Ecoporngraphy and Agency

I had never put much thought into the official animal of my state, the Florida Panther. Not out of a lack of education, I can remember taking a trip to the zoo in the fourth grade and learning all about Florida's state mammal, as well as Florida's state bird, and our state flower, and our state fish, and so on. I had never put much thought into our state animal, because in all honesty the Florida Panther doesn't occupy much of my time. I come from central Florida, where there are no Florida Panthers lurking in the bushes. And while I'm not a vegan, I consider myself a conscientious person when it come to nature. I recycle, I try to eat organic and use cruelty free products, and so on. But I'm not a 'nature fan', in the sense that I don't have a 'save the animals' bumper sticker, or a screensaver of the endangered manatees. Maybe this is why I found Welling's assertions on ecopornagraphy so foreign and hard to grasp. How could someone look at a picture of a forest or an animal and think 'this is pornographic'? I thought, deeply confused. However, as I read through Welling's essay, I realized that he was not drawing a comparison between visual representations of sexual intercourse and visual representations of nature, but between the lens through which a viewer sees these things.

The association between nature and 'female' is longstanding and popular. Wellington discusses how 'Mother Nature' has been given a twisted sort of agency, an identity that allows for 'nature' to not only be mass produced and consumed, but to be feminized, (the descriptions of unexplored land as 'virgin' in particular stuck out to me, as well as Welling's discussion of how nature depictions are edited to be unrealistic and better looking, similar to how models are airbrushed to sell a product stuck out to me) and in a way victimized. By giving nature human aspects, and in specific, feminine human traits, a false agency has been created. It has shifted the responsibility of preservation and animal rights from a scientific endeavor into an emotional 'save the damsel in distress' crusade.

In Campbell's own words, agency not only is protean and promiscuous, it can also be malignant.
I think that the point that Welling was attempting to make, that nature has been commodified in the same way that women have been commodified, speaks to a problem with giving non-human entities, that can't possibly be understood in human terms, such as nature, a human agency.