is that, if many young people are increasingly cocooned from outdoor experiences, they could quite easily become unaware of what is happening in the wider environment at a range of scales (from global climate change to local biodiversity loss). And soon that could be too late to fix.
It can be tempting to see young people as the obvious focus for attempts to tackle this problem (in the hope that they will somehow escape the challenges currently faced by the rest of us when they grow up). Indeed, the whole discipline of environmental education is essentially predicated on this idea. Within it, and regardless of where wider lifestyles seem to be headed in many places, it has become quite common to buy into the suggestion of ‘getting them early’ and then hoping for the best (Collins and Hitchings 2012). Yet, it is entirely possible that today’s young people will be socialised into future societies that are even less inclined to linger in greenspaces, irrespective of our attempts to get them bitten by the greenspace bug in their relative infancy (Asah, Bengston, and Westphal 2012). Indeed, if we think life course is important, perhaps we should consider how people move through other stages that each present their own opportunities and challenges in terms of establishing an affinity with the natural world (Bell et al. 2014). Then there is the much-vexed matter of how some ethnic groups feel that public greenspaces are not really for them, partly because they often congregate in parts of the city where they are comparatively uncommon (Gentin 2011). We have also seen studies exploring how women have particular ideas about the forms of urban greenspace in which they feel sufficiently safe and comfortable (see Krenichyn 2004). Others have also considered how those living in disadvantaged areas may particularly benefit from nearby greenspace (potentially acting as a kind of buffer to dissipate the stresses of experienced financial hardship) (Ward Thompson et al. 2016), and how older people might feel that they gain as much from viewing greenery from their homes as going out into it (Day 2008).
One recently popular way of thinking about encouraging greenspace benefits has been to speak in medical terms and to talk of the most effective ‘dose’ of nature experience to foster individual and collective health (Gladwell et al. 2013; Cox et al. 2017b). This is not without its problems in terms of downplaying variable circumstances (how groups might respond differently to their dose and face different dosing challenges) (Bell et al. 2019). Yet, for me, this is an apposite way of thinking about the issue because, when we are taking our medicine, we are doing something that we know is good for us, but which we can otherwise easily overlook. This is the essential idea that justifies the focus of this book. Within it, my aim is to consider how certain outdoor experiences that may feasibly involve beneficial encounters with plants and trees might be squeezed out of everyday life. My thinking is that we can make urban greenspaces as attractive as we like. And (without being too dramatic about it) we can extol the restorative benefits that come from spending time in these spaces until we are blue in the face. But, if many city people are being captured by certain patterns of everyday living that render them oblivious (or, perhaps more rightly, incapable of responding) to the benefits of being with trees and plants, the mounting evidence suggesting that going there could do them much good will be of little effect.
With that suggestion in mind, this book turns to a variety of situations that may initially seem trivial (I’ll make no bones about it). It will spend time attending to how a sample of city lawyers speak about ‘stepping away from their desks’ and how some recreational runners have ended up on treadmills. It will explore why the basic idea of living plants can prove challenging for some of those who are lucky enough to own a domestic garden and how young people feel they should wash at summer music festivals. The processes at play in these situations are those to which even the people involved may give little thought. Nevertheless, my argument is that they could eventually end up having significant consequences. But I am getting ahead of myself here. The next step is to discuss how I became interested in this topic and the concepts on which this book draws to explore it.
The Nuts and Bolts of Nature
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.
Entangled and Disentangled
But there are also ways in which it takes a different path. As mentioned, one of the defining features of this work has been a commitment to looking at how ‘social’ life is never entirely social. In other words, part of the point has been to recognise how people must contend with all sorts of materials and forces in their lives, even though a great deal of previous research tended to downplay these features (with the ‘social’ sciences looking at people and the ‘natural’ scientists looking at physical processes). These geographers have been keen to demonstrate how humans are not so separate and apart from the components of the natural world as we (rather arrogantly) might have been inclined to see them. And so, to use two early landmark examples from this field of work (Whatmore 2006; Hinchliffe 2007), their aim was partly to provide a new perspective on how human life goes on. But it was also to determinedly see it differently – ultimately to provide accounts in which people are shown to deal with a variety of materials, animals and plants in ways that they may not always want. So this work was also wrapped up in an ethical project of, in effect, bringing us down to earth (Whatmore 2006) by being a little more humble about the importance and power of our species. A similar objective was to ‘animate’ the material world (Hinchliffe 2007) by belatedly seeing it as a more central character in the story of how social life goes on.
