This paper examines the ecological implications of the Western genre through André Bazin’s conception of realism. In the context of the Anthropocene, the dichotomy between nature and culture has been cast as a problem of anthropocentrism. Ecocinema and ecomedia practices have sought to affirm nature beyond human perception and to highlight the ontological entanglement of humans and the nonhuman. Yet such approaches often overprivilege nature while neglecting the question of the human subject, leaving cinematic nature suspended in ambiguity—whether concrete or conceptual—and thereby rendering ecological discourse vulnerable to charges of ideological construction. I argue that the task is not to recover a more concrete notion of nature but rather to embrace the radical declaration of its loss. Bazin’s theory of realism, which insists that cinema exists only at the expense of reality and foregrounds the gap between reality and fact through the ambiguity of the image, reveals the ecomedia significance of such a stance. In this sense, the ecomedia practice of cinema discloses the human condition as one in which nature must inevitably be annihilated and replaced by nature-as-signifier. Through an analysis of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, the paper demonstrates how the Western genre, with its persistent dramatization of the struggle between nature and culture, performs this ecomedia practice.