“Nature is considered to be the one place free of human artifice, the place where deep universal truths can be uncovered that are not to do with us,” [Helen] Macdonald says, “which, of course, is bullshit. That’s not the case. We put all our deepest human meanings into nature. We sort of force them in there, and then we use them to prove the veracity of our own concepts back at us, which is what nature writing does all the time.”