Almost all of us harbor an innate and powerful fear of nature. Much of our anxiety is rooted in logic, the wild is, after all, dangerous and unknowable. But there are inexplicable instincts coded into our psyche that seem more rooted in myth than reality. At night, when we peer out our windows into the waiting dark, we fear a faceless evil, and while we don’t know its nature or that of the wilderness that harbors it, we dread it just the same.

These instinctual anxieties toward nature manifest in much of the literary canon—from fairytales like Red Riding Hood, which warn of the dangers of the woodland wilderness, to early texts like Dante’s Inferno, which crafts a powerful parallel between natural bodies and the underworld in its opening lines:

[Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark…]