The bad environmentalism of ‘nature is healing’ memes

Introduction

Environmentalists frequently argue that a more humane ecological world would require interruption of everyday life in order to develop a more conscious political culture. In February and March of 2020, an interruption happened – though certainly not as most expected, desired, or planned. The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic surge paused some aspects of the normal circuitry of things in deeply socially differentiated ways. For some environmentalists, this hiatus appeared to have a silver lining of sorts. As humanity’s negative impact on the natural world appeared to grind to a halt, space was supposedly created for natural life to re-emerge in the interstices of the human-dominated world. Taking to social media, such individuals spread hopeful aesthetic representations of this opening. Swans and dolphins had returned to the canals of Venice. ¹ In China, elephants supposedly got drunk on rice wine and fell asleep in a tea garden. ² Boars were seen in Italy, civets in India. ³ If you believe that human social life is inherently anti-ecological, the logic made sense; following it to the extreme, some speculated that perhaps these changes indicated that some portion of humanity ought to die. For example: in reply to a tweet about Venice rivers, a March 16 commenter writes ‘Seems like Corona is the vaccine and we are virus of the nature!’ ⁴ Nostalgic images of nature and advocates of human extermination have long gone hand in hand; in 2020’s online cultural parlance, such a desultory combination is frequently understood as ‘eco-fascism’. ⁵ Of course it was immediately revealed that aspects of these viral tweets were fake: swans have long frequented Venice, while the elephant story is largely fictional. The video of boars roaming an Italian town was shot a year prior to the pandemic, while the Indian civet is a common city dweller. ⁶ Yet posts documenting ‘nature healing’ as well as those describing humanity as the ‘real virus’ received tens of thousands of retweets and hundreds of thousands – in one case over a million – favorites.

As a corrective, the story of fake news and fact checking wasn’t very compelling. A March 20th 2020 National Geographic online article exposing the faultiness of the tweets ⁷ did not spread as far: the most popular (undeleted) tweet linking to that article has a mere 6700 retweets and almost 16,000 likes as of January 2021. ⁸ However, another response was more successful. Rather than disputing the facticity of the ‘nature is healing’ tweets, social media users parodied their format, playing off its sanctimonious and smug tone to ultimately expose critical disagreements with its philosophy and politics. Dripping with irony, the first of these tweets to go viral reads: ‘with everyone on lockdown, the lime scooters are finally returning to the river. Nature is healing, we are the virus’ (Figure 1). Referencing general social hatred of privatized electronic transport scooters increasingly popping up in urban centers around North America, an image is attached depicting several scooters thrown in a river. It was – and remains – a hit, with 75,000 retweets and 428,000 likes. In a comment to BuzzFeed News, the author of the scooter tweet explained: ‘There were tons of posts about the Venetian canals clearing up and the dolphins returning to Italy/various animals returning to typically urban areas and [I] was annoyed by the eco-fascist statements of ‘we are the virus’. . . . I just thought of something that clearly does not belong in nature and as someone who hates the scooter share business I thought the Lime scooters in the river was perfect’. ⁹ The genre was almost immediately taken up by other users, providing an alternative interpretive framework of nature, the un/natural politics of the pandemic, and adjacent political events.

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Figure 1.

A tweet from March 26, 2020 reads ‘with everyone on lockdown, the lime scooters are finally returning to the river. nature is healing, we are the virus’, followed by an image of several Lime-brand electric scooters in a body of water. https://twitter.com/taladorei/status/1243190429283213313

Scholars of pop culture and the environment sometimes adopt the affects of the people and texts we study; in the case of those who study the politics of climate change, it is incredibly easy for us – and our students – to feel hopeless and despondent. This encourages a structural elitism, in which it is imagined that we are an embattled few with the proper knowledge and values pitted against a largely uncaring mass of uneducated regular people. This affective structure, Nicole Seymour argues, has sometimes resulted in scholarship which ignores the range of other forms of environmental affect, performance, and culture that contribute to understanding and interpreting the natural world. ¹⁰ Seymour highlights instead ‘bad environmentalism’: ‘environmental thought that employs dissident, often-denigrated affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on both our current moment and mainstream environmental art, activism, and discourse’. ¹¹ Along with recent scholarship on memes in cultural geography ¹² and pop-cultural studies of environmental discourse and affect, ¹³ this article mobilizes Seymour’s concept of ‘bad environmentalism’ through an analysis of how ‘nature is healing’ memes represent cultural struggle over understandings of nature and naturalization. This is demonstrated through the definition of five different categories of humor that the memes mobilized: the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to the naturalization of social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in/of the natural world. I extend Seymour’s analysis by demonstrating the humor of these modes draws upon and destabilizes different senses of nature: first, as the separation of the human and nonhuman world into supposedly different spheres, and second as the name for the proper or normative socioecological order. I conclude by considering what the study of memes can teach us about the limitations of current analyses and pedagogies of environmental politics.

