From July to August 2019, I took part in a month-long walk along the Welsh Coast with a group of eleven others. The walk was organised by a small organisation called Land in Curiosity, whose aim is to explore ways of being in the world that enable nature connection, community and self-directed learning. Each person on the walk had his/her own learning project.

Two interrelated passions of mine are nature connection and environmental activism. We have entered an age known as the Anthropocene: an age in which the human species has become a geological force, incalculably transforming the earth’s systems on every level – altering the hydrosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. We have a dozen years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which there will be droughts, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. It could be argued that society has not acted on the scale it needs to because it has lost its connection to nature. But what does reconnecting with nature look like?

Over the last six years, I have lived in eco-communities, co-founded a social enterprise aimed at reducing waste and been on Deep Ecology retreats in the Spanish Pyrenees. Initially, I was glad to find an alternative way of living to that of a society which pursues infinite economic growth on a finite planet. I felt liberated from the haze of hyper-mental abstraction and analysis into a sense of embodiment, rootedness and connection to the earth. People around me were more connected to their intuition and emotions. Through meditation, I was able to touch into the raw presence of sensory experience, rather than getting caught up in conceptual proliferation.

In the eco-communities I lived in, I grew organic vegetables and worked in ornamental gardens. Trees lined fields as a wind-break; sunlight, rain and soil allowed vegetables to grow of themselves. There was a magical quality about witnessing this process. I read Martin Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology, which posits that there is a distinct difference between poeisis, which is form of bringing-forth that a craftsperson or poet practices, and modern technology, which is a form of challenging-forth, relating to the totality of things in the world as a ‘standing reserve’ to humanity: things simply lie there, stationary and indifferent, waiting to be taken up and ‘made useful’ for technological activity.

In his essay Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger explores a similar theme of what it means to dwell. While animals dwell in burrows, holes and dams, humans dwell in houses, flats, condos and the like. Human beings build homes because they are the kinds of creatures who dwell. To dwell in a home is not merely to reside. It is to belong to a place. In an age of technocratic-capitalist rootlessness and obsession with sheer will, I was initially inspired by Heidegger’s vision. I wanted to dwell – not in a flat in central London – but in a more ideal dwelling: earthy, untouched nature.

Gradually, however, I came to feel that this attitude strengthened the opposition between society and nature, rather than softening it. If eco-communities were embedded in nature, were cities, city dwellers and industrial society not in nature? Only wholefoods were eaten, only natural materials were used for building, while modern technology was boycotted. Fresh water from a stream was idealized, even though recycled wastewater from a tap is often cleaner. Seemingly natural events like hot summers were tied up with climate change, a phenomenon driven by human culture. At the same time, if belonging is only for those native to place, as Heidegger envisioned it, what happens to the foreigner or stranger? Given these loops, how to live in an ecologically responsible way was the question I wanted to explore during the walk.

Our first camp was near a train station called Dovey Junction, in the middle of the Welsh countryside – just south of Snowdonia National Park – and the only station on my journey not attached to any town. One minute I was looking at the expanse of darkening landscape through a train window, the next minute I was on the platform looking at the same landscape directly – or was I? What is a direct perception? A lot of environmental prose is written in the “authentic” style, in which the author is seemingly invisible, recounting an unmediated experience of nature. But perhaps being truly ecological means acknowledging one’s own weird involvement in whatever is happening. As I made my way to camp, the empty platform behind me faded into the rural surroundings, like a remnant of “the Zone” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Woken up the following morning by birdcall, I introduced myself to those in the group. We divided up equipment: pots and pans, gas stoves, first aid kits, spare sleeping bags, tents, tarps, swiss army knives, maps, books etc. Another name for equipment is technology, and we needed a large amount of it. Even if I discarded my tent, slept only in a bivvy bag and foraged my food during the walk, I would still be employing technology of some kind. But I consoled myself with the fact that we were only using small, appropriate technologies of the kind E.F. Schumacher would approve of.

During the first few days, we wound our way around small paths in the low-lying hills of the Welsh countryside. Hills were interspersed with farmers’ fields filled with crops. The agricultural areas were not as wild as the exposed hilltops – but no less natural. Man-made fences, ploughed furrows and wheat crops are made of the same planetary elements as the vernal grass swaying on hilltops. A question about destructive British farming practices like GMOs and monocropping arose in my mind, but I noticed how quickly I jumped in my own mind from this question to thinking that agriculture must somehow therefore be unnatural. These practices might be unethical, but they were not unnatural.

