Queer Ecologies – Insights from Timber Festival 2024
Jasmine Qureshi speaks at Timber Festival. Photo credit: Frankie Dewar
How can we take part in ecology and biology in a way that addresses the toxicity of colonialism, normativity and patriarchy in the subject? Jasmine Qureshi speaks to us about using queer theory, indigenous teachings and ancestral storytelling to approach these sciences.
From 5th-7th July 2024, All The Elements curated an area at Timber Festival that brought the amazing energy and knowledge of our community into a beautiful outdoor festival setting in the National Forest. In this series of content, we’re sharing some key takeaways and learnings from the All The Elements programme. Jasmine Qureshi shared a thought-provoking introduction to queer ecology, and we’ve decided to share the whole talk so you don’t miss any of its nuance.
MEET THE EXPERT:
Jasmine Isa Qureshi (they/she), is a journalist (BBC Wildlife, Gaytimes, Metro, etc.), writer and marine/queer ecologist, working as a researcher previously for the BBC Natural History Unit, The Mindfulness Initiative on Climate Youth Resilience, and currently working with grassroots organisation WildCard as Communications Lead.
As a trans, desi, non-binary, and muslim woman, she finds that her need to intertwine her identity in her work is required for authenticity and creativity to thrive. As such, she is a published and spoken word poet, an Ambassador for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, an advisor for RSPB England, and a presenter, speaker, workshop facilitator and wildlife TV Researcher. She is currently working on her first book.
This audio was recorded in the All The Elements main tent as part of Timber Festival on 7th July 2024. This space was run in partnership with Timber Festival, and kindly supported by Patagonia.
The full transcript is available below or on our Substack feed.
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Hello. How are we all doing? Good? Everyone's in a very mellow mood, I think, which is good. Perfect for this. Kind of a first thing. I'm on a stage, and you are not. I'm at the centre, and you are not. These are all kind of odd for the thing I'm about to do,
so I'm going to kind of walk around a bit and try and even up the odds. I did kind of want to sit on the floor, but then people can't see me, and accessibility is kind of a cornerstone of what I'm talking about,
so I think I'm going to try and walk around the stage and make you feel all kind of included. And we're going to begin, I think, with a bit of a check-in. I think the topic I'm about to introduce, and it has to be noted I'm only introducing it because it's a very complex, in many ways, topic.
It's a very large topic. It encompasses a lot of threads. So the way I'm going to introduce it to you and introduce the introduction is by asking you all to close your eyes. Imagine you are in a place that you would consider to be comfortable, that you would consider that you were held,
and that you would consider that you don't have to extend yourself or be useful in any fashion or form. And if you wish, take a deep breath in and hold. And let it all out. Feel free to open your eyes or keep them closed if you want.
That is kind of an entry that I do into seminars that I give. And these are seminars that are actually given at places that don't normally do that as an introduction to seminars, like Oxford University, which is a bit weird to do, but that's what I did.
And the reason I do that and the reason I've done that today is because what I'm doing is breaking down a hierarchy, a hierarchy that exists within education. And that's one of the reasons, again, why I'm going to tell you what I'm about to tell you. You do not have to listen to anything I'm about to say.
You do not have to remember anything I'm about to say. Because at the end of the day, what I'm doing is guiding and facilitating. And we had a point previously, which I think was really perfect for this, which is leadership is an interesting word because leadership deals with leading. It deals with centering.
And it sometimes most often deals with imposing leadership. And I find that leadership, in any form that it may exist, exists much better when it is a facilitative process, when it is a process whereupon I am guiding and I am providing you with tools that
you may or may not use and you may or may not find useful, but I'm providing them to you anyway, and you are going to use them as you will, as per your lived experience. So I'm presenting you with information that is per my lived experience and my personal understanding of a subject and topic.
It is not an absolute guidebook and therefore you do not have to listen to it. You can also leave if you want at any point. If you are hungry or need to go to the toilet, you can do that if you will. I'm not here to hold you into this space.
What I've just done is called Space Agency. And it's very interesting because I've only recently found a term for it. But it's a concept that has actually, it's been around in what I've been talking about for many, many years. It's a term that refers to the idea of consent within a space,
the idea that there are structures that can exist within a space where you feel you have more access to the information that is being provided. Now, I've said 'access', and I've also mentioned a term that is a conceptualising of something that has existed for a long time. Now, keep those two things in mind, if that's okay.
