little illo for an anarchist queer ecology zine

fellows in violet and green ✸ part of a growing collection! (3/7) 🌷🌈

Was reading a book about how pagans can envision and create a sustainable future and one of the chapters was taking about shame, and how shame around sexuality leads to shame around everything else that ties you to the earth, and so you try to disconnect yourself from nature and that leads to anti-ecological behaviour. Honestly a fascinating perspective - very liberating for a queer environmentalist!

Queer ecology is the application of queer theory to nature. It seeks to challenge dominant systems of heteronormativity, cisnormativity, colonialism, and capitalism and show how these destructive ideologies distance us from our natural environment. How we understand the natural world, and our place in it, has been heavily influenced by media that positions nature as pure and bountiful. The moniker “Mother Nature” emphasizes its life-giving and nurturing qualities. But nature also rages and destroys and fornicates as if life depended on it which, of course, it does.

Some scholars argue that heteropatriarchy is fueling environmental collapse. In contrast, queer communities of care and support, built by people who are ostracized from their families, better reflect the symbiotic relationships in nature. Our planet is home to immense diversity in terms of both sex and gender. This should inspire us to expand our understanding of human identity, sexuality, pleasure, and desire.

Consider the New Mexico whiptail lizard, which reproduces through parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction that allows the female to create a viable offspring without a mate. Consider, too, the “birds and the bees” talk: It’s the clichéd story parents use to explain how babies are made, though as Micha Rahder notes, it’s an insult to birds and bees to have their ravenous sex lives reduced to a heteronormative fable. Both are infinitely more sexually adventurous than (most) humans.

The natural world is much wilder than we can ever imagine. We have so much to learn.

Clare Egan’s reading list on queer ecology is essential reading. 

Scientist Photographs Once in a Lifetime Sighting of Bird with Half Male and Half Female Plumage https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/scientist-photographs-once-in-a-lifetime-sighting-of-bird-with-half-male-and-half-female-plumage/

Have you heard of the Queer Ecojustice Project? Based in (so-called) CA. Highly recommend their zine Queer Ancestral Futures.

I have!! But thank you for bringing them back to my attention because then I can share with everyone;

They are part of a list of queer ecology resources and references I’m gathering and I welcome further suggestions and resources!

Presses our hands together so our bacterias enmesh and on a micro level we become a part of one another

Linoleum print, 2022

My recent blog post on queer ecology + here's an excerpt from trans writer Callum Angus:

“Trees and people live in transition now, perhaps permanently, and I do not think this is all bad. Such a shift in climatic thinking requires accepting loss sometimes, and remembering where we’ve been, what we’ve done wrong, and a willingness to find new things beautiful. It requires recognizing the beauty in new definitions of gender, allowing the expansiveness and creativity of trans people to revise what we thought was known about gender in the past. It requires adaptation to new seasonal rhythms, yes, but adaptation with an awareness that this is not the first time whole societies have been forced to adapt to change they didn’t want, and a willingness to listen to those communities with much more respect than we have in the past.”

-qbv

found these while exploring my camera roll and i just think they're neat

Hinsegin Flétta

"We are all lichens, lichens are us. What is an individual if not a mass made up of billions? We are individually, plural beings, wandering the earth." - Kai Edwards

roses and violets ✸ part of a growing collection! (4/7) 🌷🌈

It is the relation within the human and the natural and the god and the geese and the past, present, future, body-self-other. A queer ecology is a liberatory ecology. It is the acknowledgment of the numberless relations between all things alive, once alive, and alive once again. No man can categorize those relations without lying. Categories offer us a way of organizing our world. They are tools. They are power. 

The field of queer ecology has a HUGE overlap with solarpunk values, theories, and goals. Of course the solarpunk movement must be inclusive of queer people, but it must also account for the queerness of what we call nature and the environment. We must also be able to queer our own perspectives: What borders and boundaries are we constructing, who/what do they effect, and how? Here’s a good primer on one thing that queer ecology can mean.  

Jurassic Park marathon because I just think it’s neat that the dinosaurs are trans

Queer ecology embraces the plurality and paradox of nature, rather than forcing it into the binaries and categories that our society craves.