Some of the conversations at this time revolved around philosophical topics: whether our lives were projects or journeys, the need for more restorative justice in the legal system – light topics like that. Here we were, embedded in nature, having the kind of conversations which only an education allowed us to have. Were we abstracting ourselves out of nature at this point, denying our physical being? Or is the realm of abstract ideas no less natural than the soil in the earth?

A few days in, we made our camp in the middle of a pine forest. Due to storms the previous week, some trees had collapsed. Some group members wanted to keep walking and find a different camping spot, while others thought that the forest would provide shelter from the storm. Different environments were preferable to different subjectivities. Eventually, we settled on the forest. After an uncomfortable, blustery night, I opened my tent flap in the morning to see sunlight pouring through the trees, which painted a new scene altogether. Temporal shifts and weather changes were affecting my experience of nature. The more I tried to define fixed qualities of nature, the more elusive they were.

For Aristotle, the primary principle of nature – “physis” – is change, and what changes can never be perfect: If a perfect form were to change, it would necessarily become imperfect. In her 2014 book The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert offers an account of just how changeable and anarchic nature, when viewed in terms of planetary history, really is. Some 200 million years ago, she writes, during the extinction at the end of the Permian period, which killed off perhaps as much as 70 percent of vertebrate species, a mysterious “massive release of carbon” turned the oceans purple and the sky green.

Environmental philosophies such as Deep Ecology present nature as a harmonious system, which if left alone by human beings will restore its balance and equilibrium. In this version, which dates back to the late 18th century, environmentalism was the good twin to evil industrialization. While industry was mechanical, soulless, destructive and superficial, nature was organic, authentic, harmonious and pure. But the mutable qualities of the forest were already making me doubt Mother Nature’s stable equipoise. Even if it is possible for human beings to reduce their activity on earth, what if nature is already in itself disturbed, out of joint, in a state of disequilibrium?

Setting off the next day through the forest, I noticed that the man-made path was a new corridor in the ecosystem, creating light changes and improving biodiversity. So an “unnatural” intervention was aiding “nature”. Furthermore, the “unnatural” path appeared “natural”, so neatly embedded in the forest was it. Vegetation was growing over the path and rainfall would gradually erode it. The “natural” appearance of the path was clearly improved by nature’s inherent imbalance.

We each walked at our own pace, allowing time to flow slowly like oil from horizon to horizon. Gradually, long grass turned into gravel tracks and the number of bridges over the river increased. Soon we entered the town of Machynlleth, passing cafes, shops, the town hall and a church. All these places were institutions, brought into existence by man’s second nature: reason. What kept them standing were bricks, stones, conventions and beliefs. Like the human story itself, we had begun the day in the organic world and ended up in the social world.

Carrying on by the river, we found what we thought was an ideal camping spot. Yet only half an hour later, a farmer was driving his quad bike towards us, informing us that we were trespassing on his land. There were many moments like this one during the walk, where we accidentally found ourselves on private land. The history of land ownership in the UK is a staggering example of how the evolution of our second nature (reason) has been anything but rational. Only 8% of it is public land, a fact which has its origins with Enclosure in the 13th century, when smallholdings were gathered into large farms owned by a single landowner. More disturbingly still, one sixth of country manor houses (in England) were bought with profits from sugar plantations and the slave trade. What we think of as nature is a patch on the canvas of history, stained by capitalism, colonialism, and racism.

The following day, a spontaneous decision was made to hitchhike the next stage of our journey to Aberdovey beach. The hitchhiking was accomplished successfully. Our driver was intrigued by our heavy kits and adventurous look. While I think that there is a seed of genuine desire in people (in me anyway) for wilderness, there is a question about the extent to which this impulse is a product of civilization itself. Why are images of the wild west, space exploration and Edenic landscapes so appealing to people? Is there a more enticing fantasy for civilization than its own negation?

After several days of walking through domesticated countryside and a colourful patchwork of fields, the vastness of the seascape triggered a different sensation. From Aberdovey we walked for an hour along the beach. It was a pleasant hour. The soft sand and the sound of the surf created a sense of lightness I had not experienced for a long time. As the beach unfurled, the outer expansiveness of the physical world brought about an inner expansiveness. I remember feeling a huge release of tension in my body.

