The love of nature: Imaginary environments and the production of ontological security in postnatural times

Abstract

Abstract The existence of nature is vehemently called into question in the Anthropocene. The standard image of nature as a pristine, harmonious, and stable background no longer holds, especially as ecological changes increasingly penetrate the collective consciousness. Consequently, there has been growing interest in the psychological effects of this end of nature. A recent wave of scholarship shows how climate change and the Anthropocene more generally affect people's daily lives and present significant threats to psychic well‐being. This paper follows on from these debates. In contrast, however, we ask if and how nature is still considered as providing a subjective sense of (ontological) security today. We argue that, even under postnatural conditions, nature still maintains an imaginary existence in the social reality of the subject. We address this argument empirically by focusing on everyday life perceptions of nature in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, and theoretically by following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Drawing on image‐based interviews (photo‐elicitation), we demonstrate that a psychoanalytic approach to imaginary environments allows us to understand why people state that they love nature even though it does not exist. We show how this love works by pointing out how nature is considered as (m)other and, through this, engaged as a place to retreat and escape from the burdens of everyday life while being perceived from a certain distance. In conclusion, we emphasise the broader political consequences of the imaginary existence of nature and call for further engagement with the persistence of nature's fantasy in times when nature seems to no longer fit the purpose.

Full text

Geo: Geography and Environment. 2022;9:e00106.
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https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.106
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/geo2
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INTRODUCTION
… no discourse has any consequence in nature, and that is why one loves it so much.
(Lacan, 2006a, p. 33)
If there is one diagnosis that has increasingly infiltrated the political, social, economic, philosophical, and scientific
debates in recent years, it is the diagnosis that “nature does not exist.” The standard notion of nature as a pristine,
harmonious, and stable background against or upon which culture is established no longer holds true, especially since
Received: 15 March 2021
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Revised: 6 December 2021
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Accepted: 11 February 2022
DOI: 10.1002/geo2.106
ARTICLE
The love of nature: Imaginary environments and the
production of ontological security in postnatural times
LucasPohl
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IlseHelbrecht
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
© 2022 The Authors. Geo: Geography and Environment published by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Department of Geography, Cultural
and Social Geography, Humboldt-
Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Correspondence
Lucas Pohl, Department of Geography,
Cultural and Social Geography,
Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin,
Rudower Chaussee 16 / 12489 Berlin,
Germany.
Email: lucas.pohl@geo.hu-berlin.de
Funding information
The research for this paper
was funded by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG,
German Research Foundation)—
Projektnummer 290045248– SFB 1265.
Abstract
The existence of nature is vehemently called into question in the Anthropocene.
The standard image of nature as a pristine, harmonious, and stable background
no longer holds, especially as ecological changes increasingly penetrate the col-
lective consciousness. Consequently, there has been growing interest in the psy-
chological effects of this end of nature. A recent wave of scholarship shows how
climate change and the Anthropocene more generally affect people's daily lives
and present significant threats to psychic well- being. This paper follows on from
these debates. In contrast, however, we ask if and how nature is still considered as
providing a subjective sense of (ontological) security today. We argue that, even
under postnatural conditions, nature still maintains an imaginary existence in
the social reality of the subject. We address this argument empirically by focusing
on everyday life perceptions of nature in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia,
and theoretically by following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Drawing on
image- based interviews (photo- elicitation), we demonstrate that a psychoana-
lytic approach to imaginary environments allows us to understand why people
state that they love nature even though it does not exist. We show how this love
works by pointing out how nature is considered as (m)other and, through this,
engaged as a place to retreat and escape from the burdens of everyday life while
being perceived from a certain distance. In conclusion, we emphasise the broader
political consequences of the imaginary existence of nature and call for further
engagement with the persistence of nature's fantasy in times when nature seems
to no longer fit the purpose.

