“This is our version of being whole—as immigrants and as Texans.” In this movingand beautiful personal essay, Jenny Tinghui Zhang reflects on family, sacrifice, and a life of driving in Texas. Zhang describes a childhood and adulthood ruled by the road, her parents’ hard work over the decades, and a family separated by long distances.
Once, when I visited my parents in Katy over the holidays, I walked in on them riding their stationary bikes, which they had placed next to each other in front of the TV. I don’t know how long I stood there watching them. I felt melancholy seeing them together like this, pedaling in place in the same direction but still separated and going nowhere. My mother had achieved tenure at her community college, and my father was at a good place with work. Neither of them wanted to risk another bout of unemployment by giving up their job.
They shouldn’t have to pedal this hard only to stay in place, I remember thinking. They shouldn’t have to live in this disjointed fracture. I stood there watching them and I wondered: How much longer can we do this? Just how much distance can a family withstand?
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It’s ironic when you consider that homophobia originated from the idea that homosexual behavior is a crime against nature. What is considered “natural” or “unnatural” has been used to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people, as well as people of color and Indigenous people, for generations. And yet, nature has always been flamboyantly queer, insatiable in its appetite for sex, pleasure, and new life.
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.
Stories about nature have been used to advance right-wing fundamentalist views. When The March of thePenguins was released in 2005, Christian fundamentalists rejoiced at its depiction of penguins as upstanding, monogamous partners, paragons of traditional family values. But there are also examples of penguins in committedgay relationships.
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.
As we bear witness to the destruction wrought by climate change, we need new ways of interacting with the environment. As you’ll see in this reading list, queer ecology offers a new lens through which we can reimagine our relationships with our bodies, our peers, and nature.
This thoughtful personal essay by queer conservationist Alex Johnson, laid out in the form of a lesson plan, joyfully challenges the double standard inherent in believing that nature intended for only a man and a woman to love each other and that humans ought to tear the earth apart to extract fossil fuels. Nature writing tends to be either beatific in describing the wonders of the natural world or despairing at how we are destroying it. But Johnson’s essay calmly collapses that dichotomy, noting how we “call geese beautiful and elegant and faithful until they are shitting all over the lawn and terrorizing young children.”
Writing about nature means accepting that it will prove you wrong. And right. And render you generally confused. Nature is mysterious, and our part in the pageant is shrouded in mystery as well. This means contradiction and paradox and irony. It means that there will always be an exception. Nature has always humiliated the self-congratulatory scientist.
The @QueerWildlife Instagram account challenges dominant narratives about nature and highlights examples of queer ecology in action.
Established in 2017, The Institute for Queer Ecology (IQECO) is a collaborative “organism” that is guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonized thought. Landon Peoples’ wide-ranging interview with its founder, Lee Pivnik, explores the institute’s creative mission to champion inventive solutions to the climate crisis. The institute aims to challenge mainstream ideas of humans versus nature and celebrate opportunities for synergy with the natural world. Lee, who identifies as queer, reflects on the intersections between his own identity, evolution, and the false binary that exists between culture and nature. This conversation offers a useful framework on how to find “beautiful fluidity” in a time of constant change.
The Institute of Queer Ecology acts as a visioning tool to speculate and imagine a new world that we can inhabit together—thinking of change as this grounding, universal principle that we first see in ourselves, and then acknowledging ourselves as individuals in the beautiful fluidity that queerness promises at the individual level—where you have the ability to constantly make yourself resistant to categorization.
“There’s nothing more queer than nature,” Brigitte Baptiste argues in her short but compelling TEDx talk. Baptiste, one of the world’s most influential environmental experts, founded the leading biodiversity research center in her native Colombia. She has advised the U.N., written more than a dozen books, and won international prizes for her work. Najit Benrabaa’s interview covers Baptiste’s unique career path, “green capitalism,” and how a queer lens informs her work. Her fascinating personal story runs in parallel to her work as a biologist in Colombia, which is the most biodiverse country in the world per square kilometer.
The queer view of biodiversity helps us assign new words to the transformations instead of reducing ourselves to canonical parameters or stereotyped descriptions. There is multiplicity in species and ecosystems. Queer ecology is a different way of looking at nature—it insists on the fact that we can enjoy, without prejudice, the diversity of life forms and sexualities being expressed.
