The Unsettling Outdoors. Russell Hitchings

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