So followed three days of rest, lying on the beach and swimming in the sea. We set up our tarps in the dunes, tying them to marram grass. During night swims, moonlight glanced off the water and shadowy forms of the headland could be made out in the distance. The play of light and shadow gave the scene an ethereal quality: no longer natural but supernatural or infranatural. The flattened-out space resulted in the sky feeling much larger and closer to us. In the minutes before sleep as we lay in our bivvy bags at night, it was as though we could touch the stars.

On the beach, the nonhuman world sprawled out before me in a spiralling mesh – beautiful, disturbing, and ugly at different points. One day I found myself swimming beside a jellyfish, a cold-blooded marine animal with umbrella-shaped bells which was able to glow in a bioluminescent fashion, with whom I shared 60% DNA. I saw a flock of starlings flying together in elegant patterns, but I also saw a seagull munching on the entrails of a crab as well as a dead seagull with its guts spilled out. I pulled up a stone near camp and saw a thousand ants scuttling around in a frenzy.

Each mini ecosystem was linked to the next. The seagull munched on the crab near a rockpool; not far from the rockpool were the sand dunes, where ants scuttled beneath a stone; in the sea beyond the dunes, the jellyfish floated; flying above the sea were the starlings. Not far from the beach was Aberdovey, where children ate ice-cream and adults drank lager in the sun. One area of the street was littered with rubbish and fumes exuded from traffic. A critical thought pattern arose in me: “human beings are a malign force on the planet, polluting wherever they go with casual disregard.” From a different perspective, however, these people are life-forms which are not separate from the animal world. Our lungs evolved from the swim bladders of fish. So why is it that despite occupying one more lifeworld interconnected to others, I was holding human beings to a different standard?

There is a link between the different standards I was holding human beings to and the seeming divide between nature and culture: our reason, which is reflexive, separates us from nature – despite evolving from it. We can make decisions which counteract our instincts and emotions. We are inside and outside of experience at the same time. If reason is a key factor driving human actions, and human beings are causing the climate crisis, understanding reason and how it relates to physical being are key. If my physical being is natural, does that make my reason unnatural? Do physical activities disengage me from thinking? Is thinking disembodied?

In one sense, I cannot tell where my physical being ends and my reason starts, but in another sense, they exist in an asymmetrical relationship. My body pulls me down and into experience, whereas reason pulls me up and out of it. Emotions can be powerful and beautiful yet misleading, while reason can be clarifying yet cold. My thoughts are like leaves growing on the outer branches of the tree of my being – delicate, peripheral expressions of something more fundamental. Thought corresponds with and distils elements of reality, albeit not in a 1:1 way.

Reason has allowed us to do astounding things. We have launched spacecraft, split the atom, cracked the genetic code: and these are only our most recent feats after previous millennia spent discovering the wheel, brewing, glassmaking, agriculture, using fire, domesticating animals, developing the earliest techniques of surgery. But reason has also had toxic results. We used it to create nuclear bombs and cigarettes and Vicodin. There is something cold and inhuman about reason, like an alien being which always-already exists within people, transcending their egos.

That reason always-already exists in people a priori to experience is what Immanuel Kant wrote about in Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we can grasp and measure arrives to us always-already shaped by criteria that are not internal to it. The dimensions of space and time are nowhere to be found in the world as it is in itself but are rather structures in our mind which exist a priori, along with certain truths about geometry. Insights with our reason occur at a deeper mental level than empirical understanding. By failing to count to infinity empirically, for instance, we are able to conceive of infinity on a different level. According to Kant, reason is not mere logic and calculation but the conditions that make logic and calculation possible.

Reason operates at a dazzling, lofty, interplanetary level. For the Romantic Poets, reason was not the opposite of the imagination – the imagination was reason in its experiential form. Significantly, reason is not outside of reality but an aspect of it. So, any environmentalisms which privilege intuition over thinking, body over mind and embeddedness over abstraction are making a mistake. I want to break down these binaries. On the beach, while interacting with nonhumans and natural elements through direct sensory experience, I was filtering these experiences through my consciousness, distilling my observations, and writing them down. At night, I imagined looking back from distant stars at the pale blue dot and felt a dizzying emotion in my body.

