There was a moment, in the early days of the pandemic, when reports surfaced here and there of improvements in air and water quality across the world, as production and traffic abruptly diminished.
Images circulated of herds of mountain goats and wild boar exploring deserted city streets and schools of dolphins exuberant in the Bosporus.
The Hyperboreans of Greek legend, for example, led a perfect existence beyond the north winds in a permanent spring, and the denizens of Thomas More’s “Utopia” “cultivate their gardens with great care so that they have both vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers in them.” Later, William Morris drew nature — made almost palpable on the walls on well-furnished parlors — into his utopian counterimagining of the factories of industrial society.
The cows were led, through the digital animation that played before their eyes, to imagine they were wandering in bright summer fields, not bleak wintry ones.
Will the rejected, unemployed and redundant be deluded into thinking that the world is beautiful, a land of milk and honey, as they interact minimally in stripped-back care homes?
Theodor Adorno, the great German philosopher and cultural critic of the mid-20th century, observes in “Aesthetic Theory” how nature that has evaded human cultivation — Alpine moraines or moonscapes — resembles the unnatural forms of industrial waste mountains and is just as terrifying.
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