In his recently translated Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber describes ecological relationality as essentially erotic: Ecology is “every description of reality that understands it as an interconnected system of reciprocal inspiration, dependency, penetration, and the persistent search for freedom,” and that “centers on the principle of erotic attraction” (Weber 2017, 7). Weber's definition of ecology brings forward a set of related questions that this essay aims to historicize: How have the descriptive practices of ecologists produced this understanding of eros as both a drive for connection and—even more importantly—a striving for freedom and autonomy? How does erotic, ecological description function, on the page, across the screen, as it finds footing within the epistemologies of modernity? What does an erotic ecology look and feel like, and how might it also instruct this form of seeing and feeling? For Weber, the stakes of these questions are high: “Every scientific description of the world that lacks this [erotic] center ignores our central life experience,” he states (7).Nested within this special issue exploring the seemingly unbounded, while necessarily limited, scope of ecological thought, this article considers the (in)finitude of contact among beings and bodies coexisting within relationships termed ecological. I am interested here in historicizing ecology's erotic practices of description, rooted in its scientific practice and the mediatization of that practice. I demonstrate throughout this discussion how the descriptive practices of ecologists and ecology communicators strive to suggest (in)finite connections among organisms and environments. I aim to do so with particular emphasis on moments where connections among bodies become finite: loosened, slackened, even severed. I take up this emphasis on the finitude of ecological eroticism partly in response to voices within environmental writing that advocate for an ecological thought defined by unbounded proximity—and that are critical of knowledge work and media representations that assert distances between the human and nonhuman world. Timothy Morton's definition of “the” ecological thought is one such example: “Everything is intimate to everything else,” he asserts in a descriptive statement of infinite potential connection (Morton 2010b, 78). Elsewhere, their ecological thought brings our awareness to the “strange strangers” that live in close proximity to ourselves, “nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet” (78). And in contrast, Morton's artificial, highly mediated Nature is always “over there” (Morton 2007, 8).Weber, too, rejects as “ecological” any form of scientific inquiry that asserts a spatial or temporal distance between researcher and environment: In a rather sweeping statement, he claims that “the idea of being cut off from the other, as laboratory researchers are from their objects of inquiry, is perhaps the fundamental error of our civilization” (Weber 2017, 26). The strong rhetoric of these claims contrasts sharply with the fact that both writers also demonstrate an awareness of the fact that ecology also includes efforts on the parts of organisms to distance themselves from each other, or to end attachments that bind them. Weber accounts for the striving of bodies to retain freedom and autonomy in his definition of ecology, and Morton, too, insists upon the distinctive alterity of his “strange strangers.” This suggests to me that it is not, in fact, the concept of species sovereignty itself that threatens Morton's and Weber's definition of ecology as much as it is mediated representations of ecology that, by nature of their own formal, epistemological, and ontological affordances, seemingly “cut off” human observers from the environments that both attract and rebuff humans as participants. In grappling with the impact of media on the descriptive work of ecological thinking, Morton and Weber put ecological eroticism at the very center of this special issue's concerns about how mediation both encourages the proliferation of an ecological worldview and puts its fundamental qualities at risk.1I turn to perhaps an unlikely set of materials to answer these questions by examining the descriptive practices of two conversant works of ecological eroticism in 20th-century modernity: the beloved British science film series Secrets of Nature and its source text, a foundational work of ecological writing, Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789/1834).2 One of the “few bright spots’’ of the British Film industry in the 1920s–1930s (to use Rachel Low's description), the 144 short films that comprise Secrets of Nature were screened for popular and avant-garde audiences alike and were celebrated for their innovative techniques and instructive editing by such moderns as Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and, of course, the editorial team at Camera Work.3 For viewers like Shaw, the