Five Narratives that Shaped My View of Nature

Part of the goal of this website is to use language to reshape our perspectives of the environment, so for this first Green Phoenix post, it feels right to talk about some narratives that have done that for me. I’m using the word “narrative” in a broad sense, referring to any art form that expresses stories, thoughts, and experiences. This isn’t a comprehensive list, and I don’t necessarily agree with these narratives’ conclusions, but they have all played some role in sharpening and developing my view of the natural world.

So, here’s a list of five of my formative narratives!

1: Calvin and Hobbes (Comic Strip, Bill Watterson)

I grew up with compilations of these comics propped up beside my pillow and my bedroom wall, where they could be a source of consolation after nightmares. This comic strip is artistic, goofy, and philosophical in turn—and often at the same time—following a boy and a tiger as they roll out monstrous snowmen, romp through forests, and careen down swerving hillsides by wagon or sled.

This comic expresses a deep love for creatures and landscapes. Calvin is frequently frustrated at the littering and tree-chopping in his forest, and he spends a great deal of time exploring the wooded hills near his home. And then there’s Hobbes, the tiger. Despite his penchant for curling up in the sun like a housecat, Hobbes is Calvin’s friend and equal, not his pet. In fact, Hobbes frequently proves himself Calvin’s superior, morally and intellectually, which has some amusing implications for human pretensions of dominance.

These comics probably nurtured some of my love for nature as I grew up. I know for a fact that they made me want to live closer to a forest. I also sometimes wonder if Calvin’s disgust for litter may have contributed to my later habit of picking up bottles and discarded wrappers from around my neighborhood.

2: Pokémon (Video Game, Nintendo)

Throughout elementary and middle school, I loved these games for similar reasons that I loved animals. I could just lose myself in the beauty and diversity and endless pages of trivia involved with Pokémon, and with many of their creatures being based on real natural phenomena (for example, the spore-infected Paras mirrors the effects of cordyceps fungi [Bulbapedia]), these video games can inspire a great wonder for the environment.

However, while Pokémon games do celebrate the beauty of natural creatures, they arguably objectify that beauty, turning animals into something to possess and manipulate. As most of you probably know, these “pocket monsters” are depicted as partly sentient beings that people capture in steel orbs, releasing them to pit them against each other in battle. This focus on capture, manipulation, and abuse carries some pretty disturbing messages about our relationship with animals.

Even if these messages were unintended (I doubt Nintendo desired to condone animal abuse), the implicit messages of these games offered me an interesting lesson—a lesson that I see reflected in certain zoos, and in the exotic pet industry: affection does not prevent abuse. You can admire an animal’s beauty and hurt it at the same time. If we’re to truly care for nature, we need to go deeper than mere admiration.

3: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Nonfiction Narrative, Annie Dillard)

One of my favorite books, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a profound and poetic series of nonfiction essays, inspired by Dillard’s reflections on God and nature in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Aside from its beautiful writing style, which is both analytic and artistic, I loved this book’s multifaceted depiction of nature. Before this book, a lot of the portrayals of nature that I’d read were either idealized explorations of natural beauty or cruel, Jack London-style reports of natural savagery. Dillard’s view, however, is not so black-and-white. As she explores unique animals and landscapes, she writes about nature’s parasitism, mystery, piteousness, extravagance, cruelty, fecundity, instructiveness, and absurdity, as well as its capacity for divine revelation. She explores nature as it is and in all its variety, and often with reference to the Eskimos.

This book allowed me to develop a more nuanced view of nature. Our environment is not a marble statue, needing to be sanitized and polished up, as if the whole point were to prove that nature is aesthetically pleasing. Moreover, like any relationship that we may have, our connection with nature not only deals with absolutes of “beauty” and “savagery,” with black and white, but with a whole array of color—personality traits both numerous and unique, which demand to be experienced for what they are.

4: The Earthsea Cycle (Fantasy Series, Ursula K. Le Guin)

Taking place in a world composed entirely of scattered islands, where wizards and dragons occasionally butt heads, Earthsea explores the perspectives of a hubristic mage, a corrupt priestess cult, a seafaring nobleman, and a girl of incredible magic power who’s nearly burned alive. Something of a fantasy classic, this is a creative and poignant and deeply philosophical series.

Concerning its views of the natural world, this series stirred up a lot of questions in me about the role of good and evil—and of opposing forces in general—in our environment. One of the recurring themes of the series is the necessity of both good and evil to maintain the natural order. From my interpretation, Le Guin seems to hold that while evil can and should be tamed, it cannot be eliminated without negating what is good in our world. Thus, the thriving of all living things relies on that moral balance.

The epigraph to the first book summarizes this idea very eloquently:

“Only in silence the word,

only in dark the light,

only in dying life:

bright the hawk’s flight

on the empty sky.

-The Creation of Éa” (Le Guin 12)

While I may not fully agree with Le Guin’s ideas, they inspired a lot of important questions in me about the natural order. Is evil necessary to create good? Is death necessary for life to thrive? Concerning the latter question, the current structure of our ecosystems certainly requires death, but must it stay that way? Could it change? The way that we answer these questions have strong implications for how we think about the qualities of nature and its ultimate trajectory.

5: Perelandra (Science Fiction Novel, C.S. Lewis)

A fantastical exploration of the planet Venus, this novel describes a largely oceanic world where floating islands roll over enormous waves, where draconic creatures glide beneath a sky of gold, and where evil is nonexistent (until the events of the novel, of course). Though there’s some exploration of environmental relationships throughout the whole story, some of the most moving ideas are in the novel’s culminating dialogue—more of an extended poem, really—which celebrates the “Great Dance” of God and the countless worlds and creatures that fill the cosmos.

Honestly, I could dedicate multiple blog posts to this dialogue, but to give an incomplete summary, it expresses the inherent worth of nature (with or without sentient beings), as well as God’s presence in every living and nonliving thing, from the mosquito that you swatted this morning to the tectonic plates. The dialogue also asserts the interdependence and centrality of every aspect of the universe. These aspects aren’t “equal” in the sense that they’re all the same (for instance, the whale is shaped differently from the moon, and the moon is better at governing the tides), but each aspect has a unique value and role in the universal order, and each part is simultaneously supporting and being supported.

This section is too poignant for me to resist quoting it, so here’s an especially strong excerpt. It’s in an elevated style, but I urge you to consider what it’s actually saying, and to resist glazing over it:

“In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each

movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to

which all else had been directed. Thus each is equally at the centre and none are

there by being equals, but some by giving place and some by receiving it, the

small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the

patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptered

love. Blessed be He!” (Lewis 217)

Last Thoughts

Though these works come from an array of art forms, they are all narratives that helped to challenge and shape my beliefs about nature. Regardless of whether I agreed with all of them, they started a conversation—sometimes within myself, sometimes among friends and family—and those interactions were helpful in developing my perspective.

If nothing else, reflecting on these narratives reminds me that our video games, our fantasies, our reflections, and even our comics all have an impact on how we see the world. When I open a book, I’m not opening a window to some reality that’s isolated from my own, but rather a window to my own reality through new eyes. Yes, narratives have inherent worth and beauty, and can even be used for healthy escapism now and then, but the stories we tell, even if it’s just the little pocket monster game on my Gameboy Advance, shape the way that we see and care for our environment. Often, it's by exploring other worlds that we come to understand our own.

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Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. New York, Penguin, 1993.

Lewis, C.S. Perelandra. New York, Macmillan, 1944.

“Paras (Pokémon).” Bulbapedia, Bulbagarden, 1 June 2020,

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Paras_(Pok%C3%A9mon).

Accessed 2 June 2020.