I realized that I was dealing with environmentalists with no attachment to any actual environment. Their talk was of parts-per-million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers, sustainable technologies, renewable supergrids, green growth, and the fifteenth conference of the parties. There were campaigns about “the planet” and “the Earth,” but there was no specificity: no sign of any real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth.

This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”

that humans were the center of the world, that the Earth was their playground, that they had the right to do what they liked, or even that what they did was that important. I thought we were part of something bigger, which had as much right to the world as we did, and which we were stomping on for our own benefit

This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful, and most untouched landscapes.

The ecocentrism — in simple language, the love of place, the humility, the sense of belonging, the feelings — was absent from most of the “environmentalist” talk I heard around me.

Now it seemed that environmentalism was not about wildness or ecocentrism or the other-than-human world and our relationship to it. Instead it was about (human) social justice and (human) equality and (human) progress and ensuring that all these things could be realized without degrading the (human) resource base that we used to call nature back when we were being naïve and problematic.

So there was a reason for environmentalism’s shift to the left, just as there was a reason for its blinding obsession with carbon.

Carbon emissions must be “tackled” like a drunk with a broken bottle — quickly, and with maximum force.

We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability.” What does this curious, plastic word mean?

From that reaction came a feeling, which became a series of thoughts: that such things are precious for their own sake, that they are food for the human soul, and that they need people to speak for them to, and defend them from, other people, because they cannot speak our language and we have forgotten how to speak theirs. And because we are killing them to feed ourselves and we know it and we care about it, sometimes, but we do it anyway because we are hungry, or we have persuaded ourselves that we are.

And in the morning, with dew on the tent and cold air in my face as I opened the zip, the wild elements of life, all of the real things, would all seem to be there, waiting for me with the sunrise.

Together, we see stories that sustain us saying no one is a virus— because, to take a turn at Stuart Hall’s words, “Appeals to ‘nature’ are not explanations, they are an alibi.”[3]

Nature will heal when we heal the white supremacist vision of nature as an object to be extracted, resource to be mined, concept to racialize, sacrifice, make killable

Others have traced Nazi blood and soil logics to the history of American settler colonial capitalism, making clear that environmental history cannot be told without Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery

Ecofascism in the United States is not so much a matter of left versus right, but notions of “nature” and “natural law” easily deployed to underwrite violence.

humans-as-cancer metaphors have dominated discourse for at least the last forty years. The idea that “nature is healing” from “our” viral violences is an insidious instantiation of an ecofascist sentiment that has been with us a long time.

“healing” continues a murderous intellectual tradition that is at once both global and virally American.

witnessed a diverse range of students articulating their anger through this universalist language. The impulse likely, and understandably, emerges from a too-rare glimpse of non-human flourishing in landscapes often marked by unmitigated destruction.

This saturation of freedom with loss comes not from the inevitability of the game’s end but from the fact that everywhere you go in the game you encounter blighted landscapes and bereaved villages. And, what’s more, the game insists on the unevenness with which this distress is experienced.

To awaken often means assuming this role—save the princess, save the world—as if it were a natural, routine activity. While Link loses his sleepy former self, that loss never gets marked by trauma.

Awakening can mean ascending to a new level of consciousness and learning from past mistakes, but it also commonly means the privilege to stand both within and above history.

Breath of the Wild, meanwhile, presents a paradigm of freedom that is aligned with loss and self-denial. Awakening to the consequences of the world’s finitude and the uneven distribution of freedom is a necessary part of the story.

delivers an environment alive with the joys of play and invention. Such generosity is particularly striking in a larger media landscape of remakes and sequels typically characterized by predictability, irony, and cynicism.

Breath of the Wild severs that link to the past. By occupying an open world on a massive scale, the game deliberately suspends the ideology of winning—with its emphasis on objectives, goals, progress, and development—that organizes not only the Zelda games but perhaps all videogames.

He is the literal link between games, and his vacuity makes him the perfect avatar for the player. When players occupy the role of Link, they learn to submit to the mandates of duty, responsibility, and restriction that structure the series.

Why do we play videogames? To what extent can videogames be reparative rather than escapist? How can the formal mechanics of videogame design, with its essential link between hand and eye, feeling and thinking, change the way we relate to mind, body, and world?

He teases us with a line like “burst // against teeth / with my juice and seed,” which perhaps we’re tempted to read in a sexualized way but which seems to be, really, just about the tomato.

Tonally also the poem is feeling its way around, starting with a more formal proclamation (“I know I am a nightshade”) and eventually breaking into the slangy-grandiose “I’m as big as the harvest / fucking sun.”

Could this really be the tomato speaking? In what way could a tomato be a boy but not a man?! It appears as though for a moment the strain of the metaphoric construction has split, and that the poet himself has fallen out of the game and into confession.

As a footnote points out, taxation was one of the primary motivations the Supreme Court had for deliberately mis-classifying tomatoes as vegetables in 1893.

Does the tomato claim membership in this arbitrarily defined identity group with any ambivalence? It doesn’t seem so. So if some categories fit more comfortably on us than others, the same seems true for the tomato.

Perhaps prison is anything that severs and alienates, paradise is the reclaimed commons with the fences thrown down, and so any step toward connection and communion is a step toward paradise, even if the route detours through jail.

But change is not always by revolution, the deprived don’t generally wish that the rest of us would join them in deprivation, and a passion for justice and pleasure in small things are not incompatible.

Imagining the woods or any untrammeled landscape as an unsocial place, an outside, also depends on erasing those who dwelt and sometimes still dwell there, the original Americans

Conventional environmental writing has often maintained a strict silence on or even an animosity toward the city, despite its importance as a lower-impact place for the majority to live, its intricate relations to the rural, and the direct routes between the two.

“black slavery spoiled his country walks,” it spoiled the slaves’ country walks even more.

Those who deny that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused have undermined the connections for all of us (so few have been able to find Thoreau’s short, direct route between them since). This makes politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site.

To believe that conscience is an imposition upon consciousness is to regard engagement as a hijacker rather than a rudder, interference with one’s true purpose rather than perhaps at least part of that purpose.

So glorious a display of pure wildness, acting at close range while one is cut off from all the world beside, is terribly impressive.

the sequoia suffers most of all.

These king trees, all that there are of their kind in the world, are surely worth saving, whether for beauty, science, or bald use.

Unless destroyed by man, they live on indefinitely until burned, smashed by lightning, or cast down by the giving way of the ground on which they stand.

and for each of these there are many young trees and crowds of eager, hopeful saplings growing heartily everywhere—on moraines, rocky ledges, along watercourses, and in the deep, moist alluvium of meadows, seemingly in hot pursuit of eternal life.

the most attractive that has yet been discovered in the mountain ranges of the world.

In Yosemite, even under the protection of the Government, all that is perishable is vanishing apace.

Slow indeed was my progress through these glorious gardens, the first of the California flora I had seen. Cattle and cultivation were making few scars as yet, and I wandered enchanted in long, wavering curves, aware now and then that Yosemite lay to the eastward, and that some time, I should find it.

but the way is so beautiful that one is beguiled at every step, and the great golden days and weeks and months go by uncounted.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.

appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath.

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories, how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had.

Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.

Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

In short, all good things are wild and free.

American liberty has become a fiction of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame.

There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her Chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.

And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade.

It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.”

There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted.

A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.

At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter.

New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World....

From the East light; from the West fruit.

It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one.

But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds.

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.

What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works—for this may sometimes happen.

even politics, the most alarming of them all

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods.

So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions.

will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch.

but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one's self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy

stand it I do not know

in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class

You must be born into the family of the Walkers.

probable derivation

vagrant

having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering