The Trope of “Nature”
by Olivia Clark
Earlier this year, I drove across the country, this time from the coast of Maine to San Francisco, for the second time in my life. Gearing up to the 3,000+ mile voyage, I found myself romanticizing the time I was about to spend on the so-called ‘open road’; a classic American trope that has been played out to the nth degree, and yet still never ceases to capture our wildest imaginations (see: Nomadland winning the Oscar for Best Picture this year). People travel far and wide to see the natural phenomenon of America, which indeed are amazing in the truest sense of the word. However, does doing so diminish our appreciation of the everyday world around us? So, as I packed up all my belongings into my tiny sedan, I began to contemplate our culture’s obsession with the supposed solitude and serenity of the ‘open road’, and what time in nature really means in today’s age.
It’s been argued by countless environmental writers that Americans have lost sense of humans’ connection to nature. Most people no longer are knowledgeable or aware of how to coexist with nature. The nature outside our own backyard has become a spectacle, a destination to seek out. Instead of relishing and appreciating nature on a day to day basis, the wild, as Henry David Thoreau once popularized, has become a majesty of otherness. Some people try to dominate and capitalize off nature, while others act as though it is an otherworldly phenomenon that exists on a higher ground. However, in the age of the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch marked by human impact on the environment through climate change, we have never been more out of touch with nature and yet everything we do affects our environment, whether we like it or not.
In his book, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, the historian William Cronon states that the idea of “wildness” is an unnatural social construct, a cultural invention, formed through romanticism and myth of the American frontier. To save our planet from the destruction we are simultaneously causing, we must reshape our view of nature by learning how to coexist. Human culture is truly inseparable from nature; however, our society teaches us to ignore it. One of my favorite modern thinkers, the feminist scholar Donna Haraway argues that culture has aspects of nature and nature has its own forms of culture. After all, humans are descendants of chimpanzees, who we consider wild animals, but we must not forget our place as homo sapiens.
Approaches to protecting the environment can be broken up into many camps, including environmentalism versus conservationism. The motives behind these different groups can vary, but I often think back to this dichotomy when I find myself sentimentalizing nature. Thoreau, William Wordsworth, and many other influential nature writers of the past perpetuated the idea of manifest destiny and the myth of the frontier; this is still seen today in our desires for cross-country road trips and wanderlust. However, these mindsets often neglect to acknowledge the displacement and mass murder of indigenous people. It’s become commonplace to create these idealistic, blank canvases of nature when in fact this land was never truly separate from humans. It’s also clear that the outdoors industry and its culture is white supremacist and exclusive. These days, it’s often by luxury, not necessity, that people spend time in nature. As in, it takes a certain kind of lifestyle to have the freedom and flexibility to go on backpacking adventures and road trips.
All of this is not to say that I’m against those who embrace ‘van life’ or Instagram-worthy road trips. Quite the opposite, as I believe that we must learn to re-incorporate nature into our day-to-day lives to benefit the environment for current and future generations. We don’t need to deify nature by only appreciating our planet on vacations or Earth Day. We need to work towards a responsible and sustainable coexistence between humans and nature every day. While we may have lost it over the years of industrialization and capitalism, our attachment to the wild must be valued once again.
All images courtesy of Olivia Clark.