Bad environmentalism and political-ecological affect(s)

Led by scholars drawing on feminist and queer political-ecological thought, political ecologists have increasingly examined the politics of emotion and affect in environmental movements and ecological struggles. Feelings of pain and suffering emerge in struggles over resource extraction ¹⁴ or knowledge of environmental crisis, ¹⁵ embodied emotions emerge in interactions with the natural world and subsequently affect political decisions, ¹⁶ and emotions can play important roles in producing – or preventing – common attachments to natural landscapes. ¹⁷ Not surprisingly, many of these scholars mobilize an analytic influenced by performance studies, ¹⁸ seeing the work of emotion and affect as a dynamic process of becoming rather than a series of discrete, linear moments. However, as González-Hidalgo and Zografos have recently argued, an outsized focus on ‘optimistic’ emotions such as ‘love and caring’ has the ability to cloud attention to the work that ‘pessimistic’ or ‘negative’ affects such as ‘anger, sorrow, anxiety’ can produce in environmental struggles. ¹⁹ Of course, as these authors readily acknowledge, in situ much more ambiguity prevails than solely optimistic or pessimistic affective scenes.

Yet where should we locate ambivalence? On the one hand, emotional attachments or disaffections certainly play uncertain roles at most in directly producing concrete political subjectivities. ²⁰ However, another problem with framing optimistic versus pessimistic emotions is the existence of ambivalent affects, or the ambivalence of affect itself – what Spinoza called fluctuatio animi or ‘vacillation of the mind’. ²¹ A now-classic example of the analytic utility of such irresolution is Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’, which indicates a relation in which ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’. ²² Berlant examines various modes in which subjects struggle to recognize or manage that attachment – say, to a pursuit of ‘the good life’ associated with neoliberalism which exhausts subjects and relies on exploitation and immiseration of others. The utility of such a concept does not aim to replace the ambivalence of political subjectivity, ²³ but rather to demonstrate that we are likely to be pulled by multiple ambivalences, including a given yet not-altogether-known combination of joyous and sad affects. In reading ‘bad environmentalism’ in this light, I do not mean to suggest it provides a resolution to the above frameworks of affect in political ecology. Instead, it offers a potentially clarifying analytic addition to how we approach studying emotions in feminist and queer political ecologies.

In order to understand the critical work of bad environmental affect, however, we first have to understand the dominant affects of conventional environmentalism, such as ‘guilt, shame, didacticism, prescriptiveness, sentimentality, reverence, seriousness, sincerity, earnestness, sanctimony, self-righteousness, and wonder’. ²⁴ It is not that such emotional repertoires are solely responsible for the failures of environmentalism. Nor should we stave off the emotions associated with factual knowledge of ecological catastrophe. However, when crystallized through aesthetic work, such an emotional knot has the capacity to lead to depression and burnout, to reinforce the heteronormativity and whiteness of environmentalism, and to buttress expertise and in-group behavior at the expense of new participation. Ecocritical scholarship itself can display these tendencies, resulting in a lack of ‘self-awareness, self-reflexivity, and metacritique’. ²⁵ It can make our writing, conferences, and classrooms alike unenjoyable.

Bad environmentalism is not a replacement for these affects but an analytic rupture which disassembles their internal logic while remaining less-than-assured about an alternative ‘proper’ position. Bad environmental affects include ‘irony, irreverence, perversity, and playfulness. . .absurdity, camp, frivolity, indecorum, ambivalence and glee’. ²⁶ Seymour finds bad environmentalism is frequently performed by amateurs, may not be recognized as environmentalism, and is often mobilized in queer, Black, feminist, and/or Indigenous critiques and parodies of environmentalist performance. Bad environmentalism invites laughter rather than seeing it as excessive or unserious. Seymour is careful to suggest that such performances are not a political program; this would be impossible given the proclivities for contradiction and imperfection. Bad environmentalism should not be understood as a form of environmentalism defined by political action or social-movement building. Instead, the ambivalences of bad environmental affect offer openings for alternative cultural configurations of environmental and climate justice movements to take hold. ‘Bad environmentalism’ need not be consciousness-raising or activity-producing to shape culture; consequently, it ought to be considered environmentalism even though it is not associated with either the actions or the subjects who might usually be identified with the term.

Seymour’s archive of bad environmentalism includes a variety of texts including TV shows, a mockumentary, literary texts, and various kinds of performance. Participatory digital media such as meme making is one area of pop culture not explored by many political ecologists, making it ripe for understanding. ²⁷ I understand memes as easily reproduced formal images and commentary predicated on circulation, repetition, and augmentation through participatory digital media. ²⁸ The proliferation of climate, environmental, and environmental justice memes are a form of popular culture which present an alternative repertoire of affects than we would expect given the extant literature examining pop culture and the environment, which has focused on the apocalyptic and utopian in science fiction films and books, ²⁹ and normative images of nature and the environment more generally. ³⁰ Unlike other forms of pop culture such as television shows, books, or movies frequently critiqued in such studies, digital media is predicated on user participation in content creation. In their ‘accessible, nonhierarchical, and lowbrow’ production, memes are ‘low environmental culture’ par excellence. ³¹ Memes are also definitively performative, but they break down the performer-audience dyad through which cultural communication is sometimes understood. ³² This is to say that memes, like other forms of participatory digital culture, are both reflections of and contributions to subverting popular culture in a slightly different way than standard performative speech acts or cultural texts tied to publishing houses or television or film studios. ³³

Nonetheless, digital media is surely not liberated from power relations. Nor does circulation of political content necessarily lead to political action. ³⁴ The study of the prevalence of meme cultures and subcultures in the ‘alt-right’ demonstrates that the anonymity of meme production can lead to a hardening of ‘politically-incorrect’ or otherwise cruel transgression and irony premised on racism or homophobia. ³⁵ Rather, I mean to suggest that at least in some respects social media might provide a window into a different slice of pop culture than literature, film, and television. Because memes – especially when using irony and humor – are predicated on ‘juxtaposing genres, pushing back against the expected’, ³⁶ they can both draw from and push against the normative representational and emotional relations of environmentalism.

