At the end of March I was, like many people, spending hours each day on the internet, my attention glued to graphs of projected deaths, maps of infection hot spots, photos of masked travelers huddled in subway cars. But then new images appeared, and they were quite unlike the others. Here were maps showing improvements in air quality, photographs of deserted streets and squares bathed in sunlight and, most surprising, videos of wild animals thriving in newly deserted towns and cities.

These animal videos are astonishingly popular — one video, “Coronavirus lock down effects on animals” on Nature Connection’s YouTube channel, which includes clips of wild boar roaming Italian towns, Japanese sika deer walking the streets of Nara and a family of Egyptian geese crossing the empty tarmac of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has had over five million views — and their content has often been recirculated in mainstream news media. The videos are earnest and encouraging. “What a difference without humans,” says one YouTuber on the Planet Now channel, her voice full of wonderment as she shows us before-and-after shots of Venice, moving from muddy water and bustling crowds to empty streets and clean canals. She talks us through footage of fish and dolphins, screenshots of tweets about Venetian swans, news that ducks have returned to the fountains of Rome. “Look how blue it is,” she says, dreamily, of the canal water.

Such testaments to nature’s sudden resurgence are, according to one Nature Connection video, a “silver lining” to the pandemic’s manifold horrors. In them, human progress, traditionally seen as a movement outward from cities to conquer the wild, seems to have not only halted but also turned back on itself. We cannot go anywhere; we’re stuck in our own homes, and it is the animals, suddenly, that are coming to us. “Nature is taking back Venice,” reads one headline in The Guardian, as if this were a war and humans under siege. It’s the return of the repressed, taking the form of goats browsing clipped garden hedges and cantering along the streets of Welsh seaside towns, flocks of wild turkeys strutting about Harvard Yard as if they remember the forests that once grew there.

Parodies of these videos are flourishing, mostly on Twitter. There are doctored images of dinosaurs frolicking in city streets, a photograph of rainbow lorikeet parrots accompanied by the explanation “Pigeons in London are returning to their natural colors now that pollution levels are lower. The Earth is healing,” and — a personal favorite — photos of limp pizzas flung over branches and floating in the sea solemnly captioned “with everyone quarantined, all the Italian wildlife has returned to the forests and water.” This is mockery with an edge, castigating the notion that wild animals altering their daily behavior might be heartening news at a time of rapidly increasing human suffering and death.

The backlash increased with the revelation that many of these nature videos involved misleading or fake content. The dolphins were filmed in Sardinia, not Venice; a photograph of sleeping elephants shared by one Twitter user and favorited by nearly a million people did not depict them passed out after drinking corn wine in a village in Yunnan Province, as the caption claimed. In reality, most of the animals in these videos have been there all along. Swans are a familiar sight in the waters of Burano, wild turkeys have haunted Harvard for several years and in some European cities boars have become so common they’re considered pests, making these videos apocalyptic in the oldest sense of that word — that is, as a revelation of things that have always been there but have gone unnoticed, like the Venetian fish we can see only because the water they swim in is no longer muddied by constant boat traffic.

But the truth of these videos seems less interesting to me than the reasons behind their popularity. What is it that we are desperate to see in the natural world right now, and why? Anyone who has had a bird or a bat fly into her home knows how disturbing it can be when animals appear in spaces you assumed were your own, as if they were heralds of luck or future disaster. This sudden, unusual visitation of animals to our streets and cities feels similarly portentous, their presence newly freighted with human significance.

And because in times of dislocation and crisis we search for familiarity to ground ourselves, many of these videos work for us because they show scenes straight out of the cinematic imagination, in which the still, empty streets of postapocalyptic cities are often accompanied by a flourishing of vegetation and wildlife — most famously in the movie “I Am Legend,” in which herds of white-tailed deer bound among abandoned cars in the overgrown streets of Manhattan. We know these places. We have seen them before, and that knowledge carries with it a promise of survival.

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.