One descendent of reason is science, which has done more to dethrone an anthropocentric, imperialistic attitude than any retreat into a forest. Copernicus posited that the earth revolved around the sun, meaning that human beings were not at the centre of the universe. In the 18th century, Mary Anning discovered the first dinosaur fossils, and the geologist Charles Lydell began to establish just how ancient Earth is. An awareness of deep time opened to a civilisation which had believed that the world was only a few hundred thousand years old. Darwin’s proposition that all species of life descended over time from common ancestors meant that human beings were much closer to animals than was previously thought. Discoveries like these removed us from our snug lifeworld, while paradoxically bringing us down to earth.

Leaving camp, we walked north up the beach towards a small, deprived town called Tywyn. Boxy, run-down houses lined the streets, and the skyline of houses resembled a row of sails. Two men stumbled out of the pub, cursing in Welsh. Rows and rows of static caravans lined the fields – not many of which appeared to be inhabited by holidaymakers – did not enhance any impression of a flourishing town. Living here entailed a rough existence. Issues about social justice arose in my mind, which are not exclusive from issues of ecological justice. I will come back to how they relate later in the piece.

We skirted inland from Tywyn, passing a crumbling farm building covered in a carpet of moss and seedling flowers. Like abandoned, post-industrial sites around the world, these ruins were becoming a basis for the growth of new organisms. As moss slid and snaked into every nook, I thought of coffee dregs turning to mould, of mycelium breaking down dead organisms in the soil, of bacteria decomposing organic matter in my stomach. Decay is as natural as growth, and for a moment I had a glimpse of a regenerative landscape, where new life is made possible by the absorption of agricultural remnants into the earth.

Near Tonfanau, a fellow walker guided the rest of the group in identifying and learning about plants on the roadside. These included ragworts, hog weed, rose hips, cow parsley and oxy daisy. Some of them were edible, some were not. Bees gathered nectar from sunflowers, while a birch tree overhanging the road released pollen into the breeze. It was a scene of symbiotic interconnection. The polyculture shared nutrients from the soil effectively, while trees and sunflowers cooperated with breeze and sunlight.

Yet the flip side of symbiosis is unsettling. It was unclear here which plants were hosts and which were being hosted, whether competition or cooperation was taking place. The natural processes were neither efficient nor pragmatic. Of the dense clouds of pollen that floated down from the tree, only a few granules would breeze upon ovules. If a bee stung me, it would have died. Nature bungles as much as it innovates.

Stranger still, scientists can now generate algorithms that enable them to model plant growth. These algorithms are iterated functions, often producing fractal shapes. Rather curiously then, if you can write an algorithm that produces a sunflower by plotting a set of equations, surely the thing itself is a map of its genome, a three-dimensional expression of the algorithm’s unfolding? Knowing the algorithmic character of sunflowers gave nature an unnatural quality. At the same time, my senses were seduced by the fragrance and visual feast on display. These two ways of relating to nature worked together.

After Tonfanau, seven group members departed, leaving five of us to reach what was for me one of the most important locations on the walk: Fairbourne. This town will be the first in the UK to be flooded when sea levels rise. The government has defunded sea defences, instead planning to decommission the town and remove its 850 residents. Yet as we walked through the town, the tides rolled rhythmically against the shore, the chippy owner smiled, and people meandered past a toy railway. Children played innocently in a small park – the hot summer sun shining down on them took on a disturbing quality. In 26 years, this town would be deserted; in 100 years it may be under water. The threat of climate change was present in its absence. The mix of seeming normalcy and an awareness of a menacing future created an uncanny atmosphere.

At high tide, you could see how vulnerable the town was. In some places the houses were almost lower than the level of the sea. In the only interaction I had with a local, he was desperate not to leave his home of twenty years, and there was a mixture of sadness and confusion on his face. Are these feelings not what we are all experiencing at this time, albeit at a lower intensity? Like the residents of Fairbourne, I delude myself that my hometown is safe and secure, somewhere I can embed myself, forgetting that it is exposed to something massively distributed in space and time: the biosphere. It is vital that we accustom ourselves to the magnitude of this dimension. It allows us to overcome habitual perspectives and realize two things: firstly, that each of us are not centre points of the world, and secondly, that we are inseparable from the world.

The issues of social and ecological justice intersected again in Fairbourne. Although it had a little railway, shops and a post office, the same affluence and tourist appeal was not on display here as in neighbouring Barmouth. The residents of Fairbourne are not expected to receive any compensation for the loss of their homes, and resettlement plans are unclear. They may be the first British climate refugees. 580,000 houses are at risk of flooding along the English coast, and the Environmental Agency has said that Fairbourne will not be the first coastal town to be decommissioned. But it is inevitable that the protection of economically important towns on the coast will be prioritised. Just as the global south suffers more from the impact of climate change than the global north, so the poor in the UK will suffer more than the rich.

