What even is queer ecology?

A special mini episode on one of my favourite subjects!

Transcript:

Hi, I'm Kes Otter Lieffe, 
In recent years, queer ecology has become a big part of my life showing up in my writing work, workshops, podcast and public speaking.

But what even is queer ecology?
 
Like most queer subjects, queer ecology is being constantly defined and redefined. It can be something academic and abstract or it can be rooted in community and grassroots struggles for land and liberty. It can connect science, philosophy, politics, it can be gloriously geeky and it can also teach us something about who we are and where we belong in our more than human community.

Here's a small introduction that I wrote for my website at otterlieffe.com.

Human nonhuman. Natural, unnatural. Sentient, non sentient. You and me.
Our intellectual world is full of binaries that are disrupted the closer we look at them. Trillions of microbes live in my body. At this moment, they possibly outnumber my own cells. So who am I?

There are no humans without nonhumans. We are each a community and individuality is a myth. In Utah, in the so-called USA, a single quaking aspen tree has cloned themselves to create a forest covering 43 hectares. They might be the heaviest known individual organism and they're also a forest. So, what are individuals?

94% of giraffe sex is between males. A quarter of tropical reef fish species change sex during their lifetime. There are whole species of lizards with no males at all. So, what is sex?

You might be wondering who I am and how I got into all of this. I'm a writer, the author of Margins, a trilogy of queer speculative fiction novels. I've also written several short stories and a colouring book series on queer plants and animals. I'm an ecologist and I've been involved in grassroots community struggles for over 20 years focusing on the intersections of class, queerness and environmental struggles, always trying to create radical alternatives to the trash fire of capitalism.

I write and organise from a working class, chronically ill, transfeminine perspective.

As so many young nature lovers, I grew up with wildlife programmes on TV. And I never once heard about bisexual red deer, sex-changing parrotfish or binary-smashing lichens. Complexity and diversity were reduced to simple stories of male bird meets female bird and does a little funky dance to impress her. They mate, they make little baby birds. And that apparently is the whole point of life.
As I began to research the few texts that exist on queer ecology, I discovered a world far richer than I could have imagined.

I've now been writing and teaching about this subject for years and I realise more each day that none of this is new. While the term queer ecology might be relatively new, among many Indigenous communities and others living closer to the nonhuman world than the industrial society that I grew up in this knowledge of more than human gender, sex and sexuality is ancient.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, you can find everything at otterlieffe.com. I have a monthly newsletter in which I share updates and resources. You can find my novels and colouring books in bookstores and online. You can support my work financially at patreon.com/otterlieffe and in other ways at otterlieffe.com/support.

Thank you so much for listening.
The music you're listening to is "Barista Barista!" by https://soundcloud.com/tiefgarage