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ecological changes have begun to increasingly penetrate the collective consciousness within and beyond academia. The
most drastic consequence when thinking about this change in nature has been the proclamation of a new epoch, the
Anthropocene, which declares humans to be the most influential geological force on the planet (Crutzen & Stoermer,
2000). If humans are the driving force that globally shapes and changes nature the way it is, then any notion of nature as
something external and independent of human society has run out of steam. With the Anthropocene, “we have entered
into a postnatural period” as Bruno Latour (2017, p. 142) puts it. While it is today widely recognised that catastrophic
events such as heat waves, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires can only be sufficiently explained if one
abandons the idea of nature as an ontological precondition of humanity and instead accepts the idea of the environment
as inherently connected with our social, cultural, and urban life worlds, many questions regarding the psychological
impacts of this abandonment, or loss of nature, remain unanswered.
Of course, scholars have insisted for decades that issues such as climate change can only be adequately understood if
nature and society are not separated from each other but considered as intertwined (for a classic example, see McKibben,
1989), and geography has been one of the disciplines that most intensively deconstructs the binary conception of nature
and society (for an early overview, see Castree & Braun, 2001). From Marxist understandings of nature as a “product”
of social praxis (Castree, 1995; Smith, 1984) and post- structuralist interpretations that deal with nature as an ‘effect of
power’ (Braun & Wainwright, 2001) to post- colonial approaches that retrace the colonial roots of “commonsense” cat-
egories like “nature” and “resources” (Gregory, 2001; Willems- Braun, 1997) and feminist accounts that dismantle the
gendered and sexualised projections behind the nature– culture division (Nesmith & Radcliffe, 1993; Rose, 1993), geog-
raphers have manifestly worked against conceptions of nature as something pristine and separate from human activity
to pave the way for an “internal” understanding of nature as something thoroughly determined by history, culture, and
politics (Braun & Castree, 1998).
What is “new” with regard to the melting binaries of nature and society in the Anthropocene is that this meltdown
increasingly affects the majority of people's daily lives and presents significant threats to mental health and psychic
well- being (Adger, 2010; Berry et al., 2010; Cianconi et al., 2020; Clark, 2020; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018; Gifford & Gifford,
2016; Hayes et al., 2018; Obradovich et al., 2018; Pihkala, 2018). As part of the debates surrounding the Anthropocene,
scholars from psychology and related disciplines began to elaborate more deeply how ecological changes are linked to
a range of negative psychological impacts, including depression, suicidal ideation and post- traumatic stress, as well as
feelings of anger, hopelessness, distress, and despair (for an overview, see also Ellis & Cunsolo, 2018), and how everyday
life today often revolves around issues such as “eco anxiety” (Pihkala, 2018), “ecological grief” (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018),
or “Anthropocene horror” (Clark, 2020) resulting from changes in the environment. Erik Swyngedouw (2015, p. 135)
captures this unsettling dimension of the Anthropocene by tracing the weak foundation provided by nature today:
Nature is unpredictable, erratic, moving spasmodically and blind. There is no final guarantee in Nature on
which to base our politics or the social, on which to mirror our dreams, hopes, or aspirations, on which to
ground our dreams and plans for a different, let alone better, and socio- ecologically more sensitive mode of
living together.
This paper follows on from these debates. In contrast to the approaches mentioned above, however, we do not concen-
trate on the environmental dynamics that currently unsettle and disturb people's sense of security, but rather ask if and how
nature can still be considered as providing assurance. Following the radical uncertainty resulting from the absence of nature
in the Anthropocene, it seems questionable whether subjects today can still establish and maintain a secure way of living.
If one cannot even engage in small talk about the weather anymore without the spectre of climate change looming over the
conversation, as Timothy Morton (2013, p. 99) proposes, and if it is no longer possible to even assert that one exists “on earth”
or “in nature,” as Latour (2018, p. 41) suggests, because” the place ‘on’ or ‘in’ which we are located begins to react to our ac-
tions, turns against us, encloses us, dominates us, demands something of us and carries us along in its path,” how can one still
maintain a sense of “being- in- the- world,” an “ontological security?” Would it not be reasonable, even “natural,” that the end
of nature would also lead to a breakdown of subjectivity? How can one still secure oneself as a being when it is indeed true
that ‘nature is dead’ (Latour, 2004, p. 25)?
While we agree with the overall proposal of a “death of nature,” we argue that there is something about nature that
survives this death. More precisely, we argue that, even under postnatural conditions, nature can still retain a strong
imaginary existence in the social reality of the subject. Theoretically, we adopt a psychoanalytic approach based on the
work of Jacques Lacan. While Lacan was an explicit source of inspiration for some early feminist geography critiques of
the nature– culture binary, like Gillian Rose (1993), and outside the field of geography influenced the writings of scholars

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like Donna Haraway (1991), an explicit engagement with Lacan with regard to environmental questions somehow be-
came marginalised by the explosion of New Materialism, Actor- Network Theory, and other more- than- human- inspired
environmental geographies. In recent years, a couple of contributions in geography and related disciplines have returned
to Lacan to highlight how psychoanalysis enables us to grasp the Anthropocene's unsettling psychosocial conditions
and the end of nature it entails (Burnham & Kingsbury, 2021a; Fletcher, 2018; Pohl, 2020; Robbins & Moore, 2013;
Swyngedouw, 2015), as well as how environmental fantasies can have depoliticising effects on issues like global warming,
sustainable urban development, and other responses to climate change (Davidson, 2012; Healy, 2014; Stavrakakis, 1997;
Swyngedouw, 2010). Scholars in tourist studies have furthermore emphasised how nature, and in particular “wilder-
ness,” is constructed by nature tourists as an object of desire that revolves around a “fantasy of authenticity” (Knudsen
et al., 2016; see also Dash & Cater, 2015; Vidon, 2019; Vidon et al., 2018). In the following, we seek to deepen the insights
from this “return to Lacan” in environmental studies by focusing on the structural preconditions and psychospatial dy-
namics which seem necessary for (imaginaries of) nature to (ontologically) secure the subject's existence. We ask how the
subject positions itself in relation to nature, so that nature functions as an agency of approval and self- assurance. While
Lacan is sometimes read as a thinker who primarily helps us to “capture the fragility and fragmentation of the self,” but
who does not enable us to understand “how the individual obtains a sense of coherence and how this connects with reas-
surance in the “reality” of the external world” (Giddens, 1991, p. 96), we examine how Lacanian psychoanalysis indeed
allows us to carefully scrutinise the psychospatial conditions through which the subject obtains a sense of coherence and
(ontological) security via a reassertion in and imaginary reference to the “external world” of nature.
The remainder of this paper proceeds as follows. In the first section, we introduce our Lacanian framework by point-
ing out what it means to approach nature as imaginary. In the subsequent section, we provide background information
on the overall research project from which the materials and methods guiding this specific research study are derived.
This paper is part of a broader research project that focuses on the influence of geographical imaginations on the estab-
lishment of ontological security. Based on 60 image- based interviews that were conducted with residents of Vancouver,
British Columbia, in which they spoke about security- related issues they face in their everyday lives, we elaborate in the
main part of this paper how the interviewees evoke an imaginary of nature through the images that were shown to them
in the interviews. Through three sections, we demonstrate that a Lacanian approach to nature qua imaginary allows us to
understand why the interviewees state that they “love” nature. We show how this love works by relating it to a Lacanian
definition of nature as “(m)other.” We proceed by pointing out how the subject relates to its love of (m)other nature in
a narcissistic way by addressing nature as a place for retreat and thereby escape from the burdens of urban everyday
life. Furthermore, we draw attention to the limits of the love of nature by stressing how the interviewees insist on their
distanced view of Vancouver's wilderness, and how the idea of getting “too close” to nature fills them with anxiety. In
conclusion, we summarise the key strengths of our approach and discuss the broader political consequences of the imag-
inary of nature. We emphasise that the pristine, untouched imaginary of (m)other nature can only be maintained when
nature is physically, socially and conceptually “cleansed” of any traces of human activity, which involves a continued
denial of climate change, and leads, in the particular case of British Columbia, to a repression of indigenous life.
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LACAN AND (THE IMAGINARY) NATURE
Psychoanalytic, and in particular Lacanian, theory has been repeatedly applied to questions of nature and the environ-
ment in recent years. In tourist studies, for instance, one of the crucial insights stemming from Lacanian approaches
is that wilderness, in the sense of a pristine and untouched space of nature, can generate deep, meaningful and thus
“authentic” experiences for nature tourists, even if there is nothing genuinely authentic about that tourist destination.
Focusing on a publicly protected park area in upstate New York, Elizabeth S. Vidon et al. (2018, p. 68) emphasise how
this park, which is entirely “constructed, staged, marketed, and managed … nevertheless answers the call for authentic-
ity so often heard in tourism.” Even though the pristine wilderness evoked by the staging of the park does not exist in
any “scientific” or “real” sense, it still has the intended effect on the touristic subject. Tourist scholars therefore consider
wilderness a prime example of what Daniel C. Knudsen et al. (2016) describe as “the fantasy of authenticity,” namely, a
socially produced space that allows tourists to feel at ease, seeking their “true” selves and hoping for a kind of reconcili-
ation, or wholeness, emanating from nature:
As a unique and powerful stage for fantasy, wilderness creates a sense of the authentic and is one means
through which we, particularly in the West, engage with the fantasy of authenticity. As a quintessential

