This animated image attempts to problematize the Romantic ideal of nature that is still prominent in many of the narratives responding to the current and coming environmental disaster. In this image, we try to move away from the Romantic ideal—represented here by an emblematic image of Loweswater in the Lake District National Park in Cumbria, England—which is iconic of a conceptualization of nature as benign, harmonious, and beautiful. This interpretation, which in part can be traced back to the eighteenth-century “Lake Poets” such as William Wordsworth or Thomas De Quincey, is today perpetuated through the Lake District tourism industry as well as nature-conservation strategies.11One might even see this type of “perfect nature” indirectly or unintentionally invoked in certain types of imaginations of low-carbon futures. See Leigh Martindale, “Understanding Humans in the Anthropocene: Finding answers in geoengineering and transition towns,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 33, no. 5 (2015): pp. 907‒24.

Moving away from nature and the wild as picturesque and smooth, we engage with the geological and the processes of formation that have contributed to making the Lake District what it is today, but which are missing from the Romantic frame. Examples include the Ordovician supervolcano that produced eruptions on a scale to rival Toba and shaped many of its current hills and rock formations, the now nonexistent glaciers that carved its valleys, the Neolithic stone-axe factory that tapped a particular layer of volcanic ash, the graphite mineral discovered in the sixteenth century that led to the eventual globalization of the pencil and, indirectly, towards development of the new “wonder material” graphene, and the agricultural imprint left on the landscape through the clearing of the forests and the impact this has had on responses to climate change, particularly increased flooding.

Contrary to the popular notion of the Lakes as a “natural” landscape, George Monbiot introduced an ecological perspective when he reacted to the Lake District’s nomination as a World Heritage Site by coining the area a “wildlife desert.”22George Monbiot, “Climate change? Try catastrophic climate breakdown,” The Guardian (September 27, 2013), online (accessed 11/07/2015). In a similar way, this picture takes up Kathryn Yusoff’s33Kathryn Yusoff, “Geologic Life: Prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 31, no. 5 (2013): pp. 779‒95. invitation in which she, among others, recommends thinking of the Anthropocene as a “geological turn,” recognizing Anthropos’ indebtedness to earthly and nonhuman processes.

The background image, representing “deep time” and the interconnectedness of the Earth’s processes, is the “golden spike” in Zumaia (the Basque country, northern Spain), one of only a few places on Earth where the K-T Boundary is visible.44An iridium spike represents the catastrophic event caused by collision with a meteorite: the “nuclear winter,” provoked by the ash and debris of the impact, brought about extinction of the dominant land animal of the time, the dinosaurs. The image also depicts Milankovitch cycles recorded in rhythmic sedimentary layering in the flysch. While the K-T Boundary can be seen as an analogy of the crisis unfolding as the result of human engagement with Earth, Milankovitch cycles remind us that we should not consider nature and our place within it without also considering the geological and the cosmic.55Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable life on a dynamic planet. London: Sage Publications, 2011. Therefore, the actual golden spike only becomes visible when Loweswater fades away, just as only when we discard the now-obsolete Romantic model will we really be able to confront planetary catastrophe. While Milankovitch cycles are smooth and gradational, the meteorite impact is sudden and unexpected. But both of these seem to be excluded from the Romantic image of Loweswater.

The picture prompts the question: What happens to our idea of nature when we take into account all of these excluded agents, interconnections, and processes? Now, with the geological brought to the foreground in Loweswater, it is up to the observer to take up the challenge of working out what that means for human‒nature relations.