Affective circulation is central to participatory digital media. Memes ‘incite a volatile affective politics’ in part because they ‘detach us from stale genres’. ³⁷ In particular, ‘Twitter serves as a conduit of interconnected structures of feeling, lending rise to not just sentiment-driven publics but connecting and redirecting expansive meme-plexes of expression deriving from a variety of media’. ³⁸ Much can be said about the overall impact of social media on social relations and psychopolitics more generally, and numerous methods exist to study such social relations. Smyth, Linz, and Hudson examine how the circulation of gifs, emojis, and memes – as ‘affective forms of communication’ – help create feminist spaces of survivance in hostile conditions of labor and social reproduction. ³⁹ On the other end of the circulatory process, studies also focus on participatory reception of memes by following the function of retweets and shares and their effects on forming subjectivities or identities. ⁴⁰ What is important to bring from these studies is that fast-circulating memes invite digital participation in cultural and emotional worldmaking that can tweak and remake meaning. This article humbly examines only the representational moment of memes as evidence of widespread cultural struggle over the meaning of nature, rather than studying collective production or mimetic reception. ⁴¹ I show how such representations tweak the genre expectations of environmentalism through irony, parody, humor, or absurdity.

Below I will show that ‘nature is healing’ memes work – that is, they circulate and are funny – precisely because they play against several conventions of ‘nature’, that ‘most complex word’ as Williams famously noted. ⁴² In particular, ‘nature is healing’ memes riff on the incongruence among un/natural objects and settings and the perceived illegitimacy or un/naturalness of socio-ecological orders. At times, Seymour approaches a similar assessment, suggesting that bad environmentalism takes ‘“unnatural” approaches to natural (and other) landscapes and issues’. ⁴³ Such a form of unnatural humor is deeply indebted to queer performance, such as camp and drag, which through imitation and exaggeration highlight the absurdity of normative (or purportedly ‘natural’) manners of being. That is, somewhat contra Sturgeon’s assessment that pop culture primarily represents the ‘naturalization of social differences and economic systems’ in, through, and as hegemony, ⁴⁴ bad environmentalism instead plays precisely through the intentional confusion of multiple meanings of ‘nature’ (e.g., the other-than-human and the normal/proper). It does so not only with ambivalent political effects, but also through a formally ambivalent affective infrastructure. I decompose the humor of the unnatural into five different forms, thus extending on Seymour’s argument by showing precisely how ‘nature is returning’ memes not only parody their object (nature/eco-fascism), but also delegitimize the very process of ‘naturalization’ through which its object would be established as normative or desirable.

Does this structure make camp, queer humor, or parody dependent on the normative object which it (implicitly or explicitly) critiques? At times, yes. Yet even when dependent on the object of criticism, ‘nature is healing’ memes make visible the former’s absurdity and thus offer opportunities for sustaining emotional life in adverse conditions. Critical scholarship supports this approach. McKeithen’s ⁴⁵ examination of online cultures of the ‘crazy cat lady’ argues that ‘Using queer camp and parody, these women-with-cats reclaim the crazy cat lady while rejecting and reworking associated stereotypes’. Similarly, in a sustained analysis of the absurdity of designating a reclaimed military toxic waste site as a natural park, Krupar ⁴⁶ comes to the conclusion that ‘camp humor can help sustain vital attitudes and prosthetic personas under conditions of diagnosis and crisis’. In their examination of The Yes Men and Greenpeace’s creation of user-generated content mimicking Shell Oil’s corporate media interface, Davis et al., ⁴⁷ demonstrate that memes can undermine the legitimacy of institutional actors and the formal conventions through which legitimacy is affirmed. The socio-political context which surrounds ‘nature is healing’ memes is the ongoing pandemic which has killed millions of people worldwide, adversely impacting hundreds of millions more through economic and political reactions. The original, unhumorous ‘humans are the virus’ comments seek to legitimate and valorize this death. As with climate change knowledge more generally, simply fact-checking or reaffirming expertise potentially convinces only those for whom these institutions and modes of knowledge are already seen to be legitimate. By contrast, in situations of crisis, humor, irony, and absurdity create alternative emotional registers for engagement in the politics of the natural world, ⁴⁸ allowing a more humble, less self-assured, but still critical politics.

