Finca el Peregrino was a permaculture farm an hour south of Mendoza in the Uco Valley. It was run by a couple in their 60s and their adult children, who had left Mendoza because the children were allergy-ridden and ill, and they wanted to live as vegans, which was difficult to do in Argentina. The farm they bought was mostly an apple orchard; they were carving out space for vegetables. They were poor. They lived the first few years with a tarp for a roof. Their oven was wood-burning, as was the water heater. Their scrappiness was a marvel: After they built a roof, they laid the tarp over a pit, channeling hot air up to a tall box with mesh shelves; the rising air dehydrated fruit. They built natural structures—seed banks, compost toilets, barracks for volunteers—with scavenged materials. One morning, we went out in the pickup and harvested hundreds of young, supple poplars from the roadside with machetes. These we wove around thicker trunks to make walls for the barracks. We filled the wide parts of the weave with glass bottles, then built up the walls with adobe we had stomped into the right consistency.

It was, as farming famously is, hard work. We planted; we weeded. We sorted apples for farmers markets. The irrigation system was rudimentary: Municipal water flowed downhill through the farm weekly. We built a system of earthen dams that channeled the water through the rows and watched the water reach the end of one row, then spill over a dam and start the next. At day’s end, we ate a communal dinner. I played chess with Ignacio, the patriarch, and two other volunteers, Antoine from France and Bertrand from Belgium.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I was bad at farming. I was slow at physically demanding labor. The family dubbed me “creative” and found tasks better suited to my temperament, like basic gardening before dawn and feeding the horses during siesta.

I woke very early to water the vegetables nearest the house before the pipes ran dry. In turn, I took a lengthy siesta in the orchard under peach and plum blossoms. I drank mate from a gourd and wrote the only story I ever wrote in Spanish. It was about misrecognition: A little onion plant falls in love with the guy who waters her until she dies, after which he eats her. It was something of a rewrite of my first successful story, “A Day in the Life of My Mother’s Pickle,” which I wrote at age 8. In that one, after my mother eats the pickle, she explodes. I’m working on a new one from the perspective of a hot dog.

After writing, I went to the farm’s horses, El Capitán and Pupe. It was up to me to move them to fresh pasture. El Capitán was tame, but Pupe was wild. Three times I found a torn rope where she should have been. She loved El Capitán. Eventually, he would scream for her—a violent, horrible sound—and she would return and submit to my tying her up again.

It took a couple of years more, but I finally ended up in grad school. It was clear that Jaclyne was on a different path. We split up. She became a farmer. She still is.

It’s a common enough fantasy: Leave the poisoned world behind. Start a bakery or a café. Join a commune. We have genres: georgic, pastoral, tradwife. The fantasy of leaving the city for a rural life of healthful work close to nature gained power a couple of centuries ago as a reaction against industrial capitalism. We call that Romanticism: Wordsworth, Thoreau, Rousseau.

Hothouse Bloom—the debut novel by Austyn Wohlers, published in 2025—tests the limits of this fantasy. Its protagonist, Anna, wants to shed her subjectivity and forget her own name. She goes to nature not to restore herself but rather to “live as the extension of something insentient, inhuman, serene.” She is pushing 30 when her grandfather bequeaths her a permaculture farm, mostly an apple orchard. The coincidence startled me as I read the novel 20 years after my time at Finca el Peregrino.

For me, farming was too distant from the life of the mind to be satisfying, but that’s what draws Anna: “She was looking for a certain absolute stillness of psyche.” She wants to live in “the perfect present.” She chases “the paradise of nonthought.” She abstracts the names of animals “into sounds, pure sounds, so that their callingnotes were nonsymbolic and nonreferential.” She is in pursuit of a purity that can only, in fact, be achieved in death. Then, she thinks, she will be happy. Wohlers tells us little about the life that Anna left behind: a boyfriend, attempts at painting. “Experiments in love, generosity, art, work, friendship: they’d all exacerbated things.” Now she wanders the orchard practicing becoming a creature of pure perception and no cognition.

Only two things get in her way: people and money. She is “unsure of how to reconcile the necessity of others with her new way of being in the world.” And: “Even more difficult” is “the necessity of commerce.” A college friend asks to stay with her, and Anna says yes, thinking she will convert him to her pastoralia. He thinks she is unwell. His curiosity about things prompts her to wonder: “Why was everyone so intent on deciphering the world?” She imagines nature—the orchard—as bifurcated from humanity, Edenic.

Anna inherited the farm but has no savings and, therefore, little money. Most of her apples turn out to be blighted. She hires a pomologist to explain why. A crack in her barn’s foundation costs $5,000 to fix. By the end of the novel, Anna is spending most the day at her computer, studying other farms, looking into loans. She gets sick, shits blood, goes to a clinic and then McDonald’s. As confirmation of her collapse back into civilization, her food “smelled great.”

So much for leaving the poisoned world behind. Hothouse Bloom opens with an epigraph from the Italian Marxist Jacques Camatte: “The human being is dead and no more than a ritual of capital.” Life under capitalism has become spiritually bereft. That’s what Anna is fleeing. But the conclusion affirms Theodor Adorno’s koan, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

Almost. The novel itself—not the dark story it tells, but the fact that Wohlers wrote it, its existence in our world—testifies to hope. Whereas Anna is a failed painter who has abjured representation in favor of direct experience, Wohlers has written a novel that brims with luxuriant specificity and rhythmic musicality. To read it is a pleasure as much physical as philosophical. Its diegetic dead end is sublated into the novel’s seductive command, “Live by art.” Like Anna, I’d found that life on a permaculture farm that was mostly an apple orchard proved to be beyond me; like Wohlers, I looked to language for a new direction.

