Ecological Connections and Contradictions: Penguins, Robots, and Humans in Hollywood’s “Nature” Films

Abstract

As Raymond Williams has noted, “nature” is probably the most complex word in the English language with a rich and varied history of meanings (Williams, 1976). In the American context, popular understandings of nature are firmly embedded in the continent’s colonial history of European contact with a region purportedly “wild” and open for control (Braudy, 1998; Nash, 2001; Marx, 2005; Sturgeon, 2008). Puritan, Enlightenment, and Romantic ideas weave together to create a polysemic sense of nature as the biophysical world that is both God’s creation and Satan’s domain, revered and reviled, ultimately exceptional and mythic—both a material resource base and a source for metaphysical challenges and rejuvenation. And yet, these varied and often contradictory views of nature often function through a consistent, dominant idea of nature; what one might call the “received idea of nature.” In this received idea, “nature” is invariably imagined as geographic landscape and biophysical place populated with wild animals, and it is frequently perceived as radically other. In particular, environmental rhetoric of “nature at risk” suggests an oppositional tension between nature and humanity, which is often exacerbated by the sense of an idealized nature, or Nature capitalized (see, for example, Cronon, 1996; Buell, 2005; Morton, 2007).