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‘other,’ wilderness is also paradoxically an essential part of us rather than something exclusively external and
is a place to which many of us gravitate in an attempt to feel fulfilled, self- sufficient, whole, and unalienated
from our true, biological selves.
(Vidon, 2019, p. 19)
What is already indicated in this quote, and further elaborated by us in what follows, is that the fantasmatic impact of na-
ture has an influence not only on nature tourists, but, as we will show, more generally on subject positionings “particularly in
the West” because it is especially due to a Western understanding of subjectivity that “the human” is considered in separation
from nature, which paves the way for a fantasy of nature as something worth preserving, something desirable, something that
can be owned and lost. In their introduction to the volume Lacan and the environment, Clint Burnham and Paul Kingsbury
(2021b, p. 3) capture these fantasmatic workings of nature more generally by stating:
The Imaginary environment is the space around us … here the environment is an image, it is constitutive of the
ego and of our narcissistic relation with others. The environment is a site of play … but also of alienation and
aggressivity. These dualisms of affect are crucial if we are to understand the differing ways in which we relate
to and enjoy the environment, and if we are not to descend into moralistic dismissals of those with whom we
disagree. The environment, or nature, in terms of the imaginary is also nature as beauty, breathtaking, even
sublime.
One aspect this quote touches upon, and which we consider crucial for further engagement with the potential for applying
Lacanian psychoanalysis to the environment, is the role of the image with regard to the creation of imaginary nature. What
often tends to be overlooked by scholars working on the fantasmatic existence of nature is that the imaginary, for Lacan, is
immanently related to images. The reason why Lacan (2013, p. 35) relies on the term “imaginary” in the first place is that it
allows him to emphasise the linkage of image and imagination.
At the origin of the imaginary, Lacan situates the “mirror stage,” the moment when the child looks into the mirror
and starts to assume that it is seeing “itself” (and not just a reflection).1 This moment is crucial for Lacan (2006b, p. 78)
because he insists that humans are born with a fragmented self- image, a “body in pieces,” and that it is only after the
mirror stage that they receive a coherent and consistent, yet “orthopedic,” image of the self. For the subject to be assured
of who they are requires the projection of the self onto the other. Therefore, it does not require a mirror in the literal sense
of the term: “A human being can couple his or her image to basically any object in the environment” (Nobus, 1999, p.
116). What it takes is an image through which the subject (mistakenly) perceives him/herself and thus gets “caught up in
the lure of spatial identification” (Lacan, 2006b, p. 78). The early Lacan also uses the term “imago” to clarify this point.
Imagos are external images with which the individual identifies itself to establish an imaginary identity. Imagos function
as images we have of who we are (ego) and of who we want to be (ideal ego).
The image of the ideal ego is thereby intimately related to the position of “the mother,” which Lacan primarily defines
in structural terms as the primary caretaker of the child. For Lacan, the unification with the mother functions as a point
of origin from which the child separates itself through the mirror stage to find its own unity. Only after seeing “itself”
in the mirror does the child gain a notion of self- identity as a being separate from the mother. The image of the mother
thereby persists as a kind of role model for the child by providing it with a fantasy of coherence and stability: “It is by
identifying with and incorporating the image of the mother that it [the child] gains an identity as an ego” (Grosz, 1990,
p. 43). Against this background, Lacan conceptualises the mother in imaginary terms as obtaining a non- lacking, all-
powerful position on the one hand, and an ultimately inaccessible and desired position on the other.
Overall, one could say that the subject, for Lacan, only assumes an identity based on a decentring of one's self via the
image of the (m)other. This requires spatial identification with an outer image to become oneself. Otherwise, strictly
speaking, the subject does not exist (Lacan, 1991).
The subject is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the deceiving
and realised image, of the other… That is where it finds its unity.
(Lacan, 1991, p. 54)
A significant point about Lacan's concept of imaginary is thus to understand how the individual generates a kind of se-
cured image of the self by tying together its intimate fantasies (of coherence, stability, etc.) with an external image (of the
other). In the following, we consider this idea to engage with the imaginary functioning of nature. We emphasise that nature