Methods

In January 2021, three student research assistants and I assembled an archive of ‘nature is healing’ memes. Our goal was not to be comprehensive, but rather to sample purposively until reaching saturation, iteratively coding for formal themes. For two reasons, the primary platforms we used were Twitter and Reddit. Both the original ‘humans are the virus’ sentiment and the ‘nature is healing’ memes emerged on Twitter. More practically, Twitter and Reddit have much more powerful search functions than other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Twitter’s advanced search, for example, allows one to set date parameters as well as thresholds for ‘likes’. Instagram, although a hotbed for memes, allows for searches only by hashtag. #natureisreturning had some 86,000 posts and one cannot easily sift through them by date. Twitter and Reddit also frequently feature reposted memes from other platforms, such as message boards, Tumblr, or Instagram, mitigating some risk of missing certain trends in the meme.

The research team searched in one-week blocks from the first known appearance of a ‘nature is healing’ meme on March 26th, 2020 through January 15, 2021. Keywords like ‘nature is healing’ and ‘nature is returning’ were used, and we added variations as we found them (e.g., ‘earth is healing’, ‘animals are returning’, ‘skies are clear’, ‘returning to the wild’). The initial search also included ‘humans are the virus’, but this tended to return very few to no meme results, even when using a minimum ‘like’ threshold. Such excluded content includes political conversations and comments that displayed no humor or irony or no images that would suggest they function as memes. Searching through these comments – many of which displayed the authentic ‘eco-fascist’ ideology – was deemed to be overly burdensome. Though we limit ourselves to the English language, it was clear that the format had broad appeal around the world, with most identifiable examples from North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Several potential weaknesses can be found in approach. Although ‘nature is healing’ became the shorthand for the genre, some posts play off the melodrama of naturalistic description using different word combinations. Consequently, our search terms likely missed unique versions of the meme. Furthermore, the internet provides an incomplete archive given that content can be deleted. Finally, many memes are shared in meme ‘communities’, some of which are private. In the case of ‘nature is returning’ memes, Twitter was the dominant – but not only – platform. Our search yielded over 200 unique instances of the format before we considered saturation to be reached.

Through iterative discussion, we identified thematic categories through which variations on the meme appear through coding, discussion, and subsequent recoding. These categories are described below as the out-of-place in nature, nature out-of-place, examining the naturalization of the social order, and the naturalization of political transformation. While each of these categories uses the meme in a critical-ironic manner, a final category examines the use of absurdity. Of course, many memes might fit in multiple groups, and some do not easily fit into any of these categories. Still, we found that this fivefold account proves a durable and useful heuristic which might be expanded and extended to other humorous/bad environmentalisms. We include images of tweets below and link to others in the notes as a way of crediting authors for their work.

The out-of-place in nature

Much like the discarded scooter, the first category of ‘nature is healing’ memes plays on the incongruence of an artificial or otherwise ‘unnatural’ object or creature found in a conventionally ‘natural’ setting. ‘The bagels are returning to the forests. New Jersey is healing’. ⁴⁹ Cheese puffs appear in a forest, Japanese body pillows (dakimakura) in a river, dildos in rivers and a park. ‘New flowers are blooming, nature is diversifying, we are the virus’ we are told; pictured is a pile of cigarette packets. ⁵⁰ Some versions of the meme further played on our expectations of conventional scenes of nature. ‘[T]he crocs are finally returning to rivers’, but instead of the expected crocodiles, the photo depicts several pairs of Crocs brand shoes (Figure 2). Hence, one aspect of the humor plays on the widespread transgressive cultural understanding of waste as ‘matter out of place’. As Henderson argues, trash demonstrates ‘the fearsome, uncanny revelation that there is no matter perfectly in place and that all matter is partly unhomely (unheimlich), out of place’. ⁵¹ In these memes, such an unheimlich sense is arguably rendered more effective than the law-breaking masculinity of some forms of transgression by instead being depicted in a more playful form of deviance. As Cresswell’s classic work argues, such transgression might cause ‘a questioning of that which was previously considered “natural,” “assumed,” and “taken for granted”’. ⁵²

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Figure 2.

A tweet from April 26, 2020 reads ‘the crocs are finally returning to rivers, nature is healing. we are the virus’. An image depicts several pairs of Crocs-brand plastic footwear floating on a body of water. https://twitter.com/CapriCornyCait/status/1254587854577172481

More unique versions of this meme (as other categories do as well) evidence bad environmentalism by imitating the norms of naturalistic description. ‘Once hunted nearly to extinction by humans, the magnificent white toilet roll can now be seen again in the urban woodland’. ⁵³ This meme references the toilet paper shortage while conjuring an imagination of frolicking tubes of paper. Furthermore, the prevalence of the scatological further calls to mind the destabilization of a purported purity of nature. This is taken to absurd ends in an odd photograph of toilets populating trees. In this image, it is almost as if the toilets were about to scatter like wildlife. ⁵⁴ The out-of-place need not be trash; it can, of course, also include certain humans who have exceeded or displaced their social roles. ⁵⁵ One confounding (but no less silly) meme shows ‘the businessmen finally returning to the wild’ (Figure 3). The image is true to form: a series of suit-clad men with briefcases are shown in two blurry images wandering at night near the side of a highway. Another, more unheimlich example features a scene of doll heads growing out of cabbage, from the Cabbage Patch Kids brand (Figure 4). Here, the humor relies on taking the somewhat disturbing mythology of a child’s toy growing in a garden to be fact.

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Figure 3.