'Queer' I think is a really weird term by definition it means weird it means different and I'm going to ask you a question what does the word 'queer' mean for you and i'm going to ask you to just think on it i'm not necessarily going to ask you
for an answer but the word 'queer' is very interesting to me because There are no right or wrong answers to what it means or what it refers to. It's an interesting word in that it's actually not existed for a very long time in the way that it does now and the way that I'm referring to it.
It was conceptualised only in the last few years to refer to something that has actually existed for a very long time. And then we go back to the idea of something being conceptualised recently, but still existing for a very long time. And that lends into what queerness refers to for me personally. That fluidity,
the idea that things do change, the idea that the conceptualising and the labelling of things does change over time, even if the concept that exists as the foundation of that thing has been around for a very long time in the many ways that it exists.
But interestingly, a word has come up recently that I think most gloriously defines queerness for me. And that is the word 'undermine'. For me, queerness is undermining. Now, we're often given queerness and undermining, particularly undermining, in a negative format. When we say we undermine something, it generally means maybe pass no respect on it.
Maybe, you know, push it down. Maybe from a higher point, you use your power to sway it or influence it, perhaps in a negative way. But actually, when we go into what undermine really connotates, it connotates deconstruction. It connotates an element of there are systems that existed previously, and I'm not casting them aside, but I'm undermining them.
Therefore, I'm taking away the absolute power they have over me. So for me, queerness refers to the undermining of absolution. What on earth does that have to do with ecology? Well, first and not really first, because I was trying to do that thing of breaking down the hierarchy of education.
Um, so I've said a lot of other things first, but who on Earth am I and why am I here? So my name is Jasmine. My pronouns are they/ she, I'm a lot of different random things that I seem to have picked up in my journey to
interact with the world in a way that it nourishes me a bit better. So I'm a journalist. I write about different issues, including transness, as I am trans, queerness, as I am queer, non-binaryness, I'm non-binary, my pronouns, but also my race and my identity and what that has to do with any of this. I'm Desi, which means,
in terms of the diaspora that I reflect and perhaps fit into a bit better, I'm Indian Pakistani. And I have bits and pieces of other cultures and communities mixed up in that. I'm also a Marine Biologist and an Ecologist. I'm also someone who writes and tells stories and someone who writes poetry.
And I didn't know this, but they actually have a book that I've contributed to over here. That's very nice. You can read that if you want. There's apparently only two of them, so you may have to fight. Which I'm sure won't happen. But the idea of me coming here and talking to you about queer ecology is very
strange to me, most recently, because I actually don't view queer ecology as a subject. I think it's more of an interaction. It's that undermining thing. It's an interaction with ecology. I'm interacting with a subject and a structure that has previously existed, that's previously been constructed in a certain manner,
and I'm interacting with it in a way that I'm undermining it. But that's not enough, is it? Why am I undermining this structure? That kind of comes into where my identity comes in. I'm someone who grew up in inner-city London. I didn't really have access to stereotypical areas of nature. I didn't have access to reserves or parks.
I kind of grew up not really thinking that nature was for me at all in the stereotypical way that it was provided. However, I did link to something and that gave me the steps forward to get into nature, and that thing was bugs. So I love bugs. I love bugs.
Insects, bugs, creepy crawlies, anything with more legs or no legs or any number of legs. And they held my attention and they were kind of a catalyst or a pathway into ecology because I couldn't access these bigger, exotic, beautiful ideas of what nature was. These giant fields of whatever it might be in there.
These giant forests, wild animals that I watched on documentaries. I loved them, and I really, really wanted to experience my interactions with them, but I couldn't access them, so they weren't really very real to me, because my perception of them stopped at perceiving them in an extended fashion,
and I wasn't able to really interact with them and have an experience of that environment. But what could I have an experience of? It was insects. And insects, for me, are one of the most intersectional creatures on the planet. They are absolutely fascinating because there's so many ways they're fascinating. There is an almost,
and I'm going to say unlimited, even though some would disagree, but I would disagree with them. I think there's almost an unlimited amount of ways that insects differ and are intersectional and interact differently with the systems of our world. Now, the idea that I couldn't perceive and I couldn't connect with larger nature comes
back to this idea of perception. Perception, again, is something that I link quite closely to reality. You may have heard of this concept before, but the idea is that if you have a reality, it is something that you have tangibly, to certain extents, perceived and interacted with. That's your reality. Everyone has different realities.
