Perhaps these videos of returning animals offer us other kinds of comfort too. The Covid-19 crisis seems like an intensification of a growing series of emergencies: warnings of unstoppable climate breakdown, a terrible increase in forest fires, rapid Arctic ice-melt. We have for a long while now felt helpless and despondent about the fate of our planet. As the writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben has suggested, to spur us on we need visions of recovery, of renewal, of resurgence. These videos operate from the premise that our absence from our cities is temporary, an interregnum in which lessons can be learned. Civilization has not ended: It’s just on temporary furlough, ordered to its room for a long, hard think about what it has done. Here, these video creators say to us, is your new Eden — if you want it.

This impulse easily shades into a punishing moralism, as many of the comments under the videos attest. They range from a sense of atonement to fantasies of outright retribution. Some videos explicitly state this is a time for “Mother Earth” to “recover and rejuvenate her energies,” but the view of a large number of respondents to these posts is that the pandemic is somehow an act of revenge by an oppressed and violated natural world. One particular slogan, with variations, appears repeatedly in comments: “We are actually the virus to our Mother Earth, and coronavirus is just an antibody.” Wildly misanthropic and scientifically incoherent, it is a sentiment that has been circulated approvingly by white supremacists keen to blame immigration and overpopulation for the world’s ecological ills.

But the more I watch these videos, the more they seem to work against such corrosive forms of cynicism and despair. The images they give us, of shadowy power lines and antlers, of wide, deserted sands packed with flocks of seabirds and turtles, also open up a space for us to imagine the new world that will come when this crisis is over, a space that might allow us not only to rethink how we relate to the natural world but to one another. The video that’s playing in the corner of my computer screen right now explains that animals now have the opportunity to “discover all that they have been denied” and are able to reclaim “what is rightfully theirs.” The disregarded, unvalued and oppressed are returning to reclaim their spaces, just as we are seeing a shift toward recognizing the essential roles of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, grocery assistants, porters, postal workers, health workers, caregivers and so many other people who are working on the front lines of the crisis. I begin to see that the animals in these videos are far more than flesh and bone. They are emissaries of hope and possibility, letting us dare to dream of a better world when this nightmarish darkness is gone.