What we call “natural” is often ideological, and the supposedly spontaneous joy we take in nature must be learned, as historian Claude Fischer notes. Such pleasure is a product of privilege, not our human birthright, and has become a status marker defined by the conspicuous rejection of convenience. 

Food has lately become an egregious example of the nostalgia for pure nature; as historian Rachel Lauden points out in an essay about what she calls culinary luddism: “For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty.”

Werner Herzog concurs with the ancestors: in nature he sees only “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” There is “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy” in nature, only “overwhelming indifference.”

(image: Tate.org)