The key point is that this work sets itself the dual task of both recognising that nature’s components can act into the social world, but also, and crucially for me, encouraging us to look at things in this way. For example, one of the ways in which those working in this field have increasingly imagined how human life goes on is in terms of ‘entanglement’ (Harrison, Pile, and Thrift 2004; Jones 2009). This has become a popular term partly because the ‘anthropocene’ demands that we see ourselves as entangled (Hamilton 2017) since the idea of an external nature no longer makes much sense if we have entered a new geological epoch defined by human ‘impacts’ on the earth. Some recent examples of geographers encouraging us to see society as ‘entangled’ include Robbins (2019), who considers how this idea can help us reimagine standard scientific practice, Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy (2019), who use it to question common ways of seeing manufacturing, or Morris (2019), who draws on entanglement to challenge predominant conventions of animal conservation. These researchers have been drawn to this terminology because part of their intention is to emphasise how individual people are constrained in terms of what they can do with nature’s components – that they are subject to the willingness of various lifeforms, environments and materials to bow to the wishes of the humans with which they live. There is also a nicely suitable organic image that is conjured up here – life is a project in which humans must respond to the reality of their existence amidst a thicket of other agencies.
The suggestion that the geographer’s role is one of rooting social life more fully into the material world has also influenced the people who have been studied using these ideas. Often these have been those best placed to help us develop this approach by telling us about the benefits of acknowledging their entanglements. To give three examples of recent work in this vein, we have seen some groups of English farmers recognising the benefits of recalibrating their relationship with the soil in a way that attunes them to how they should manage it in ways that are not always so controlling (Krzywoszynska 2019). Another example asks us to attend to how ‘off-gridders’ in Canada can take pleasure from being required to live within the limits of what variable weather conditions provide to them as part of a broader ethical commitment to reducing their impact on the planet by consuming less energy (Vannini and Taggart 2015). Returning to greenspace, a third example relates to a study of Australian city residents who, when asked by the government to report on the health of their local parks, wrote love letters to their favourite trees (Phillips and Atchison 2018). These researchers have given us some arresting and often life-affirming accounts of how certain groups of people are responding to some difficult environmental times. But those who are studied here are also those whose personal sentiments often chime well with a broader ethical project of seeing humankind as entangled.
I have often wondered about how, in many contexts, people seem quite happy to live some relatively disentangled lives. Indeed, they might even prefer that (in view of how being entangled instinctively seems unattractive, it is perhaps surprising to see that it has become a kind of rallying call for attempts at reimagining social life). My thinking here is that, though it has been tempting to focus our studies on those who see themselves in this way, this leaves broader questions about the rest of us open. Wider societies might not want, or have the time, to become entangled. Going back to how Bixler and Floyd (1997) noted how increasingly sanitised lives could be engendering new levels of reticence when it comes to encountering the ‘natural world’, they were effectively alerting us to how modern societies have been quietly disentangling themselves. Kaika (2004) argues something similar when she highlights how it can now feel ‘uncanny’ to be reminded that constant domestic water supply, for example, ultimately depends upon what the ‘natural world’ is able to provide. Ingold (2004) similarly points to how hard many societies have worked to achieve standards of ‘modern metropolitan’ living that are all about achieving a state in which their members are relatively oblivious to these kinds of entanglement. Many people now give little thought to the practical challenge of urban walking, for example, partly because their societies have furnished them with shoes and surfaces that help them to forget about it.
