Queering Nature Writing: Speaking to the Trees and How We Talk About the World
In the winter of 2021, I participated in a training through the Rhode Island Nursery and Landscape Association. Part of the training involved doing trail work. On our first day, my crew and I set out to trim overhanging branches. One of the crew members began hacking away at the limbs without a second thought. He referred to the trees as annoying and such a bother to work with. My crew leader panicked and begged him to stop what he was doing. When trimming overhanging branches, you must cut the branch at a specific location so that it can grow back properly. Our relationship with nature is defined by our physical and verbal interactions. The way we touch a tree and also the way we speak to the tree creates a unique connection. The work involves both care of the trail and care for the tree, an outcome without hierarchy.
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s piece, Nature Needs a New Pronoun, she discusses how we objectify the more than human world, we dismiss the complexity and spectrum on which nature thrives. “We are surrounded by intelligences other than our own…. But we’ve forgotten. There are many forces arrayed to help us forget—even the language we speak.” Kimmerer provides the example of how we would never use the word “it” to address a human family member but we use it all the time when talking about our non-human kin. This thought process also occurs when thinking of gender and sexuality. There is a desire to control the uncontrollable, to declare this or that. The time has come to see the world through queer tinted glasses and the magic that can happen when we embrace the spectrum of language we can use with our human and non-human kin.
Etymology of the word queer traces back to the early 1500’s, meaning something off center. Planet Earth itself spins not straight up but on a tilt, off center. We are sitting on a queer spinning planet. A planet which contains shifting beings who don’t follow set rules. These creatures could not survive without the shifts they undergo. Elements of earth that don’t seem alive also shift. The morning sky must rest to make space for the night. The tide shifts throughout the day.
Beings that experience this shift go through evolution. Evolution is the change in the characteristics of a species over several generations which allows them to adapt to their environment. Now let’s think of the evolution of language. If we look back 400 years at Elizabethan English, it can seem like an almost entirely different language than the one we speak today. (Thanukos, 2008) The journal piece, A Look at Linguistic Evolution, aims to show just how similar biological and linguistic evolution are. The need for new words changes with the environment and at the same time words will also die out. For example, the word “you” in Old English was not a subject pronoun until it started becoming interchangeable with the word “ye.” “Ye” and “you” were then used for plural and formal singular. (2013) In the 17th century, you replaced “thou,” “thee” and “thy” and started being used primarily for its singular use. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote a book labeling anyone who used the singular “you” was an idiot and a fool. (Baron, 2019) Sound familiar?
In New Zealand, the Maori people use the word “kaitiakitanga”, which means to guard and protect the environment in order to respect ancestors. (2017) In German, the word “waldeinsamkeit” translates to a solitude of being in the forest. The environment in which we exist is an extension of us. Even after we die, our body continues to interact and affect the earth; it is a continuous companionship. However, this companionship is weakened through linguistic imperialism, “Among the many examples of linguistic imperialism, perhaps none is more pernicious than the replacement of the language of nature as subject with the language of nature as object.” (Kimmerer, 2019) We are driven to view nature as other through hierarchical thinking and individualism.
Queerness expands beyond gender and sexuality, it is a mindset. We are taught binary thinking through media such as movies or books. One of my favorite book series growing up was The Chronicles of Narnia, classic tales of good versus evil. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz states, “Dichotomous (binary) thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other is suppressed.” (Page et al., 2022) Another form of binary thinking appears as early as elementary school, the food chain. Humans are always placed at the top, suppressing non-human kin. We seem to look down at the world around us.
About three years ago, I began using they/them pronouns. I feel uncomfortable when trying to squeeze myself into the boxes of male and female. My relationship with my body has continued to evolve as I explore the possibilities of living outside of the gender binary. When I am talking about my body, I am also referring to all the extensions of myself that I encounter. My extensions make up my ecosystem. The crumbs on my bed from food that missed my mouth invites the ants on to my arms. I sometimes am startled by their presence and scream which sends vibrations through the air and triggers my nervous system. Let us remove the idea of the food chain and even the food web. Let us shrink ourselves down and focus on just the web, taking notes from the spiders in the corner of our rooms. When we put on queer tinted glasses, we are able to see the webs that attach us. They, for me, is both a singular pronoun and a way to highlight how I expand. I feel as though I am a tree where my sturdiness comes from all my different roots.
Queer nature writing provides a space to challenge the use of the word natural and the harm its application can have on the world. The breaking of barriers and shift to spectrum thinking, can help us to see all the similarities that exist between us and in the world beneath our feet or above our heads. Queer writing is the act of queering language. Through reading queer nature writing I have been able to care for the rivers that flow through my veins and the rainstorms that happen when I feel intense emotions. I find comfort in the chaos that occurs in my body sometimes because I know the sky also cries and the trees sometimes must shed their past to enter into their future.
Ollie Quinn (they/them) is an Environmental Humanities student. They are passionate about the mycelial connection between the arts and the world around us. They believe that through creative and imaginative thinking, we can dream of brighter possibilities for our future.
Work Cited
Baron, D. (2019, March 29). A brief history of the singular 'they'. Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved March 23, 2023, from https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/
Indigenous people and nature: A tradition of conservation. UNEP. (2017). Retrieved March 25, 2023, from https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/indigenous-people-and-nature-tradition-conservation
Kimmerer, R. W.. (2019, November 26). Nature needs a new pronoun: To stop the age of extinction, let's start by ditching "it". YES! Magazine. Retrieved March 24, 2023, from https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/together-earth/2015/03/30/alternative-grammar-a-new-language-of-kinship
Page, C., Jeune, A. L., Stevens, S. J., Phelan, J., Matthews, S., & Hayashi, K. (2022, February 9). Queering your thinking - non profit news: Nonprofit quarterly. Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://nonprofitquarterly.org/queering-your-thinking/
RLG. (2013). You: A short history. The Economist. Retrieved March 23, 2023, from https://www.economist.com/johnson/2013/01/17/you-a-short-history
Thanukos, A. (2008). A look at linguistic evolution. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 1(3), 281–286. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-008-0058-3