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

The existence of nature is vehemently called into question in the Anthropocene

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" categories 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), geographers 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 concentrate 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 actions, 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 like Donna Haraway (1991), an explicit engagement with Lacan with regard to environmental questions somehow became 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 "wilderness," 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 dynamics 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 reassurance 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 pointing 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 establishment 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 imaginary 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.

| LACAN AND (THE IMAGINARY) NATURE
Psychoanalytic, and in particular Lacanian, theory has been repeatedly applied to questions of nature and the environment 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 authenticity 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 reconciliation, 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 '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 nature 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). 1This 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, allpowerful 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 secured 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 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.

| 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 establishment 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 (ontological) 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 "snowballing" 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 positioning 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 nearfar.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 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 interviewees 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, belonging 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 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 following, 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 geography 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 nature'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 projection 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.

| 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 emphasise 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: 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 interviewee 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 criteria.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 interviews 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 me … and downtown Vancouver in those days was, uh, it was before a lot of this development, you can imagine 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 environment 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 considered 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 compensatory 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.

| LOVE THY NATURE AS THYSELF
Upon showing one interviewee the image of a mountain range (Figure 1), he identified the image with Canada and immediately 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 mountains … 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 disorder.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 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 insisted 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 supposed 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 mountains … 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 decorate 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 environment 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." 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 ontological 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 possible, 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 immersed 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 emphasise 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 neither 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 and nature as a way of fuelling the fantasy by maintaining the insatiable (because ultimately impossible) search for satisfaction articulated around it.

| 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 preconditions 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, something "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 systematically "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 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 willingness 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 encourage geographers to further engage with this persistence instead of simply discarding it as a mere illusion.

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I G U R E 2 Arthur Crestani, Royale Ville, 2017 F I G U R E 3 Guillermo Arias, Mexican border, JR, 2017'; © JR-art.net.