Now, you might think, "oh, that's kind of a pseudoscience thing. Everyone's got different realities, but we're still tethered to a similar constant physical reality". I say, no, I don't think we are. But then again, you don't have to listen to me. But I would say that your physical reality,
the reality that you have in front of you and the reality that you touch and feel, for example, the grass, for example, plants, for example, the air you breathe, these are realities that you perceive in different fashions, in different formats. You perceive them via your senses. You perceive them via how you've lived in those places before.
You perceive them in many, many different ways depending on who you are and how you differ. This is interesting because actually we build our realities. And we build our realities through constructs and constructions. And those constructs and constructions are often built in society. That's what a social construct is. It's something that's built within society.
It doesn't make it unreal or real in my opinion. It just makes it something that's built in society. For example, money is a social construct. It's a form of transaction that we built within society. Therefore, if you build something within society and it's a social construct, and it then influences how you perceive the world,
you can change reality, you can construct things that do actually have an effect on your reality. And one of those things is biology. Biology and ecology is one of the most foundational sciences on the planet. It's something that people study in order to work out how systems within you and within the rest of the world work.
And based off of those perceptions that people have, those assumptions, those constructions that you build within biology, those ideas of the world, we build everything else. We build our policy. We build our society. We build our ideas of each other. We build the rules in which we're supposed to live by. We build them from science and biology.
But we do build biology. Biology isn't something that simply came out of the ground. And like I was saying before, with the idea of something being conceptualized recently and actually existing for a very long time previously, sometimes if something exists underlying in terms of a group of interactions or feelings or understandings of a subject,
and then it's conceptualized in a certain way and labeled in a certain way by a certain someone, that can influence how you see that thing. You still with me, kind of? So I hope you've kept in your mind the word undermining because I'm undermining biology and I think I've kind of explained why, but not really.
So I'll go into a bit deeper. This idea of biology, where does it come from? What is it? What does it mean? Now, a lot of the work that I do is around deconstructing origins. Where does stuff come from? Everything's got an origin. Everything starts somewhere, doesn't it? to an extent. Everything starts in a place.
And for me, that gives me a tether to reality and to society. Because if I understand that something's had an origin, if I understand that something has had a beginning identity and it's grown from there, It's undoable, but it's not undoable in a way that makes it unreal.
It's undoable in a way that makes me understand that actually things exist in many, many different forms and the way you conceptualize them isn't absolute. And things don't have to be absolute simply because they're suggested they are. and often if they are, you should question why they've been told as absolute. Like biology.
Why is biology given to us as a set of facts and figures and data, as absolute constructions of a thing? There's a little word, that's actually not so little, but it's not often spoken, and it's called 'colonisation'. And you may have heard of it. Colonisation is interesting because it actually has many different meanings,
but I've managed to kind of staple a random assortment of meanings to it. I'm going to try and explain that now. I think colonisation, based on what I've read and what I've researched and what I've understood, is the occupation and exploitation of anything. That can be minds, that can be land, that can be ideologies,
that can be structures, that can be anything you occupy, and then you exploit. But that has consequences. If you dissect what that means, well, in order to occupy a space, there needs to be space in that space for you to get into. You need to either make space, or there needs to be space before that,
that was empty and if it's not empty you need to make it seem as if it was because then you can fill it with whatever you want once you're in that space by virtue of you being able to move into that space and occupy it in a certain way you are then able to exploit now interestingly exploitation
is another complex word that we might not get a lot of time to go into. But exploitation requires you to have privilege of access. Now, 'privilege' is another word that's kind of thrown around a lot and not a lot of people really like it. I have a lot of opinions about it.
I think that privilege is not necessarily a negative or positive word. I think it's a word that refers to access. If you have access to certain services within a certain system, you have privilege within that certain structure. If you move into a different system and you can't access those services, you are underprivileged in that context.
And therefore, everyone can be privileged and underprivileged in many different contexts. But if there is a system and a society that has services that you are primarily able to access, you are primarily privileged. Therefore, you have enough power To do what? Exploit. So therefore colonisation becomes a currency.
It becomes something that you are able to do if you are more privileged within a system. If the system doesn't exist previously, you do what? You make the system. You build it. You build the system and you are able to then be curated to that system and therefore you can use it to exploit anything.
Why would you want to exploit anything? I think that that takes us to the origins of queer ecology again. Queer ecology is actually a term that was conceptualised a few years ago by someone called Dr. Catriona Sandilands in an essay that was actually really good. And you should check it out. I think it's really good. However.