Interested in the sensual aspects of queer ecology? The podcast Serpentine has a series of lush conversations on nature, pleasure, and desire.
Grassilingus, anyone? In her funny and thought-provoking essay, Meghan Flaherty examines ecosexuality and wonders how we ought to interact with nature. Her essay is carnal and complex, layering works of indigenous wisdom like Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass with the teachings of Instagram personalities like @MyOrgasmicLife, who calls herself the “Brené Brown of pussy.” Flaherty discovers, as both a gardener and an intellectual, that engaging with nature without exploiting it restores us in ways we can’t yet define. Quoting Kimmerer, she concludes that “any action on behalf of life will be reciprocated: ‘We restore the land, and the land restores us.’”
There is no dualism. There is no big divide. We are all connected, with or without souls. Hierarchy, any domination in the web of life, hurts everyone. “All flourishing is mutual.” We flourish, all of us together, or we flourish not at all. We start respecting all these “others”—nature, perhaps, first and foremost—or we die.
Rebecca May Johnson’s piece also begins in her garden. During the COVID lockdown, she passes her time growing vegetables and experiences how challenging it is to contain nature’s voracious appetite for life. Dividing land into allotments rented by individual gardeners proves futile as the vegetables copulate underground; growing courgettes and pumpkins side by side, she harvests strange hybrid crops with ombréd colors and alien textures. As she weeds, she listens to podcasts about gay women in France who are banned from having children through IVF. She thinks of her friends trying to become pregnant, of the “the intense, repressive hell” of making babies under patriarchy. Her essay expands into an argument for generosity — in terms of both material things and one’s frame of reference — as she shares the produce from her teeming garden with friends, lest they rot in the soil.
That violent heteronormative cultures of sex and reproduction among humans are attributed to ‘nature’ feels astonishing after spending time on the allotment. The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel that makes a mockery of conservative ideas of the natural.
The food on my table is a persistent connection I have with nature. Whether it’s the herbs I grow on my windowsills or the veggies I pick up at the farmer’s market, it’s thrilling to think about nature’s queerness as I prepare dinner for my girlfriend. Like most people, we rely on an agricultural industry that exploits the earth’s resources for profit. Queer farmers, many of them nonwhite, are redefining what it means to farm the land respectfully, thinking of their crops “not as resources to be extracted, but rather as members of an ecosystem.” Daphne Chouliaraki Milner writes about mindful land practices and behavior-based animal management, reimagining one of the most environmentally damaging industries on the planet. This piece highlights the many challenges with monoculture farming and charts a path toward a more equitable and healthier future for the planet and all of its inhabitants.
“Queer theory complicates reductive binary understandings of the world; it complicates ideas of hierarchy; it complicates the idea that there are better positions and worse positions”, said Benedict Morrison, member of Quinta, an ecovillage and LGBTQIA+ community project. “Queering our food systems is an attempt at radical empathy. It’s an attempt to always find the value in difference.”
Clare Eganis a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes aregular newsletterand is working on her first book.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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Fittingly, for an essay about St. Patrick’s Day, this is a jolly piece — but one that also touches on the loneliness of moving to a new community. Harrison Scott Key takes us on a raucous ride, and although I doubt I will ever end up at the parade he describes, after reading this essay I have a sense of what it would be like if I did. Crazy.
I love these men, because it’s easier to love people you’ve watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning while you film it for your friends. Not that you always get so carried away. But you do. You forget to eat. And while our wives and girlfriends steer clear of all this good clean fun in the days before the parade, many have begun to join us for the storming of the square, along with our sons and daughters, grown tall now, who have made this ritual their own, generation to generation, as it should be.
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Vidya Athreya shares her field research and personal experience working as an ecologist in the Indian state of Maharashtra, focused on leopard ecology, conservation, and human-carnivore conflict. Around the world, people see big cats like leopards as dangerous and bloodthirsty, when really the primary threat to big cats is humans. In this piece, Athreya touches on the complex relationships humans have had with big cats since prehistory, and documents the surprising things she’s learned about the behavior, movements, and eating habits of the region’s leopards. She asks: Can humans and leopards coexist in shared landscapes?