It was art that pulled me from nature. I went to graduate school to study literature. I wanted to do things like read Hothouse Bloom and then write about it. I did not let go of nature gracefully, though. I was still working as a wilderness guide during the summers as a graduate student. I read the kids Blood Meridian in the tent. I came to the first day of seminar in late August aggressively tanned, in a beard and Carhartt, wearing my grandpa’s knife on my belt, talking about turkey hunting.

But time assimilated me into academia, disciplined me into its sociolect. I learned to say things like “Isn’t that a little essentialist?” I traded my Carhartt for skinny jeans, my knife for American Spirits. I tucked nature into a weeklong canoe trip in early August.

Starting grad school in 2009 meant that I belonged to a cohort galvanized by the 2008 financial crisis to pay attention to economics. I wrote about the concept of apocalypse as the literary correlative to economic stagnation. I wrote about how the economics of publishing shapes fiction. It is catnip for me when a novel like Hothouse Bloom opens with an epigraph from an Italian Marxist. I raise my eyebrows; my heart rate increases; my mind pounces. I notice the disjunction between what the novel says (that Romantic pretensions will be deflated and leave us at McDonald’s) and what it does (aspire to aesthetic value that resists capitalist valuation).

Hothouse Bloom tore through me when I read it this year. I kept thinking about it. I read it again. The strange parallel to my life felt like it might be a key to finding meaning where meaning has eluded me. Despite my attraction to nature, I have studiously avoided writing about it, thinking about it. Ecocriticism is, for me, terra incognita.

So my understanding of nature is thin. As is the risk in my profession, one book led to another. I read Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts, a work of political theory with the ambitious aim of situating nature at the heart of the logic of capitalism. She argues that so long as capitalist markets rule over us, we are compelled to devalue nature. Capitalism is a humanism, she writes, riffing off Sartre: It privileges us over nonhumans. Only humans can earn a wage. Only humans can buy and sell, expressing our preferences in the market. By their exile, nonhumans forfeit agency and influence over their fate. Nature becomes, foundationally, a free gift. It has no economic value. It is priced at $0. We do not owe the tree for the work it has done in growing an apple. We do not owe the earth for the eons it took to produce oil. Not under capitalism, at least. We simply take.

But the free gift of nature presents an opportunity. “When we start to wonder why an obviously valuable thing—clean air or a stable climate—isn’t valued at all,” Battistoni writes, “we might start to wonder about value itself.” The free gift can act, then, as a “wedge into the broader structure of capitalist valuation.” If we become skeptical about capitalist valuation, we recognize that our personal choices have limited political salience. We see our unfreedom. We see the need to organize with others to insist on nature’s value and to contest capitalism.

Anna, in Hothouse Bloom, fetishizes nature’s exclusion from the logic of capital, its escape from any meaning at all. She commits William Cronon’s all-too-human error of treating nature as the sublime and the frontier, a fount for the expression of awe and a testing ground. She fails to see what Battistoni shows: that nature is at the heart of capital, the freely taken source of material wealth. She fails to understand her unfreedom—the limits of personal choices in a vicious system—and her brutal education is the novel’s plot. Art is Wohlers’s consolation, her wedge into the broader structure of capitalist valuation.

I am skeptical about the possibilities for change that Hothouse Bloom and Free Gifts offer: nature and art as wedges into capitalist valuation. It seems to me that nature and art are, if we look at who values them and how, spiritual sustenance for the wealthy, with little political promise. But I love these books anyway. They speak to the gap between who we are and who we might be, which, as we age, becomes the gap between who we are and who we might have been. I could have been a hunter, a farmer. I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock. Battistoni and Wohlers look hard at our challenges and refuse capitulation. They offer works of hope, however slight the chances. Every failed campaign for a better world is an ember someone might rekindle later.

A tiny creek runs by my house in Atlanta. If it has a name, I don’t know it. It’s the occasion for an urban farm a couple of blocks northeast of me and a forest preserve a few blocks southwest. I go to one or the other most days with my dog or my kids. One day, my wife and daughter came upon a gaggle of toddlers my daughter’s age playing in the creek, and my daughter joined in. I just hoped she wouldn’t end up with E. coli poisoning. She was, after all, up shit creek.

A student of mine, Dez Miller, wrote a dissertation about urban rivers in the cultural imagination. Miller lives nearby and investigated the local watershed. A bit downstream, after my creek joins a few others to become Intrenchment Creek, it tests positive “routinely” for “fecal matter.” Miller notes how the land on this waterway has witnessed Muscogee removal, plantation agriculture, rumors of lynchings, a prison farm, and, most recently, a political struggle to block the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, known as Stop Cop City, which lost.

But Miller also acknowledges the resilience of rivers, how they persist and nurture ecosystems, networks of life. That my little shit creek still trickles through the neighborhood feels like a small miracle. Water is wild. Anyone who has paddled whitewater knows its glorious force and also its treachery. I remember once how Jaclyne, after we’d made it through a river’s mouth, turned in the canoe and thanked it for safe passage.

Summer mornings we go, my daughter and I, and wade in the cool water. Kudzu and ferns veil us in green. The trickle flows over a log, under the road, out of the neighborhood, into Intrenchment Creek and then South River, snaking its slow way southeast across the state, river into river into river, until it pours into the Atlantic Ocean between Little Saint Simon’s Island and Wolf Island among painted buntings, roseate spoonbills, and wood storks. The Bachman’s warbler sang here, and though it has been thought extinct, rumors of sightings still circulate from time to time among birders who want to believe.