And Dr. Catriona Sandilands does not suggest that they made this term up. But there are a lot of people that say they invented this term. But actually, again, it's a conceptualizing of something that's existed for a very long time. And to find the origin of it, we have to go a long,
long time back to one of the first dualisms, or binaries. Binaries are an interesting word. To me, binary means an interaction between two things. More or less, that's what a binary is. If you go back to one of the original dualisms, which, based on what I've read, is humans versus nature,
this is an idea that was brought about, again, by imposed reality, by imposed construction of systems. So we're going back to our colonialist model, our colonization. Certain states, certain groups, certain organizations in the past moved into lands due to where they were exploring or where they were taking resources from.
And they moved into lands that actually they found people already lived in. Indigenous tribal communities, people who were living upon the land and living intertwined with the wildlife, with the nature, with whatever they had over there, with the resources that they were taking in a regenerative fashion.
They found that these people were living in harmony with nature in those environments. Unfortunately, that doesn't really work for colonization. Because what colonization requires, again, is a power hierarchy. You must have a certain structure that allows you to have certain levels of privilege, again, access within a system, power within a system in order to exploit something.
But if you are in an environment where the humans and the wildlife have a mutual respect of each other, where they are on a similar level of respect, where the fluctuations of their identity actually allows each of them to exist in harmony with each other, that system of exploitation doesn't work anymore.
So a system, a new system, was imposed by this colonialist mechanism and these peoples. And this structure was humans versus nature. And the idea is, and it's conceptualized most recently as something called speciesism, it's the idea that humans are inherently different from other animals simply because we are humans. That came about, again, via this model of exploitation.
Turning nature into a resource allowed humanity and the people moving into that environment to exploit nature in a way that meant there were zero repercussions or there were less repercussions and it meant that it was easier it was easier to convince the wider population to exploit those resources
The rebellion against that dualism by the indigenous folk and the indigenous communities that continues to this day, the rebellion against the idea that humans and nature are inherently different is the start of queer ecology. It is an undermining of a previous or imposed hierarchical structure upon a system or within a system.
And it is the undermining of that structure, not just because you want to undermine it for the sake of undermining it. I mean, you can do that if you want. But it's undermining for the purpose of deconstructing that system so that you may live more sustainably and harmoniously within that system and structure.
Queering ecology for me is inherently about that undermining and that deconstruction because what you are doing is you are looking at the structures of biology and ecology that are given to us as absolutes and that have been built and constructed as a system to tell us how to understand biology and biological systems and therefore the world.
And it's been given to us and we are needing to go along with it. And actually, I would rather undermine it And one of the things that's led me to that is my identity. I said I'm trans and queer. Those are interesting words for me. The words queer and trans are actually quite Eurocentric words.
They are words that were come up with in the last few years again by mainly white, mainly Eurocentric, actually quite heteronormative, which in this case means a standard of normality that exists within heterosexuality. These terms are only come up with recently.
So the way that I interact with them is very interesting as someone who is not within those communities. I often find I'm quite limited by them. Now, this is quite useful for querying anything, because what I'm looking at is the origin of a term of an absolute structure of an identity.
And I'm looking at that term and I'm thinking it has an origin. It has an origin, so therefore it's been made by someone. Who's it been made by? Where did they come up with that term? Where did it come from? And how is it being used in the current system we're in?
How do you do that with biology? Because biology is quite a complicated subject. And I found studying it was actually very, very difficult because it was given to me in all of these very numerical, very stats-based, very absolute ways and fashions and formats. And undermining that can be very difficult without using facts and figures and data
and normative methods of undermining. But then you kind of find yourself at square one again because you're just using the same methods to undermine the structure and actually you've just found another format of absolution. Which is why I'm like, queer ecology is not a subject. It's an interaction with a subject.
I'm not providing you with another subject to learn about. I'm providing you with a toolkit that could be broken. A toolkit that you may use or you may not use. Like science. Science is not a guidebook. my opinion it's not something that's absolute it is a toolbox and I often go into
seminars and I say things like science is an art and they get really angry and it's quite funny. Science is the art of asking questions. It is an art. It should be mouldable as an art it should have creativity intertwined within it
And the ways that we can understand how to do this is via blueprints and guidance and futurisms. Blueprints and guidance refers to indigenous teachings, ancestral storytelling, the idea of art, creativity, and science living within each other, the art of questioning being something that you can do even if you don't have a
formative degree or foundational understanding of structures within science. The idea is that you are allowed to ask questions even if you haven't been told your entire life that you're allowed to ask questions. The confidence to do that. These are all very, very essential to being a good scientist.
