In an era when the natural world collides with the human, we must get to a truer vision of what life means on this planet

Jeff VanderMeer is the Florida-based author of more than a dozen novels, the most recent of which is Absolution.
All along the Forgotten Coast of the Florida Panhandle, the natural world exists in confluence with the remnants of the human – this area of Gulf both remote and subject to storm, as we were reminded recently, so that the permanence of habitation is also ephemeral.
One haunt of mine, Wakulla Beach, features the broken-off faux Doric columns of the Wakulla Beach Hotel from the 1920s, with mature cabbage palms erupting up out of the stone foundation to create a tableau worthy of being called a Florida Ozymandias. There is even a rusted well pump frozen in the concrete that brings to mind a sword in a stone. Fiddler crabs for generations have lived in the places where the foundation has worn away, exposing sand beneath, perhaps much different in their habits than their brethren on the beach beyond. A turkey vulture on that beach, attuned to the bycatch of fishermen, feasts on part of a discarded ray beyond a snarl of used fishing line wrapped around a bush.
What are we to call these places? Where biodiversity is extremely high but where perhaps dozens of rusting automobiles from the 1950s can be found stacked high like giant shiny beetles, shedding pollutants into the natural systems we so admire as postcards? Where septic tanks lurk underground like dirty bombs, waiting to explode and undermine natural springs? There is so much hidden, so many ways in which the landscape has been mediated by human intervention, that feels important to understand on its own terms.
We might be naive to think that our relationship to the landscape has ever not been fraught, but the modern ubiquity of human-built environments and the similar abandonment of certain places or even whole industries has created a confusion when it comes to the idea of wild or unspoiled places. Indeed, much of what we encounter is “mixed use,” not in the cynical parlance of developers, but in the contamination of one with the other – the human and the non-human. As a result, our reactions to our locations, our very co-ordinates, and what we do to them sometimes feels unmoored from reality, and certainly from history.
Take the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, a major setting in my Southern Reach novels. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps created a series of levees and raised berms to control the flow of water, as part of the process of the federal government establishing the refuge, on what had once been land hunted and fished by Indigenous people. It had also, briefly, felt the tread of Spanish conquistadors and their horses, and all the attendant stains of colonialism. Today, we may look across vistas like St. Marks – the limitless and prehistoric-seeming expanse of marsh, the islands of trees below a blazing blue sky – and the stirrings we feel, the appeal, is in its timeless, unchanging nature. Even if that is a kind of fiction.
Geologists may still war glacially over whether we live in the Anthropocene or not, but the reality of our modern condition is that, whatever you call this era, we must try to get to a truer vision of what life means on this planet when everything is more entangled due to our activities than ever before.
Nowhere is this clearer, ironically, than in plans to turn former mines into solar or wind farms. Just as we wrongly think of the word “desert” as meaning “devoid of life,” abandoned mining sites are seen as derelict human ruins that serve no purpose. We automatically think in terms of resurrection, even when such resurrection may mean a kind of impoverishment in contrast to what has flourished in the interim. Sometimes, despite attendant pollution, places like mines have become biodiversity hot spots – or sanctuaries due to unregulated (unaffordable) housing development – that we may now destroy in the name of green energy.
This impulse may correspond to something in the human brain that is reluctant to understand the complexities of place. Something that wants clear, unambiguous answers to questions or problems. We are often overcome or colonized by this idea of human structures needing to replace another, failed structure, and in some cases we risk misunderstanding the context and the richness of opportunity. Which is to say, sometimes a ruin should be left a ruin for the greater good. Just as sometimes a “pristine” wilderness is deceptive. As Christopher Brown points out in his new book A Natural History of Empty Lots, “the illusory myth underlying” pioneer-era stories of Western settlement that “the American continent was an empty wilderness, when it was more like the world’s most minimally tended garden, persists in the way we think of the natural areas we have preserved amid our conquest. And while we do have many insanely beautiful parks in this country, most of them are not as immaculate as we like to think. Try finding your way out of the traffic jam that fills California’s most gorgeous Pacific refuges on a pretty Saturday afternoon.”
In that stark reminder of how even the presence of a redwood may hide a paucity of real life, I’m reminded of Hurricane Ian and how the storm flipped the salinity of salt and freshwater ponds at St. Marks, and how it may be months before we recognize, beyond the usual signs of aftermath, similar changes from Hurricane Helene. The world now is flipping environments, shedding normal growing zones, and changing at a rapid rate. Rather than take for granted what we think we’ve always known, we should re-examine, re-evaluate, cast a suspicious eye horizon-ward. Part of this, too, means keeping in mind that biodiversity, for example, renders trillions of dollars in economic services every year – some of which directly or indirectly avoid tragedy. A recent study, for example, showed that infant mortality rates were much higher in places with fewer bats due to habitat loss, because of a spike in use of pesticides.
