One of the misconceptions we have about nature is that we are somehow separate from it, that we can organize humans into one box and nature into another us. Humans like to think of ourselves as special, and the idea of unadulterated wilderness is an appealing myth. Yet, to truly grasp nature, we have to put ourselves in it, to understand our role as a part of that system.

You saw them, but before you saw them you smelled them. The scent of bile and garbage, fruit scattered across the sidewalk like big salmon eggs, that pop into orange mush under your feet. Yet their unpleasant spell is offset by their spectral beauty –– elegant, fanned leaves, skeletal branches; an echo of the cretaceous.