And most of us can do them without a degree in science. Now these ideas do exist in indigenous communities, in ancestral storytelling and ancestral learning. So therefore we don't have to just reinvent things. They do exist. However, I'm not a big advocate for taking stuff apart, going backwards and erasing all the different pieces.
And I'll explain what I mean. Coming back to this idea of reality. Now you'll notice I haven't said something like binaries aren't real, and spectrums are. And you'll also notice I haven't said something like money isn't real, even though it's a social construct. Because like I've just said, social constructs are real. Because what's reality?
It's a perspective, isn't it? It's a perspective of interaction. You deal with reality by interacting with it. So therefore, maybe, If something is a construct and it affects you, therefore it is real. Now going back to the binaries thing, when people come to me and suggest that binaries aren't real and spectrums are,
that's very much an opinion and view and perspective that you can have. Because again, the reality of it is very much intrinsic to you. But to suggest that something isn't real, you would have to go into the definitions of reality. Now binaries and spectrums are identification systems. They can exist together.
And let's do a bit of bio... Oops, hit the microphone. Let's do a bit... I've got too many piercings. God, I sound like my parents. Let's go into a bit of biology, because that's why I'm here, apparently. And binaries and spectrums. Now, do we all love a really, really popular thing? Chromosomal binary identification systems.
Chromosomal binary identification system. That's a very long word. What does it refer to? It refers to the ways that you identify chromosomes. Primarily or majoritively within society. We use our little letters, X and Y. It's actually the most foundational argument that people who don't like trans
people like to go through when they've fallen over with all the other arguments. I kind of go to that one at the end and suggest that actually... On a base level though, even if you decide to go against all the societal norms and make up reality, there's still this one reality that pulls us all together.
We're all Xs and Ys. It's an identification system. Clues in the name. It's a system. It is invented. It is invented to do what? It's invented to identify. So it is real. Because it's a reality. It's a reality of interaction. You've interacted with a certain thing. You've made a decision and assumption of it.
And you've purposed it and packaged it as a structure. But what you've done now is you've said, oh no, but that's absolutely how everything works. That's definitely how everything works. It's not just the way that I just interacted with it. Because we don't talk about that. Chromosomal binary identification system, I think,
is quite a good way of explaining how binaries and spectrums both exist and also both don't. Because chromosomes, and you'll love this, are like shelves. Chromosomes are like shelves. They have lots of different things on them. So imagine you've got a bunch of shelves and you've got a bunch of different objects and items on those shelves.
Different shelves have different items on them, but sometimes the same people go to the same shelf and they pick up the same object, but they do a different thing with it. Now, if you try and imagine everyone in this room going to a different number of shelves
that have different numbers of objects on them and they sometimes go to the same shelf maybe three times and someone never goes to the same shelf, that's quite complicated. You can't really conceptualize that very easily, can you? There's almost an infinite number of ways that everyone could interact with those little bits and pieces on those shelves.
The people in these examples are the structures that exist within your body. The proteins, the molecular structures, the contraptions that fly around your body all the time. The shelves are your chromosomes, and the stuff on them is how the stuff in your body is interacting with those chromosomes.
It's very individual and it's very, very fluctuative and it's very flexible. It's very hard to conceptualize how a chromosome influences how people exist. Now, what's that got to do with anything except for the word chromosome? Well, if you are suggesting to me that chromosomes exist in a binary and that is it,
they are X and Y and that is it, and that influences how you look, live, exist, sing, do anything, That doesn't really work with the idea that chromosomes are shelves and the whole idea that I've just given you, does it? They don't really work together because what you've done is you've very much
simplified one subsection of a chromosome, and in this case they would refer to perhaps sex, they would refer to perhaps the way your body grows, and therefore the way your body grows which we will then use to identify. Now, actually, if we look at chromosomes and their structures, and let's put the shelf thing to the side here,
because otherwise we'll get a bit complicated. X and Y is a binary, right? It's two things. They are interacting with each other. But there are other types of chromosomal structures. Sometimes you've got an extra X. Sometimes you have another letter. That doesn't mean that that binary doesn't exist. But there are other ways of these chromosomes interacting.
Now the idea of normal within society has been used for many, many years to suggest something to be corrected to. But actually within data, it just refers to the majority amount of things in a system. It's a majority pattern. It's just the biggest amount of stuff in a system. That's what normal is.