Added to this common sense with regard to modern landscapes, we must pay attention to actual derangements: abstract decisions made about land use that should be laughed out of existence for their incompetence and incomprehension of reality. The least of these – for there are many – may be the illogic of climate-crisis solutions. In Florida, we bring in thousands of tons of sands to restore beaches eroded by weird weather and rising seas, only to have it washed away in a few years, with a further need to replenish – or even in a few weeks, as happened in the Tampa area during Hurricane Helene, burying cars near the shoreline as a further warning.
Similarly, we misidentify built environments and the comforting properties of the word “wall” or “defensive fortifications” as if we are medievalists when we put up concrete barriers against the sea. This doesn’t even always work in the Netherlands any more, which is struggling to keep up with rising ocean levels. These, too, shall fall, and Rome with them. A tower is a tunnel in times of flood and the values we assign to certain types of structures, even lighthouses, need to change, and our reassurance with them.
What does it say about what we value – and perhaps what we should value – that British Columbia’s Site C Dam still went ahead, flooding an entire valley? This ode to the dead past coming in the same year that better, more forward-thinking views of the landscape resulted in destroying dams to, for example, restore salmon fisheries, with enormous positive benefits to both the human and the world in general. If we know that dams are a thing of the past, and often produce carbon, but we still impose them in horrendously apocalyptic ways, what are we doing but acting out yet another ritual or affliction that has contributed to compromising the future?
I say these are the least of our dysfunctional relationships to our environments, built and otherwise, because we now use up water in various locations for AI and Bitcoin – not to mention the sacrilege of bottled water from Florida springs – to sustain a virtual world that will be wiped out if we don’t leave enough water for crops, livestock, wildlife, and, yes, people. There is a sense that we have accepted that virtual landscapes have the same validity as real ones, and yet this is so utterly untrue as to feel perverse, wrong, unsettling. It threatens to mean that we strip-mine the world of its meaning to the point of having to exist as online entities (a deranged idea) because nothing else is left.
What seems lost here, too, is further disconnect. Just as we try to find comfort in the idea of “wall” we also sometimes are too quick to relax into terms like “solar.” As an ardent supporter of clean energy, I still must balk at certain assumptions made in the name of that energy. It’s as if the word itself, implemented or even said like a spell enough times, will save us from the ideologies and foundational ideas that have gotten us to this point in human history, made possible by severe exploitation of landscape, and even of deep time. This disruption of deep time is so buried in petroleum that solar seems by its very nature, based on light, to be something pure, something not encumbered by brute laws of the universe.
But the truth is that solar can be manipulated and distorted by powerful entities like huge utility companies with armies of lobbyists and agendas that have nothing to do with community well-being or the planet’s future. Solar companies, too, are not necessarily benign. They outsource the question of panels polluting as they degrade to the future, which has already had to accept too much uncertainty, and too often extractive capitalism seeps into site location, for example in the New England wilderness chosen to enable timber harvesting and sand mining.
What does it say about our policy imagination about the world we live in that the Bureau of Land Management opening up millions of acres in the West to solar farms means the United States has hamstrung its own biodiversity restoration efforts there – condemned thousands of endangered Joshua trees, and the life they support, to death, and created the blueprint for impossible migrations for all manner of wildlife, as well as the extirpation of water sources for hundred, possibly thousands of miles, for migrating birds? To say nothing of the fate of the endangered desert tortoise.
The absurdity of how we view and use our landscapes is that we cannot escape the grip of the exploitive enough to reconsider common uses of attendant terms like “desert” and “solar.” This is the ultimate dysfunctional relationship with our environments, and how we perceive built and non-human places. It represents an impoverishment of our human imagination that we cannot embed in our solutions the requisite foresight and planning to at least do the least possible harm. Somehow, then, we need to do the hard work of altering how we see the world, and wrench our policies and decisions into a new framework that acknowledges both the value of the non-human and the value of even seemingly degraded places.
Perhaps we need to try harder, even in our daily lives, to really see what’s around us, in all its entangled complexity and extremity of need, and not reduce it and thus ourselves to something simpler and less true. If we want lives that are more in synch with the world, in a way both more meaningful and, yes, more practical and useful to our own survival.