The main way to resist social and ecological injustice is through progressive political policies. But we can also resist it by changing how we relate to nature. If we relate to nature as a distinct, reified thing “over yonder” – beneath our clothes, in our DNA, over in the mountains, in our emotions (but not in our reason) – we not only distance ourselves from it psychologically but we implicitly label anything which is not in that framing as unnatural. As a result, all sorts of binaries spring up, including rural vs urban, traditional vs technological and natural vs artificial. A reification of nature is built into the philosophy of Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project, a network promoting “uncivilized writing” (a contradiction in terms?), which is permeated by phrases like “civilisations are the enemies of real places”. What are “real places”? The place just over the hill, along the lane, beyond the forest edge – certainly not here, certainly not now, certainly not anywhere with all these ghastly people in it.

A rigid binary between natural and artificial, seemingly innocent, opens the door to fascistic lines of thought, making the prospect of social and ecological justice less likely, not more. Nowhere more significantly and terrifyingly did this ideology develop than in Nazi Germany, where the notion of an organic state threatened by viral entities such as the Jewish people and foreign powers took hold. Nature, with all its violence and beauty, was the primary model for conceiving German history and identity in the Third Reich. Likewise, in English nature writing at a similar time, fascist ideas were being expressed. Henry Williamson’s writing called for the health and purity of the English soil to be protected from subhuman immigrants in the city. Williamson was a ruralist, a naturalist, naive and solitary, but a Nazi too; a fervent admirer of “the great man across the Rhine”.

In the nature writing tradition, there is a paucity of working-class or ethnic minority voices within it. It does not consider that perhaps people do not choose to live in polluted urban environments and be disengaged from nature. It is not too far from here to thinking ill of working-class or immigrant communities for not understanding or appreciating the natural world “properly”. We longingly talk about “our” land as a vanished Arcadia, we make loose play with ideas such as “aboriginal” and “indigenous”, and if we are not careful, we swallow the nativist myth entirely.

During our stay in Barmouth, I wandered off into the mountains on a two-day hike. I walked swiftly, scrambled down rock faces, hopped over bramble bushes, used my arms for balance. My physical body was at ease in the physical world. At the same time, my movements were automatic, as if programmed. It was only my conscious awareness which was truly expansive and free – the ground of all choice and volition.

At eight, the sun began to set. I sat down on the grass and looked out beyond the mountains to the sea. I was as far away from the social sphere as I had been in the preceding three weeks. Or was I? I had the sense of being watched, of being accompanied. What was I seeing? What was seeing me? Nothing less than the empty dimension of open subjectivity itself. It was not like seeing myself in a mirror. I was seeing myself as the void that looks back at me.

Descending towards a lake which I had decided to camp besides, I became disoriented when the path disappeared into the heather. I continually lost balance on steep slopes of scree. Swarms of midges whirred around me. A buzzard soared overhead: it was sleek and elegant, yet possessed an intimidating strength. Its beady, telescopic eyes sought out prey with “bullet and automatic purpose” (cf Ted Hughes) and it occurred to me that, like my own body, its predatory nature was a kind of automation. Having forgotten my tent, a night in my bivvy bag awaited. Creatures rustled in the undergrowth behind me; the atmosphere was charged with a creepy, wired energy.

Rain began to fall. The rainfall turned into a storm. Wind battered against my bivvy bag. A small hole in the top of my bivvy allowed rain to come in: soon I was lying in a puddle of water. I poked my head out of my bivvy bag. Tempestuous conditions were shaking earth and sky. Whether a war or a dance was taking place was hard to tell. At 3am, I admitted defeat, and began clambering down the mountain, below spinning clouds and flashes of lightning.

Like my experience on the beach, a lot of things happened at once. Perpendiculars, straight lines and fixed objects became loops, rises and flowing bends. Once more, the framework of nature as involving coherent forms, holistic harmony and organic beauty was shattered. Symbiosis and interconnection do not entail holism. Maybe there is no organic whole, just component parts coexisting with each other, proliferating in fractal patterns like a Mandelbrot set.