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is imag(in)ed, and that it is through this imag(in)ing that the subject creates an illusion of nature as a place to gravitate to in
an attempt to feel fulfilled, self- sufficient, and whole. The fantasy of nature is supported by certain images, or imagos, which
allow the subject to get sucked in and caught up in the lure of spatial identification, enabling it to establish an (ideal) ego and
to love nature as (m)other.
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IMAG(INARI)ES OF NATURE AND ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY IN
VANCOUVER, BC
This paper is part of a broader research project that focuses on the influence of geographical imaginations on the estab-
lishment of ontological security (see also Helbrecht et al., 2021). Introduced by the psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing (1960)
and prominently reinvented by the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991), the concept of ontological security has been
used in a variety of fields to capture the social, material, and in our case, environmental conditions necessary for people
to be, become and remain psychologically healthy.2 Between 2018 and 2021, our research team conducted a total of 180
qualitative interviews in the cities of Berlin (Germany), Vancouver (Canada), and Singapore to speak about (ontologi-
cal) security- related issues and challenges people face in their everyday lives. Each interview took approximately 1hour.
Interviewees were selected following a sampling strategy, focusing on a balanced ratio of gender and age on the one hand,
and a polarised social profile in terms of income and education in order to capture a broad spectrum of subject positions.
This sampling strategy was implemented through online postings, advertisements, personal contacts and a “snowball-
ing” principle. The structuring element that guided the interviews followed the “photo- elicitation” approach (Harper,
2002), using images to shed light on the emotional and affective dimensions of security- related spatial knowledge (Pohl &
Helbrecht, 2022). Due to our open approach, the interviews touched upon a variety of topics, from the ontologically (in)
securing aspects emanating from housing and homemaking (Pohl et al., 2020) to the importance of geopolitical position-
ing with respect to political caesuras for everyday perceptions of security (Genz et al., 2021).
For our research project, several photographs were used that not only depict different scales and types of space, from
rooms and squares to borders and outer space, but also, in the researchers' opinions, are associated with issues of security
and insecurity (see Figures 1– 3 for examples). It was considered crucial that the images leave room for interpretation
and free associations, especially for questioning standard dichotomies such as safe– unsafe, positive– negative and near–
far. Apart from the selection of images, the interviews followed an open approach, with the images being shown to the
interviewees one after the other as broad questions were asked: “What do you see in this image?” or “What feelings does
this image trigger?” The set of images used in the interviews consisted of five images that were used in each interview
and a free sample of eight images from which the interviewees could choose themselves which one they would like to
FIGURE  iStock, Adrian Wojcik, Sun Glare Frost, 2014

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talk about. A number of images captured environmental motifs. While some evoked an image of nature in the sense of a
“pristine wilderness” (Figure 1), others related more to aspects of an urban, human- formed, nature (Figure 2).
While the interviews were not intended to focus on the role of nature in particular, an issue often raised by the in-
terviewees was their relationship with the environment. In many interviews, it was emphasised that nature occupies
a special place in the individual's life. We then began to systematically examine the interview material in terms of the
human– nature relationship in order to grasp how and why nature plays a role in feelings of self- assurance, belong-
ing and well- being. We identified a variety of emotional references to nature in the interviews, which we conceive
in this paper as elementary prerequisites for how nature maintains its imaginary function as a basis for ontological
security even under today's postnatural conditions. We suggest that photo- elicitation is suited to investigating the
imag(inari)es of nature because it allows us to explore how the subject internalises an external image by using it as a
fantasy screen for projecting their desires onto the other. The images in our analysis behave like mirrors in a Lacanian
FIGURE  Arthur Crestani, Royale Ville, 2017
FIGURE  Guillermo Arias, Mexican border, JR, 2017'; © JR-art.net.

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sense, wherein the interviewees ‘could project their nostalgic desires, their distorted memories’ (Žižek, 1991, p. 9),
as well as their fears and anxieties in order to establish a sense of who they are and who they want to be. In the fol-
lowing, we point out how nature was reflected on in our interviews to demonstrate that nature can have an impact
on ontological security that transcends its material existence, an impact which can only be taken into account when
seriously engaging nature's imaginary existence.
While our research project as a whole compares the three cities mentioned above, this paper refers exclusively to our
fieldwork in Vancouver, where our research team has conducted 60 interviews. The reason for this selection is that the
responses to the images in all three cities showed striking similarities; thus, by focusing on one case only, Vancouver, we
can elaborate more and present deeper insights into how the imag(inari)es of nature relate to the ontological security of
the subject. Furthermore, it is worth noting that some of the most influential work in the field of environmental geog-
raphy has drawn on Vancouver and British Columbia for empirical research, including the works of Bruce Braun, Noel
Castree, and David Demeritt.
We would, however, emphasise that our main aim is not to enrich this incredibly important branch of research on
British Columbia: our focus is not on Canadian environmental geographies. Rather, we focus on British Columbia
because it provides an ideal- typical image, or imaginary, of nature that is very much “predicated on the idea of na-
ture's externality” as Braun (2002, p. ix) critically asserts. Similar to the “American wilderness,” we find here a notion
of nature that appears as utterly “other” to the subject, an “untouched” and “pristine” land that, no matter if it does
not exist “for real,” still lives not only “through discursive mechanisms and cultural imperatives” (Vidon et al., 2018,
p. 66), but also, as we will demonstrate in the following, through images. While scholars repeatedly emphasise the
“mythic” quality of the Canadian wilderness and the way it is socially constructed, for example, through the natural
resource industry, art, storytelling, tourism, and Canadian nationalism (Crane, 2012; Dent, 2013; Pente, 2009), we
point to the role of images when it comes to the functioning and principles of this mythic, or in Lacanian terms,
imaginary nature. The following three sections explore how the interviewees in our research refer to nature in order
to give consistency to their lives: first, through a process of (m)othering wherein nature is imag(in)ed as a realm to be
loved and desired and that exists in distinction to the everyday life in the city; second, through a narcissistic projec-
tion of the ego's ideal image onto the external world of nature; and third, through the anxieties emanating from the
empty and distant image of nature in relation to everyday life.
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THE LOVE OF (m)OTHER NATURE
Multiple times, when interviewees in Vancouver were shown the image pictured in Figure 1, the response was simply:
“I love nature.” Keeping Vancouver's dramatic scenery in mind, this answer does not seem very surprising. However,
even if we leave Vancouver and look more generally at the intimate relationship with nature, this answer seems quite
commonsensical, even expected. In the introduction to her book devoted to the love of nature, psychoanalyst Shierry
Weber Nicholsen (2002, p. 1) states that one will hardly find anyone who does not “value and appreciate some part of the
environment.” Something similar can be said about the interviewees in our research. In the following, however, we em-
phasise which particular part of nature has been appreciated and valued in the interviews, and highlight the differences
in who has what possibilities to surround themselves with this part of nature. We therefore enter into our analysis by
unpacking the love of nature in order to take into account what one loves nature for and how exactly this love operates.
I love nature. I love the trees, I love the water, I love the animals and stuff like that … since I was a child. Yeah,
I love the outdoors, the mountains …
(Van07, 274)
This quote from a woman in her late forties is representative of how most of the interviewees in our research described
their love of nature. When she refers to “trees,” the interviewee is not referring to the trees in the park next to her house, by
“water” she does not mean the water running through the sewers, and with “animals” she does not have in mind the rats and
cockroaches that live all over the city. In short, the nature that is mobilised here is not an urban nature, as pictured in Figure
2, but a nature one loves because it is “outdoor”, and thus externalised as the realm outside of urban everyday life. Since the
social realities in the interviews were significantly shaped by the urbanity of Vancouver, many interviewees described their
love of nature first of all via their non- love of the city:

