Post
THREAD
1/5
I want to pick up another part of the ‘nature cure’ problem
When a woman writes about the outdoors, people often reach for the same narrative template. She walked, she felt better, the land healed her. It can read as wholesome encouragement, even harmless, but the effect is anything but neutral.
‘Nature cure’ quietly shifts the focus away from the systemic forces that harmed her in the first place.
#Scotland #Writing #WritingCommunity #Reading #Books #NatureWriting #Nature
2/5
It turns structural pressures into private moods and political realities into matters of personal wellbeing. And it offers an easy fix where none exists.
3/5
My book ‘Drystone - A Life Rebuilt’ is about things that cannot be remedied by a hike. Reading it otherwise trivialises both that weight and the lives marked by it. My physical engagement with drystone appears late in the narrative so it cannot be mistaken for a cure, and I never propose one. Racism does not vanish because I feel the weight of a stone in my hand. Misogyny does not retreat because I observe the textures of the Perthshire hills.
4/5
If walking were sufficient, ramblers would have dismantled the patriarchy by now.
5/5
Nature cure is a quiet form of erasure. And a cop-out.
The land is there, it can hold us, but it cannot remake the world. Only we can do that.
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