cinematography and editing are also dazzingly erotic, administering a bristling attachment to the bodies of bees, flowers, and insects that constructs a longing for both attachment and autonomy. When read in conversation with contemporary theoretical works at the intersection of media and eroticism, the films demonstrate ecological eroticism via a form of mimetic description, sourced from science, that relies upon acts of both distancing and proximity. Bringing theories of eroticism, media, and film to bear on these works of science communication, I show that modern ecological science and its media were vehicles for teaching an eros that brings all life into communion, while respecting, too, the alterity among us.My discussion begins with Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne. Published in 1789, the text demonstrates how eroticism lives in scientific knowledge work: Scientists’ close, but also often distanced, perspective is critical to the construction of this form of feeling in prose. The text has seen numerous renaissances since its publication, and its descriptive style was celebrated by a variety of moderns, including the ecologist Charles Elton, Virginia Woolf (who needs no introduction), and Mr. Bruce H. Woolfe, the director of British Instructional Films, who credited the text as his inspiration for Secrets of Nature. Woolfe directly cites White as the inspiration for production of Secrets: Woolfe writes that White's letters “made me consider the possibility of putting the lives of some of these creatures on the screen. Surely there must be a large number of people who would be interested in seeing something of the life that is lived all round them” (Woolfe 1934, 10).But Elton and Virginia Woolf make perhaps more interesting conversants for the purposes of this article. In citing this passage from White on the very first page of Animal Ecology, Elton echoes White's earlier efforts to ground ecological description in fieldwork, practices rooted in proximity, and attentive to animal behavior, as opposed to form: Faunists, as you observe, are too apt to acquiesce in bare descriptions and a few synonyms; the main reason for this is plain because all that may be done at home in a man's study, but the investigation of life and the conversation of animals is a concern of much more trouble and difficulty, and is not to be obtained but by the active and inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the country. (White, quoted in Elton 1927, 1)For her part, Virginia Woolf finds in White a gender-bending paragon of scientific description, “the image of science at her most innocent and most sincere” (Woolf 1939, 461). Indeed, Woolf goes on to say that as a scientist, White's “own description fits him best: ‘the kestral or wind-hover,’ he says ‘has a particular mode of hanging in one place, his wings all the time being briskly agitated’” (461). Interestingly, both writers point toward White's descriptive practices and fieldwork posture in tandem, suggesting a relationship between the comportment of fieldwork and its representation on the page. It is this relationship, and the vacillating comportment between near and far that is inscribed within it, that this article explores next. White's prose models a form of mimetic description that constructs ecological eroticism, and that informs our understanding of Secrets of Nature's erotic pedagogy on screen.Like Weber, White often refers to love and desire in describing the relationships among his nonhuman subjects throughout The Natural History of Selborne, but he also discusses fieldwork in amorous overtones, consistently referring to moments of scientific encounter as desirous and pleasurable. The prose style of one letter describing varying species’ survival instincts—“an affection that sublimes the passions”—is a prime example of how scientific desire is embodied throughout this text (White 1789/1834, 182): A further instance I once saw of noble sagacity in a willow wren, which had built in a bank in my fields. This bird a friend and myself had observed as she sat in her nest, but were particularly careful not to disturb her, though we saw she eyed us with some degree of jealousy. Some days after, as we passed that way, we were desirous of remarking how this brood went on; but no nest could be found till I happened to take up a large bundle of long green moss, as it were carelessly thrown over the nest, in order to dodge the eye of any impertinent intruder. (183)White's prose has a particular rhythm in its placement of nouns and verbs, accompanied by consistently interrupting phrases and clauses, and it takes us a moment to get our bearing in its distinctive form. When we do, we start to see this mildly affecting moment—“remarking” the brood's development—as an erotic encounter, and especially if we take contemporary theories of eroticism, which emphasize both proximity and distance, connection and moments of disconnection, into account. For