BETWEEN SAYING AND DOING. NATURE, HUMAN PRACTICES AND GEOGRAPHY

Abstract

Although the model of unlimited economic growth was a matter of debate at least fifty years ago, human behavior on Earth continues to be based on the priority given to the ephemeral individual needs of a minority of the global population, exacerbating social and territorial imbalances, environment and landscape degradation and cultural homologation.
Such behavior, the result of Cartesian dichotomies, superseded in theory but not in practice, poses for geography some crucial epistemological questions, as it is a discipline founded on the relationship between nature and human beings, but then more and more oriented to focus attention on man’s actions, representations, and meta-narratives.
By presenting some critical reflections both on development, progress and technology, and on how some relevant thinkers have envisioned our natural environment over time, the paper aims at offering some meta-theoretical reflections. A return of geography to the centrality of nature - as a preliminary and indispensable interlocutor of human beings, both in a rational and non-rational sense - is suggested, in order to overcome the still existent dichotomy between reason and feeling, pragmatic usefulness and metaphysical reflection, and to create the preliminary condition for the pursuit of long-term goals.