A tweet from April 27, 2020 reads ‘the businessmen are finally returning to the wild. the earth is healing. we are the virus’. In the style of nature photography, two nighttime images display groups of businessmen receeding into a field as illuminated by spotlights from a car. https://twitter.com/fuckmarrywill/status/1254805652528148482

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Figure 4.

A tweet from May 1, 2020 reads ‘The Earth is healing. Nature is returning’. An accompanying image displays Cabbage Patch Kids, a doll brand that purports the myth that children grow from cabbages. https://twitter.com/JeremyCShipp/status/1256161897549688832

There are thus two elements to the humor of transgression in the first category of memes. A meme depicting something ‘that clearly does not belong in nature’, in the scooter meme author’s words, destabilizes the sense that only certain beings belong in nature. The return of trash further implicitly critiques the everyday capitalist social order which reproduces disposability while proliferating profit-seeking objects like rentable scooters.

Nature out-of-place

An inversion of the out-of-place in Nature, a second series of memes poked fun at the idea of animals and other natural creatures returning to constructed or otherwise ‘human’ spaces like the city, or otherwise odd or unexpected locations. Horses are seen on balconies, cows returning to the ocean, cattle and deer in grocery stores, or an alligator in a backyard swimming pool. Reproducing the critique of waste above, many depicted urban “trash animals” such as raccoons, squirrels, and rats. Figure 5 depicts a seagull caught standing on a pair of sneakers on the beach; it appeared as if the gull were wearing the shoes. Plants were also seen out of place. Corn grew in the streets of Indianapolis, Indiana, while the iconic “Cloud Gate” bean sculpture in downtown Chicago was pictured as if it had spawned a variety of beans. A variation of the meme depicts a ‘fake’ or constructed animal in the city, such as the infamous giant rubber duck in the Thames.

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Figure 5.

A tweet from June 5, 2020 reads ‘Nature is returning’ accompanied by an image of a seagull standing atop a pair of athletic shoes on a beach. https://twitter.com/justbrad/status/1269019476571324424

Members are accepting of the existence of ‘urban wild things’, but rather than proposing we ought to take these urban ‘nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously’, ⁵⁶ they suggest that the purportedly out-of-place can still be funny. What is humorous is not the really the out-of-placeness of the urban landscape to animals; such animals whether photoshopped or real seem happy (if silly) foraging and frolicking in our worlds. Instead, it is the folly of cleanly sterilizing human worlds from the nonhuman that this category of meme critically poses. As Braun puts it, the recognition that our ‘culture-natures are characterized by the unexpected’ leads one to conclude that ‘Nature, it turns out, has a sense of humor’. ⁵⁷ Animal life in particular holds a power of awkwardness, a lack of self-awareness with regards to (human) norms or decorum. The seagull isn’t aware they look so ridiculous wearing oversized sneakers. Similarly, people waiting for their luggage at a Bahamas airport carousel cannot help but laugh at the crabs scurrying around in this unexpected venue. Who flew with crabs (Figure 6)? Where did they come from? When posed as ‘nature is returning’ (rather than simply healing), the crab commentary interprets the scene in a manner directly contrary to The Sun, who suggested in 2017 that passengers ‘scream[ed] in horror’ at the sight. ⁵⁸ But the video, after all, mostly features chuckles. In a reflection prior to their tweet, Penny critiques the Malthusian background of such claims. ‘In navigating the climate crisis, we have to avoid the same delusional diagnoses which purposefully mistake politics for biology and cruelty for kindness. We are not the virus’. ⁵⁹

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Figure 6.

A tweet from April 17, 2020 reads ‘Nature is returning’ while quoting another tweet that reads ‘WHO FLEW WITH CRABS?!’. An accompanying video shows dozens of crabs roaming around a luggage carousel in the Bahamas while onlookers laugh. The video can be viewed at https://twitter.com/eleanorkpenny/status/1251118163623915522

Finally, another common variation on the meme destabilized not just our expectations of what creatures ‘belong’ in the city, but also which return was being precipitated. The return included not just animals, but also dinosaurs, the Loch Ness monster, the Japanese kaiju Godzilla and King Ghidorah, ghosts, forest spirits, and Bigfoot (Figure 7). The return of the ‘wrong’ nature was thus not the harmonious romantic imaginary that conventional environmentalists or far-right naturalists imagine. Nor was it a return that must be understood by science or expertise. Instead, the return of nature is also the return of the supernatural, extraordinary, or extinct to secular worlds supposedly shorn of such wonderous creatures. ⁶⁰

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Figure 7.

A reddit post reads ‘OC the earth is healing’ (where OC stands for ‘original content’). An accompanying image reads ‘The dolphins have returned back to Italy[.] Meanwhile in Canada:’ followed by an animated GIF image of a person wearing flannel affectionately rubbing the face of the mythical creature Bigfoot. https://www.reddit.com/r/DankExchange/duplicates/gdpy62/oc_the_earth_is_healing/

The humor of a destabilized everyday social order

The third and fourth categories play on the gap in two different meanings of ‘nature’: nonhuman beings versus normal/proper life. Instead of placing the natural in the unnatural or vice versa, they instead parody the idea of ‘returning’ to a normal everyday life which the pandemic had disrupted. The signs of ‘nature healing’ include the return of alcohol, toilet paper, and ramen noodles to grocery store shelves (Figure 8). Normal life could still be glimpsed in all of its absurdity. The shirtless singing cowboy reappeared in New York City’s Times Square, while social media influencers could be seen dressed up as mermen on a beach. Right-wing US-American commentator Alex Jones could be found in public again, while after his bout with COVID Trump returned to yelling on Twitter. Other aspects of social life temporarily suspended during the pandemic were less welcome. These included parking tickets and, ironically, pollution. A sub-version of the meme became popular in mid-April when pollution was said to be clearing from the sky (Figure 9). In a masterful use of visual irony, the celestial orb lighting the night sky through the tree branches is not the moon, but a nearby Burger King sign.