Laura U. Marks and Luce Irigaray, eroticism is engendered by a vacillation between distance and closeness, between “near and far,” as Marks argues (Marks 2002, 136). For Irigaray, an eroticism that respects the sovereignty of both partners—or that respects survival instinct—depends upon an essential degree of separation; the erotic caress “would begin at a distance” (Irigaray 2001, 136). This touch is rather a “tact that informs the sense of touch, attracts, and comes to rest on the threshold of the approach. Without paralysis or violence, the lovers would beckon to each other, at first from far away” (136). A sensation of tactile arousal, delivered across separation, beckoning can find form in visual and aural experience, and presumably, through a variety of media (136).Irigaray's vague but sensory “tact” echoes Marks's erotic notion of haptic visuality: For Marks, haptic visuality is a “sliding relationship between haptics and optics,” where “distant vision gives way to touch, and touch reconceives the object to be seen from a distance” (Marks 2002, 140). Marks first describes a “concomitant loss of depth” that is part of the haptic relationship, in which the self “rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface” and which is changed by that process (140). But she does not allow the allure of the protean, because feeling, subject to define eroticism; Marks also argues that distance, via optical perception, is necessary for the creation of this affective encounter, and the survival of the self within it: But just as the optical needs the haptic, the haptic must return to the optical. To maintain optical distance is to die the death of abstraction. But to lose all distance from the world is to die a material death, to become indistinguishable from the rest of the world. Life is served by the ability to come close, pull away, come close again. What is erotic is being able to become an object with and for the world, and to return to being a subject in the world. (140)This is how one “serves” life, in Marks's account: by being able to turn away from objects that seduce us, so that both parties may live in communion, in distinction. Feeling and seeing, moved by matter and persisting through abstraction, eroticism for Marks and Irigaray is a matter of survival.Mimesis lives within both Marks and Irigaray's arguments: Beckoning bodies echo each other's movements across space and time, such that the delineations among the roles of subject and object become blurred. One further word from Vivian Sobchack helps to reinforce the centrality of alienation to this form of erotic mimesis. In explaining what she terms interobjectivity, Sobchack states that “our subjective body image is always also materialized objectively in a potentially mimetic ‘postural schema’ responsive to the world we inhabit” (Sobchack 2004, 187). This posture accounts for a sense of “alienation” or distinction among objects: It is “the density and opacity of material things in a negative relation of reciprocity with the body-subject” that allows this subject to perceive of a world wherein the sovereignty of the self is protected (201). The embrace of alienation, which I read as both spatial distance and formal difference, rescues mimesis from anthropocentrism, and instead allows it to become a tool for representing the shared, if uneven, agency of material things, nonhuman entities, and human subjects (198).White's passage embodies this erotic mimesis, serving life by teaching a style of description (and a fieldwork posture) that embraces alienation, while “reaching toward” the object of his desire. The keys to this erotic description, as Jean-Luc Nancy has suggested in his Being Singular-Plural, lies in the “punctual and discreet spacings” that White inserts throughout his text—and that mimic those he encounters in the field (Nancy 2000, 19). On the one hand, the syntax often brings researcher and wren into close proximity. The second sentence punts the verb to draw the subject of the sentence (the researchers) into contact with (if subsequent to) its direct object (the wren); in doing so, White's prose blurs the ownership of the verb, and thus the agency, in this syntax. On the other hand, White's punctuation and phrasing also mark distance between researchers and wren. White and his friend are “careful not to disturb her,” keeping their distance in the field as in prose; the passive voice construction of this sentence foregrounds the bird, as opposed to the researchers. And the careful commas separate out the observational activity from the bird on her nest. Mimicking restraint, these commas reinforce a distance between wren and researcher. Even still, a closeness beckons: The statement of distance also interrupts the bird's action of nesting, inserting itself into the syntax despite its efforts to remain apart.In White's syntax, the act of researching is vaguely described as being suspended between seeing from afar and coming close