What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent ‘low environmental culture’ should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media that provide openings for the emergence of playful environmentalisms perhaps more amenable to a diverse audience. Such ‘bad environmentalism’ mobilizes humor by transgressing the emotional norms of piety within environmentalism. This article deepens the concept of bad environmentalism through an examination of the emergence of ‘nature is healing’ memes during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Implicitly critical of nefarious arguments that the death-dealing pandemic would provide a ‘pause for nature’ and thus that ‘humans were the real virus’, the formal and easily reproduced ‘nature is healing’ genre subverts conventional understandings of ‘the natural’ as well as the naturalization of social order and political economy. In particular, I extend Seymour’s argument – and pop cultural studies of the environment – by parsing five modes through which the ‘nature is healing’ genre plays ironically on differing understandings of the natural. These are the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to a naturalized social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in the natural world. Close attention to different modes of humor provides insight into the ambivalence of affect within ecological and political movements; ‘bad affect’ can, after all, produce careful and critical aesthetics. Such research demonstrates the utility of a widened and potentially counterhegemonic repertoire of affective responses to environmental and political crisis.

模因能教给我们什么，以改变大众对自然的理解？虽然某种形式的环保主义往往带有古怪，自以为是，感伤或启示的倾向，但通常被认为是霸权主义的，但妮可·西摩（Nicole Seymour）认为，不应遮盖更顽固的“低环境文化”。幽默和讽刺可以充当环境媒体的情感语录，这些媒体为嬉戏的环保主义的出现提供了机会，而这些环保主义也许更适合于不同的受众。这种“恶劣的环保主义”通过超越环保主义内部虔诚的情感规范来动员幽默。本文通过考察持续的COVID-19大流行期间“自然正在愈合”的模因的出现，加深了不良环保主义的概念。暗中批评邪恶的论点，即造成死亡的大流行将提供“大自然的停顿”，因此，“人类是真正的病毒”，正式且易于复制的“自然正在治愈”类型破坏了对“自然”的传统理解，以及社会秩序和政治经济的自然化。特别是，我通过分析“自然正在复原”类型的五种模式，讽刺地对不同的自然理解起讽刺作用，从而扩展了西摩的论点以及对环境的流行文化研究。这些本质上是错位的；自然错位；提请注意自然的社会秩序；使社会变革自然化；和自然世界中的荒谬。密切关注不同的幽默方式，可以洞悉生态和政治运动中情感的矛盾性；毕竟，“不良影响”会产生谨慎和批判的美学。此类研究证明了对环境和政治危机的情感反应的范围扩大且可能具有反霸权的功能。