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Nature has been showing up in places you never expected. Dinosaurs roaming Times Square? A bunch of Lime scooters abandoned in a lake? According to the internet, the appropriate response to these situations is “Nature is healing.”

The memes started in earnestness. As the coronavirus pandemic tightened its grip on our lives earlier this year, people were suddenly stuck in their homes. With fewer cars on the move, streets were eerily quiet, and city dwellers started hearing birdsong. This lockdown period, now dubbed the “Anthropause,” temporarily improved air pollution around the world. Seismologists said that the absence of traffic quieted the Earth’s upper crust. Even carbon dioxide emissions took an unexpected dip. People latched onto reports of wild boars taking to the medians of Barcelona, goats commandeering the streets of a Welsh town, and a thousand monkeys brawling in a formerly touristy city in Thailand.

“It’s one of the COVID memes for sure,” said Gretchen McCulloch, an internet linguist and the author of the bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. “I think it pretty quickly became this sort of parody version of itself.”

It started with a tweet by Jalandhar photographer Anshul Chopra showing of the Dhauladhar mountain range rising majestically in the distance. Old-timers were amazed. The Dhauladhar are located more than 200 km away from Jalandhar and had become visible because the 21-day lockdown to stem the spread of Covid-19 has lowered atmospheric pollution levels. The photograph made its way around social media with messages noting that the nationwide lockdown wasn’t entirely without benefit.
A curious genre of telling the story of the pandemic is emerging – one that is centred upon accounts of the resurgence and healing of nature. I am using nature here broadly to include the “return” of nonhuman animals and birds as well as the cleansing of air and the reduction of pollution. There has been an explosion of writing on the return of animals to spaces otherwise colonised or polluted by humans. These range from fishes in the canals of Venice to dolphins on the shores of Mumbai to inebriated elephants in China to goats in Welsh towns. There is also a profusion of writing on the bluer skies, cleaner air, and the sighting of the Himalaya in towns far away.

What, one might ask, might be the problem with such a form of telling the story of the pandemic? Isn’t the “healing of nature” a fact occasioned by lockdowns across the world whereby regular human activity has come to a screeching halt? Aren’t the animals in the videos that we are all watching on social media or reading about in cooing news items, “emissaries of hope and possibility, letting us dare to dream of a better world when this nightmarish darkness is gone”? Isn’t it also important to capture what an exemplar of this pandemic-genre-in-the-making in the New Yorker described as “how the world looks from inside the silver lining”?

It is noteworthy that much of this form of writing on the pandemic is well-intentioned and, in fact, reaches for a greater earthly consciousness. Yet, there are serious questions of facticity of these accounts as well as their temporality. These ways of narrating the pandemic are also riding on a breath-taking privilege that they mistakenly think by merely acknowledging (“I know I am lucky *but*…”) they are overcoming.

On their own these criticisms – of falling prey to fake/misleading news or even being the musings of the 1% – don’t really warrant a serious engagement. What does occasion a deeper thinking is that such narratives mimic traditional modalities of describing the world and are, thence, inimical to the development of a radical climate politics.

Here’s an unexpected side effect of the pandemic – the water’s flowing through the canals of Venice is clear for the first time in forever. The fish are visible, the swans returned.

Aaryan Aneesh

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