enough to touch; critically, his vacillation between distance and closeness mimics the wren's own beckoning. As White's prose uses commas to reach toward and move away from the nest, the wren obscures it with her own punctuation mark—the mossy patch—which, like the commas, also happens to be the agent of contact among White and wren. While carefully scanning the landscape, White “takes up” this slight variation in the terrain with a vaguely tactful sensibility. It is not clear whether the moss is identified by eye or hand. Does White reach out and touch the nest, or does the nest remain at arm's length? The passage doesn't quite confirm this point of contact. Indeed, his parallelism suggests as much: Observing both the wren “as she sat on her nest,” and the act of research “as we passed that way,” White's repeated use of conjunctive clauses forges another close, but distant, point of contact between the wren and the researcher. The final conjunctive clause, describing the position of the moss, “as it were carelessly thrown over the nest,” describes the work that the wren's own mark achieves here, bringing the researcher closer, even as it retains space between White and wren. To put a point on it: White's syntax mimics the work of the wren's moss, echoing the distanced contact between observer and birdlife that forms the shape of this landscape.There are many moments of syntactical eros to unravel in The Natural History of Selborne, but we will leave Gilbert White and his wren loosely drawn together by a mossy patch, a researcher cozying up to a beckoning wren, mimicking her postures at a remove. I turn next to the 1933 Secret, The Nightingale, to demonstrate how White's prose informs on-screen ecological eroticism. Although the film says little about sex, which is itself rare among the Secrets, its grammar mimics White's own practices of description, serving life by punctually cuing viewers’ to turn toward the spaces between beckoning ecologists and ecologies. Within these punctuations, the series's argument for film as an ethical—because distanced—venue for ecological thinking becomes legible, even if the life forms that inspire this argument remain hidden among the thicket of things.The documentary film tradition has a complicated relationship with descriptive practices that respect species survival instinct, and as one of the earliest science and nature documentary series, Secrets of Nature is perhaps one of the reasons why this relationship exists in the first place. How much revelation, via mediation, is ethical? At what point do filmmakers’ efforts to bring nature's secrets closer to viewers infringe upon the sovereignty of the subjects they film? How can film craft descriptive practices that both develop attachments, and slacken their grip before longing overcomes the requirements of life itself?The series's title belies a commitment to an audience's “right to know,” that long-standing paradigm that so worries Brian Winston in his account of documentary ethics, for all appearances emphasizing a contract between viewer and film over the rights to consent and privacy that its stars also possess (2000, 132). Brett Mills has made this case explicitly in reference to nature filmmaking, arguing that the “right to know”—typified by efforts to reveal nature's secrets, even while motivated to protect habitats—grounds these film's ethical agendas. While nature documentaries “do good” by facilitating ecological awareness and, to an extent, by keeping human traffic out of wild ecosystems, they also fail to respect animals’ and plants’ rights to privacy and consent: “When confronted with such ‘secretive’ conduct, the response of the wildlife documentary is to see it as a challenge to be overcome with the technologies of television” (Mills 2010a, 196). “The question constantly posed by wildlife documentaries is how animals should be filmed; they never engage with the debate as to whether animals should be filmed at all” (196). Mills's argument puts Winston's primary question—how much mediation is ethical?—into a somewhat different light, suggesting that documentary technologies consistently violate the rights of nonhuman documentary participants in their very operation (Winston 2000, 132).As might be expected, Secrets of Nature's production history is filled with anecdotes concerning technological innovations for exposing its subjects’ secrets—we should consider it the progenitor of the genre.5 From specific directions concerning the design and camouflage of hides to accommodating plant growth on film to filming below the soil's surface, editor Mary Field—the former school teacher whose cinematic punctuation defines the series's cohesive style— and consistent contributing director Percy Smith position revelation as a cornerstone of the series. They even suggest to readers how they might go about exposing nature's secrets for themselves.6 But the series's distanced descriptive practices—an index of ecological