The dilemma for refusal has never felt quite so urgent. To refuse is something, as AM Kanngieser reminds us in To undo nature; on refusal as return, usually understood as an act of being-against. Drawing in large part upon their extensive fieldwork on the Pacific Island of Nauru, and situating themselves – and thereby us – in the context of the ongoing pandemic, AM Kanngieser takes apart any tidy conceptions of refusal we may have. “We are told to be certain”, Kanngieser writes. “We are taught in discourses and languages that name and possess, universalise and reduce to quantifiable parts. In doing so, we do not learn to be with what is beyond us.” Kanngieser reminds us of refusal before dialectic, when refusal also meant to give back, to restore, to return. Kanngieser’s text may disorient us, and in the resulting uneasiness, they invite us to be-with, to sit-with, our own undoings.

During the pandemic, I sit outside in the weak sunlight scrolling through social media. I am high risk, my immune system failing; I barely leave the house, though I visit the black locust tree every day. The wind flicks wet leaves, dappling the ground in pale gold-green ovals. They fall onto my shoulders, damp and furled, as I watch videos of people swimming in a sea, far away. Friends post photos of flowers they find while strolling around their neighbourhood. For a moment, an iris’s bloom bursts online. My feed drifts along with clouds, sunsets, lightning storms. There is a yearning for forest hikes and long walks around the lake. Almost everyone I speak to says they miss being in nature. Sales of houseplants skyrocket and people take up gardening. I plant seeds. It’s therapeutic, we are told. My monstera plant grows and grows, unconstrained. I hear its branches creak at night.

I think a lot about water, in this time. As I immerse seedlings, just barely emerging from the dirt, I think about what is carried in its flow. Whisperings of rivers that greet the sea. The currents that pull between oceans, deep below. The saltiness of estuaries that ebb through the roots of mangroves. Waters that return to themselves, always different, streaming off, merging back, sinking in. My partner tells me: you never step in the same river twice. Someone suggests I read about Oceanus, the Greek titan of water, the son of Uranus, the god of the sky, and Gaia, the goddess of the earth. Oceanus ruled the River Okeanos, which encircled the flattened globe. His river begat the eternal flow of time. I think of what it means, to come from water, that nebulous tide. Like the River Okeanos, the word nature also means to birth, to beget. For thousands of years, nature has been linked to an innate essence of life, of body, of the universe, of the human. It is a force woven through the world itself, coiling tighter.

Among those damp gold-green ovals I register the stillness of the impending night. I consider what has been done to reduce all of this expansive, incommensurable earth to nature as we know it. I know what this nature is, and I know who this nature serves. As I breathe in the cool air, I realise that I cannot help but refuse it.

To refuse is usually understood as being-against: the Bartleby-an preference not to; refusal as strike, occupation, boycott, cancellation, retaliation, resistance, from passive evasions to spectacles of revolution.⁠1 The no of refusal is a mode of survival: an impenetrable boundary, silent or shouted. It is a refusal to be killed or to succumb: the Indigenous refusal of colonial recognition, the Black refusal of white erasure and enclosure.⁠2 But before refusal as dialectic, in the now unused meaning found in common Latin, refusal also meant to give back, to restore, to return. Derived from re-, “back”, and fundere-, “to pour”, this meaning fell out of use, likely because conversational Latin was not transcribed but comprised of evolving and divergent dialects and sociolects. The only way that common or vernacular Latin came to be known was as exemplified error, as linguistic breaches or mistakes.

The addition of refusal as return – a definition always already slipping away, consigned to hearsay and archival traces – disarranges refusal’s march towards the future, seeking action, reaction, momentum. An understanding of refusal as return – a (re)turning to an (un)known because nothing ever returned to its self-same or absolute – unsettles narratives of resistance that are framed only in opposition. The idea of pouring back or watering expands the conceptualisation of refusal as an act of liberation. Refusal as return swells refusal’s imagination-otherwise, loosening it and diffusing it. There is something compelling about pouring water back, the way it flows and circulates in its dissipation. Water as reverence, libation, in memory of. Water as sustenance, poured as a gesture of nourishment and love. Water thrown out, released, a dam burst, a flooding rain scattered across the ground (“to scatter” is also contained within fundere); water returning to its mutable source. In this watery return lies a desire for restitution, even if it comes through dispossession, violence, and death.