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The place that makes me feel just most at peace is when I'm surrounded by trees, by green, by nature, and not so
much by the busyness of the city, the cement, the people.
(Van28, 6)
The urban perspective from which the interviewees in our research perceived the image of nature is essential when it
comes to the imaginary of nature, because it allows them to perceive nature as “other” based specifically on the differences
between it and city life. What we are dealing with here is one of the most elementary lessons from Lacan's concept of desire.
To desire something presupposes that this object lies at a certain distance, which is why Lacan (2019, p. 321) states: “To the
subject, the object [of desire] appears outside, as it were.” The same applies to the interviewees’ reactions to the image of
nature: the imag(in)ed nature was considered as “other” precisely in the way it was situated outside of the subjects' urban
everyday lives:
[I]f you close your eyes and imagine that you're there [pointing to the image in Figure 1], you will feel like maybe
the air is cold or maybe it feels very fresh and clean because there's no one around, maybe there's less pollution
… It just feels like you get to enjoy the whole space and you're by yourself. No one else is here … building or kind
of ruining the nature. You can just enjoy it …
(Van54, 58)
When talking about their love of nature, several interviewees admitted that they try to get out of the city as often as they
can because it is in the city that they spend most of their everyday lives. One interviewee offered a detailed description of how
excited she had been to go on a camping trip in the woods, even if she had to take a taxi to get there:
I just went camping a few weeks ago … it took an hour to get up to the taxi ride. And that was a $60- taxi ride to
get up into the mountains until Golden Ears Park. But it was worth it … There are a lot of people on the weekend,
but most of the weekdays, there wasn't … It was really nice.
(Van07, 280)
While this interviewee highlights that a $60- taxi ride to get away from the busy city life is worth the money, another inter-
viewee experiences his life as unfulfilled because he is “stuck in the city” due to his busy working life:
Because you get kind of stuck in the city, you know. Some people are really good about getting out, but, with my
PhD in here, I'm so busy. I work long days. Every day and don't get out of the city a lot.
(Van16, 284)
What these statements share is that they consider the desire for nature by linking it with a certain degree of inaccessibility.
To be in nature is here not taken for granted. People do not simply dwell in nature. Nature is not just everywhere. In fact, it
takes a certain amount of effort to arrive in nature and whether one has the ability to get there or not depends on specific cri-
teria. Our research has shown that older interviewees are especially willing to spend the money and make the effort to get out
into nature, while younger interviewees prioritise other factors, such as work or social life, and therefore get out of the city less
often. Furthermore, economic factors such as income play a significant role in the ability to access nature. While wealthier
Vancouverites spend weekends hiking in the mountains, skiing or going to the beach, and sometimes even have their own
lodges in the countryside to regularly gain access to nature, poorer residents lack most of these opportunities, which can even
strengthen their desire for nature.
Distance thus becomes a key marker, through which the interviewees imagine their separation from nature, whereby
distance not only means the objectively measurable distance needed to get out of the city, but more importantly relates
to the psychosocial distance experienced from the fantasmatic positioning of nature as outside. That this distance is not
only perceived spatially but can also have a temporal, or spatio- temporal, dimension has been emphasised in the inter-
views through references to interviewees' own childhoods. Several interviewees described their love of nature in terms of
a long- lasting relationship that is connected with various deep memories and strong feelings, and which dates back to a
time when the city was less present in everyday life.
Well, growing up in Vancouver, for me, I think one of the probably strongest memories I have is of the beach
… and the saltwater and the view of the mountains … [T]hose things about Vancouver … are meaningful to

