Nature Doesn’t Owe Me Comfort (and also somewhere else is nowhere)
My favorite moment when I’m hiking or kayaking is the moment when the landscape seems to pull me in and swallow me up. If I’m in the woods, it feels like the trees have closed up behind me. It’s such a palpable feeling that I’ve even looked over my shoulder a few times to make sure the path is still clear. It’s the moment when I imagine I’ve stepped away from society and have entered the wild. It’s similar to that moment on a plane when you get just high enough off the ground that there’s a feeling of separation; you’ve entered a different kind of space and time, an otherness that removes you from your usual existence.
A lot of us move into nature with the expectation of separating and finding something outside of our day-to-day. I depend on that feeling so much that any discernible reminder of the society I’m “leaving behind” feels like an intrusion. A phone ringing on a quiet trail, a loud radio on the beach, a plastic water bottle in the mud, an orange flag marking a tree, traffic from a nearby highway. Each intrusion is a small reminder that I haven’t left it all behind.
In Louisiana these intrusions also come in the shape and smell of petrochemical infrastructure. A clearing that opens up to pipeline pump-stations behind barbed-wire fences, the distillation towers or flares from a refinery on the horizon, bright yellow or orange pipeline markers weaving through the trees, an orphaned well sitting in the middle of a bay. Countless times, I’ve watched the beautifully monotonous landscape of a marsh be interrupted by black and white signs with red borders that read “Warning. Do not anchor or dredge. Pipeline crossing.” I’ve stood on barrier islands miles away from the mainland and faced a horizon littered with distant offshore oil platforms, those enormous floating cities for no one.
These markers of modern civilization are hard to miss in Louisiana. Our land is flat, simultaneously lowering the horizon and exaggerating the sky. The smokestacks, towers, flares, chutes, container cranes, gas terminals, and oil rigs that line the horizon are hypervisible when you’re below sea-level.
While hiking or paddling, these constant glimpses of infrastructure jolt me back to the reality I was trying to escape. They are an abrupt end to a short communion. They remind me of not just the individual impacts I have on the environment but also the violent, systemic extractivism that is weaved into our society’s foundation; they are reminders of the complexity and hyperobjectivity of the climate crisis. My brain, which was seeking an escape in nature, is redirected to the mess we are in, the mess I tried to leave in the parking lot.
When I move into natural spaces marred with litter, noise and air pollution, industrial infrastructure, I am reminded of our country’s priorities. I am reminded of the United States’ obsession with economic growth, always at the expense of environmental justice and ecological/public health. I am reminded of the scope and scale of the climate crisis and that even these “natural” places aren’t safe from its effects.
I recently realized that these high expectations for nature and my disappointment in these moments are rooted in problematic and binary thinking. Viewing nature as a separate entity that exists outside of everything manmade is a Western idea that spread with colonialism. With this lens, I’m asking nature to do the impossible: I’m asking it to exist in an unspoiled way that doesn’t reflect reality or even my own actions. And in places like the Gulf South–places overwrought by heavy industry–nature and industry have shared the same spaces for so long, they are now inextricable from one another.
Viewing nature as something separate, something untouched and beyond the reaches of society, causes us to have unrealistic expectations of our environment. We move into spaces we’ve designated as “natural” and “wild” and expect an experience, perfection, escape, even transfiguration.
And we maintain these expectations as a society even though our lifestyles are fueled by the mass exploitation of nature.
Adjusting how we view our relationship with the natural world—and lowering our expectations for the experiences we think nature owes us—is imperative as we continue to face the climate emergency.
Unrealistic expectations for the natural world further compartmentalize our thinking about nature. And perceiving the world as a patchwork quilt of separated spaces like industrial zones, urban areas, business districts, nature preserves, and roadways is a dangerous habit. That compartmentalization justifies the exponential spread of extractive industries. That compartmentalization perpetuates the myth that there is a somewhere else within our single biosphere.
Compartmentalizing our perception of the environment limits our thought processes and immobilizes our imagination. Our brains cannot do the difficult work of seeing the connections between these supposedly separate spaces; our brains struggle to believe that so many things can be true at the same time.
Expecting too much from nature or asking it to exist unscathed by the harm we cause it is to be constantly nostalgic and disappointed. Left unchecked, that disappointment can lead to learned helplessness about our compromised world, which could easily slide into fatalism. And fatalism is simply not an option for our species right now.
