Queer Ecology

Ecology is a relatively recent science. The term was coined in 1866, by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, barely 30 years after Darwin’s famous travels aboard the HMS Beagle. Ecology, like all sciences, is a product of its social world, but especially. But given its interest in complex, interactive systems, the science of ecology derived its systems of knowledge as much from politics, theories of international relations, and ethical philosophy as from its big sister biology.

Over the course of history, ecology has evolved along with other philosophical trends, or been used as a metaphor to political ends. In Metamorphosis by the Institute of Queer Ecology, the tools of ecology are queered and decolonized to expose the fractures of our current petro-capitalist world order so that we can reimagine new connections between epistemologies, species, and worlds. A collaborative, decentralized collective of artists, scientists, and activists who subversively frame themselves as an “institution,” the Institute of Queer Ecology uses exhibitions, art, and direct action to agitate for an inclusive, decolonial, multi-species future.

The consequences of the traditional Western notion of a “nature” apart from culture, becoming everyday clearer. And ecology’s potentials and limits in grappling with our vast interconnectedness is increasingly relevant. Today, we hear mostly about ecological destruction. About mass species die off. About the decimation of landscapes. About new microbes trying to kill us. As the climate crisis accelerates, it’s clear that we must challenge our assumptions.

The Institute of Queer Ecology is proposing a metamorphosis. In these videos, the lifecycle of holometabolous insects—bugs who undergo a “complete metamorphosis”—is proposed as a revolutionary paradigm for transforming ecology and capitalism. Queerness serves as a type of ecological visioning, a way of proposing an alternative, utopic world. Each video—featuring voiceovers from Mykki Blanco and Deli Girls’ Danny Orlowski—is a mini-manifesto, proposing new ways of becoming strange, becoming less human, to create a multispecies world in which we all might survive and thrive.

The Institute of Queer Ecology

Prelude.  Serotiny.

 Around 3.5 billion years ago life began. A single ancestor of the nearly trillion living species today bubbled up from a harsh and primordial earth. We are all and have always been, entangled. Each ecological disaster and each extinction, rather than an individual tragedy, is a collective loss and exposes the almost incomprehensibly enmeshed systems of power that rule our lives.

In this prologue to the Institute of Queer Ecology’s Metamorphosis series, an overview of the current ecological crisis is given with a voice-over by Danny Orlowski of the band Deli Girls.

The ongoing ecocide is intimately tied to colonial genocide. In Brazil, slash and burn fires decimate the Amazon rainforest many indigenous peoples call home to make room for cattle to be raised by laborers who work to produce money for their capitalist bosses. Climate change-induced forest fires are put out by prisoners caught in a system of ongoing slavery in California—unless you’re so well-off that your insurer guarantees you a privatized fire service.

Economic imbalances are creating a less and less habitable earth, while consolidating wealth for the top few. Industrial capitalism and colonialism are helped by and perpetrate near-willful extinctions. Climate control is preparing us for a new doomsday economy, where even a green response could be a capitalist or ecofascist wolf in environmentalist sheep’s clothing.

For an equitable, habitable world, we need to organize: not just for resilience, but for regeneration.

Dis Art

 Episode 1. Grub Economics.

Metamorphosis is a nature show that undoes assumptions about the world and our place in it. Treating humanity’s systems like little bugs, in Grub Economics, the Institute of Queer Ecology along with Mykki Blanco map a proposal for a post-human, post-fossil fuel future.

There is a myth that nature can always right itself to a state of equilibrium, that all slight deviations will eventually correct themselves back to the status quo. This misunderstanding of ecological interconnectedness has been warped by many, not just as it relates to the so-called environment, but even to the ends of “scientific” racism or classism.

These beliefs have relied on a half-reading of Darwin, whose evolutionary theories relied in no small part on a notion of constant competition. We need a new understanding of nature that would go beyond competition to recognize queer relations like symbiosis and co-evolution as necessary for collective survival. And, while this myth led early environmental movements to focus on a fabled balance, perhaps the only constant is change, even chaos.

While we talk often of evolution in ecosystems, we don’t talk so much of revolutions. But all revolutions—even human political ones—take place in the sphere of biology. What would today’s ecological revolution look like?

Currently, the global economic order is in a sort of larval stage. Like hungry caterpillars, capitalists unyieldingly extract and extract. They’re grubs thriving on a petromodernity that manufactures products known to be toxic while supporting a system that needs those toxic things, all the while perpetuating extreme economic stratification.

To cope with the danger of planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution of our extractive, capitalist world, some of the more privileged—primarily scientists and technocrats from the global north—have proposed large-scale geoengineering projects, like releasing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide, essentially intentional pollution, that would act as a shield to help cool the planet. Or, perhaps, like a smokescreen to prevent us from imagining other ways of changing our world, such as fundamentally rethinking the economic order, and liquidating assets to redistribute our resources to create something more just and altogether new.

Dis Art

Episode 2.  Liquidation.

Capitalism hides its shape from us, so let’s give it one. Perhaps of the caterpillar, that voracious larva that, like the extractivist or petro-capitalist, feeds endlessly. Of course, if they survive, caterpillars eventually become something else. They turn into a cocoon, then a pollinating butterfly. Today’s oligarchs would like to be able to live somewhere between the consumptive larval stage and the protective cocoon, an ideal limbo for them. They live in a separate world, barricaded by private police and militarized borders.

However, in a real cocoon, a radical, transformative process takes place: there is the liquidation of organs to clumps of cells that reorganize themselves, however, all matter is conserved, and some structures are too. Liquidation in the Pupal State, as described by the Institute of Queer Ecology along with Mykki Blanco, represents not erasure, but redistribution.

If extractive capitalism takes the shape of the caterpillar, then perhaps we can induce its inevitable liquidation, reformation, and metamorphosis so that our world might take a shape that is queerer and more equitable, for all species.

Dis Art

 Episode  3.  Emergence. 

In Emergence, the final chapter of the Institute of Queer Ecology’s Metamorphosis, Mykki Blanco guides us out of our straight, fossil-fuel soaked cocoon.

The mode of “reproduction” integral to cis-heterosexuality and the traditional family and thereby to capitalism is unsustainable. The biopolitical control exercised by capitalism’s investment in heteropatriarchy—by maintaining clear gender roles, clear family orders, limiting reproductive rights, and so on—only allows for the reproduction of the world in which we already live. It posits reproduction as a useful tool to regenerate its ideas and to generate laborers it sees as disposable. It limits the passing of knowledge, the building of kinships across traditional boundaries of age, geography, and kinship. It limits the imagination. But to build a new world, we must first imagine a way towards it. Queerness has long made families and shared knowledge in alternative ways. queerness introduces desire as a world-building tool.

Utopic thinking is not about queering capitalism but leveraging queerness to mutate capitalism, to dissolve it, . and transform it. Where petro-capitalism produces things to be disposed of—including human beings—a heliosocialist or hydrosocialist system would force us to move with earth systems—the sun, the water—to be in constant balance with the earth’s movements and the many species that inhabit the planet.

This is not opposed to “reproduction,” but opposition to the reproduction of the world as is, a world that limits desiring, imagining, connecting, learning, and growing. Similarly, indigenous philosophies—many of which have long grappled with the post-human, object-oriented, or ecocentric turns new to western thought for years—and struggles promote and promise anti-capitalist, anti-extractive alternatives. A queer utopia would be one of indigenous sovereignty.

Currently, we are reproducing for a world that cannot continue without end, a world that does not make space for genuine desire and that is not generable. Rather than reproducing, we might produce something altogether new.

Dis Art