It's not to be corrected to necessarily. So abnormal is not something that you need to correct to become normal. Abnormal is just the other stuff. There isn't as much of it in that system at that particular time. But it doesn't add up to that pattern, therefore we call it abnormal. Interestingly,
if I'm referring to chromosome binary and X and Ys as the normal and therefore the thing to be corrected to, it means two different things in data. and in society. In society, it generally means that's the normal. That's what most people go by. Therefore, that's the correct way of existing.
And everyone who fits into that structure, they are the norm and they are to be corrected to. And for many years, people who didn't have that chromosomal structure were corrected and still are to that normative way of existing. But just as I've said, there are other ways of chromosomes interacting.
There are multiple ways of chromosomes interacting within that X and Y criteria. There isn't even an X chromosome. The letter X for that chromosome isn't really referring to the shape of that. It's referring to the fact that that chromosome was unknown for a long time, and so they called it X. It's starting to unravel a bit.
This model's not really working. The X doesn't really refer to anything. The Y is another interactive chromosome. They interact very differently within our bodies in very different ways. There are other types of chromosomes that exist. This binary exists within a spectrum. So binaries can exist, but they exist within a spectrum. And therefore, what are they?
Well, they're an identification system. And that spectrum is also an identification system. Now notice how that is constructed and given to us as an absolute way of looking at things. And we are suggested to correct. We are suggested to correct to be that way of identifying things. A lot of that happens in biology.
And this comes down to, once again, colonialism, capitalism, and centricity and absolution. At the moment, an earring is playing truant. I'm trying to get out of my ear. That is why I keep reaching up to my ear, sorry. I haven't got like an earpiece or anything. I'm just going to leave that for now.
If you are presented with an absolute fashion or way of looking at things, and you are told that is the only way of existing, That is a form of colonization. Your format of existing, your way of thinking, has been occupied and then exploited, I think, primarily. If you're being told what to do and you're like, oh,
I don't really agree with that, or that doesn't really make sense, and they're saying, no, no, no, but we've got lots of facts, you know, data, that's absolute. As we've just said, data can exist. It's definitely not tampered with at all. We've just had an election. Therefore,
if you are presented with all these facts and figures and you are told that's the absolute way of existing, I think that requires a hierarchy to exist, does it not? Because a hierarchy must exist, as we've just said, in order to exploit, in order to construct, in order to tell someone to do something without repercussion,
in order to turn something into a resource without repercussion. Hierarchies exist with power, so therefore you create a power dynamic. You sometimes create a power dynamic by suggesting that some things are better than others simply because they inherently just are. Speciesism, we just talked about that. In order for speciesism to exist,
you have to create an identification system because you have to be able, I don't know what this means, I've just realized. I could be running out of time and I'm not really sure. Speciesism needs an identification system. Why does it need an identification system? Well, it needs an identification system because as I've just said,
you need to identify something as being better than something else. And the only way you can do that is by turning things into absolute ways of existing. You exist as something, you tick these number of boxes, therefore you are this particular object, item, animal, organism, person. Therefore, if majority of you tick those boxes,
you can be the norm, you can be the majority, and therefore everything will need to correct you because you are the norm, therefore you are the majority of way of existing, therefore you are correct. This has existed for many, many years within biology. As an ecologist,
I've tried to study many systems and found that actually a lot of the ways that we study organisms and animals is wrong, but it's wrong because what we do is we center one idea of them existing and we center the human experience. And that's called, another big long word that you don't have to remember, anthropocentrism.
Anthropocentrism is interesting because it's got a little sibling called anthropomorphism. I think the sibling's all right. I think the older one is a bit nasty. Anthropocentrism is nasty not because... Well, not because of the fact that it's anthropogenic, not because of the fact that we are using the human lived experience to understand other structures and formats,
because how else are we supposed to understand the world? We're humans. Foundationally you cannot truly understand something else from completely another perspective other than your own. But why is that bad to do that? I don't really think that it is. So therefore anthropomorphism I think is fine.
If you are studying an organism or environment as per your own lived experience, That's fine. The problem comes when you center it and when there's privilege involved. So again, privilege refers to access within a system to certain services, which means that that might be more curated to you,
which means that your voice might be louder in that system. Therefore, even if you've suggested that you are having a view of the world and that's just your view of the world, it could be heard louder than other people's. Yeah. So therefore, if you say that you are anthropomorphizing an organism in order to understand it better,
for example, and this is something that I sought to study more at university, communication systems in whales and dolphins. Do we all like whales and dolphins? Pretty cool. Dolphins are a bit weird, but the rest of them are pretty cool. Whales and dolphins have a way of communicating. They have a way of talking.
