Queer Ecology: Walking into Another Nature

These days, it seems as if every other person is gay or some variant of the theme (LGBT).  Actually, the internet says it’s 3.2%,, which is enough to be a normal variant. Ginger hair is 2.2%, for example.

So apart from sexuality, which many regard as a private matter, what has this characteristic got to teach the rest of us? That is what I went to find out on a walk advertised as a queer ecology walk, meeting the non-binary fineries of the planet.

To Tom, our walk leader, queer is about querying assumptions. Binary gives black-and-white views of nature, this plant wanted, that a weed, native good, invasive bad. Queer people step outside that stiff, divisive mindset.

Tom had hidden away from fellow humans in the garden since he was a child (maybe I should say since they were a child). Nature was his fellow, he melted into its mysteries, and and the way it entangled itself together to thrive echoed his way of being.

His vision was about symbiosis and the entwinement of all forms of life to thrive together. He questioned the hard lines between species, he saw different species cohabiting, becoming more interdependent until they merged into single organisms made of multiple creatures. He gave the example of gut microbes being part of us. He showed how a small species like bacteria may start as a parasite, but it and the host evolve to benefit each other and become one being. Our learning was wrong, it was not competition but collaboration that was the true driver of the miracles of evolution.

We stopped every few yards to focus on another tree, mound, or entanglement of species to understand how they were benefiting each other. A clump of brambles. What do we think of brambles? “Ouch”. But in their midst was a growing tree,, protected from the grazing animals by its thorns. As the tree grew strong enough to withstand grazers, the thorns would die back here and move to another forest edge. Similarly with gorse, where it is 1–2 degrees warmer in winter under their ever-flowering, ever-green protection. Birds and small mammals owe their safe winter survival to this lower canopy and the distribution of seeds extending the tree cover. By an ant mound, he explained the complex cooperation between blue butterflies and ants, quite extraordinary.

He dismissed the mindset of our Nature Conservation empires, which defend nature through the militaristic extermination of non-native and diseased species. Give them time, he said, and they will melt into a balanced ecology and give rise to disease-resistant offspring, as ash trees have done.

It was a beautiful spring day and a wild rambling land, Brithdir Mawr, with insects, birds, and their calls hovering around our little group. A first cuckoo was heard. When we returned for soup, we shared our take-home.

A London researcher on immigration felt the non-native species lesson was relevant to her work. I noted that being queer is not a comfortable place to land in life, yet it offers vantage points for insights hidden from the majority sunk in our cushion of normality.

Beset by culture wars and the eggshells of political correctness, we miss the magic of difference. The only irritating bit to me was being asked to choose my pronoun. Um er..