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.
This takes us back to the extinction of experience thesis. My point now is that, whilst this area of geographical work has trained our attention onto how exactly people handle the ‘nuts and bolts’ of nature (and whilst doing so has breathed new life into the accounts