It's something we call whistle and clicks. It's something that refers to their ability to talk on a way or a manner or a level that is actually, it's almost as advanced, we say, as human beings. Now, the reason I'm talking about that is because they are the easiest to study language-wise because we have anthropomorphized them.
We have anthropomorphized their language. We've suggested that they have culture. They have communities. They have ways of talking that is similar in advancement to us. That's anthropomorphizing something. That's fine. However, anthropocentricizing is when you suggest that's the only way of understanding it. That's the only way of it ever existing. And that can come about on purpose,
via colonization, by occupying and exploiting a space or identity or structure, or it can come about by mistake because of privilege. because your voice is heard louder therefore your anthropomorphizing of this thing from your own lived experience just becomes the norm it becomes the majority therefore everything else must be corrected to it. Still kind of with me?
So let's go back to queering ecology. So now, what am I undermining? I'm undermining something that's been provided as an absolute by certain people within a certain system that is set up in a certain way as to identify structures, organisms, whatever it might be, in a certain way,
so that some of them are inherently seen as better than the others. I think undermining that sounds pretty good. Not just because I'm trans and I like trans animals. Actually, I have a workshop called Penguins Aren't Gay, but we can get into that later. I'm undermining it because inherently I do see the issues of structure,
the structured issues that exist within biology, as I've just said, a topic that underpins all of society as being something that inherently... does influence systemic issues of racism, systemic issues of misogyny, systemic issues of ableism. These are systemic in that they exist within and intertwined in our systems.
And they're quite toxic because they stop people from doing things. They limit their access. They make people underprivileged within certain systems. Therefore, to undermine that structure, that's pretty cool. I still haven't really got around to how I do that. So let's look at what I'm about to embark on in a PhD, which is really horrible and scary.
It's insect neurology. It's a bit odd. The ways... Well, maybe not. Apparently some people think about how insects think all the time. I think you should do a PhD. Insects think... They think. That's weird, I think. It's weird because actually, a couple of years ago, we didn't even think they breathed.
Because they are so very different in the structures and manners and ways that they exist to humans that it was almost, again, so difficult to conceptualize the fact that they did similar things as we did that it was considered to be ridiculous. They just can't do that. That's just not something that happens. And with that,
we come to a very particular part of queering, which is understanding where erasure occurs and the erasing of things. Because actually, and we're referring back to data and how it's tampered with and biology and how it's constructed, stuff being erased does construct realities. It does change your reality. primarily a big reason why biology is so heteronormative,
so patriarchal, so Eurocentric, is because the indigenous ideas, the ancestral ideas, the global majority people ideas of how biology and ecology and wildlife could be looked at, were looked at by a certain type of people who have constructed a certain type of system. And they were looked at and they thought, "Oh, that's that same problem again.
That's the people we came to in the beginning and we were trying to exploit. We were trying to exploit and turned their structure, their sustainable structure, you could say, into a system where we could explore easier. Now it's coming back. Their undermining is coming back again and again and again. So what do we have to do?
We have to erase this mindset, this idea." Because what it does is it makes unstable your absolute way of thinking. It makes unstable your predictions. And I know I'm throwing a lot of words at you, but I'll stop in a minute. Predictions is a very important word here,
because what we're referring to is the ability to predict where something goes. The ability to predict where something goes underpins another big word that everyone keeps throwing around for no reason, or maybe more reasons. Capitalism. Capitalism is, yeah, it's a very weird word. But actually, I think foundationally, it refers to the movement of stuff.
It's the movement of stuff at the exclusion of that stuff from certain groups, communities, and organizations via another group, community, or organization that is powerful enough to take that stuff away. And then they gain money from moving that stuff. It's a very basic idea of what capitalism is, but it's kind of right in many ways. Now,
if you want to move stuff and exclude it from someone else, you have to go back to colonialism, you have to be able to exploit an environment and occupy it, but you also have to do it efficiently. You have to do it in a way where you get most stuff moved in a short amount of time.
Now, how do you do that? You predict where stuff is going to go. The idea of prediction within economics, within capitalism, is very, very strong because it allows for capitalism to work faster and better and more. Now, if you are predicting within a system where things go and what things do,
it would help if everyone went along with that idea because it helps you predict things. Construct systems. Construct systems of existence, identity, and understanding within foundational subjects that underpin our society like biology and ecology, like data, like maths. We're not going to clear maths today. That's a whole other thing.