Leopards were not only surviving but raising families in this agricultural landscape—and there was something about the way local people dealt with it that I could not fathom. I’d been trained to see the juxtaposition of large carnivores and people as a situation of imminent conflict. One day, early in my research in Akole, I drove with Ghule kaka (“kaka,” an honorific, means uncle), the farmer I was working with, to interview a woman whose goat had been killed by a leopard. Like a typical wildlife biologist, I asked her what problems she had with leopards. She brusquely replied that a particular leopard routinely came by a path in the hills, passed her house and went “that way.”
Later I asked Ghule kaka what I’d done to annoy her. “These people revere the leopard, and you’re asking her what problem her god gives her!” he replied. Nearby was a statue of Waghoba, a large cat deity that many people in the region have worshipped for at least half a century. I remember a pastoralist whose sheep was taken by a leopard. “The poor leopard had no prey in the forest,” he said. “What else could he eat? So he’s taken the sheep, and God will give me more.”
I’d started out as an arrogant young biologist convinced that we can resolve human-wildlife “conflict” only by understanding the animal involved. My experiences in Akole convinced me that it is humans who hold the key, and I soon got a chance to test that theory.
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This is a fascinating look at GLP-1 drugs, which, when injected, create a sense of satiety. I appreciated Tolentino’s exploration of the continual shift in our acceptance of different body shapes, as well as the impact of this particular trend. A piece that made me think about society, as much as weight.
For people who are dealing with those conditions, Ozempic appears to create a path toward a healthy relationship to food. For those who aren’t, it might function more like an injectable eating disorder. As the side effects make clear, it’s not a casual thing to drastically alter your body’s metabolic process, and there is no large-scale data about the safety of these drugs when taken by people who are mainly interested in treating another chronic condition, the desire to be thin.
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Five decades after DJ Kool Herc’s genre-birthingBronx party, hip-hop has aged into a new form of tragedy: legendary practitioners dying of natural causes. As Jelani Cobb points out, however, “natural causes” does not mean “old age.” Beloved De La Soul member Dave “Trugoy” Jolicoeur succumbed to congestive heart failure; A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife, to diabetes. Name after name, the irony remains. You can outlive the immediate dangers, only to fall to the long shadow they cast.
De La Soul’s work is defined by its subversive wit and creativity; Jolicoeur chose the name Trugoy the Dove in an attempt to set himself apart from the superficial aggression that had defined so much of the genre even by the time De La Soul emerged, in 1989. But the music that so profoundly articulated the tragedy of premature death at twenty is far less vocal on the subject of premature death at fifty. It was easy to draw the parallels between the artists gunned down in the streets and the indexes of violence affecting Black and brown communities. Tupac’s death resonated precisely because the circumstances under which it occurred, in 1996, were so familiar. It’s less common, though, to sketch the connections between Sean Price, the Brooklyn-bred rapper who died in his sleep at age forty-three, and the disparities of health, health care, and longevity that impact those same communities.
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An unjust police killing. Nature reclamation in the fossil fuel era. Surviving a bear attack. The underbelly of the antiquities trade. And for a well-earned dessert, the legacy of the world’s first breakout video game.
