What We Call Nature Is Just a Word for Things We Havent Killed Yet

Prologue: The Last Tree on Earth There is a tree—if you can still call it that—growing out of a wind-blasted ridge in western Ladakh. It is neither tall nor noble. It doesn’t rise toward the sky like some symbol of endurance. Instead, it hunches low against the cold. Its bark is bleached, its leaves few. A thorn, maybe. A remnant. A survivor of something vast and unseen. I stood before it, not long ago, on a morning when the air was brittle enough to break. The mountains crouched like sleeping animals. No birds. No sound. Nothing but that tree and the wind that threatened to tear it free. And I wondered: Is this still nature? What we call “nature” might simply be a name we give to what we haven’t consumed yet. Not sacred. Not separate. Just unclaimed. For centuries, we’ve described nature as a kind of untouched world, set apart from human life — a garden, a wilderness, a virgin landscape. A backdrop to our dramas. But this fantasy is wearing thin. With the glaciers retreating, oceans rising, forests slashed and burned, how much of this planet remains truly outside our grasp? And when everything has been altered — the air, the rivers, the soil — what exactly are we still protecting? A word? A feeling? A memory? In this column, I want to trace the cracks in the idea of “nature.” To follow the language we use to keep it at a distance. To ask how long we can keep pretending it’s somewhere “out there,” untouched and pristine, when it’s already under our nails, and buried beneath our highways. The tree in Ladakh, twisted and alone, is not a symbol of purity. It’s a marker of absence. A reminder of what was here before us. And what might remain when we’re gone. And it invites a terrifying but necessary thought: that “nature” is not a place, but a time. A before. A vanishing echo. This isn’t a travel essay. There will be no recommendations for eco-resorts or best times to visit. What follows is something colder, more honest. A reckoning with the idea that nature — as we think we know it — may already be dead. And that the only thing left to protect is the truth. What We Think ‘Nature’ Means When we say “nature,” we usually picture something lush. A forest thick with ferns and filtered sunlight. A mountain untouched by footprints. A turquoise lake reflecting the sky, as if the two were having a quiet conversation. It’s always somewhere far, somewhere still, somewhere unspoiled. But that vision isn’t real. It never was. What we think of as “nature” is a myth — a curated illusion rooted in centuries of separation. It’s the product of Enlightenment dualism, of colonial maps, of national parks drawn with erasers instead of pencils. It’s a word we use not to describe the world, but to divide it. At its heart, the word “nature” implies an outside. Something beyond cities, beyond systems, beyond the reach of human complexity. But where exactly is that line? Is a forest still natural if it’s been selectively logged? Is a river still wild if it’s been dammed upstream? What about the Arctic, now traced with microplastics? Or the coral reefs, bleached into ghost towns by the warming we caused? Our romanticized view of the natural world — the “pristine wilderness” myth — conveniently erases both our impact and our presence. It forgets that people lived in many of the places we now designate as untouched. It ignores Indigenous stewardship, pastoral migration, ancient trails. It paints the land as empty so it can be claimed, sold, or saved — depending on the marketing strategy. This illusion has consequences. When we think of nature as something pure and separate, we end up creating policies that aim to preserve aesthetics rather than systems. We designate zones, fence off beauty, and call that conservation. All while the air warms, the soils degrade, and life becomes harder to sustain — even within the protected boundaries we celebrate. Nature, in this view, becomes a stage. A prop. A screensaver on the back of a burning computer. And as long as we keep pretending it’s “over there,” we’ll never see the destruction happening “right here.” The truth is: we live inside what we’re destroying. The division between human and natural is a fiction — one that’s grown too fragile to hold. And maybe it’s time we stopped trying to protect nature as a thing, and started understanding it as a relationship — damaged, complicated, ongoing. A Language of Avoidance Words are slippery things. They can comfort or confuse, reveal or conceal. And when it comes to the word “nature,” we’ve chosen concealment. We use the word not to see the world more clearly, but to blur it — to push something away from ourselves, to keep it safely distant and undefined. When a forest is logged, we say it’s been “harvested.” When species vanish, we call it “loss,” as if they simply misplaced themselves. When the ocean warms and the coral dies, it’s “bleaching,” a word that sounds less like extinction and more like laundry. The language we use