Bernicia’s Queer Garden

In ‘Lavender’s Green? Some thoughts on Queer(y)ing Environmental Politics’ (1994) Catriona Sandilands wrote about the ‘absence of any significant and sustained conversations between L/G/Bi and environmental politics’. If we revisit this, will we find out it is still the case?

“Land is oppressed, land is abused, land is extracted, otherised, and like queer people, the land suffers from conflict and abuse by everything that is from a heterosexual capitalist world” wrote the Queer Anarchist collective Mary Nardini Gang. What could be borrowed from ‘queer solidarity’ that may inspire or shape the idea of ‘steward’ in land justice and climate crisis movements? 

Activists have long sought justice for people to live a queer life of peace and acceptance. This is still on-going and necessary collective work. Can this labour exist alongside or intertwined within justice for (queer) plant-life to exist: for rivers to flow and be, for our mountains to stand tall without being extracted? What may it look like to be in solidarity with more-than-human kin, as we would with queer folk, to build a (un)harmonious existence for all forms of life?

Queer plants and animals are always expanding our understanding of ecologies and societies. Queer perspectives within plant biology show us the myriad existences and diversity of more-than-human life, and challenge normative thought; exposing the gender binary as a myth and a social construct; debunking the idea that queer relations and gender nonconformity are uncommon or only appear within our human-centric worlds. But can ecology also expand our views of queerness, and help mould our intimate relations with the more-than-human?

We can think of intimacy as a closeness experienced between people, things, and places. Being with memories, thoughts and ideas is also a kind of intimacy with ourselves. What if intimacy were an attunement with the natural environment, a felt kinship with moss, or an erotic exploration with wildness? What if caring for a woodland is not altruism, but a queer kind of love? Is inspiration from our rivers a queer kind of longing to be fluid and ever changing? Our vision of kinship and intimacy could include connections with all living and non-living things.