Resurgent natures? More-than-human perspectives on COVID-19

Abstract

Stories of nature’s resurgence during quarantine have been dangerously conflated with an alarming narrative contending ‘Earth is healing, we are the virus’. Deploying a more-than-human perspective, we show how this discourse arises from biocultural decontextualisation that assumes nature has an inherent capacity to resurge. Such fetishisations distract from the need for urgent environmental action and obscure what resurgence actually is: a multispecies endeavour requiring cultivation and nurture.