At the heart of my most recent completed book is an enchanted forest. Why not? It’s a historical fantasy, and western fantasy has been thick with enchanted forests ever since the 12th century romantic poets sent their knights spurring under the eaves of Brocéliande. Enchanted springs, spirits, shapes slipping half-seen among the trees: you can do all of that here. Also, as in any outdoor setting, (but especially a forest) you can have good old mood-setting metaphors like gathering mists, twisting paths, and the sudden, tiny signs of spring after a long bleak winter.
When I say “You can have…,” what does that mean? I mean that these things come up often enough in our story-telling tradition that they require little adjustment from the reader. The reader is half expecting them before they turn up on the page. They fit. The reader accepts and reads on.. This is how we use Nature in our stories. It works. It has done so for centuries.
These days, there’s another way we use Nature, and that’s to hold up a mirror to ourselves and show us how ugly we are. Humans are greedy, exploitative and destructive our stories say. Nature is serene, delicate and beautiful, The ideal is to live with Nature, to leave the spiritual deserts of our skyscrapers, our spreadsheets and our screens. Some storytelling does this beautifully, sometimes its preachy, and often, I’m afraid, it’s rubbish.
Have you seen the Avatar sequels? I haven’t bothered. But I remember the original film, which came out in 2009. I found it much as friends had told me I would: visuals beautiful, story predictable.
Well fair enough. If the makers were going to risk that much money on a film, maybe the last thing they wanted was a plot that would be challenging for the audience. They brought out the formulas, tried and tested, and let the public roll in. You can tell a derivative story with great verve (though I don’t think they did so this time).
But let’s look at the story a bit more closely. It’s interesting precisely because it was pitched to be ‘safe’ and to have the broadest possible appeal at the time. What we want from our stories is also a mirror, although we don’t often look at them like that.
First, yes, there was that ecological message. The good guys lived in harmony with nature, with a mystical reverence for their surroundings: a bit like a romanticised version of the First Nation tribes of America. The bad guys were rapacious corporate types, mining ore and blasting trees, with goons who looked and sounded a lot like US military and mouthed slogans like “Shock and Awe.” In the end the world nature-spirit decided the issue. At one level it was silly – even cynical. We were sitting in our heated and air- conditioned cinemas watching the result of a massive technological effort, and what it said to us is that we had to get back to beautiful Mother Nature, (who in the real world is a cold and bloodthirsty bitch and not at all nice to her children.) But stories are dreams, and dreams can have truth even when they are silly. At a time when more and more of us were accepting that we had to change to balance the ecology of our world, that was the story we wanted to hear.
(Although it’s worth asking how much this sort of preaching has contributed to the backlash: to MAGA, “Drill baby, drill” and the popular support for ICE raids. Worth asking, and I don’t know the answer. I do know that people don’t like being made to feel guilty, and yet sometimes it’s what the storyteller should do. Let’s look at that another time).
But some things don’t change. In one of those early scriptwriting conferences, one of the Avatar crew will have said, ‘And it’s got to end with a battle’. A nice heroic battle, with lots of special effects and the good guys winning at the last moment against impossible odds. Hard-wired into our souls, still, is the thirst for crisis and blood. We can turn a lot of things around. We can discard the old macho pioneer- and conquest-stories for New Age myths about Harmony and Mother Nature. But there must be good guys and bad guys and they’ve got to fight. They are the gladiators. We are the audience yelling in the stands. What does that say about us?
Maybe there are a few things about us that Nature hasn’t forgotten.
Last Updated on June 15, 2026 by John