Winfried Nöth and Kalevi Kull have distinguished a cultural approach and a general semiotic approach to nature (Nöth, Kull 2001: 9). This distinction has been refined to a dichotomy between cultural ecosemiotics and biological ecosemiotics (Maran 2007). Timo Maran has argued, following Riste Keskpaik, that such a dichotomy better be overcome in order for ecosemiotics to be able to “mediate and translate different sign systems and structural levels of semiotic systems in culture-nature relations […] and to bring forth natural, animal and nonverbal aspects of human culture and its texts” (Maran 2007: 279).In this vein, Maran, and, earlier, Andrew Stables (1997) have provided interesting proposals to integrate nature and textuality. Maran has made the case for conceptualizing nature writing as nature-text (Maran 2007, 2010), wherein there is a meaning-making complementarity between written text and natural environment. Stables has argued for conceptualization of landscape as text on the grounds of the dismantling of the institution of the (human) author as guarantor of meaning in semiotically-minded literary theory.I would like to contribute to this promising discussion from another point of view. As a complement to a textualization of the environment, I propose an inquiry into how fiction is sometimes pervaded by an understanding of the environment and is capable of transmitting this understanding by way of narrative. As an example, I want to examine the rendering of animal subjectivity in a tale by Hans Christian Andersen, “The Beetle Who Went on His Travels”.