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Figure 8.

A tweet from April 4, 2020 reads ‘The pasta is returning to its natural habitat. Nature is healing, we are the virus’. An accompanying image depicts boxed pasta on the shelves of a supermarket. https://twitter.com/linecook/status/1246624276767068162

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Figure 9.

A tweet from April 14, 2020 reads ‘Due to less air pollution the sky is so clear ! I can see the moon its [sic] so beautiful!’. The accompanying image depicts not the moon, but a distant illuminated Burger King sign. https://twitter.com/dumbricardo/status/1250130329941053442

Popular versions of this meme played up the incongruity of social order and descriptive naturalism. ‘The pasta’, for example, is described as ‘returning to its natural habitat’. As if caught from behind a naturalist’s observation curtain, a large postal service truck is parked next to a smaller one (Figure 10). It is described as a ‘rare image of a mother USPS truck teaching its offspring to deliver mail.’ Given this category examines naturalization of social orders, some of these memes could be read as socially conservative. The naturalization of the economy and its supply chains, long critiqued by geographers as an aspect of neoliberalism and capitalist economics more generally, was what was returning. However, by using exaggeration and naturalistic description, we could also read an implicitly denaturalizing of economic circulation. Furthermore, the prevalence of somewhat absurd aspects of everyday life ironically taken as ‘natural’ is shocking and effective. Playing on the conventional aesthetic language and images of environmentalism allows us to see from a different perspective. The easily-recognizable codes of descriptive naturalism and of social life are each destabilized in the process. We cannot seriously perform reverence for boxes of noodles. So, this category of ‘nature is healing’ meme is, I would argue, less conservative than one might expect. It is funny precisely through performing naturalistic misrecognition through exaggeration and parody. ⁶¹

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Figure 10.

A tweet from May 12, 2020 reads ‘rare image of a mother USPS truck teaching its offspring to deliver mail. nature is healing.’ The accompanying image depicts a large postal delivery truck parked alongside a smaller postal delivery truck. https://twitter.com/anarchybaking/status/1260264478698024960

The naturalization of a destabilized social order

Especially as the format of ‘nature is healing’ memes became a well-recognized and humorous code, it became a frame to interpret social and political events happening throughout the world. Rather than naturalizing the return to the pre-pandemic social order, the fourth category naturalizes explicitly political transformation of the social order. This included, for example, suggesting that the removal of racist statues to ‘the rivers, canals, and harbors of major cities around the world’ could be a sign of nature healing. ⁶² So too was the potential ousting of authoritarian political leaders posited as a restoration of political harmony. Donald Trump re-election signs were captured in a trash can after the November 2020 United States election. A (photoshopped) photo of the Philippine sky was captured where clouds formed the words ‘oust Duterte’. ⁶³ Others posited the opportunity to transform everyday life for the better, as in several memes that depicted outdoor cafes and bike riders whilst suggesting ‘cars were the virus’. Finally, changes wrought to the economy could also be seen as better. Gentrifying tech workers leaving San Francisco were a sign of a healing city, as were bees occupying a tech company’s empty office. The replacement of a grocery store salad bar with bottles of liquor was, ironically, healing as well.

Overall, the category of memes which sought to naturalize destabilization or transformation was less frequent and popular than others. This is consistent with the sense that transformative (left) politics involves a critique of naturalization, rather than a reproduction of it in other modes. It was more difficult for transparently political content to achieve the same levels of humor. One exception to this rule was the emergence of memes critical of police treatment of Black Lives Matter protestors in the United States. In some of these memes, the critique was rendered possible by the derogatory use of the term ‘pigs’ for police, popularized in the United States by the Black Panther Party in the 1960s (Figure 11). Other uses of the meme highlighted nonhuman animals like owls and horses purportedly participating in anti-police actions (Figure 12). The case of the wind blowing tear gas back on to Atlanta, Georgia police could be seen as one in which nature rejects this toxic chemical – the environmental effects of which remain somewhat unknown (Figure 13). In this version, the meme issues a corrective to the understanding that we are the virus by instead locating particular institutions as death-dealing. Or, ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘rioters’ returning to the streets of Paris, for example, could be humorously seen as nature healing itself, as could the case of ‘Lenin’ spelled in a decades-old tree stand in Siberia. ⁶⁴

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Figure 11.

A tweet from June 7, 2020 reads ‘Wild horses in the streets. Pigs playing in mud. Nature is healing’ accompanied by a ‘praise hands’ emoji. The image depicts in the foreground a security officer who has fallen off of their horse during the rain as protestors are gathered in the background. https://twitter.com/never_21_again/status/1269542279498412036

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Figure 12.