The dream of self-same return anchors much of Western environmentalism. When the first European lockdown took place, I saw images appear on social media of what were claimed to be the canals of Venice returning to their “natural” state. The photos showed clear blue riverways, so azure I could see fish swimming across sandy ground, swans floating in pairs –even dolphins weaving through the city. All were celebrated as a sign that nature was restoring itself. “Nature is healing, we are the virus” was the mantra tied to the diminishment of human activity. The popularity of the claim was accelerated through millions of likes, hundreds of thousands of reposts, magazine and newspaper articles, all revelling in what, of course, turned out to be fabrications. What the popularity of the claim did show was that the persistence of a desire for nature is predicated on an intrinsically racist ordering of the world.

Nature has never been benign, nor has the human. Nature is contemporaneously defined as the collective physical world, including plants, animals, landscapes, and other features or products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations. The historical separation of the domains of nature and society was foundational to Christianity, which deigned Man superior to non-human beings. Who and what constituted Man had been made sacrosanct by the time the 1493 Papal Doctrine of Discovery decree was issued by the Catholic Church, which permitted Christian explorers rights to claim land from non-Christians, establishing a religious, legal, and political basis for widescale dispossession. This intensified throughout the ascent of the nation-state and its cleaving from the church alongside the instrumental rationality of Western epistemology.⁠3 As Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, post-Enlightenment philosophers and scientists contributed to instituting a racialised representation of the “universal” Man and his others; raciality was deployed as a strategy of power that attributed reason, self-determination, and self-consciousness to the European subject only.⁠4 Imperialism, reminds Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, was always already “a discursive field of knowledge”.⁠5 The emergence of European capitalism was anticipated by the conjunction of racial differentiation and nationalism; the calculus of the world as resource was already in formation centuries before its naming.⁠6 What was considered not-Man (that which was classified as non-sentient, not self-determined, unknowing, fungible) was valuable only insofar as its accumulation of economic value, always in oppositional and inferior relation.⁠7 The displacement and genocide of Black and Indigenous people were thus inextricable from conceptualisations of nature as distinct from European religious, social, and political life.⁠8

“Whiteness”, wrote WEB. Du Bois, “is the ownership of the Earth forever and ever, Amen”.⁠9 The making of nature is tied to the church, the nation-state, and white supremacy, a confluence reiterated again and again through the production of the world. The systemic enslavement of African people by European colonisers, the indenture of South Asian people, the blackbirding of South Sea Islanders violently instrumentalised non-white people for the propagation of white wealth. Vast ecosystems flattened for plantations and fields, raw minerals pulled from the ground and sea for the building of nation-states, agriculture and war – resource extraction has always been a precursor of climate catastrophe.⁠10 Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls the logics of the “white possessive” the mode of rationalisation underpinned by the “desire to invest in reproducing and reaffirming the nation-state’s ownership, control and domination”.⁠11 White possessiveness underpins capitalism as a structure of ordering relations. The ordering of land into resource also translates into the enclosure of land for pleasure, play and study.⁠12 What is desirable and worthy of conservation as delineated from what is exploitable for mining, housing, or agriculture has been arbitrated by those who profit, for whom this world is for. This is why the construction of nature, the nature claimed to be healing, could never be anything other than the most forceful articulation of power.⁠13

