Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

No one wanted to kill the baby snake, a threatened species in New York and a living being with value unto itself,

As I will share in this book, I have built over time a deep kinship with species that have been maligned by other humans—venomous snakes, fungal parasites, soil-dwelling insects, slippery spineless beings—and the “undesirable” habitats they call home. Of these, snakes were my first love. Their habitats were also my refuge; their complication of category—somewhere between earthly and demonic—needed no explanation to me, a child who found herself within the dysphoric double consciousness of an amphibious personhood. Together we could slither between the rocky contours of the world, both natural and imposed, and rest in the dark comfort of the unseen.

There is value in the in-between and uncategorized, even in a culture that rewards certainty.

The forced assimilation of my Armenian family meant that my last name was chopped by immigration officials from Keshishian to Kaishian, a fact I wouldn’t learn until my early thirties. The original name—“son of priest”—carries thousands of years of history like a bumblebee carries a grain of pollen in the delicately adapted pockets of her legs.

I began to see that diversity is not only abundant in nature but is its very premise. The beings of our world are bound together by webby agreements predicated on difference. We all engage in special earthly pacts, trading energy through water, sunlight, iron, and sugar, each of us taking and contributing, each of us necessarily different. These differences are not positive or negative—they simply exist.

I like blurring the line between human and nature because I believe we, as a species, have become profoundly lonely in our self-enforced isolation. And it’s because of this that the planet is spinning through a devastating loss in biodiversity.

garod: tongue of a snake, meaning exile, longing for home. Or is desire what garod means? Longing for a native place.

For when he commits sin against water and vegetation, even when it is committed against merely a single twig of it, and he has not atoned for it, when he departs from the world the spirits of all the plants in the world stand up high in front of that man, and do not let him go to heaven.

In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, as I loved the land, I learned that the land loves me back.

In a world of harsh exposures, swamps and forests are soft pockets of filtered light.

The planet is still being torn apart for profit, poisoned, and parceled up into private lots. It is illegal simply to be in many places—laws about loitering and sleeping encampments are designed not to cure but to make invisible the failures of our economic system. You can either participate or you can be destitute.

What does exploring it even matter? Why should we care about a microscopic fungus living on a water-striding bug in the pooled rainwater within a bromeliad in the Andes? In return, I would ask, what are the implications of leaving these less visible organisms unnamed? What happens when the connective tissue of the earth is deemed unimportant? Calling species by their names is a practice of honoring, of praise.

anyone who was not European, wealthy, male, and able-bodied. Regions outside Europe were made accessible to researchers by the apparatuses

of colonization and the slave trade, and organisms that had been known and loved by people indigenous to these areas for millennia were frequently reported as new discoveries. Even within Western Europe, women had historically been keepers of ecological knowledge, but their voices were excluded from formal participation in science and their knowledge dismissed as “folktales,” “witchcraft,” or “old wives’ tales.”

The record is, as Sagan said, “a message in a bottle, cast into the cosmic ocean.” It was also apparent to me—and has been stated in the past by those involved with the project—that the recordings had been curated with a distinct reverence for the diversity of life on our planet. A collection that includes a thunderstorm, sheep-herding calls, and a chimpanzee vocalization is a purposeful signal of this world’s interdependencies. If we want our fellow interstellar voyagers to know us, they must know Earth. They must know that we are in companionship with other beings, other forces of nature, on a planet full of water and muck, and that our species has fanned out across it, living in

a myriad of earthly textiles and architecture. The Golden Record is an expression of gratitude for this raucous bastion of life.

In recent years, we’ve all watched the acceleration of the privatized space race. Driven by billionaires with egos to fan and money to burn, this pursuit of space tourism and, perhaps, colonization smells of desperation. Its very conception, never mind its astonishing material requirements, are made possible through previously unimaginable wealth, only achievable through widespread

destruction. To me, these appear the acts of lonely people attempting to cure their loneliness not by addressing the root cause—their social and interspecies alienation—but by deepening the wedge, widening the gap, and literally flinging themselves into orbit. In contrast to Shatner’s grief, after Jeff Bezos first looked down on Earth, he popped champagne.