Meg O’Connor | The Appeal & Phoenix New Times | March 14, 2023 | 7,576 words
It’s been nine years since Laquan McDonald was killed by police in Chicago, shot in the back while walking away. It’s been seven years since Philando Castile was killed by police in the Minneapolis suburbs, shot while his empty hands were raised during a questionable traffic stop. And it’s been four years since Jacob Harris was killed by police in Phoenix, seconds after he emerged from a car, his back turned. You’ve likely heard less about Harris’ death than you have McDonald’s and Castile’s, but Meg O’Connor’s thorough investigation makes clear that you won’t forget it. The gross miscarriages of justice are plentiful: the circumstances of Harris’ killing and the shifting police statements around it; the money and valuables police took from Harris’ father’s home before informing him his son was dead; the fact that Harris’ friends are currently serving decades-long prison sentences for his death, while the officers who pulled the trigger (and unleashed an attack dog on his prone body) walk free. We’ve heard far, far too many names like McDonald’s and Castile’s and Harris’ over the past decade, and nothing makes me think we won’t continue to hear many more. That’s what makes this sort of journalism so necessary — not because it can bring these young men back to life, but because it makes brutally clear how unjust their deaths are, and how broken policing is. —PR
Lacy M. Johnson | Emergence Magazine | March 9, 2023 | 3,724 words
We’re starting to see the massive environmental repercussions that the fossil fuel industry’s surge has wrought on coastal areas of the United States. At EmergenceMagazine, Lacy M. Johnson reflects on the Baytown Nature Center, a portion of land restored after oil drilling and water extraction caused the land to sink, making the executive Brownwood subdivision vulnerable to storm surge flooding with more frequent and violent storms caused by global warming. As Johnson catalogues the decades of destruction in disappearing land and animal habitat — all in a bid to fuel vehicles and serve an ongoing war effort with the petroleum-based building blocks of explosives and rubber — you have to wonder, is it really worth it? If you ask Johnson, the answer is no: “It’s normal to want to repair what’s broken, folly to repair what breaks us and keeps on breaking.” P.S. For a Louisiana perspective on fossil fuel, havoc, and the human cost of repeat devastation, read “Great American Wasteland” by Lauren Stroh. —KS
Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | March 10, 2023 | 5,900 words
I have never seen a grizzly bear, but I have seen its tracks: Impossibly huge imprints squelched deep into the mud, tips of long claws cutting in even further, an echo of the power that passed before. Ryan Hockensmith’s piece made me all too aware of what it would be like to encounter that paw firsthand with his chilling, graphic description of a grizzly bear attack on junior college wrestlers Brady Lowry and Kendell Cummings. Although Hockensmith does not shy away from the horror, he leaves plenty of room for the other aspects of this story, whether the friendship behind Cummings’ act of bravery or an understanding of the bear’s actions. (As he sets out, she was likely just protecting her cubs, with the young men fairly blaming themselves for being “in its house.”) The piece details the months following the attack as well, becoming a testament to the boys’ resilience, Hockensmith tracing their road to recovery without overindulging in sentiment. I came out of this gripping feature with great respect for Cummings and Lowry. —CW
Greg Donahue | New York | February 13, 2023 | 5,508 words
The uber-wealthy never cease to amaze with their shamelessness. Case in point: Michael Steinhardt, billionaire investor, noted philanthropist, and, ‘twould appear, someone who for much of his life had exactly no problem buying stolen art. A lot of it. Steinhardt amassed one of the biggest private antiquities collections in the world, including an array of “fresh” objects, straight from the earth and unlikely to pass through above-board trade on their way to Steinhardt’s Upper East Side penthouse. “Steinhardt bought an object so fresh it had to be cleaned by the dealer in a hotel bathtub before being delivered to his apartment,” journalist Greg Donahue writes. The guy once kept a stone skull dating back to 7,000 B.C. on a side table in his living room — we know this because the object appears in real-estate listing photos saved by the Manhattan district attorney’s office that investigated Steinhardt. Wild. “As an investor, mastering risk had brought him wealth and prestige,” Donahue points out, placing Steinhardt’s shady dealings in the context of his wider existence. “Why should antiquities be different?” The piece also subtly raises the question of whether the antiquities market is beyond repair. Steinhardt might be among the worst offenders, but he’s also a symptom of the market’s problematic status quo, shaped as it is by privilege, greed, and colonialism. —SLD
Charles Russo | SFGATE | March 9, 2023 | 2,809 words
Charles Russo tracks the beginnings of the modern video game industry, which has its roots in a “scrappy Silicon Valley startup” now known as Atari. Its founders, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, had previously created the world’s first coin-operated video game, a futuristic yellow machine called Computer Space. Under Atari, they developed Pong, a simple yet engrossing arcade game that became an instant hit with the American public when it was released in March 1973 — and is now a beloved classic. This is a delightful dive into the video game industry’s “big-bang moment,” accompanied by fun images from the ’70s. My favorite is a photograph of a massive retro Atari arcade game at the Powell Street BART station in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by people with bell-bottoms. —CLR
David Browne | Rolling Stone | March 10, 2023 | 8,295 words
In this piece, David Browne gives a respectful account of the frantic life of Lisa Marie Presley. Although there is some attempt to analyze how growing up in the spotlight affected her, this is more of a faithful narrative of her world and tragic death. —CW
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