What the Wimmera shows is the intermingling of social and natural systems, a socio-natural entanglement whose main driver has been the transformative powers of the human species in its quest for adaptive survival; an aggressive adaptation, however, that includes both intentional and unintentional alterations of pristine nature. The pristine autonomy of nature in the Wimmera (ie., natural processes defined as independent of human influence) is hard to defend. 

The proposition is that human beings are now a geological force in their own right, and the Anthropocene confirms that nature has morphed into human environment: — the argument is that climate change is an unintended consequence of the human colonization of nature and the use of fossil fuels for energy. A key Anthropocene insight is that human action has altered the reality of nature, so that attention to the latter must thus be paid to actual nature, to the nature that we can observe.

 A distinction is therefore made between human actors and nonhuman actants, both possessing agentic capacities. Nature is a dynamic entity that changes on its own and changes in contact with humanity. The agentic capacities are explicitly ascribed to nonhuman beings and even inanimate entities, that is, actants  (eg., lack of rain, drought, dust storms, floods, bushfires) that have efficacy: they produce effects that influence human actors by encouraging or blocking them, alter a given course of events, and so forth. 

However, some actants are more significant than others since  there is a difference between the recognition of the unintentional agentic capacities of nonhuman actants, on the one hand, and the far more powerful human agency, both intentional and unintentional, on the other that involves adapting nature to human ends. The Wimmera is a prime example of the history of the colonization of nonhuman nature in the 20th century.

It shows that though  matter (which lies below nature or is contained within it) retains its autonomy as a vital force that underpins the visible world, this vitality is captured by human beings for their own goals. We are not dealing with the old pristine nature anymore but rather, with a transformed, hybridized, humanized one facing a troubling future.