The cemetery is biodiverse, full of massive trees and few cars. The people who go there—the bird allies of SUNY-ESF and graveside mourners—are unlikely to harass animals. The crows are in the cemetery because it is full of life.

The trees are not just a static perch for birds but interlocutors in the crow evolution story. With these visitors, the trees are transformed, Medusa-formed, a many-headed beast, a multi-creature. The trees protect the crows from predators, offer a lookout point from which they can survey. The fall starts to strip the silent brown oak leaves and replaces them with vocalizing black

irides...

Scientific evidence for corvid cognition has placed these beings in the small and pedestaled Western scientific category of “primate-level” intelligence. But much of what science has revealed about crow behavior in the past few decades was already considered established knowledge by many groups of people around the world, from the First Nations of Turtle Island to the Armenians of West Asia.

The delay in scientific appreciation can be traced to the often negative and ominous perception of corvids in Western culture, a bias that itself has been linked to centuries of European wars and crusades.

If I myself were a bowerbird, no courtship ritual would be successful without purple at the heart of the love nest. Sure, I might be enticed by a stage bedecked in emerald, ruby, lapis lazuli, or onyx, but only a theater of purple love could ensure my commitment. Maybe what the birds experience in this moment is the same as when we initially encounter a resonant piece of art or music. Like hearing a song for the first time and feeling, paradoxically, that it is singularly for you—and that it was created by someone who is, in some way, just like you. You cannot manufacture that feeling. It simply happens.

This is not always as obvious as a bowerbird choosing a bejeweled shrine; it can also be “cryptic,” in which the female’s body, seemingly apart from her mind, makes choices. Some female animals, for example, can select the sperm of certain males over others after insemination, whether by altering their bodies’ pH, producing spermicidal compounds, or contracting their muscles to discard certain sperm, among other mechanisms. This choice may be informed by the Darwinian conception of fitness—when a male is perceived to possess genes that would create the greatest likelihood of offspring survival—but attempts to quantify this experimentally have failed in a surprising number of cases. The preferences of female animals, from moths to monkeys, seem frequently to be driven by perceptions of beauty, whether it increases offspring survival or not.

It became clear the bowerbirds were teaching me something, something I had understood and boldly pursued as a child but neglected in my twenties. As a child, I was a little bowerbird learning my craft, and purple was the glint in the eyeshine of life. The next chapter in my life would be to build my own bower. The goal would be to honor my own choices, aesthetics, and intuition, not to attract a mate. But if I did this work—if I was true to my own pleasure—surely the people who came to my bower would be the right ones, be they friends or romantic partners.

So much damage has been wrought by believing we are exceptional and superior to other beings. We have denied our own ecological birthright—the right to move freely, to be in symbiosis with the habitat we evolved in. We have poisoned ourselves with these beliefs.

When you realize other species experience desire and pleasure, things you may have thought were only for humans, the world becomes infinitely more beautiful. When you learn that asters and goldenrod look so lovely next to one another because their purple and golden petals appear more vivid side by side—because the pollinator finds this lovely and eye-catching, too—you feel less alone. When you see how a bowerbird spends years of his life artistically arranging his home to attract love, you can more easily see yourself as part of a long, sprawling story on this earth.

The Homestead Acts, beginning in 1862, incentivized colonial western expansion and conversion of prairie into agriculture, and the 1887 Dawes Act allowed the US government to unjustly claim over ninety million acres of Indigenous lands for agricultural purposes. This is when the concept of “private property” took hold on the continent, imposing rigid and violent cartographies on what was otherwise a fluid, shifting community. In the same period, five thousand bison were being slaughtered daily, with the direct and incomprehensibly evil intention of starving and punishing Indigenous communities. In fewer than twenty years, the population of bison was brought from over sixty million to a mere three hundred.

