I looked out my window this evening and it was gorgeous. 7 p.m, golden hour, just waiting for the sun to fully set, barely any snow left. As the light was streaming into my room, I felt the urge to capture the aesthetic. To upload it, post it, and then stare at my own Instagram page as the likes pour in, admiring how nice it looks on my feed.
As much as I claim to be an “Autumn girl”, daylight savings always brings out a different side of me. In a few months, when the temperatures rise and the sun becomes scorching, my mind will change. But for now, I enjoy spring.
And yet, as I sat in the warmth of the sun, about to post a quick photograph—I didn’t think about how unnatural it felt. How March used to mean lingering cold, maybe even the last snowfall of the season. How, years ago, I would have still been bundled up in layers, cursing the wind, walking to my elementary school. How it’s possible that the temperature could rise to 16℃ this weekend. Instead, I let the warmth lull me into forgetting. Forgetting that winter has barely felt like winter in these last few years. Forgetting that the sun staying out later feels less like a gift and more like a warning. It’s easy to let the fading chill take the seasonal blues with it and to pretend that the world is just being kind to us for once.
There is something dangerous about the way we talk about nature. The way we dress it in soft, golden light, wrap it in metaphors, drape it in nostalgia like an old novel, abandoned and left to yellow at the edges. It is easy, too easy, to let the climate crisis blur into aesthetics—to turn forest fires into poetry, melting glaciers into breakup songs, and rising oceans feel like something out of an apocalyptic novel rather than an emergency happening right now. It is easy to write about nature as if it were still an untouched God rather than a supernova that’s collapsing. It’s easy to admire nature from a distance, to turn it into something aesthetic, rather than confront what’s actually happening to it.
Romanticizing nature isn’t new. Writers have done it for centuries—Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, Thoreau retreating to his pond, Whitman swore he could bequeath himself to the dirt and rise again through the grass. We have traced ourselves into nature, made it the pool of our sorrows, our longings, our lust, our existential musings.
I believe there is an issue with this kind of thinking, a quiet self-absorption masquerading as reverence. When we make nature into poetry, we distance ourselves from its reality. We speak of it in grand, wistful tones, but we do not listen. But what happens when the seasons stop making sense? When winter lingers too long or disappears too soon? When everything feels off in a way you can’t quite name, but you know, deep down, that something isn’t right?
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, has spoken about the necessity of shifting environmental conversations away from the abstract and toward tangible solutions. She argues that we must match our personal skills with direct climate action, rather than drowning in despair. We are so comfortable in the illusion that nature is something separate from us, or that we can simply love it into survival. We’re starting to mourn the beauty rather than trying to sustain it.
Even within environmental conversations, we get stuck in cycles—hope, grief, rage, repeat. We either paint the future as a total apocalypse, completely ruined already or assume that “things will work out” without actually changing anything. The Guardian recently questioned whether false hope does more harm than good, whether our poetic yearning for a return to nature’s “balance” distracts us from the sheer scale of the crisis at hand. Maybe the problem isn’t just how we talk about climate change but how we process it emotionally.
I think the answer lies in the need to find a middle ground—where we can still find poetry and magic in the world, but we let it be the kind that sharpens rather than soothes. Not the quiet musings of a wandering poet, but the restless, unsentimental strength of an activist, the one who sees nature as it is—brutal, resilient, alive, and in danger. Nature isn’t waiting for us to find the perfect words. It’s burning, it’s flooding, and it’s dying.