Paper short abstract:

As news of ”nature healing” began spreading in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns during spring 2020, this was soon mocked by internet memes. I analyse these memes as absurd, posthumanist contestations of both the anthropocentric Nature-Culture divide and the antihumanist view of humankind as the virus.

Paper long abstract:

Along with the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemia in spring 2020, media began reporting on ”the return of nature” as wild animals were spotted in emptied urban areas. This was quickly followed by a genre of internet memes that made fun of the idea of ”nature beginning to heal”.

In this paper, I present a collection of these memes and analyse them in a posthumanist framework which questions the modern separation of Nature and Culture. I will look at the corpus of ”nature is healing” images as absurdist repositionings, where objects considered cultural have been transferred into the assumed nature or otherwise act in natural ways. I argue that these amusing recontextualizations mock the romantic idea – present especially in spring 2020 – of an Edenic, non-human Nature reclaiming urban space. This idealisation was at the time also linked to the antihumanist, anticultural notion of ”humankind as the real virus”. What the memes show, instead, is that human phenomena such as black metal bands can be considered something organic and part of the ecosystem as well, while some signs of non-human nature healing are the result of wistful over-interpretation.

This memetic reversal undermines the idea of a blissful premodern state of life that has been corrupted by Culture but will now return as Nature’s retribution in the form of COVID-19. ”Nature is healing” memes can thus be read as a creative synthesis where the artificial Nature/Culture-boundary blurs. In short, they defy both the old humanist and the antihumanist view.