Area of Effect

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #193*. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.*

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What does digital grass feel like?

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Last week I went to do some volunteer forest management near where I live. We were clearing out holly undergrowth, allegedly to let more light reach the floor and encourage wildflowers. It felt strange to me – this was a beech woodland; often called a cathedral forest because the canopies grow tall but there’s very little beneath them. Beeches are inherently shady, and their leaves are acidic and slow to decompose. Holly is one of the few things that *will *grow under beech, and it provides both warm habitat and late berries for woodland creatures in the winter.

But more than that, I was curious about the idea of forest management in general. A lot of the volunteering I do is litter picking or clearing paths for people to walk; I tend to avoid the bits that feel like micromanaging. Because surely if humans weren’t involved, the forest would manage itself?

Yes and no. I talked to my dad about this, who is a professional in this area, and though he said he would have left the holly, he also walked me through a nested doll of complications. If humans weren’t around, there would be deer and pigs that grazed the holly, leaving more room for flowers and other herbaceous layer plants, so there is some argument for removing it, depending what aspect of the ecology you want to maximize. But without humans there also wouldn’t be a beech forest at all; beech only being native to southern England.

As Jedediah Purdy writes in After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, we live in a world where, “because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings.” Although when I tell my dad I’ve been reading the book and give that summary, he reacts with immediate skepticism: since humans are inherently part of nature, this is not an “after.” (I think Purdy both approaches this idea and never fully expresses it.)

In Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the city of Lumiose is trying an experiment: sectioning off swathes of its urban landscape to be turned over to Pokémon. These “wild zones” are dangerous spaces which only the prepared can enter, and they fall between cafes and shops and, presumably, homes, fragmenting the city into places for humans and places for nature.

Understandably, many Lumiose citizens aren’t so sure about all this. In one early mission, an elderly woman has dropped her wedding ring in the cemetery, which has been designated Wild Zone 4. She can’t retrieve it because it’s been grabbed by a Pokémon that she doesn’t have the ability to battle. Pokémon also escape the zones, causing trouble around the city. Elevators are in constant need of maintenance because they’re being blocked or broken by aggressive wildlife. Once, you have to lead sentient rubbish away from a cafe, which is surely a hygiene issue.

It’s hard to imagine these wild zones are actually any good for the Pokémon, either. One of the biggest problems facing many species is habitat fragmentation, where a road or new development cuts their home in two, reducing their overall quality and separating populations. As Purdy writes, “we can’t just pen in animals to save them. We need to secure migration corridors and help species move as their habitats lurch across a changing map.” And many of the enclosures are small – in one late game area, there are essentially half a dozen lions living on a single corner. (Let’s just sidestep the fact that people can come in and trap them in digital boxes to be brought out only for cockfighting. Pokémon love that, it’s long established.)

In sum, Pokémon and people do not live in harmony in Lumiose. And yet Quasartico Inc., the company behind the city’s redevelopment project, continues to open new wild zones. As Ken Shepard writes in his review: “If the relationship between humans and Pokémon has only changed in terms of proximity, what is their shared city aspiring to that is actually moving the needle of progress?”

“Interestingly enough,” writes Shepard, “Z-A seems unsatisfied with its own answer.” I agree. Quasartico are played as the good guys, lending you their help in stopping Z-A’s immediate existential threat, but they’re also clearly not equipped to handle the bigger picture.

And maybe that’s because there is no easy answer to the bigger picture. Pokémon is a series about catching and battling critters, and it’s also a game that’s concerned with the welfare of those cute little designs. In After Nature, Purdy writes, “I freely admit that no ‘we’ that could grapple with the crises of the Anthropocene yet exists, and that nothing I say here will call it into being.” As my dad tells me, you can choose to maximize for wildflowers or you can choose to leave holly thickets, and neither is inherently better than the other. On the other hand, to clear fell the beech and replace it with tree stock that would have been here after the last ice age would clearly be counterproductive.

“In a world we can’t help shaping, the question is what we will shape,” writes Purdy. The wild zones of Legends Z-A don’t feel particularly inspiring, even to the Pokémon Company themselves. But perhaps they could borrow from something expressed by the franchise all the way back in 1997.

The 31st anime episode, Dig Those Diglett! features Ash and the gang running into some workers trying to build a dam and being stymied by the ground Pokémon Diglett. The foreman asks the Pokémon trainers to fight the Diglett, and Ash and multiple other characters try, but their own Pokémon refuse to come out of their pokéballs. The people eventually establish that the dam would flood the Digletts’ home, and that the Pokémon, having figured this out immediately, refused to fight in solidarity.

I’m reminded of my dad’s instinctive disgust of the idea of being post-nature. When we look to what shape we contribute to the whole, perhaps we could start with solidarity rather than management.

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Jay Castello is a freelance writer covering games and internet culture. If they’re not down a research rabbit hole you’ll probably find them taking bad photographs in the woods.