Please stay on the trail pleads the sign. “Streambank restoration…project ReWild.” To protect nature, we must stay within the framework of the societal organization. Society, however, is the dialectic opposite of nature. Both constantly work to destroy each other, while simultaneously relying on the opposite’s existence. To stay on the path is to save nature, but only as a vanquished foe. In such a position, it loses its dialectic tension with society, and hence loses what we might call its essence—that it is inimical to us.

When starting up a mountain hike, one does not pick a spot at random. You look at where others have gone, creating a path, and follow it for some distance. In doing so, the hiker goes beyond where they could’ve otherwise reached, opening up more of nature to their gaze.

However, though positivism—particularly as it manifests in the supposedly objective sciences—asserts that more is better, this is not actually the case. To stay on the path is to protect knowledge of nature from being affected by nature. The corporately constructed trail promises the violent safety of the administered world. In this, it offers the false freedom of domination, which can only produce untruth. It says that one need not think of what is below your foot or behind the branch. This hides the fact that it makes such considerations impossible. On the trail, one can see the forest for the trees, unbiased by the nature’s dangers. But without the trees there is no forest; without terror there is no nature. It is only when thinking about where to place your foot that truth makes an appearance. One can only truly know nature when you are at its mercy. It is an autonomous totality affected by but independent of society. On the hiking trail, this is not apparent; the pathway is subtle, making it feel as though you are in nature, but one that is familiar and subject to the same domination as us. It obliterates the distance between us and the realm we left. As such it leads only to untruths.

However, the sign does not lie. Walking off the hiking trail offers the possibility of understanding nature as fundamentally different, as well as revealing that we were once subjects within that realm, before administration turned us to objects. However, we are no longer subjects—enlightenment’s march has stripped us of our humanity, replacing it with the “objective spirit” that rules society. As soon as we step off the path, we bring the administered world into nature. Nature struggles to free us from it; in this struggle there is a glimpse of truth. But it comes at a cost. The grass dies, the flowers do not regrow. In learning about the earth, we attack it. Nature responds by showing us the untruth of our system. It does so at the cost of its life.