Contested Natures [Hardcover]

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global.

The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to `Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global.

The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to ``This book is vigorously written and bursting with ideas, indeed, mirroring the book's own conclusions about the post-modern world it barely manages to govern its own content. Although it 'seeks to show that there is no singualr 'nature' as such, only by a diversity of contested of contested natures' (p.1), by the end it is clear we are really dealing with the problem of 'the environment', of a 'globable nature', the 'global environment', 'the planet', 'thl“8