And yet, within small hideouts like the Badlands, places that people have fought desperately to protect, it is possible to hear the pulse, to sense the ecological heart, of a biome still alive, still fighting. In this resplendent sliver, I felt gratitude for less than total loss.

Margulis is also famous for her contributions to the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that earth is, in some sense, a superorganism. If you accept that symbiosis is a norm rather than an exception to the rules governing biological processes and species interactions, then the earth itself, as a collective, appears less random and chaotic. The planet and all its emergent complexity becomes more like a being than an object.

Consider, alternatively, the symbols of the relatively young, settler-colonial United States. The bald eagle, symbolizing our American “freedom,” is often depicted as a formidable predator. This is a misunderstanding, biologically speaking. Bald eagles are mostly scavengers, similar to vultures, rarely hunting and not exceptionally aggressive. They are more likely to be seen picking at carrion than snatching prey from the air. Our “amber waves of grain” summon up the wheat monocultures that destroyed the prairies and drove the ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous peoples in the continent’s interior. What they reveal about us as a nation, more than anything else, is our own ignorance of this land and its inhabitants.

To see your own biology mirrored in the body of a mysterious, metamorphosing, magnetotactic being is magic.

“Sit spots,” as they are commonly known, are natural places (though not necessarily remote) that one cultivates a long-term relationship with.

The water is so invitingly clear, I’m tempted to sip. Knowing I’m very likely to get sick if I do, I resist the urge. But this sends me down a familiar line of thinking. I am constantly in awe, in a terrible kind of way, that to be alive today—almost anywhere—is to exist in a world of poisoned water. There have always been parasites and pathogens that can foul water and make humans sick, but that we must also constantly assume the water around us has been contaminated heavily by industrial waste, sewage, or runoff is a dystopia we’ve been habituated to.

I believe that all beings have an ecological birthright to move through the habitats in which they emerged in a manner consistent with their evolution. To have access to clean waters to drink and swim in, companion species to romp with, fresh plants to eat, deep cavities to roost in, and dark starlit nights for sleeping or hunting. Time should be community time, set to the rhythms of all your neighbors, biological and celestial, and marked with cycles of daylight, sugar, and song.

You are permitted to perform reverse alchemy, turning into nothing what was once cacophonous, ecstatic, and absolutely not yours.

I teach a class on ecology and evolution through the Bard Prison Initiative, and on a recent exam I asked, “What is the most fundamental driver of evolution?” This question was intended to be open-ended. I told the students that I could, in theory, accept numerous answers so long as their reply was backed up by sound scientific reasoning. One student’s clever response was “time.” In essence, he argued that no element of evolution or natural selection could be understood outside of time, that change was a function of time. He spent a whole page building this argument. It was as persuasive as it was creative. Time is change, change is time, and, according to Octavia Butler, God is change. It’s the only constant.

So when I pulled the Hypomyces banningiae from the type cabinet, I was emotional. Embodied in this humble specimen—a fuzzy parasitic fungus that grows on the bodies of other mushrooms—I saw the work of two people, two colleagues, two friends. But I also saw the great tragedy of sexism. I saw two mycologists, one remembered, one forgotten. I saw two brilliant people, one employed by the state, the other dying homeless. I thought about how rarely, even in this historical moment, I’ve heard men describe any woman as “genius.” I thought about all the women who have been discounted, all the people born into the margins who die without proper acknowledgment for their offerings to this world.

“Fungi are considered vegetable outcasts. Like beggars by the wayside dressed in gay attire, they ask for attention but claim none.”

I watched a slug make slow work of nibbling a mushroom’s gills. They must know how to cruise the mycelial superhighway, I thought, as they are always finding mushrooms before people do.

I am a modern taxonomist, but if I were Aristotle, I would assign them all three types of souls—vegetative, sensitive, and rational. And by rational, I mean that what they show us, completely and utterly, is that all life is interdependent.