I’ve been reading a lot of Reckoning submissions, and inevitably, in enough volume, they do what they always do: make me want to write something about the collective attitude towards the inhuman I can’t help but perceive in them.

What is this great lament and fear that humans have lost touch with nature? I see it again and again.

A poem strives to devastate with the way children kill bugs as an indicator for the way “we” (humans? industrialized humans? colonizer humans?) kill everything. But the pain doesn’t land. All the children I know love bugs—some bugs, at least—and want to save them. The parents of the children I know, operating upon only the most rudimentary of understandings communicated to them by children’s tv and children’s books dumbed down and cuted up so as not to offend, cast about for milkweed seeds to plant in their neighborhoods to save the butterflies. Milkweed will only save monarchs, and the common milkweed everybody plants isn’t enough. It’s not even their preferred species; they like swamp milkweed and joe pye far better. But those are less weedy, harder to grow—and to understand the distinction between the three species, one has to pay a modicum of attention to plants. A lot of people don’t. But they’re trying. They care, they want to understand, they have been shown the writing on the wall and they believe it because of their children, who never learned to indiscriminately stomp on beautiful living things.

Stories and essays go on about the built environment and its inhospitability to nature causing us all to grow up unaccustomed to and therefore confused by and irrationally afraid of the natural world, leaving some of us (urban humans, those without disposable income) desperate and despairing for the kind of “pure” nature we can never have and can only even conceptualize with incredible inaccuracy, Everest, the Amazon, the Serengeti, the Great Barrier Reef, while simultaneously disdaining, ignoring, unseeing the elements of nature that are everywhere, inescapable: pigeons, sparrows, rats, cockroaches, ants, bedbugs, dandelions, purslane, a plane tree behind a fence, white mulberry, ragweed, mosquitoes, fruit flies, houseflies. The easy nature, the obvious nature, isn’t worth the name. We didn’t need to expend money and effort to see it, it’s not rare, so nobody told us to take it to heart, so we don’t.

But that’s wrong.

Anthropogenic nature is nature. Grocery store apples are apples, GMO corn is corn. The sky is nature. Weather and wind. And water: all water not sterilized and wrapped in plastic. Viruses are nature. There’s no getting away from it. Degraded nature, no matter how degraded, is still beautiful, amazing, it still has lifetimes on lifetimes of lessons to teach.

I know the role of privilege in this. I live a mile from the woods, and that makes me very lucky. I go to the woods all the time, I feel safe and at home there, I always have something to do in the woods, with the woods, besides just looking at it, whether it’s cleaning up trash, clearing invasives, foraging, or harvesting native seeds to distribute where there isn’t any woods in hopes of making more. I’ve lived within a mile of woods my whole life, except possibly the four years I was in college, when I could—and would, not infrequently—drive two hours to mountains. I kept choosing to live within a mile of woods. Even at my poorest, I managed to find a cheap, shitty, basement-level apartment across the street from the Park of Roses in Columbus. When I came to Michigan I ended up moving sight unseen into a place overlooking a parking lot and an auto body shop, and that was the least nature I have ever lived among, it was awful, it was torture, but I was more than desperate enough to find within ten minutes’ biking distance the tiny, three-acre rectangular woodlots and drainage easement marshes and linger in them, looking out at the alley behind the grocery store. But even that impulse, that desperation, comes to me from my upbringing. I was given the whereweithal to feel at home in the woods by my family. Among the components of that wherewithal are my whiteness, my able body, my financial solvency, my masculinity.

I can’t really feel what it’s like to grow up in urbanized India, like the author of one essay, yearning helplessly for the kind of woods I’ve nearly always been able to walk to. Perhaps if that author’s skills were better developed, I could? I go to New York and I have to search, desperately, for that one lone plane tree behind a fence at the corner of the next block. But I find it, and it comforts me.

I was given these skills. There were times they had to be forced on me, when my parents had to all but drag me away from books and video games, the built environment. But eventually those lessons took, and ever since, I’ve developed them. Now I find I am able to see nature in the dirty back corner of my basement, where the house spiders and centipedes hide waiting to eat the house flies and sugar ants and mosquitoes, where the microbes—some of which I have introduced—wait to provide me with delicious fermented sauerkraut and cider on demand. I can’t unsee it. I am a part of this web. I depend on them; they depend on me. I try to live with them, not against them. If, someday, some of my privilege is withdrawn such that I can no longer live within walking distance of the woods, I think maybe I could get a microscope or at least a magnifying glass and settle into the world of that tiny, everyday nature, take solace in it, learn more of its secrets, allow it to absorb and cradle me and remind me I’m part of something bigger the way I rely on the woods for now.

When I think about 2 degrees C, about mass extinction, mass habitat destruction, I can find comfort in the fact that there’s nothing we can collectively do to eradicate ants, cockroaches, rats, house sparrows, COVID and the common cold from our immediate proximity, let alone from this earth. But I had to be taught at least the rudiments of how to see the world this way. I had to practice. Sometimes against my will. Sometimes kid me just wanted to stay in the basement on a beautiful day and play video games. It was easy, comfortable, it was the path of least resistance. It was easy to believe I didn’t need anything from the woods then. Sometimes my kid wants the same thing. Sometimes I insist.

Reading these submissions from folks who didn’t have someone to do that for them—or who didn’t have access to woods to do it in—hurts.

Here I am, then. To whatever extent I came by them honestly, I am possessed of the skills. It’s twelve years since I moved to Michigan and had to learn to survive and find wilderness amid strip mall parking lots and the intermittent racket of machine saws. I want to say to everyone within the sound of my voice, come on, I will teach you this, I will show you nature. Care about nature, even the tiny everyday nature. It’s easy, look. Here’s how to go to the woods, here’s how to stay there and invest. I’m something of a hermit, it’s true. You’ve got to come to me. But I’m serious, come. Complaining about our disconnection with nature doesn’t help. I’ve tried. I’m sure you’ve noticed it, too. Do something about it instead. Please.

Come to the woods with me. Bring your kids.