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me … and downtown Vancouver in those days was, uh, it was before a lot of this development, you can imag-
ine all those towers didn't really exist.
(Van03, 2)
What is characteristic about the interviewee's description of his strong emotional bond with Vancouver's natural environ-
ment is that it is distanced in terms of both time and place when much of what characterises the city today did not exist. Just
as memories of nature are conceived of in terms of being “meaningful” to his life, the recent changes in the city are consid-
ered an opposing force that neglects the impact of nature and ultimately works against (the imaginary of) it. Nature appears
as something valuable that hardly finds its way into urban everyday life. Another interviewee, therefore, even described city
life as something that is opposed to our deepest human origins:
I think human beings are connected to nature even though we try to live in the cities, live in apartment buildings,
but I think deep down we are still just like the way we evolved. Our ancestors were used to living like, you know,
close to nature. So, I think that’s still a part of us.
(Van21, 260)
The way nature is described here resembles the fantasy of a (re)union with ‘the mother’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Similar to “the initial state” of unity, harmony and wholeness ‘that gets lost’ when the infant is separated from the mother
and born into the world (Lacan, 1992, p. 53), interviewees often referred to nature as a presumed state of wholeness that
gets lost due to life in the city. While nature is considered as “something that embraces you and really protects you in a way”
(Van50, 334), most interviewees stressed that they can hardly find (the same) nature in the city. From a Lacanian standpoint,
this loss of a direct and permanent connection to Mother Nature has to be considered in structural terms. Similar to the way
Lacan (1992, p. 52) speaks of the loss of the mother as “the first outside,” as the primordial, yet absent, point of reference that
structures “the world of desires,” nature only gains a (desirable) existence after it is already lost, which is why it appears most
meaningful when contemplating how urban everyday life prevents us from accessing it. Such a perspective allows us to raise
doubts whether “our ancestors” really lived closer to nature, or whether, if one would talk to them, they would say that it is
not them but their ancestors who really lived close to nature. However, while considering Mother Nature as structurally, and
not only empirically, separated from the subject of desire, a Lacanian approach encourages us to insist that “the compensa-
tory fantasy of the pre- Oedipal mother [is] still all- powerful” (Pollock, 1988, p. 191). While the subject is no longer, or rather
has never been, in direct harmony with nature, but only imagines this harmony retroactively, it still longs for moments where
it can get a glimpse of nature because nature (qua mother) seems to possess what the subject lacks (unity, coherence, stability,
etc.). In the following, we will elaborate on how nature allows subjects to feel better about themselves.
5
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LOVE THY NATURE AS THYSELF
Upon showing one interviewee the image of a mountain range (Figure 1), he identified the image with Canada and im-
mediately launched into a monologue about what it meant to him to be in nature:
This is Canada. I'm not sure, but, yeah, it feels like Canada. There's a lot of mountains. It feels like BC moun-
tains … It's beautiful. I love this kind of views and natural beauties. Yeah, I like it. It's positive. Once you …
visit these places, you get that freshness inside you, you know. You get that feeling inside you that makes
you more fresh. It kind of gives you a feeling to restart everything, you know. Even if you're lost sometimes,
you feel hopeless, you feel like you are broke, or you feel like anything that happens, anything negative, any
negative feelings inside. So, you go see these mountains, you see these natural views, the rivers, waters, you
know, open things, fresh air, the sunlight. This gives you a feeling to restart, the freshness, it'll give you hope.
You feel complete.
(Van18, 410)
The interviewee insists that one loves nature because it can free oneself from ‘any negative feelings’. The power of nature
would thus be to provide a sense of ontological security, especially in moments where one is confronted with one's own disor-
der. In a structural similarity to Lacan's notion of the mirrored other, the imag(in)ed nature here ‘appears to possess a special
“it” that grants it superiority, a singular object that Lacan subsequently names object a’ (MacCannell, 2016, p. 73). The object

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a sets desire (and anxiety) into motion, as it promises to fill a lack that structures the subject's desire. The same applies to
imaginary nature. While we are out of joint, nature is in equilibrium; while we are disordered, nature follows its internal laws;
while we are inconsistent, nature is harmonious; while we are lacking, nature lacks nothing. Some interviewees therefore in-
sisted that nature becomes crucial, especially in moments when one is confronted with experiences of personal crisis. When
looking at the image depicted in Figure 1, a man in his mid- thirties, for instance, explained how he started walking in nature
after he had quit his job, because some community members told him that this could help him to “reset” and “regain order:”
I quit my job recently and I started walking … in the forest … So, once some people in the community told me
that nature has its own order, and sometimes you're disordered, so you need to reset your order from nature. You
need to regain your order from nature. That helps you to get refreshed. That's very important.
(Van09, 529)
Psychoanalytically speaking, one could say that nature here represents a sort of “ideal ego,” “a projection of the
ego's ideal image onto the external world” (Chiesa, 2007, p. 22), which means that we see in nature what we are sup-
posed to see in ourselves. Similar to the mirror image in Lacan's mirror stage, the interviewee transposes an illusion
of coherence and fulfilment onto the image of nature and at the same time offers a promise of future synthesis to
which the ego is drawn. If we consider nature to be fantasmatically related to the subject's own ideal image, we can
begin to understand why some people say that they are “proud of Canada's natural environment” (Van10, 305) or why
others decide to decorate their bodies with it:
Growing up and always looking at the mountains really shaped a lot of the way I think … I love the moun-
tains … so much that I have a tattoo of them on my body.
(Van33, 666)
The reason why the interviewee decided to put an image of the external world onto her body, or why the other
interviewee states that he is proud of Canada's nature is that something about this nature corresponds to their ideal
ego. In this sense, nature provides an “image we love more than ourselves” (Fink, 2016, p. 73), and the effort to dec-
orate oneself, whether verbally or physically, with this image are attempts to internalise this image, to make it one's
own. We have here what Lacan (2006b, p. 572) calls the “hominization of the planet,” a way of approaching the envi-
ronment based on one's own ideal image. However, since nature does not in itself function as a representative of the
ideal ego but only achieves this position via fantasy, it is hardly surprising that not every image of nature fits every
subject. When showing the image of Figure 1 to another interviewee, he directly distanced himself from it by stating
that this would not be “his” nature:
This is not my nature [laughs]. Is there a different nature, yeah. I was telling you earlier about where I
grew up and what it looks like. It's, you know, Ontario, Northern Ontario, Eastern Ontario where you
have a lot of low, old mountains. So really low hills, rolling hills, lakes and rivers, forests. So, this is
clearly a coastal scene, I would imagine, anyway. Um, yeah, so it's quite different from my environment.
I mean, sometimes I'll be on the bus or something. And I'll see the mountains and say: Oh, yeah, the
mountains [laughter].
(Van16, 274)
What becomes clear in this statement is that it is the image's relation to the subject's fantasy, and not the image itself, which
turns nature into a guarantor of ontological security. In psychoanalytic terms, one could say that the love of nature therefore
primarily appears as a narcissistic relationship. The love of nature means “loving oneself through the other— which, in the
narcissistic field of the object, allows no transcendence to the object included” (Lacan, 1998, p. 194). In other words: whatever
one loves about nature has nothing to do with nature as such, but with what we see of ourselves in nature. Adopting a phrase
by Lacanian philosopher Alenka Zupančič (2017, p. 137), one could state that the love of nature is a way of loving “in which
we let ourselves be completely dazzled or “blinded” by an abstract dimension of the loved object, so that we no longer see, or
can't bear to see, its concrete existence.” It is this particular function of nature, its ability to provide a sense of “restarting” and
“completeness,” which turns it into a lovable (m)other, and not its inherent properties. Nature is here not loved for “what it
is” but for “what it does to us.” In the last step, we highlight the limits of the love of nature: while nature is often considered
desirable, we show that this desire can reach a limit if nature becomes “too much.”

