I mentioned Jeff VanderMeer recently, in reference to the landscape in the northern Okavango delta in Botswana. And still I think of his work (and the Alex Garland adaptation of Annihilation) as the best way to feel the rush and pause of nature’s appetite. Everywhere in the delta you could feel the slow motion cyclical consumption of nature — there were no ebony trees without strangler figs gobbling them up from their throats, no termite mounds that hadn’t sprouted massive trees of their own. Everything, everywhere you looked, was eating and being eaten, an inexorable march down to matter, but frozen in time, pinpointed.
And maybe it is that part of VanderMeer’s work, the sense of time outside of time — in settings that could be many millennia ago, or many hence — that keeps me reaching for him as a referent for what I am thinking these days out in these protected pockets of nature, often not far from highly populated areas, in which the wildlife exists as it did…. forever?