So what does “nature is healing” even mean? What does healing entail? As nature is an invention of Man, healing nature is aporetic; nature is always conditional on separation, and any gesture against separation would also undo nature. In the neoliberal sense called upon through the “Nature is healing” claims, which translate most often into conservation, what is being invoked is a more acute policing of nature. As Angela Last suggests, the moves to decentre the human in much ecological work has sought to “reconnect people with the Earth while ignoring their situatedness at sites of colonial trauma.”⁠14 Conservation efforts that displace and harm Indigenous communities show that the way nature is defined is contingent on division and eradication.⁠15 White environmentalism has always revealed its own roots in supremacy, seen perhaps most overtly in its insistence on overpopulation as a cause of environmental crisis. The “we” who are defined as the virus that must be curtailed in order for nature to “heal” are not white, rich, or healthy. As Denise Ferreira da Silva outlines, “the very arsenal designed to determine and to ascertain the truth of human difference already assumed Europeanness/whiteness as the universal measure, that is, as the bodily, mental, and societal actualisation of universality.”⁠16 The pandemic shows that nature is only healed when the “we” who are surplus to this universality are sacrificed for the “common good”.⁠17 This is an unequivocally racist and eugenicist argument: eco-fascist movements have been calling for the reduction of (Black, Indigenous, non-white, disabled, sick, old, impoverished) populations for decades. But to be clear, this idea of nature is not only evident on the right: the dualism that shapes and scaffolds this position grounds popular discourse as much as it does the most fervent of European leftist politics.

“Nature is healing” reiterates the fantasy of nature as separate, while at the same as asserting its dependency. If humans die, nature lives. This anthropocentric lament twins the yearning for a return to a before-time – before industrialisation, before globalisation, before Man – the before is unclear. The desire for the before-time must always obfuscate its conditions of production, to recognise them would mean to locate it in some context through which it cannot be sustained. In this kind of populist environmentalism from which nature is healing emerges, it is critical that the before-time is seen as pure, authentic. The subject tied to this time – precolonial Indigenous communities, European peasantry, early European settlers – lives with the land, is of the land, and has an innate knowledge of their surroundings (echoing the nationalistic far-right claims to European indigeneity “we are all indigenous”).⁠18 There is a phantasmagorical wholeness to this subject, perceived only through the ruinations of modernisation; nature holds the sublime, and through proximity confers it onto the subject. It would be easy to dismiss this social media yearning as romantic, but what underlies it persists. This is not niche environmentalism; far from being jettisoned, the myth of nature is continually remade.

It is precisely in response to the persistence of this desire, this knotty, collective desire that refusal as return might offer up ways for thinking otherwise. The affectivity of Anglo-European nature cannot be overturned through revolution or debunked through reason, in part because there is no consensus on what nature consists of. Nature is felt, embodied, atmospheric, emotional, encultured to the point of seeming absolute. It can perhaps only be approached where desires entangle, where through entanglement some give might be leveraged. Refusal as return is disorienting. It is easier to understand refusal’s teleological drive towards resolution than to be faced with the irreconcilable and amorphous expanse of the past. Return disavows final consolidation into power and justice because there is no end: remember, to re-pour means to come back to fluidity. To consider refusal as return is to turn to the past with an openness to expansion. Return is never identical; the past is never boundaried. On the contrary, the past illustrates the limitations of capitalist time and the fallibility of colonial history. Return is a reckoning with what is presumed to be universal. Rather than certainty, return offers only the folding of the past into the present.

As well as the being-against of refusal, return allows for a being-with, a sitting-with. Métis fish philosopher Zoe Todd suggests that for Anglo-Europeans to attend to where we are, we must face the calculative and destructive logics of humanism that we are intrinsic to, remade through our assertions of knowing the world.⁠19 To face this is to confront the most intensive of our undoings. A return is an invitation to humble oneself to another approach. Being-with requires a pause from which to imagine this otherwise, in all of its vastness and uncertainty. It is a moment between, where one is asked to hold onto many possibilities at once. To be-with such an undoing needs a disposition of attentiveness, listening, curiosity and noticing, an attunement, following I-Kiribati poet and thinker Teweiariki Teaero when he says, “two ears, one mouth, don’t talk too much. Learn to listen more”, or Fijian academic Unaisi Nabobo-Baba when she speaks of silence as a “pedagogy of deep engagement”.⁠20 Tuning into the vastness of the broadcast of the world, as Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear calls it, surpasses on every level the progressive cry of “I listened”, as though the listening we are taught is where it ends. ⁠21 To tune into does not stand in for something else; attunement is a starting point held in the suspension of what we think we know. A pause does not mean conciliation; it is a pause that might intervene in the rush to action or conclusion.