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6
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GETTING LOST IN THE WILD
In this last section, we want to emphasise one of the flipsides of the externalisation, or (m)othering, of nature. So
far, we have focused primarily on how nature is perceived as “too little,” as something one lacks and does not have
enough of; in other words: as something desirable. We stated above that the lack of an object is crucial for Lacan
when it comes to considering it as an object a, object- cause of desire, because it provides the subject with an ontologi-
cal security that results from a fantasmatic inscription of wholeness and fulfilment onto this object. Whenever one
gets “too close” to it, however, the same object that used to provide us with a sense of ontological security begins to
threaten us, to overwhelm us with its presence, ultimately confronting us with anxiety and ontological insecurity.
Lacan (2014, pp. 53– 54) exemplifies this thought by stating that one of the most terrifying experiences for the infant
is not the lack of the mother but her perpetual presence, “when there's no possibility of any lack, when the mother
is on his [sic] back all the while.” While the lack of the mother creates a fantasy of (lost) wholeness and satisfaction,
anxiety is the moment when this lack “happens to be lacking” (Lacan, 2014, p. 42), so that desire is no longer pos-
sible, because there is no breathing space that would allow a longing for full satisfaction to arise. In contrast to the
orienting function of desire, anxiety is therefore considered by Lacan as a “deeply unsettling” experience that “leaves
you with a disorienting sense of confusion and uncertainty” (Robertson, 2015, p. 15).
In our interviews, we identified a certain ambivalence when it came to fully surrendering to the space of nature. A
couple of interviewees stated that they indeed like to be in nature from time to time, but that it would simply be “too
much” to stay there for longer:
I like nature … I just wouldn't like to live there. I need houses. I need stores [laughs]. Even though I can't
afford to shop in the malls [chuckles], but, yeah, I need people. I love nature, but I can't … be in the middle
of nowhere … I'm a city person, sorry. This picture you just showed me is nice [pointing to the image in
Figure 1]. Maybe for a weekend and that's it. (Van05, 937)
While the interviewee insists that she likes nature, she at the same time emphasises that she does not want to be fully im-
mersed in nature, that she needs the city and could not spend her whole time outside of it. Another interviewee even states
that there would be something scary about the idea of being entirely “within” nature:
When you're outside of Vancouver, it's just wilderness for miles. I went on a few hikes in Northbound, and it's
just like, when you get to the top and you look and there's just boundless … no civilization per square mile, just
going, and it's kind of scary because it's like, what's out there? You know, or like if you got lost, you could go in
the wrong direction and you could just go forever pretty much. It would take weeks for you to get anywhere, you
know.
(Van11, 257)
To capture the scariness and potentially threatening dimension of nature, how the interviewees approach the wilderness
outside of Vancouver as an “empty” space with no formal spatial arrangement or current use is crucial. While scholars em-
phasise that nature is often “constructed as “empty” such that one may find moments of peace” (Vidon et al., 2018, p. 68), as
we have also insisted above, here the emptiness of wilderness is considered frightening. The blank space that is opened up
by the sublime view from the top of a mountain confronts the subject with a “too much” of nature that leads to uncertainty
and disorientation, in contrast to the “too little” of nature that provided the certainty and orientation generated by desire. For
this reason, another interviewee emphasises that the best way to experience nature is by watching both the city and nature
together from a distance:
… it's like best of both worlds … you have this beautiful view of the city and the mountains and the nature, and
you kind of have it all and just be floating there, it’s nice.
(Van03, 635)
“Floating” between city and nature is considered by the interviewee as the best possible viewpoint because one is nei-
ther stuck in the city and unable to experience the beauty of nature nor fully sucked into nature by losing access to city life.
Enjoying the “best of both worlds” thus means to have neither one nor the other, but to dwell on the threshold between city

