A few weeks ago, my family and I made the six-hour drive from San Diego to Tucson so we could revel in the curious beauty of the Sonoran Desert and the Saguaro Cacti. To get there we drove through the Imperial Valley in the south-eastern corner of California. I've wandered through this part of the world twice now, and both times these trips have made me ponder how humans change natural landscapes, and how to be better at noticing environmental damage.

To leave the San Diego basin to the east we take the eight freeway over a surprisingly high, craggy pass. It’s covered in soft, peach-colored boulders and spiky yucca plants. There are gullies and gulches up there too and they are quite green. They’re full of sycamore and oak (the Californian kind with small, dark green, barely-lobed leaves). I remember driving up and over that pass for the first time six years ago. We’d left a neutral, temperature-less San Diegan morning behind us and half an hour later it was snowing.

On our second trip the sky is clear. We pass a sign that says “elevation 4000 ft” and the road starts to tip the other way. We slide down the other side of the pass into a roughly cut canyon, the last real stretch of topography for the day. Here the boulders are more angular; the rock looks shattered. Across from us, the canyon walls look like pages in one of those Magic Eye illusion books in which busy, two-dimensional designs become three-dimensional if you stare at them just right.

The freeway spits us out of the mountains and into the flat, ivory-coloured desert. This place seems too surreal to be part of any of our customary dimensions. It looks totally empty and uninhabited. I remember the first time we drove through here, six years ago. I was relieved to be finally out of the snow storm and then realized that the space I was in was so strange that only a blizzard could do as a rite of passage to enter it. We stopped in a rest area and I was stunned by how dry and blindingly bright this new world was. But mostly I saw that it was a space riven with contradictions. While everything around me was white dunes and glaring sun, across the parking area, inexplicably, a woman hosed down the pavement.

Back to our current drive. There’s a sign for a town named El Centro. Central to what? It’s the middle of nowhere. The car’s navigation system tells us to prepare to change lanes in 249 miles. I’m settling in for the long haul when suddenly I’m struck by a vision of water usage so absurd I’m surely hallucinating. The whole world has become violently green as far as my eyes can see. Left and right, parallel lines of crops intersect at infinity. It's the projective geometry of fields. Rainbows fly alongside us as we speed by row after endless row of sprinklers. Everything is being supplied by canals. This must be some post-apocalyptic Earth where we’ve forfeited nature and engineered our survival instead. We finally cross the mighty Colorado River, born from melting snow on the summits of the Rocky Mountains, glorified, no worshiped, where it cuts through the Grand Canyon. But it’s been demoted. Here it resembles a vaguely utilitarian urban runoff channel. Blink and you would miss it, because it’s basically gone. Instead we have the luxury of flooded fields in the desert.

And then there’s the border fence, the wall that means Mexico. It’s like an endless black centipede. It appears and disappears over and behind the Algodones Dunes, making creepy, two-dimensional shapes in stark contrast with the dunes’ white, satiny sheen. It’s pure science fiction. The dunes near the wall are covered in tire tracks from off roading vehicles. It makes me uncomfortable to see that people can casually enjoy themselves next to a structure that to me so emphatically symbolizes the opposite of peace. But in the same thought it strikes me that many people must perceive the wall as a harbinger of order. An overpass briefly makes us the highest thing around and I can see beyond the barrier. I anticipate a contrast, but the Earth over there looks just the same as the Earth over here.

Weird landscapes make my internal alarm go off. I don't mean natural places that are unusual and beautiful in a slightly alien way, like Joshua Tree. I mean places where environmental change or politics have confused their original appearance and social or ecological function. The Imperial Valley is dealing with both.

I think a risk we face as we continue to develop and exploit the natural world is that we begin to perceive significant environmental damage as normal, even natural. Our baseline expectations for natural spaces shift. I often think about this when I’m in New Zealand, where tourists marvel upon our Shire-esque, sheep covered hills. To me, those grassy hills, though beautiful, are emblematic of the large-scale deforestation, critical habitat loss and severe soil erosion that had to take place for them to appear as they do today.

Being able to identify environmental change is a skill that takes cultivating. Green fields in the desert might conjure an oasis, and a river not seen is a river forgotten. We must practice paying attention if we ever want to think critically about the impact of our industries on the environment. I study nature of all sorts at every chance I get, and I listen to the warning signals I hear when I detect a dysfunctional or dystopian addition to a natural place. In doing so, my expectations for my society’s relationship with nature grow stronger.