After leaving Barmouth, we walked through an area parallel to the coast which was semi-wilderness territory. With its mogul sand hills, browning vegetation and sun-bleached trees, the landscape was akin to the Australian outback. I felt deep gratitude for the natural world here, as well as for the group of people I was walking with, all of whom valued the spirit of community and collaboration. We ate, meditated, and sang songs together. While I have been defending the human aptitude for abstraction and reason in this piece, I would argue that this capacity is commensurate with embodied communal existence. In fact, these capacities need each other.

From the top of a sand dune near the end of the day, we looked down on a private airfield. It was as though a giant slab of concrete had been planted amidst the rolling sand dunes and ash trees. A wire fence lined its perimeter. I could make out a small aeroplane beneath a hangar in the distance. While I felt grief that a rather ugly human construction overlaid the pristine dunes, it was important not to turn my gaze away or label it as unnatural. Man-made creations can be beneficial to the environment. Wind farms, for instance, may not look as “natural” as green fields with oil pipes running beneath them, but they are far more sustainable.

Human-built systems are not embedded in natural systems; human-built systems are natural systems. We are ultimately not divisible from nature, just an expression of natural possibilities and growth. We are nature naturing, even if our expression of this phenomenon at present is maladaptive and destructive. By understanding this reality, we can let go of the dream of a harmonious-primordial-natural past, which some environmentalists still cling to. There never was a golden past. Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, shows that early human beings decimated megafauna, Polynesian people deforested Easter Island and Native Americans, for all their reverence of nature, played their part in wiping out the buffalo. We are technological beings. The only choice we have is about which values we choose to guide our technological development.

A number of dizzying realizations occurred. The idea of a harmonious natural background is a symptom of our separation from it – we are not inside a universe; we are the universe. A city, with its grit and grime and people trying to find a way to live together, is as beautiful an unfolding of nature as anything else. Reason and intuition work together (in what Francisco J Varela calls embodied cognition) – taken too far, reason has a flattening effect, but it also gives us wider perspectives which erode our sense of centrality. Science takes us beyond the human perspective.

According to the ecological theorist Donna Haraway, these paradigm shifts will bring opportunities as well as hazards. In her 1985 seminal feminist text, Cyborg Manifesto, she uses the figure of a cyborg, which denotes a human-machine hybrid, to break down a triad of binaries – human and nonhuman, organism and machine, physical and nonphysical. With its kinship to other entities, the cyborg has the Copernican potential to remove humans from the nucleus of the ecosystem. In fact, there would be no nucleus. Within a cyborg ontology, “man” as historically perceived as the centre of the universe, is dethroned and displaced, instead coming to exist in networks of tight couplings with other creatures, both organic and man-made. Haraway writes:

“Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”

In a time when we are facing unprecedented social, economic and technological changes as well as the possibility of ecological collapse, we must start from where we are and seize the tools available in order to forge new pathways and kinships. We must let go of the myth of the garden of Eden – of a pure past, a state of paradise, where God, human and nature were unified, before a tragic break occurred. This means letting go of the myth of “The One”, not only the one unified, Edenic way of life, but also the messianic one – the idea that there is one technology, one person, one philosophy that will come and save us from our brokenness. It also means letting go of the sense of a direction, of a teleology, a higher purpose (religious or secular) that we are working towards.

If there is no pure state, no original wholeness, how can we think about the connections and networks and relationships that we build? We must think about them as always partial and always multiple. We will have many loyalties in many camps, not only with individuals but with cultures, histories and nonhumans. And if there is no natural order to return to, or the inverse, no inevitable apocalypse, how could we act? We must bring in reason and intentional involvement. We could start by committing to transitioning to a regenerative, inclusive, less consumerist society which accounts for its resource extraction, wastes and emissions. We could consider localised economies and smaller scale production. We could talk about promoting ecosystems instead of preserving them, adaptability instead of sustainability.

Before settling into my bivvy bag that night, I walked a little way up the nearest sand dune and looked out at the airfield, where flood lights shone out. In the other direction, the ocean stretched into the distance. Like the groundlessness of our time, sand shifted beneath me. Yet the climate change threat has only revealed a perennial truth: nature never was a stable background, and our situation has always been groundless – pretending that it was not for thousands of years is why we are in trouble now. I began the walk with Land in Curiosity wondering if I could retreat from society into nature, only to conclude that no such retreat is possible, that climate change was always a social and not a “natural” issue. The glare of the flood lights gave the mist around me an effervescent, unnatural glow. It swirled and spiralled, open, full of uncertainty and possibility.