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and nature as a way of fuelling the fantasy by maintaining the insatiable (because ultimately impossible) search for satisfac-
tion articulated around it.
7
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CONCLUSION
“Nature can no longer be understood as the counterpole of culture and turned into an object of nostalgic fantasy,” write
Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller, (2019, p. 54) in their introduction to the Anthropocene. Accordingly, if nature in its
material existence no longer exists detached from human activity, then its psychosocial existence also melts into air. The
aim of this study is to question the validity of this hypothesis. By following a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, we
strengthen our understanding of the existence and persistence of nature as imaginary, or “state of mind” (Vidon et al.,
2018), even in times when almost everyone seems to agree that nature does not exist. One of the preconditions for the
imaginary persistence of nature, even in postnatural times, is its images. Images are the vehicles through which nature
continues to function as a site of beauty, breathtaking, even sublime, with which the individual identifies to secure its
being- in- the- world. The imaginary of nature is still a significant contributor to the subject's ontological security today,
allowing the subject to desire a point of escape from culture and society, a way to retreat from everyday life, but also to
get lost in it.
In his seminar, Lacan (2006a, p. 33) emphasises that the ultimate reason for nature to be loved is that “no discourse
has any consequence in it.” What distinguishes nature from society is that “nature is always there, whether we are there
or not” (Lacan, 2006a, p. 33). The Anthropocene radically challenges this assumption by emphasising that the nature
of today only exists in the way it does due to human influence. However, the imaginary of Mother Nature, on which all
of our actions rely, and which seems to be indifferent about how we deal with it, still exists and persists: “Nature keeps
standing there … as the Imaginary, which we can see, like, and love, but which is, at the same time, somewhat irrelevant”
(Zupančič, 2017, p. 79). Nature remains what it is, no matter how we act, no matter what we do, it is always there (for
us), especially when we need it. This is the ultimate kernel that still structures the imaginary of nature, even in today's
postnatural times, in order to secure the subject's ontological security. Or, as one of our interviewees put it:
It [nature] was here before you came and it will stay the same after you came … I think why people or why I
like nature is because there is no discussion. It just came to be…it's beautiful because no one put it there. It
was already there.
(Van54, 58)
To conclude this paper, we focus on the broader political consequences of imaginary nature. One of the central precondi-
tions for how nature and wilderness have been imag(in)ed in our interviews relates to the colonial histories and neocolonial
rhetorics that infuse what is meant by these categories. To view nature as something that is located “outside” of the city, some-
thing “special” and “meaningful” to one's own life, as well as something “beautiful,” “boundless” and “scary”— all this relies
on a series of “buried epistemologies” (Willems- Braun, 1997), which structured the images and imaginaries in our research.
In our interviews, “colonialism appears in its non- appearance” (Simpson, 2016, p. 439), through the erasure of First Nations
people in particular, of which there is a long and ongoing history in British Columbia (Barman, 2007; Braun, 2002; Cooke,
2017; Guernsey, 2008; Harris, 1997). When referring to nature in a fantasmatical way, the existence of native people is system-
atically “repressed” (Robbins & Moore, 2019). They disappear from the picture so that nature can appear entirely ‘natural’.
The erasure of people, especially native people, is thus an essential part of creating an imaginary of nature. If the focus were
to be on their histories, activities, cultures, daily lives, and so forth, nature would lose its function as (m)other. They are the
ones whose existences have to be repressed in order to keep the fantasy of nature alive. Only when their voices are muted does
it become possible to say that no discourse has any consequence in nature.
A second blind spot of the imaginary of nature brings us back to the ecological crisis, which we have mentioned in
the introduction of this paper. The ultimate threat of climate change, and of the Anthropocene more generally, is that
nature stops being indifferent about human activity, that discourse starts to have consequences in nature, which makes
nature lose its function as a lovable (m)other and turn into something ruined by culture and immanently out of joint
(Pohl, 2020). While the “death” of Mother Nature has certainly started to increasingly penetrate people's daily lives in
recent years, including threats ranging from “ecological grief” to “Anthropocene horror,” it would be (politically) fatal to
underestimate the intensity with which Mother Nature's fantasy resists and persists. Even though it seems appropriate
to say that “stable climate … is an illusion” (Hulme, 2015, p. 6), climate change has never been doubted, questioned and

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ignored more vehemently than today. Climate change denial is very much at the frontline of the defence of the imaginary
of nature, creating a social and political sphere where most of us seem to “know very well” (that nature does not exist)
and still “act as if we did not know” (Žižek, 2009):
I know very well (that global warming is a threat to the entire humanity), but nonetheless … (I cannot really
believe it). It is enough to see the natural world to which my mind is connected: green grass and trees, the
sighing of the breeze, the rising of the sun … can one really imagine that all this will be disturbed?
(p. 445)
A psychoanalytic exploration of the imaginaries of nature therefore allows us to better understand how something
that seems to have lost its existence long ago, and thus has already become obsolete, nevertheless shows a certain
persistence and insistence. While it seems common nowadays to assume that nature does not exist, in the sense of
an “untouched” and “pristine” land that would function as a solid foundation from which human activity emanates,
and to presuppose that all “the natures we see and work with are necessarily imagined, scripted, and symbolically
charged as Nature” (Swyngedouw, 2018, p. 80), our Lacanian investigation of the image- based interviews encourages
us to stress how these imagined natures can still have tremendous effects on subjective well- being, and how it is
enough to see the natural world to which my mind is connected to cling to the belief in nature. While this diagnosis
allows us to understand how nature can still function as an imaginary guarantor of ontological security, it is crucial to
stress the downsides of this imaginary. For as long as the imaginary nature exists, the political necessity and willing-
ness to act— both locally and globally— against issues like global warming are diminished, whereas the tendency to
repress all those who do not fit into this imaginary and the legitimacy associated with that repression still dominate.
In other words, Nature has not yet gone; it still persists, even in today's postnatural times. Hence, we want to encour-
age geographers to further engage with this persistence instead of simply discarding it as a mere illusion.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are very grateful to Miro Born and Carlotta Reh for conducting the majority of interviews we refer to in this paper as
well as Yannick Ecker, Carl- Jan Dihlmann, Janina Dobrusskin, Henning Füller, Carolin Genz, and Ylva Kürten for their
work in the research project “Geographic Imaginations: People's Sense of Security and Insecurity in a Cross- Generational
Comparison” at the collaborative research center “Re- Figuration of Spaces” (CRC 1265). Furthermore we would like to
thank Sandra Jasper for her comments on a previous draft of this paper as well as the anonymous reviewers for their
helpful critiques and contributions. We also acknowledge financial support by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
and the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin. Open Access funding enabled and organized
by Projekt DEAL.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
ORCID
Lucas Pohl https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7944-301X
Ilse Helbrecht https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6992-6002
ENDNOTES
1 The mirror stage appears in the works on the fantasies of nature (e.g. Vidon, 2019), but it has mostly been discussed as the backbone of
a Lacanian theory of alienation, while Lacan's insistence on the role of images with regard to the mirror stage has received little or no
attention.
2 In this paper, we focus on the concept of ontological security through a Lacanian perspective, drawing especially on the role of fantasies
and the imaginary in (ontologically) securing the subject. For previous engagements of the concept of ontological security using a Lacanian
approach, see also Browning (2019), Eberle (2019) and Pohl et al. (2020).
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How to cite this article: Pohl, L. & Helbrecht, I. (2022) The love of nature: Imaginary environments and the
production of ontological security in postnatural times. Geo: Geography and Environment, 9, e00106. Available
from: https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.106