Finding Joy in the Everyday Wild

As a conservation writer and photographer, Jessica Groenendijk travelled the world to promote awareness of endangered environments and species. Due to her collapse awareness, she shifted focus on how to promote awareness. Jess has volunteered for the Deep Adaptation Forum and the annual Deep Adaptation Review, which is how we connected. I asked her to share with us how she has been refocusing her aims and talents in this new phase of her life. The result is a beautiful reflection, below. Jess will join us for a metacrisis meeting on how an artistic and creative mindset can help us to adjust to life on a disrupted planet. If you feel called, I hope to see you there. Thx, Jem

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Finding Joy in the Everyday Wild – through fractals in a fragmenting world, by Jessica Groenendijk

In the prime of my career, I boated up Amazonian rivers, like coiling cappuccino ribbons, in search of giant otters, tracked elusive black rhinos in Zambia’s dusty miombo woodlands, and shared meals with renowned ecologists in Peru’s flagship research station. My pen and my lens sought to portray Nature in all its glory, aiming to stir hearts and minds, and maybe, possibly, turn back the tide of loss.

But the tide kept coming.

Even as I published story after story, I felt a growing sense of unease, a physical ache under my sternum. I wondered if the Nature I kept returning to really was as pristine as I imagined. I saw pockets of forest razed to make way for illegal coca crops. I watched lake shores and riverbanks being ravaged and poisoned by gold miners. I continued writing, kept photographing, but found myself lurching between panic, rage, denial, and grief.

Finally, I stopped communicating altogether.

Now I live near a small, rural town in the UK, tucked between sloping fields and bramble-thick hedgerows. Here, I have once again started writing and going on photography walks with my father, not to seek spectacle, but to witness what still exists – a cupped, pink mushroom, a young newt suspended in a web of gossamer algae, a gnarled beech tree elder surrounded by young saplings.

It is this tree that opened my eyes to Nature’s fractals.

A fractal is a pattern in which every smaller part of a structure is similar to the whole —think of a fern’s frond, a cow parsley flower, or a snowflake. Infinite complexity born of simple repetition at different scales. It’s everywhere once you know how to look. Not only in grand displays, like cloudscapes or river watersheds, but also in small, stubborn repetitions.

Last week, I re-visited the old beech tree with my father. I felt the same awe I once experienced during a close encounter with a jaguar in Peru. Perhaps deeper. Because on this occasion, we found the tree injured. Three thick branches had broken off in high winds, leaving behind jagged, raw wounds. Somehow, the lack of those branches made me aware for the first time of its remaining sweeping limbs mirroring its moss-cloaked roots. Fractals holding the earth and reaching into the sky.

Even amid so much destruction, Nature’s signature persists.

The concept of Deep Adaptation helped me make peace with my ecological grief. It doesn’t pretend we can reverse the damage, doesn’t offer false hope or technofixes. It’s about what we do with the awareness that collapse, in various forms, is probably already unfolding. How do we live with dignity, compassion, and community in the shadow of unravelling systems? How do we root, like trees, rather than flounder?

My writing and photography have become acts of Deep Adaptation. Not in the traditional sense of strategy or resilience planning, but in the emotional and spiritual sense. Cultivating attention. Gratitude. Remembrance. I no longer photograph and write to save Nature. I do so to witness it, to affirm it still sings, though muted. Each image, each story, is an offering of reverence. A reminder that life remains, and, therefore, so does potential. 

There’s humility in turning from the dramatic to the domestic, from the endangered to the enduring. But I no longer see this shift as lesser. On the contrary, it feels more real. A return to wildness as a part of everyday life —hidden in leaf litter, heard in the hoot of a tawny owl, found in the resilience of weeds. With deep adaptation in mind, I choose to help inspire my family, friends, and community to a greater love for what is natural around us, our home. 

Sometimes I miss my old life. I feel a pang of nostalgia when I recall the myriad sounds of the rainforest or the soap opera of giant otter lives. But I’ve come to believe that the fractal beauty of Nature —this self-replicating, ever-emerging pattern —offers us a powerful promise. It is the promise of Nature’s irrepressible impulse for creation and survival, wherever we are. Even, or especially, in quiet corners of a field in East Sussex.

So, I write and I photograph. Not because I believe this will reverse extinction or halt the fires and floods. But because I am grateful. In love. The act of communicating for Nature grounds me, hones my seeing, draws me close. And what I now understand is that, whatever happens, Nature’s fractal promise will remain.

With thanks to Jem for his insightful input.

Jess.

[Photograph of the beech tree and dad by Jessica]

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You can read and see more from Jess on her new Substack – the blue hour journal. Jess’s reflections remind me of the approach of a former coordinator of the DA Forum, Zori Tomova. In a recorded DA Q&A, she explained how the predicament we face had woken her up to the need to prioritise what she most loved about life, and celebrate that while encouraging others to do the same. The video of our chat is below. It would be great if you could join Jess, myself and other like minds, discussing these matters in an online seminar. To do that, please sign up to the Metacrisis Meetings initiative. Thx, Jem

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