Exploring “Forest Euphoria”
Pity the poor banana slug, just trying to live its life and munch moss, but instead catching strays from the President of the United States of America.
In May, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at “ending the taxpayer subsidization of biased media,” by which he means ending all federal funding to PBS and National Public Radio. A fact sheet released by the White House to show the president’s justification for labeling public media as “left-wing propaganda” highlighted an NPR segment mentioning that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites.”
Here’s the thing, though. Banana slugs are hermaphrodites. They have both male and female reproductive organs, can mate as either males or females, and even fertilize themselves. Is it left-wing propaganda if it’s something that happens in the woods every day?
I began to worry that, as an environmental journalist who writes about asexual eels and cicadas whose butts fall off after extended hallucinogenic orgies, I was destroying America. So I called Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, a Putnam Valley native who’s the curator of mycology at the New York State Museum in Albany.
She’s also the author of the extraordinary new book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature. The book is part memoir, detailing Kaishian’s days exploring the abundant nature of the Hudson Highlands, and part an examination of the ways in which the natural world resists simple categorizations. Previously, she taught a class on queer ecology at Bard. On the first day of each class, she and the students would work out a definition of what queer ecology is.
On one level it’s about the species that defy binary definitions of sexuality. Slipper snails are all born as males. But as Kaishian explains in Forest Euphoria, sometimes a group of snails will pile on top of one another to form a writhing mound. During this process, some snails will then transition to females.
Clonal raider ants are all female. Their society has no queens or males. They reproduce by developing embryos inside themselves without fertilization, a process known as parthenogenesis, a combination of the Greek words for “virgin” and “creation.”
Then there’s those slippery eels, who for most of their lives have no sexual organs. Speaking of the Greeks, the asexual nature of eels drove poor Aristotle crazy; he eventually declared that they must spontaneously reproduce from mud. Aristotle was in good company, as young Sigmund Freud was also flummoxed by eels and spent an entire fruitless summer in his youth flaying hundreds of eels in an attempt to discover the elusive eel testes. (Freud’s obsession with phallic symbols makes a lot more sense now, doesn’t it?)
We now know that eels’ sexual organs only develop in the final stage of their lives as they race back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn and die, their stomachs shriveling up to make room for the new testes or ovaries.
But there’s another level to queer ecology, bound up in the word “queer.” When I was growing up, it was an insult. But as Kaishian told me, the word was reclaimed by the gay community in the 1980s and ‘90s in the face of widespread government indifference to the AIDS crisis and homophobia.
“It was a way of galvanizing a collective to act against government neglect and oppression,” she said. “Queerness is about the collective, understanding power and understanding how unity is necessary in combating oppression.”
In queer ecology, one is invited to think about what gets labeled normal, and what gets labeled abnormal. “Why do we think this way as a society?” asked Kaishian. “How is science influenced by cultural forces, and how has that, in some cases, inhibited our knowledge?” A familiar attack on the LBGTQ+ community is that their lives are “unnatural,” but as Kaishian explains, queerness is literally “natural,” with thousands and thousands of examples spread across the Tree of Life.
Through this lens, the attacks on public media, scientific knowledge and the trans community aren’t separate issues but part of a broader pattern.
“All these things are related,” she said. “Climate change, as much as it is a technical, scientific problem, it’s also a social and a political problem. It’s not just about finding scientific salvation from carbon in the atmosphere. It’s also about confronting our very relationship to Earth, our very relationship to consumption and the other species that we share a planet with. The total destruction of the planet is also linked to the hierarchies that humans create. If you can create a hierarchy between people, it’s very easy to then also extend that into the natural world.”
Queer ecology, then, is not about putting politics into science but about taking politics out of it, about looking at the world as it actually is without cultural biases getting in the way. When we do that, we discover wondrous things that were previously neglected.
The first exhibit that Kaishian curated at the museum lifts up work that was, for cultural reasons, ignored. Outcasts, which runs through Jan. 4, displays the vibrant watercolors of fungi painted by the 19th-century mycologist Mary Elizabeth Banning. Because of her gender, her work was never taken seriously in her lifetime. She died penniless and destitute, but not before mailing her life’s work to a sympathetic researcher in Albany.
Her work sat in a drawer for almost a hundred years, where the darkness ironically helped preserve the painting’s vibrant colors. With the new exhibit, her work has been brought out into the light and is being given its due. Princeton University Press will now publish Banning’s book in the future.
“It’s really exciting to see young girls come to the exhibit,” said Kaishian. “I’ve done a couple of children’s events educating kids about mushrooms and their biology — but also explaining that there was a time when women were told they couldn’t be scientists. And now we can be. Think about how important that is.”
