Ecoporn Exposed

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I'm gazing wistfully at a towering red-rock butte bathed in gentle sunset light, shades of brown to violet framed against a meek background of sky. It's massive but tame, brooding but well-mannered, broad-shouldered but shy. Its silence is nothing short of submissive.

It's the January pinup in the Nature Conservancy's calendar. Environmental organizations and independent entrepreneurs yearly churn out glossy wall charts and engagement books for the consumption of nature-loving citizens like myself -- grizzly cubs from the Nature Conservancy are on the menu, for instance; spotted dolphins and two albatrosses with their beaks interlocked from the Sierra Club; and, from Audubon, a polar bear perched with all four paws together like a performing bear in a circus, as well as a mother-and-baby baboon and mother-and-baby koala, perfectly groomed, hugging each other cutely and looking straight at the camera, with big, dark, inviting pools of eyes.

As I flip through these adorable menageries, I'm reminded of nothing so much as my twentysomething days working for slaves' wages as a copy editor at Hustler Magazine. I'm reminded of models named Tammi and Lynda, buck naked and intertwined, long tresses artfully arranged to frame obscenely augmented breasts, who also hugged each other -- although not so cutely -- and looked straight at the camera with big, dark, inviting pools of eyes.

At first glance, a girl-girl spread in Hustler has little in common with a twin-albatross picture in an Audubon engagement calendar. But both are clearly porn. They offer comfort to the viewer: They will always be there, ideal, unblemished, available. They offer gratification without social cost; they satiate by providing objects for fantasy without making uncomfortable demands on the subject.

The landscape photographs featured in the calendars may not play quite as facilely on the heartstrings of the average American wildlife consumer as baby animals, but they too are blatantly pornographic. We see the Grand Canyon, cliffs lit orange, with snow in the foreground; we see a fuchsia fog unrolling endlessly over the Northern Cascades under a golden sky; we see an emerald-green pool surrounded by red rock in Havasu Canyon.

This is picture-book nature, scenic and sublime, praiseworthy but not battle-worthy. Tarted up into perfectly circumscribed simulations of the wild, these props of mainstream environmentalism serve as surrogates for real engagement with wilderness, the way porn models serve as surrogates for real women. They are placebos substituting for triage.

And they don't even get us off. Nature calendars rely on a hackneyed canon of evocations that no longer serves a purpose. Their girlish good looks have aged poorly. At best, they elicit a regretful nostalgia for a never-known past of unspoiled landscapes; at worst, they reassure us disingenuously that the last great places are safe and sound.

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