Luciente, although coming from what seems like a simpler future, has the privilege of being able to experience and train in the wilderness without as many consequences as Connie faces, which is what makes this experience less traumatic for Luciente. 
The only risk in the utopia is the war they are fighting, and even that feels distant and not an immediate threat. But in Connie’s time she has to be constantly aware of the forces working against her, let alone the problems with the world outside of the mental institution. The absence of the resources to control exposure to risk, especially in the environment, sets up who the ecological subject and the ecological other are even more distinctly; Connie, in being unable to control her life at all, must be the ecological other because she has no choice but to let her relationships to the land be decided by other people. 
Luciente doesn’t ignore Connie’s needs, though, helping her find food, shelter, and teaching her how to make a fire, all knowledge that comes from the inherently environmentally sustainable connotations of the Ecological Indian. 
Connie now is having the wilderness experience that a Camp Fire Girl or Innocente would have had, with environmentally based freedom and the ability to savor, not struggle against, the outdoors. 
Connie others herself like this after feeling comfortable in the wilderness because she knows that it wasn’t her knowledge or skills that are providing for her; instead it is someone who is accepted as being environmental, who has assumed and lives as the Ecological Indian. Connie knows she isn’t like Innocente, experiencing the wilderness on her own in order to develop as a person, but rather the ecological other who has been kept out of the wilderness by means of which she has no control over. 
One similarity between Connie and Innocente as they experience the wilderness is that the spaces, they are in are manufactured, changing how they adapt to their manmade wilderness. The utopia is clearly a reconstruction of what the Earth, according to environmentalists, ought to be, even manufacturing racial diversity. Innocente learns a different set of skills than what Connie needs to know, as they are privileged to have a pristine wilderness. 
 This realization of the trees being a human landscape allows a connection between the utopia and the present, where an expression of the utopia’s environmentalism can be traced back to this moment. These trees and whoever planted them were working to help the earth, but in doing so inadvertently saved Connie’s life, for even just those moments she is there. However, this sets Connie up against the person who planted the trees, who left a positive legacy on the earth while Connie struggled with even just having freedom from the mental institution. Being the ecological other makes Connie a failure in her own time because of this. 
