Please Love Nasty Things - Blog Posts

Lately I keep thinking about environmental campaigns since roughly my childhood had to play up rainforests as these bright, shiny, heavenly fairy-tale utopias in order to get people to care about them. But in older media they're like dark, terrifying, brutal primordial deathworlds, the "SAVAGE UNTAMED JUNGLE!!!!" to the point that we still call the same exact thing a "jungle" in media if it's supposed to be more dangerous and exciting, even though there's really no technical distinction there. The reality though is that both are simultaneously true. I keep going on this rant lately but everything scary, painful, disturbing or dangerous about nature IS beautiful and wonderful and awesome!!! It fucking sucks that the majority of people only want to care about nature if they can comfortably hike it in their jorts and their crocs and only care about animal species if they're pretty to look at, useful or cuddle-able. "Rainforests" are absolutely kickass brutal primordial deathworlds. They're beautiful and precious and fantastic but they are also places where leeches will rain down on you from the trees until all your clothes are bloodstained and stinging ants the size of your thumb will make you feel like you're burning to death with a sting and one scratch from that adorable little monkey can torture you to death with sepsis. You'd never even guess, from how rainforests are portrayed on TV, that the thick canopy means they're actually dark as shit 24/7.

We get told piranhas actually aren't scary and that's true! The dreaded candiru is also so unlikely to attack humans we still don't know for sure if it really happens! But you don't hear about the Amazonian catfish, the size of a piranha, and incidentally also sometimes called a "candiru catfish," that convergently evolved with a cookie cutter shark and comes out at night to bite big round scoops of flesh from unsuspecting thighs:

I would love to meet all of these terrible awful things and I want them all to thrive forever and ever. Please love nasty things. We are nasty things. We're the nasty things planet and it rocks.