A tweet from June 18, 2020 reads ‘Nature is healing itself’ while quoting a second tweet with the headline ‘Louisiana police officer crashes after owl flies into patrol car, starts pecking at him’. The accompanying image depicts a large owl in the passenger seat of a police car, shot from the perspective of the driver’s seat. https://twitter.com/Profgampo/status/1273602892751044610

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Figure 13.

A tweet from May 31, 2020 reads ‘nature is healing’ whilst quoting a tweet that reads ‘We have gas in Atlanta. Most of it is blowing back onto police’. The accompanying video depicts a crowd of police officers who have deployed CS gas onto the streets, where a group of protestors were gathered. The wind appears to be blowing the gas dispersing from canisters back towards the gathered police https://twitter.com/revrrlewis/status/1267264400920100864

Absurdity

The categories of memes examined above play off the expectations of ‘nature’ and ‘healing’ in a usually recognizable manner not entirely untethered from reality. However, a final heterogeneous category we found worked instead through aesthetic absurdity. Rather than simply an out-of-place being or uncanny scene, absurdity is defined by pushing these modes toward detachment and irreverence. What is ‘natural’ is not simply out-of-place or a playful critique of documentary naturalism, but instead a positing of the exuberant, ridiculous, or weird as the actual baseline of socioecological life. The 1990s neon aesthetic of Lisa Frank art (Figure 14) or the growth of spaghetti on trees (Figure 15) posit a healing or return that is fabulous and fantastic. A series of ostensibly real photographs of a wolf walking around with a watermelon in its jaws is deeply unanticipated, as is an image of two snakes wrapped around each other while a dog stands by the body of half of a shark. Other scenes were simply odd, or perhaps rely on local context. Timberland boots appear in a New York City subway. Spaghetti was spotted in a recognizable pothole near my institution, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. These situations inspire a consideration and appreciation of the everyday ridiculousness – both planned and stochastic – which exists around us.

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Figure 14.

A tweet from April 12, 2020 reads ‘This photo of the Hudson River was taken yesterday. The earth is healing. We are the virus’. The image is of a group of extravagantly colored dolphins frolicking in a body of water underneath a rainbow, in the popular style of Lisa Frank. https://twitter.com/meesterleesir/status/1249373249265455104

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Figure 15.

A tweet from March 28, 2020 reads ‘Because everyone in Italy is quarantined, the natural wildlife has returned to the water and forests [heart emoji] We are the virus’. Two images of pizza follow, one on a body of water and one hanging from a tree. A reply to this tweet reads ‘Will the wild spaghetti trees start flourishing again?’ accompanied by the strange image of a person on a ladder seemingly harvesting spaghetti noodles from a tree, as aided by two other individuals. https://twitter.com/theRx_/status/1244007550317522944

Absurdism is a method for exposing the inconsistency of claims toward rationality in existing governing orders. Here, it is less directed at a (bio)political regime, though it still remains perpendicular to the governing logic of nature versus culture on which conventional environmentalism is premised. The method renders the calculative Malthusianism of ‘we are the virus’ to be absurd at the same time. However, Krupar ⁶⁵ also argues absurdism can be used as ‘a methodology of making things more ambiguous, strange, and curious’. Consider ‘spaghetti junction’ in Lousville, a knot of highway interchanges disguised as ‘rational’ urban planning. Add some meatballs to it, and the highway scene appears slightly different (Figure 16).

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Figure 16.

A tweet from May 7, 2020 reads ‘After months of quarantine in Louisville the meatballs have finally returned to the spaghetti junction. Nature is healing. We truly are the virus.’ The image depicts a complex highway interchange from above with several meatballs edited to appear nearby. https://twitter.com/catheronie/status/1258562412812341252

‘Nature is healing’ memes as ‘bad environmentalism’

There might be little in the above memes that would define them as ‘environmentalism’ according to its conventional scenes and affects. Yet the ‘nature is healing’ meme genre clearly accomplishes two tasks many environmentalists consider to be crucial: critiquing, at a cultural level, the supposed naturalness of everyday life, as well as the boundary between nature and humans. This final brief section analyzes what the meme format adds to our understanding of the humor of bad environmentalism.

First, many of the above memes share an embellished or exaggerated parody of the emotional weight of the original anti-humanist ‘eco-fascist’ tweets. Though there are neverending uses of ‘the virus’ as a metonym for what really plagues us (e.g., ‘capitalism is the virus’, ‘nationalism is the virus’, etc.), the speculative format suggesting ‘humans are the virus’ collapses the species into an undifferentiated biological mass taken to be essentially destructive of the planet’s ecology. Such a move, common in various environmentalisms and Anthropocene cultural texts, reproduces sad affects of guilt or rage, ultimately concluding that some portion of humanity ought to be exterminated. The ‘nature is healing’ meme format inverts such scripted expectations. Emojis such as hearts and ‘thankful hands’ along with phrases like ‘wow’ and ‘nature is amazing’ have a playful contempt against the weighty sentimentality and calls for sacrifice. The ‘nature’ that is returning is not the one of balance and harmony, but the weird, uncanny, irreverent, and silly. Humans are not the virus; instead, we share in common with the rest of the natural world a tendency for the unexpected. This can remain the case even in more critical modes such as parody, which suggest some of our absurdities – such as urban planning or police forces – ought to be reformed or transformed. Their popularity suggests these counterhegemonic understandings of nature are more prevalent than pessimistic/critical analyses of popular culture might have posited.

