The backlash increased with the revelation that many of these nature videos involved misleading or fake content. The dolphins were filmed in Sardinia, not Venice; a photograph of sleeping elephants shared by one Twitter user and favorited by nearly a million people did not depict them passed out after drinking corn wine in a village in Yunnan Province, as the caption claimed. In reality, most of the animals in these videos have been there all along. Swans are a familiar sight in the waters of Burano, wild turkeys have haunted Harvard for several years and in some European cities boars have become so common they’re considered pests, making these videos apocalyptic in the oldest sense of that word — that is, as a revelation of things that have always been there but have gone unnoticed, like the Venetian fish we can see only because the water they swim in is no longer muddied by constant boat traffic.
But the truth of these videos seems less interesting to me than the reasons behind their popularity. What is it that we are desperate to see in the natural world right now, and why? Anyone who has had a bird or a bat fly into her home knows how disturbing it can be when animals appear in spaces you assumed were your own, as if they were heralds of luck or future disaster. This sudden, unusual visitation of animals to our streets and cities feels similarly portentous, their presence newly freighted with human significance.
And because in times of dislocation and crisis we search for familiarity to ground ourselves, many of these videos work for us because they show scenes straight out of the cinematic imagination, in which the still, empty streets of postapocalyptic cities are often accompanied by a flourishing of vegetation and wildlife — most famously in the movie “I Am Legend,” in which herds of white-tailed deer bound among abandoned cars in the overgrown streets of Manhattan. We know these places. We have seen them before, and that knowledge carries with it a promise of survival.
Perhaps these videos of returning animals offer us other kinds of comfort too. The Covid-19 crisis seems like an intensification of a growing series of emergencies: warnings of unstoppable climate breakdown, a terrible increase in forest fires, rapid Arctic ice-melt. We have for a long while now felt helpless and despondent about the fate of our planet. As the writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben has suggested, to spur us on we need visions of recovery, of renewal, of resurgence. These videos operate from the premise that our absence from our cities is temporary, an interregnum in which lessons can be learned. Civilization has not ended: It’s just on temporary furlough, ordered to its room for a long, hard think about what it has done. Here, these video creators say to us, is your new Eden — if you want it.
This impulse easily shades into a punishing moralism, as many of the comments under the videos attest. They range from a sense of atonement to fantasies of outright retribution. Some videos explicitly state this is a time for “Mother Earth” to “recover and rejuvenate her energies,” but the view of a large number of respondents to these posts is that the pandemic is somehow an act of revenge by an oppressed and violated natural world. One particular slogan, with variations, appears repeatedly in comments: “We are actually the virus to our Mother Earth, and coronavirus is just an antibody.” Wildly misanthropic and scientifically incoherent, it is a sentiment that has been circulated approvingly by white supremacists keen to blame immigration and overpopulation for the world’s ecological ills.