The scale of violence upon which nature was built, and continues to be built, is immeasurable. In the pause of being-with, we might tune in to what we would rather ignore. We might encounter how dearly we hold onto the fantasy of nature and ourselves as benign and good. Tuning-into might reveal the magnitude of horror that nature requires to heal. As fearful as this may seem, to listen and to move with attunement is a prerequisite for respecting the earth and all who inhabit it. The world made by Europeans tells us that we know everything already. We are told to be certain. We are taught in discourses and languages that name and possess, universalise and reduce to quantifiable parts. In doing so, we do not learn to be-with what is beyond us. The immensity of the loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities exceeds what we can comprehend. But as Indigenous and Black Studies scholars, artists, and ecologists show, so do the myriad, and insuppressible flourishings and alliances, the joyfulness and love, the lives lived otherways.⁠22 Attunement leads us to the gaps and silences and soundings that run through everything, that connect the earth and all who live and die.

Attunement is not done in one way or another; there is no instruction; there is no end. The disposition to listen, and crucially the capacity to be open to what is received, changes all the time. Listening is a practice of interplay and relation. The stakes we bring are different, as are the responsibilities we bear. It can be hard to sit with what we hear. We might be compelled to offer solutions: we want our solutions to undo the damage we have caused or that has been done to us. It is counter-intuitive to pause. But in the pause, we might feel out where our own relations hum, and how we hum with them.

As I sit here waiting for the soil to dry and the birds to begin their night song, I think about who was here centuries ago, when nature was being made in Europe. I think about what nature brought with it when the Europeans came. My hand against the skin of the earth registers vibrations. My body, made of water, trembles along. It is from within this tremble together, this pause, that we might better understand why nature must be abolished. Not reformed and not reconfigured, because none of this can be repaired. To undo nature requires an annihilation of the supremacy founded in Anglo-European ways of being and knowing the world. This whiteness cannot escape the drive to ownership, to enclosure through possession, and through possession to isolation and the negation of difference. The parallax view afforded by return is an offering – it affords the conception of an earth unpossessed by Man. From the pause of being-with might come a turn to what is unknowable, a turn to what flows and eddies elsewhere. This is not an individualistic imagination, it is collective, and it is cumulative, a gathering relation to what it means to be together.

In the end, refusal as return, as re-pouring, did not hold fast in official usage. Perhaps the old meaning was abandoned because the comings and goings could not be contained. The no of refusal is far more declarative than the shifting opacities of waters that evade us, no matter how much anthropocentric metaphor is yoked to its tides. A stream, a river, a pond, an ocean; each move as it moves, without invitation or incursion. Return is a relinquishment of what comes next; perhaps it is only through grappling with what we must return to that those imaginations of life, incomprehensibly other to what we are living now, might rise to the surface.

This piece was written on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri and Bunurong peoples of the East Kulin Nations. We acknowledge the traditional owners of these lands, and pay our respects to elders past and present, and to Country itself. Sovereignty was never ceded, resistance is ongoing.

AM Kanngieser is a geographer and sound artist, working through listening and attunement, to approach the relations between people, places, and ecologies. Over the past decade, they have focused on experimenting with sonic methods and practices (including field recordings, radio building and training, sonic ethnographies, oral testimonies, songs, sonifications, composition, and sound walks) for environmental-geographical research.