eroticism—germinates a competing species of ecological ethic within the series, one that emphasizes technological mediation in the service of nonhuman sovereignty. Mediation, then, is a source of (and not a liability to) an ethical ecological eroticism in many of the series’ best moments, a perspective that becomes clearer when we reassign Secrets of Nature's priorities by understanding its scientific and aesthetic ecological history.As should be expected of this diversely curated series, mediation in the service of life looks quite different throughout, sometimes relying upon photographic innovations (time-lapse and microcinematography, in particular), and sometimes playing upon the camera's shortcomings. The 1932 Secret, The Nightingale, is a delightful case study of the latter category, leading its viewers into the thickets surrounding Oxford in search of this capricious, if nyctophiliac, songbird. It does not accomplish this work, however, through the revelatory supremacy of cinematic vision; throughout, the camera is often quite visually inept. Indeed, The Nightingale doesn't often speak to Kracauer's claim that “film renders visible what we did not, perhaps even could not see before its advent,” making more legible the elusive details of our ordinary environment (1960, 300).7 The camera gropes and blunders through the nightingale's beloved shady groves, generating an instructional film that teaches the experience of fieldwork as being simultaneously drawn into and rebuffed by the thicket of things. The Nightingale explores how film might not lead us toward a more proximate relationship with material actuality, but might instead teach the beckoning, distanced eroticism that field work requires. Indeed, The Nightingale is a case study in how this series's affective experience underwrites a field work ethic that, as Marks argues, “serves life” by encouraging viewers “to come close, pull away, and come close again.”Shot by Oliver Pike, who handled the Secrets of Nature's avian films, and edited by Field, The Nightingale is known for its serendipitous footage of the titular star performing a sprightly dance near the film's conclusion, an image so beloved that it was caricatured charmingly in Punch (Field and Smith 1934, 229). Set in a circular mask, and scored on the fly by W. E. Hodgson, this sequence is remarkable for its close encounter with a bird who has for most of the film been particularly well hidden from human and cinematic eyes alike. To watch The Nightingale is to often peer fruitlessly among shaded groves, eyes constantly fooled by the falling of light through tossing branches: Viewers find themselves, like the camera, scanning woodland landscapes, “desirous of remarking” the birds’ whereabouts. Field and Pike make the most of the camera's clumsiness in dark habitats—as well as carefully paced closeups, long shots, and long takes—to construct this desire. And as in White's writing, these tools also mimic the birds’ ability to punctuate their habitat in ways that beckon to and rebuff the camera; indeed, the film's structure brings viewer, researcher, and nightingale into a close mimetic relationship that both blurs the boundaries among them and allows them to be carefully reestablished.Field's opening sequence is an act of evasion: Viewers watch cars rolling through Oxford streets, scan the forest in a rare panning landscape shot, and are introduced to the nightingale's often-mistaken doppelganger, the robin. A quick cut between robin and nightingale introduces our star, with the effect that we frankly can't identify the difference: Victor Peers's commentary orients us by pointing to the differences in coloring that are not remarkable in this black and white film. Following this case of mistaken identity, we then spend almost half of The Nightingale's eight minutes looking for him. Interspersed closeups and long shots give us short glimpses of alightings upon branches, but seldom allow us time to look closely at the nightingale; his first closeup is dashed when the bird takes off just as the scene cuts to a long take (and shot) of the forest understory. We lose him in the sea of light and shadow. We catch sight of him toward the end of this long shot not in person but by the movement of the central branch in the middle of the shot, hanging down toward the bracken. An even longer take of about 13 seconds, the shot finally allows us to see the bird as it leaps onto the tip of the farther branch just toward the end, a body catapulting through leaves, settling again on branches. The movement is startling after so many seconds of watching and waiting, and this moment of “remarking” the bird refocuses our eyes away from the patterns of trees and the ever-alluring movement of leaves in the wind, and back to the bird itself. The evasion continues into the film's third minute, during which we follow several women birders through the underbrush as they search for and find nesting sites—but no birds.These opening