Nature is Queer
In the schoolyard where I went to middle school there was a small, grassy area alongside the baseball diamond — just beyond a drainage ditch between the field and the fringe of the woods that surrounded the half of the complex. It was technically ‘in bounds’ at recess, but somewhat out of sight from everyone. For a boy who was regularly bullied — for being fat, for liking chess, for “acting gay” — it was a good place to disappear on the bad days when the jerks were in full force. The field was full of clover, and I could hide out there, sit amidst the white flowers and green leaves and bumblebees, and look for the elusive four-leaf variety while I waited for the bell to ring.
In hindsight, I guess I felt something of a kinship with the four-leaf clovers — if you don’t look too long, you don’t notice them. They blend in, just like I wanted to. But once you start to see them, and not just see them but appreciate them for their difference, you notice them everywhere.
The thing I think is most beautiful about four-leaf clovers is that they are not an anomaly, or a mistake, but a reflection of their highly adaptable and resilient nature. In fact, they are kind of like humans in this regard. They live everywhere we do, and can thrive, like we do, in the widest range of environments.
They draw these superpowers from their unique genetics: instead of having two sets of chromosomes white clover has four. And remarkably, the additional pairs come from different genetic ancestors entirely. And then there is the quirk we all know them for. Most of the time clover sport three leaf clusters, but sometimes a cluster will have four, five, or more. The record is fifty-six! Some people initially thought that anything above three was the result of a mutation or deformity. But it turns out, they are just a natural part of their collective expression as a species.
For all sakes and purposes, clover is queer. Queer because it defies the rudimentary categories that we were taught in middle school biology about sex, heredity, and reproduction. Clover also takes some liberty with its sex life. It can reproduce asexually or with seeds.
And yet, we don’t hear people regarding clover as threatening or sinful. No-one is trying to regulate or eliminate the four-leaf clusters from the species. We consider it lucky to encounter a four-leaf clover.
Our western way of thinking likes to put everything into tidy, often binary categories like female and male, gay and straight, human and nature, good and evil. But these categories rarely hold up. Indeed the more we learn about the world, the more we come to see how messy it is. But our norms and social mores haven’t been keeping up. We are still working with ideas stuck in the past, mental maps that omit and obscure every unique contour and sensual geography of life that does not conform to the accepted ordering of things. These prejudices regard the four-leaf clover the same way they do the bisexual boy in the field looking for them: as a mutation, a mistake, an error.
We cannot avoid thinking with categories and mental maps — we use them as shortcuts for recognizing and interpreting what matters in the world. But when we mistake these for the actual nature of the world we risk marginalizing, and even harming, the beautiful and important diversity that makes life on this planet possible.
Science increasingly reinforces a kaleidoscopic understanding of diversity and difference. For humans, we have known for years that the notion of binary sex is well outdated and harmfully reductive. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, diverse sexualities such as selective and sequential hermaphrodism, where species change their sex, are ubiquitous, and can be critical to evolution. Myriad fish change sex, there are fungi that have thousands of mating types, and microbes that swap genes across species boundaries. Even the most “masculine” non-human species have males that engage in same-sex sexual behavior or take on stereotypically “feminine” roles like child-rearing.
My point is not to merely draw attention to a handful of curious exceptions or outliers. These numerous species that, like clover, eschew straightforward life histories are not exceptions to a rule. They aren’t even exceptions in the first place. There simply is no rule. Life, by its very essence, defies averages and categories. Each example of difference — of queerness — is part and parcel to the larger pattern of nature.
Difference and diversity are inconvenient, however, at least to those who thrive on imposing order and assuming control, whether of the land or of our bodies. When people, through their ideologies, deem all things that do not conform to their pre-ordained order to be invalid and grotesque, they not only excuse exploitation and violence against them, they also justify it.
No one truly escapes the violence created by this kind of thinking, no matter how “normal” or “straight” or “upstanding” you think yourself to be. I am a white male in a happy heterosexual marriage. I grew up in a queer family, surrounded at home by constant loving and positive influences. But everywhere else I was surrounded by the hate and erasure of a world that wanted my family to not exist. And so, even with all the love and care in my life, I spent much of my early adulthood feeling alienated. It took me into my 40s to come to recognize and nurture my own queerness. I now know myself as bisexual, but the concepts of queerness, which are borne out of resilience and resistance for the purposes of liberation, often felt undeserved and ill-fit. They sometimes still do.
And this is precisely how the oppression of our modern, social order is meant to work: it seeks to invalidate our differences, make us uncomfortable with ourselves, and make our individuality impossible to understand never mind nourish. It has taken nearly two decades of learning on my part, about how the systematic oppression of queerness in nature has twisted our relationships with it, and led to environmental destruction and climate breakdown, before I realized that I should turn my attention and love to the queerness inside of me.
We don’t need to be bound by these crude ways of seeing the world. There are alternatives like queer ecology — a way of thinking that queer scholars and activists are actively building for celebrating life in all its glorious complexity. Queer ecology recognizes the world for what it is: a tangled web of relationships, where boundaries are fluid and categories are always shifting. In queer thinking, a human is never just male or female — but an ever-changing mosaic of hormones, experiences, desires, and self-perceptions.
I have, in my career as a human ecologist visited numerous cultural landscapes and seen hundreds of examples of how the incredible diversity and fluidity of life is key to its resilience and flourishing. Diversity is both nature’s engine and its insurance policy against disaster. The ideological fight against queerness, and the systematic destruction of biodiversity that threatens our existence as a species, are two fronts in the same war.
The parallels between our society’s exploitation of nature and demonization of queerness are easy to see. Farmers regularly drain wetlands and peatlands to make way for agriculture because the unruly mix of water and land doesn’t fit society’s values for what the land is for. Surgeons and parents, likewise regularly subject intersex babies to invasive surgeries that can cause life-long dysphoria because they don’t conform to what society says their bodies are for. We see anything that doesn’t fit the order we have for the world as either wasteful or a threat.
This is a shared mindset, and it enables the destruction of wild spaces and the oppression of entire peoples — whether Indigenous, Black, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, or otherwise.
Diversity is the pattern of life, but it can only fulfil its life-giving promises if we allow it the space it needs to thrive. A river only brings life to the land if it is free to meander; if we use concrete and culverts to make it tidy and straight, the water, and life with it, drain away. If we want to cultivate life, we need to live like a river unrestrained. We need to lean into each unique twist and turn as no more or less valid and life-giving than the last.
I believe we still have time, if we learn to see the queer struggle and the global struggle for biodiversity and a stable climate as one and the same. By affirming the value of many ways of experiencing gender, sex, kinship, and spirituality, we can affirm the value of many ways of relating to land and to life itself. Indigenous scholars have long recognized that the project of colonialism, with its racist classifications of nature and people, is one that seeks the destruction of both cultural and biological diversity. We would do well to listen to them more.
We can unlearn these harmful ways of thinking and choose to live differently, just as I’ve spent my professional career working to unlearn them. It hasn’t been easy, undoing the social conditioning we are constantly subject to and re-learning things about myself I probably knew better when I was that boy in middle school searching for four-leaf clovers. And it won’t be easy to unlearn the things we think we know about the world around us. But I don’t think it is hyperbolic to say that this unlearning is critical to our very survival as a species.
People, I realize, cannot live like a patch of grass. They could, I suppose, at one time, but we are so far removed from that time that it is hard to conceive. People can, however, live their lives with the realization that they are constantly changing, products of their changing environment and changing situations, and time. They can live, at least, in harmony with the knowledge and co-exist with it instead of working against it. — Keith Haring
