You Can Never Go Back to Nature

Annalee Newitz, with a wonderful piece at io9:

You cannot yearn to get back to nature if you don’t believe that you are fundamentally not a part of it.

Throughout my childhood, and in my adulthood, I never had a strong yearning to spend weeks camping or take a days-long backpacking trip. At times I thought this made me a shitty ecologist. But eventually it dawned on me why I don’t have those compulsions: I see nature all around me. I study and explore it, even when I am in the middle of the city. Newitz gets at the heart of this with poetic brevity.

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