sequences reiterate the eroticism of White's prose. Field's editing keeps viewers hopping between closeups and long shots, getting close enough to identify the bird, even as the bird—and in turn, Field's editing—insists upon maintaining some distance. The orientation of each shot vacillates between near and far, although longer takes in this opening sequence tend toward further distances. Indeed, throughout, the camera movements quite clearly suggest that the camera is scanning as a researcher would do, attempting to find the subtle variations in forest vegetation that might bring a birder into contact with a bird. At several points in these opening minutes, we suspect that this is the case: The camera pans dense woodland from right to left, looking for tiny alightings on branches just as viewers, sitting in the cinema, allow eyes to scan straight-on shots horizontally, looking for the bird among the branches.Jennifer Barker's The Tactile Eye (2009) offers one tempting way of understanding this moment of mimicry between camera and researcher, particularly as the film asserts its subtle environmental ethic. The Nightingale does seem to encourage what Barker identifies as muscular empathy in this sequence, as the camera, learning from field workers, scans the landscape, and then, having displayed its movement for viewers, allows us space and time in long takes of understory to do the same. Barker's notion of cinematic musculature is indebted to the theories of erotic encounter that I have pointed toward previously; here, she also aims to account for the camera's role in teaching erotic responses. For Barker, the viewer and the film are two differently constructed but equally muscular bodies, acting perhaps in tandem or perhaps at odds with each other, but always in relation to each other. Viewers are not passive participants in this engagement: we may be drawn into the film and also (perhaps even simultaneously) pushed away by it, but at the same time, we might move closer to the film or pull back and resist its invitation. (74)The relationship Barker describes here is a distinctively mimetic relationship, wherein the film, the viewer, and the cinematographer echo each other's “behavior and comportment and . . . the way we use the muscular body as a means of expression” (77). Notably, this is primarily a descriptive operation, in that it does not generate plot conflict and resolution, but encourages a sensory experience of the editing and movements of the camera.The sequence devoted to the uncovering and classification of nightingale nests by women field workers is an excellent case in point. Here, the camera mimics the posture of interested field work, and links that posture to its cognitive patterning. The women gently brush through and search among bracken, interspersed with closeup images of nests. The camera watches the women work as they stop periodically to examine something on the ground layer. Upon their stooping, Field carefully fades the images of field research into closeup shots of the nests encountered. Some information is delivered by the commentary, following Field's strict rules for pairing image and word in descriptive sequences (“The eggs vary in number from four to six, and are a dull olive green, which tones with their surroundings”), and the image of the nest fades back into images of the women's search (Field and Smith 1934, 218). This sequence repeats three times, with some subtle variation; in each, the film reveals the hiding places of nightingale nests under “the dead leaves and bracken of last year,” nestled against the foot of a tree, and “A third type of nest, which is rather rare, is built about two feet above the ground in a bramble bush.” This final shot, once again reiterating the move between stooping researcher in mid shot and closeup of nest, features the hands of the worker brushing away the top of the bramble to reveal the nest inside. Field's editing shines in this sequence, pairing the gentle if purposeful roving of the researchers with images of their quarry, encouraging us to see, feel, and move as scientists do: Looking for variations in nesting patterns, this camera work encourages viewers to embody the stooped posture of field research, hovering at a little distance above the patterns being observed.In this moment of mimetic description, then, the film, the viewer, and the researcher mimic each other's movements, changing postures in response to the distant touch of the others. Indeed, distance is critical to cinematic musculature, as Barker suggests. For as much as the camera may stoop as we have stooped—or, in turn, we may crouch over thickets as the camera has instructed—there is a critical distance inscribed within this mimetic relationship via the medium itself, which is most often viewed in venues far from the fields in which footage is shot. The mimetic musculature of film and viewer gives rise to the “palpable sensation in cinematic experience of feeling ‘ther