Forest Euphoria Quotes

“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.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Ignoring your intuition feels like walking face first through an invisible spider web, again and again”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Thankfully, the world is not constructed entirely around pain and exploitation. Competition alone does not explain the world’s abounding beauty and mutualistic interactions. And just as white people are not biologically superior to any other race, humans are not inherently “more evolved” than other species. As humans, we evolved within a consortium of organisms—bacteria, fungi, plants, and other animals—some of whom were thriving on this planet for millions and even billions of years prior to our emergence. The forces of evolution do not move in any predetermined direction.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“I want us all to be philopatric snakes in an interspecies den.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“What if we let their ways of being creep and expand and burble through our own minds, through our families, friendships, and institutions? We are all, already, quite swampy; we are all intertwined, enmeshed, and difficult to distinguish, yet our culture often forces a commitment to a particular box or definition. But why be linear when we can be webby and dynamic?”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“But while it may feel like a distraction to discuss the way culture informs science, I believe this is precisely how we make our science better, more objective, and more ethical. By naming and examining the forces all around us, we can anticipate how they might seep into our work. If we fail to have these conversations, both on the interpersonal and institutional levels, we are likely to drag bad, biased, unethical, and inaccurate "science" into the future.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“What research questions are funded, which papers are accepted for publication, and who is invited to teach courses, speak at conferences, or otherwise conduct science over time becomes science. It's a runaway train. Studies produced by members of esteemed social classes and their institutions will amass citations faster than those from outgroups, if those works are even published. If researchers and their institutions harbor social bias or explicit disdain for certain demographics, the science they produce will often contain evidence of that bias. Eventually, no matter how flawed, these highly cited works may become canon, their authors immortalized in textbooks, and their lessons taught to future generations of scientists. And when a competing idea is introduced-perhaps one that seeks to correct the initial bias—it may be seen as an affront to science itself.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Ultimately, queerness invites us all, regardless of our identities, to be more undefined, unclear, transitional, merging, interdependent, cooperative, and nonhierarchical—a very fungal way of being.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“I had experienced beautiful growth during college, I had found a vocation and a greater purpose. But since then, I had become gripped by a deep, desperate loneliness that I felt only romantic partnerships could fill. This feeling was so acute that I was willing to strike a terrible bargain. I suppressed my self-preservation and my intuition for momentary reprieves from loneliness. I entered a series of relationships with people who repeatedly and unapologetically harmed me. With my gut silent, my mind was alone at the helm generating plausible excuses for their bullshit.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor. —Joy Harjo”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“I noticed how, in the right environments, frogs could move through the world with porous skin and eyes wide open—like me, they took everything in. I learned that copperheads, when their space was respected, had relaxed personalities. When human connections failed me, these relationships held the safety, the possibility, the charm, the playfulness, the saturated liveliness that I struggled to find elsewhere. In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, as I loved the land, I learned that the land loves me back.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“In its common usage, the word "nature" carries a lot of baggage-it suggests a space that is distinct from the human species and our day-to-day world. The word invokes a great divide, an idea that humans are elevated and apart from the primordial muck from which we sprang. But this partitioning is a cultural choice, not a scientific fact. From a biological and evolutionary perspective, humans are nature and nature is human. The need to define these terms as separate realms is a result of our increasingly fractured relationship with other species, a wedge plunged into an imaginary crevice.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature