A Foggy Need for Transformation

01 Mar, 2026

Here’s something I don’t know how to work out: maintaining reverence for the planet and its forms and creatures without falling into schlock.

And here’s why I’m immersed in yet another cycle of thinking about that balance: I just finished Laura Pashby’s Chasing Fog, which is generally an account of traveling through mostly the UK in search of great fog. Believe me, I get it: I’m also a weather obsessive, and have been known to go out of my way—even shell out for part of a summer to ride around in a packed van and cram two to a bed with strangers and eat absolute crap all the while—just to see it. Something about the weather, probably its indifference to human concerns combined with its phenomenal artistry, has a hold on me. But enchanted as I am about it all, I also can’t fall into romantic raptures convinced that the clouds are offering me messages, omens, whatever, other than said signs’ indications of all the ways the idiot human species is ravaging the environment.

Those signs, though: selfish species that we are, we shrug our shoulders about biodiversity loss, air and water and ground pollution, changing ocean temperatures and currents, mass extinction and on and on, all caused by us. If the planet’s to survive, we have to be knocked out of our complacency, our inability to see the place for the beautifully fragile abode it is. And I guess I’d be willing to accept a global conversion to caricatured druidism, everyone dancing around the maypole and calling on the goddess and donning embarrassing fashions, if that’s what it took to get serious about ceasing our destructive ways. But until fascinated or worshipful or plain-old treacly sentiment leads to meaningful action, I don’t have much patience for calls to attend to flora and fauna and atmospheric phenomena as intention-bearing vehicles for individual transformation, a New Agey embrace of wild animals as your friends and the world’s beauty as a promoter of good feeling that will let you flit around unchanged in your habits of consumption and so forth, absolved by your appreciation of nature.

I’m not saying this is what Pashby is doing in her book. And we could engage in more of the sort of close attending to surroundings and self she says fog encourages her to do. But in reading, I quickly grew weary of questions such as “Has the fog come here for me?” and yearnings to “be remade by” the fog or “looking for fog, for transformation.”¹ I may have been less frustrated had I known why there was such a desire to be reworked into something Pashby apparently thought she wasn’t already (was she sad, restless, dissatisfied about a life that seemed pretty contented?), or what, if any, difference being transformed by the fog—as opposed to being appreciative of or grateful for its presence, etc.—has made. What does transformation mean, if it doesn’t entail change of behavior? The book offered no indication, and so I was left with what felt like another variety of (generalized desire for) religious conversion—say, John Wesley’s “heart strangely warmed” or the Southern Baptist kids in high school always talking about being “convicted” by the Holy Spirit—that didn’t really lead to anything outside of feeling like you’re good with God and can go your way.²

I finished the book on the same day that I watched a documentary on the history of folk horror, which went through the fantastic camp of 1970s British film and TV drama, in which messing with standing stones would seal your doom; into US gothic stuff curiously terrified by the ways of Appalachians; and on into nightmares of neopagan ritual produced by denizens of high-tech cultures.³ It was made plain throughout that for some creators and viewers, and even participants in pagan revivalism, there’s really nothing left to inhabitants of materialistic cultures, if you’re in search of systems of meaning. You either drool over your phone and just keep shopping and playing video games, or you try to do the impossible, and go back to beliefs and practices that are no longer tenable, but that at least tell you there is something beyond the mundane multitasking and digitized assumptions in which we’re stuck, that it is possible to be connected to the natural world on its own terms. Fooling yourself into believing that burning candles and chanting incantations will establish some sort of connection, not just with others, but with strange forces out there who are interested in our fates, seems like an option far preferable to asking robots to churn out entertainment options we can use to kill time, while hiding from real conversations and relationships with our neighbors. And holding hands in a ring dance and making offerings to the deity of the sacred grove—minus the human sacrifice and abuse entailed in horror films—you’re at least not adding to the resource suck of data centers. What’s the harm in a little cheesy romanticism if it’s at least more human and community-building and maybe even eco-friendly than a life spent doom-scrolling to take a break from answering Slack messages?

I don’t know. I feel I’ve been unfair to Pashby, who does refer a few times to climate crises, who does lament the ways in which fog is becoming less common due to said crises, and who really isn’t asserting that she has the power to summon or communicate with fog. If her desire is to attain to something more than the ways in which we’ve laid waste to the earth, then that’s beyond understandable—but the expressed hopes for transformation seemed far hazier, and simultaneously limited to the realm of personal feeling, than that. While reading, a scene in Grizzly Man kept flashing into my head, where an Alutiiq anthropologist notes that you respect the bear not by thinking you can commune with it, but by keeping your distance and not “invad[ing] on their territory.”⁴ That scene has come to mind again and again over the years, as I’ve struggled to understand why what I’ll call contemporary nature religionists think you can’t engage in a responsible and healthy, nonhuman-centric existence upon the planet if you’re not approaching plants and animals and etc. as entities that really just want to be our friends or cuddly-fierce gurus hanging around with wisdom to impart. It could be that I’m just unfeeling, my German ancestors having left me with a no-nonsense outlook that could do with a bit more warming of the heart. And we do need a full-blown miracle, a global conversion to more interdependent ways of seeing and proceeding, to stop the planet from burning up. But the language of personal metamorphosis, absent any discussion of why it’s needed or what that could mean, for the person experiencing it or anyone or anything else, just feels like more linguistic inflation of the kind that laments a sports upset as a tragedy and lauds a colleague who gives you a ride as a hero.

Having submitted my rant, I’ll withdraw, knowing full well I can be accused of missing the entire intention or point of Chasing Fog altogether. Maybe I should beg to be transformed out of my language-use hang-ups, and just get on with watching the admittedly amazing skies.

<sup>1. Laura Pashby, Chasing Fog: Finding Enchantment in a Cloud (Simon & Schuster, 2024), 117, 194, 196.↩

2. Here’s one account of that John Wesley experience: Bob Thomas, “Wesley’s Heart Strangely Warmed,” AP, May 23, 2023, https://ap.org.au/2023/05/23/wesleys-heart-strangely-warmed/. I also remember a really weird appearance by Billy Joe Shaver that friends took me to sometime in the early 2000s—which ended in a sort of strange altar call, or more like self-justification, a prolonged giddy insistence that as long as you accepted Jesus, you didn’t need to change anything about yourself, that you could, say, shoot a man in the face, as he’d done, and it was all good.↩

3. Kier-La Janisse, dir., Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (Severin Films, 2021), https://www.kierlajanisse.com/2020/10/29/woodlands-dark-and-days-bewitched-a-history-of-folk-horror/.↩

4. Sven Haakanson Jr., in Grizzly Man, dir. Werner Herzog (Lions Gate, 2005). I’ll have to trust that IMDB’s citations are correct: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0427312/characters/nm2178492/?ref_=tt_cl_c_11.↩</sup>

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