I find it very fun and interesting, but it's another talk. So therefore, prediction plays a part, capitalism plays a part, colonialism plays a part in constructing the system of biology in this Other system. Again, systems within systems. Let's put all of that to the side for a moment and think more about undermining.
So what does undermining consist of? What does queering ecology consist of? It consists of the confidence to ask that question in the first place. Where does that come from? That comes from facilitation, access. You need to be able to access that confidence in the first place in order to ask the questions.
You also kind of need to know what questions are most, I guess, useful to ask. And that could potentially be any question at all. But again, that comes down to confidence and that comes down to facilitated access and that comes down to access and inclusion.
Because if you are able to access services within a system and the system of privilege is broken down and divested from, you become more confident and able to ask questions from your own lived experience, which again is not a bad thing, especially when it brings in more perspectives that are different. For example, indigenous ideas, global majority ideas,
that, like I've said before, do have blueprints for doing these things, that do have blueprints for sustainably living, existing. They were there before. They can be again. It provides that hope. It provides that blueprint. So that confidence is necessary. The access is necessary. But you also kind of need to understand what you're dealing with.
And one way of doing that is by dissecting and deconstructing. We've just dissected and deconstructed a whole load of things. If you dissect and deconstruct, and you have access to dissect and deconstruct, much like people who come up with facts, which, you know, facts are based on assumptions. That's what hypotheses are.
They are assumptions that are made, and then they're poked a lot. And they're poked a lot by certain people in a certain room who have access to poke that thing. And no one questions whether or not they can poke it or how they poke it or who's
poking it or why they only get to poke it or why we're poking things. But that's how facts are formed. That doesn't make facts unreal. It makes them one reality. And the idea that something can exist as one reality and one reality only is something that we've just broken down because it doesn't really make sense in terms
of perspective. And now we come to almost the end, and I think we should move on to very quickly something called futurism and alternative system structure. I've said the word regenerative. I prefer that word over sustainable. Well, sustainable to me suggests one thing it suggests absolution it suggests a system that needs to keep
going on and on and on forever and helping everyone but we seem to have already had that that's a system that exists right now it's going on and on and on forever and it's not helping everyone because it's primarily being curated and created by a certain type of people for a certain type of people
I prefer the term regenerative because it provides this idea that we can have a fluctuating, ever-evolving structure that can change. Again, flexibility and fluidity. It can change. It might be a conceptualized idea that's existed for many, many years, but it's only been termed now and it can change later, much like the term queer,
much like the structures that we identify within biology. I'm not suggesting that science isn't real, that biology isn't real. I am a biologist. But I am suggesting that it's kind of ridiculous to give it to anyone as an absolute idea of anything that will never ever change and never has.
So therefore, regenerative futures and alternative structures are necessary. How can we do that? Well, we look at blueprints. But how do we do that at the same time as leaving the toxic systems? Well, the clue's in the name. You need to do it at the same time.
You need to be able to build alternative structures and systems of understanding things whilst divesting from previous systems that are seen as toxifying you, as limiting you, as not providing you privilege and access. That's what queering is, I think. It's undermining. But it's also building alternative structures. And... Within my book, which is not my book,
within a book that I've written a chapter of, I give a number of anecdotes about why I think queering has these structures within it, what I think queering ecology is, and what on earth and where on earth we should go with it. That's my personal view again.
These have all been my personal ideas and understandings of the interactions I have with a subject. Oh, it's raining. The rain's telling me to stop talking. I think I'm almost at the end of my talk. I didn't do very much walking around, so I'm sorry about that. But at the end of the day, through this process,
and again, the reason I told you not to really listen to the facts and figures that I had, the reason I didn't go into a lot of data collection and construction is because I do believe that the process of questioning, the process of divestment, and the process of building these structures as per the guidance of certain
communities and people who are centered within them is what's necessary. It's not necessarily about the facts and figures. They do help sometimes. But I don't think you need to remember them. So I do hope that after this talk you look at anything you would consider normal and you question why it's normal ? Who
came up with the fact that it is normal? If it's normal does that mean it's the majority of way of doing it? and that doesn't make it something to be corrected to but why is it that majority of way? Who constructed that system?
And I hope that from that you are able to look at the world and see it as a way, or in a way, that is more fluid, that is more fluctuating, and that is something that not only accepts more people simply because of who they are, but actually accepts more people understandings and identities and ideas and
perspectives of the world because actually they all exist. It's just about our reckoning and interaction with how they exist and why they exist. I think I'm done. [Applause]
