Ecoeroticism: If it's edited, is it still nature?

By George Sibley

I can’t watch a nature or adventure film any more without thinking of an essay Moab poet Jose Knighton wrote for Wild Earth magazine back in 1993 – Eco-Porn and the Manipulation of Desire. Knighton was looking at landscape photography, not films, the beautiful calendarscapes airbrushed of any human zits, blemishes or other impacts. He suggested that this kind of art has strong parallels with pornography: “Landscape photography, like pornography, attempts to seduce the beholder by presenting an image divorced from its actual physical context.”

But, he continued, just as “cheesecake images generate a cumulative aesthetic ideal of the female body in the cultural unconscious…the Grand Tetons and the Grand Canyon are stereotyped objects of idealized, romanticized desire in our cultural psyche,” leading us to “devalue homely, flat-chested, overweight landscapes. The empty plains, the overgrown woods, the mosquito-ridden sloughs are more productive habitats than most ‘scenic’ spots in national parks, but few people care about them.”

He raises an interesting discussion, one that applies equally as well to nature and outdoor adventure films. Doesn’t a similar thing happen in nature-adventure imagery, as the “ecoerotic” protuberances and cleavages of nature become beautiful backgrounds for enactment along the spectrum from “nature red in tooth and claw” — things killing and eating each other — to an anthropomorphized Bambi Nature? Or to the exploits of the extreme skier, surfer, climber or triathaloner pushing the limits of skill and endurance to conquer beautiful natural challenges? Nature, they say to me, is a beautiful but harsh and unforgiving mistress — but a mistress is a mistress. And no matter what pieties the ear is hearing from the narration, the eye is saying yeah yeah yeah.

I do think Knighton’s analogy needs to develop a distinction between the “erotic” and the “pornographic.” Erotic imagery always leaves something to the imagination (or at least the discretion); pornography presumes to be getting more “realistic” than erotica, when in fact it just gets more unnaturally obsessive in objectifying the object of its attention (usually the woman).

But more to the point, is there anything wrong with this? I don’t know. I’ll confess a vulnerability to both the erotic and “ecoerotic,” but I’m bothered by the sort of seamless descent into porn and ecoporn that comes of the eventual desire to pump up the stimulation, to trump the “oohs” and “ahs” of each previous year.

Mostly I think the erotic and ecoerotic need to be relieved, balanced, by regular ventures into the unairbrushed, sweaty, exhausting reality of, respectively, a good long unedited fuck or hike. Or a bad one. Those resonate too. Nature unedited is too big for even Imax, and the editors can only compensate with some kind of cerebral manipulations, ultimately leaving me trying to redeem myself like old Walt Whitman, who after hearing enough from the “learned astronomer,” snuck out of the theater and “look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”