to describe our impact on the natural world is coated in euphemism — a soft padding over hard truths. But the most dangerous word of all might be “nature” itself. Because it implies something separate from us. Something optional. Something we can step into on weekends, photograph, maybe protect — if it doesn’t interfere too much with progress. It becomes a category, a checkbox, a brochure. When we say “protect nature,” we rarely mean all of it. We don’t mean the toxic river winding past a refinery, or the cracked earth of overgrazed steppe. We mean the postcard version. The Instagram-ready sunset. The marketing-approved reserve. We mean whatever remains pretty, manageable, and unthreatening to business-as-usual. This linguistic distancing has shaped not only public perception, but also policy. Environmental law often revolves around thresholds: how much damage is acceptable before a place is no longer “natural”? At what point does a forest stop being a forest? When we frame nature as a pristine baseline, we render damaged landscapes invisible. We write off the in-between — the polluted, the scarred, the recovering — as already lost. But ecosystems do not think in absolutes. There is no binary between wild and ruined. There are only continuums, entanglements, feedback loops. A wounded river may still carry fish. A ravaged hillside may still bloom. The work of care — real care — starts when we look directly at these wounded spaces and speak of them honestly. To do that, we need new language. Not the language of escape or denial, but of connection. We need to say: this is part of the world too. This, too, deserves our attention. Not because it is beautiful, but because it is alive. The Violence Behind the View Beneath the silence of remote landscapes lies a quiet violence—often unseen, often unspoken. It’s the kind of violence that doesn’t announce itself with flames or explosions, but with the steady erasure of life, of meaning, of memory. It is the violence that begins when we call a place “empty.” All over the world, the idea of untouched nature has justified its destruction. In the name of conservation, Indigenous communities have been evicted from lands they’ve lived on for centuries. Their trails rebranded as trekking routes. Their homes razed to make space for wilderness lodges. They are written out of the narrative to preserve the illusion of purity—because real people are inconvenient to the postcard. The myth of pristine wilderness isn’t just wrong—it’s harmful. It is built on colonial logics that treated land as vacant until mapped, as silent until named in English. Mountains became “resources.” Rivers became “potential.” Forests became “underutilized.” The rest was ignored, or worse, cleared. What followed was extraction disguised as stewardship: mining under the banner of development, logging rebranded as forest management, and tourism sold as ecological awakening. Take Ladakh. Once considered too remote to bother with, it has now become a frontier—not of mystery, but of consumption. Roads are etched across ancient valleys. Glacial lakes once sacred are now swimming in selfie sticks and drone footage. The language of protection has been co-opted to mean access: the more “beautiful” the place, the faster it’s packaged, promoted, and sold. Even silence now has a price tag. This is the cost of calling nature “other.” It allows for its commodification. It allows us to destroy what we claim to love. We build eco-resorts on fragile slopes, fly in supplies by helicopter, and congratulate ourselves for “treading lightly.” But no footprint is weightless. Every gaze comes with a shadow. The truth is that many of the world’s last so-called “natural” spaces are not empty—they are silenced. The animals have moved on. The people were pushed out. What remains is a curated silence that we mistake for peace. But the land remembers. The land bears witness. And if we listen carefully, the stillness we find there is not serenity. It is grief. To truly honor nature—if such a thing is still possible—we must stop romanticizing it. We must stop pretending that purity ever existed. We must tell the truth: that our view of nature has long served as a mirror, not a window. And in that reflection, the violence is ours. Rewilding the Ruins Not all destruction is final. Sometimes, after the noise fades and the bulldozers move on, something unexpected begins to grow. A sapling between cracks in the pavement. A fox returning to a city park. A glacier-fed stream reemerging after a dam is removed. This is not restoration in the traditional sense. It is rewilding. And it carries both promise and peril. Rewilding, at its best, is the act of stepping back. It’s the decision to allow ecosystems to heal without micromanagement, without aesthetic interference. It acknowledges that nature is not a museum, nor a theme park. It evolves. It surprises. It fails and flourishes in cycles that resist tidy narratives. Rewilding asks u

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