Second, the mode of irony at times relies on playfully using aesthetic naturalism. This can include documentary description embellished with wonder and delight or the use of terms like ‘rare’ and ‘natural habitat’ to describe the return of ‘wildlife’. Memes mobilize ridiculous language to suggest that, say, old cell phones are ‘returning to their old spawning grounds’, that sneakers are ‘roaming’ the streets of New York, or that excavators are ‘grazing’ the sands of Manila Bay. ⁶⁶ An underrated element of more highly-crafted memes include the mobilization of naturalistic photography techniques. One peers through the trees to see a roving band of (toy) dinosaurs crossing a park path, while close-ups of a burned cd for the R&B artist Usher or jelly beans remind one of the surprises of everyday walks outdoors. Though irony can be mean-spirited, for the most part these memes express joy and celebration of humanistic and natural oddities. Who can’t laugh at penguins considering famous paintings in an art museum, or birds skateboarding? There is a humility to such ‘low environmental affect’ that is more open-ended than the norms of conventional environmentalism. ⁶⁷

Third and finally, ‘nature is healing’ memes give us additional insight into the capacity for bad environmentalism to provide critical reflection on processes of naturalization. Contrary to the idea that popular culture only naturalizes the social order, this meme is premised on varying degrees of critique. Of course, this must have always be a possibility if cultural criticism is to have any purpose; as scholars following Hall frequently argue, culture cannot be conceived as only naturalization but containing its own internal rifts, contradictions, and struggles. ⁶⁸ This does not, of course, mean that such memes tend toward the progressive or that they have the power to shape politics. Instead, they can invite reflection on nature and naturalization in a manner that critical scholarship sometimes suggests is infrequent, esoteric, subcultural, academic, or simply not present in the popular public sphere. Memes do so not only with ambivalent political effects, but also through mobilizing ambivalent political emotions. This demonstrates that the complexity of meanings tied to ‘nature’ operate in tandem with the ambivalence of emotional production itself – offering a clarifying addition to feminist political ecologies of emotion and affect. The upshot of such a less-self-assured emotional register is a potentially more inviting, popular environmentalism capable of breaking out of the latter movement’s more calcified aesthetic conventions.

Conclusion

This article has argued that ‘nature is healing’ memes provide a window into critical analyses of nature circulating in participatory digital culture. In doing so, I argue they embody an apposite if as-yet-understudied example of ‘bad environmentalism’. The five different categories of ‘nature is healing’ memes deepen existing literatures by demonstrating the utility not only of parody of environmentalism, but also of the naturalization of social orders and the division between humans and natural non-human settings or creatures. The above argument – like its object – is tentative and humble rather than self-assured. ⁶⁹ There is no guarantee of social revolution promised by ‘nature is healing’ memes, no indication that we (in the human and other-than-human senses) will come out the other side of the pandemic better. This is the dark context to contemporary humor, which proliferates in a time of widespread socially-differentiated misery. The pro-exterminist views of the COVID pandemic are like much of contemporary right-wing discourse themselves premised on enjoying a certain transgression. ⁷⁰ Against such perverse logics, dry facts and dour emotions have had limited utility. These memes render one aspect of the Malthusian premise absurd by showing that humans and nonhumans already inhabit entangled spaces together. We’re capable of producing quite silly situations together, a cause for the celebration of relations with the more-than-human world rather than constitutive enstrangement or alienation from it. That memes are capable of critical commentary on such environmentally-unjust ‘solutions’ indicates a contribution to the project of ‘environmentalism’ even if their relationship with political struggle unclear.

Meme production and memetics are indicative of the role of humor and imagination in reshaping the interpretation of the environment, climate, science and other political-ecological themes, especially among young people. Numerous opportunities for geographers, media studies scholars, and political ecologists exist for furthering our understanding of how the environment is being reshaped by participatory digital culture, and widening the sites where we see this to be taking place. Further research could examine the circulation of new concepts of analysis like ‘eco-fascism’, or how meme communities such as ‘New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens’ (NUMTOTs), ‘Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends’, or ‘Murray Bookchin’s 24/7 Utopian Beats to Chill/ Relax/ Study To’ might reshape environmental political consciousness or action. The critical scholarship which has shaped our expectations can, at times, feel like an exhaustive search for ‘nature versus culture’ divides and ‘white environmentalisms’ when, in my estimation, the field of contemporary environmental ideologies and political culture is being shaped by queer youth of color, by boundary-crossing global culture, and by new forms of participatory digital activism. This means that the use of humor through the creation of memes could possibly also be a practical mode of pedagogy, not to replace more critical or political affective registers (such as solidarity or courage), but to consciously reflect on the stakes of the environmental-pedagogical-political project itself.

Humor has long been used to sustain movements seeking to transform debilitating social relations. To succeed as a political project, perhaps environmentalism ought to be no exception.