AS A QUEER ECOLOGIST, I’d like to say something about population. But I cannot. What I would say if it were permissible is that, as queer people who want families, we are uniquely positioned to raise and develop the multitudes of the neglected and unwanted. Yes, cleaning up the procreative messes of straight people sounds unsavory—particularly in the light of the 2016 election—but altruism of this nature carries a measurable ecological weight.
If it were discussable, I would share the stories of my contra-sexed and coupled friends who tell me that, if their truth be told, they’re terrified to have children. They recognize that modern parenthood is based more upon market consumerism and human ego than upon securing some imagined brighter future.
Let me say to all such couples: come with my partner David and me, and we’ll spend our lives drinking wine from local vineyards, growing food in our backyards, playing music, walking in parks with stray dogs, and designing small, sexy, efficient homes while enjoying more evening sunlight and windstorms and bird migrations. We’ll stop buying one another useless gifts for hollow made-up occasions. We’ll indulge our senses for no reason at all, at any time we like, never beholden to absurdly explained, consumption-based justifications. There’ll be no need for greeting cards, gift certificates, or specialty cakes baked by bigots (or not baked by them).
One is not allowed to say that most parents are incompetent and many of their kids are zombies. I can’t say these things because I’m just some gay guy who can’t possibly know what it’s like to be a parent. Criticizing parents and their children is like telling people to stop breathing because you’re annoyed with the mouth noises they make. I can’t say these things because of God and Republicans and capitalism and because of Macy’s and Disney and Coca-Cola and every company that automatically defaults to the imago of the family as the single most effective means to sell a product. I can’t say these things because I believe in politically protected, procreative personal choice and self-determination.
But because people like me cannot say these things and be taken seriously, there is no serious conversation taking place around the damaging effects of today’s reproductive cultures. I’m just some self-centered white guy who has sex with other guys like myself while we spend a lot of money on organic produce, drink more than we should at Sunday brunch, and experience pleasure for no reason at all. Gay men like me have no reproductive value. Our sexual efforts amount to nothing. And that is precisely the point: that is what just might save the planet. Nothing. We need more humans engaged in more activities, sexual and otherwise, that amount to nothing.
The reason I feel justified in criticizing human parents and parenting and human children and childhood is because I study animals. Mother apes (and the occasional father) hold their babies until the infant is ready to let go. If we knew this first, how other apes operate, we may well solve a host of sociological problems by ensuring that the neurochemicals most needed for a healthy social development, produced by a human parent constantly touching an offspring, take root early in life.
You don’t want to hold your babies? Then don’t have babies. Strapping them into plastic molds welded to multi-axled pushcarts, some doublewide with lofts and cargo holds, not only isolates and frightens human babies, it disrupts the calm of other human apes in coffee shops and on public transit, at concerts and baseball games. Not only does not holding human babies make for more cranky, maladjusted adults, it pisses off many other human apes just going about their business, not expecting to have a phalanx of plastic machinery disrupt a comforting cup of hot chai. I criticize parents and children because I’m concerned about the species to which I proudly belong. We need to ape what it means to be an ape.
I criticize parenting because I see the epidemic of rampant consumption (originally a Victorian disease) instilled at an early age, and it never goes away. Even at one’s beloved Trader Joe’s, one is menaced by swarms of neoliberal consumers-in-training dressed in synthetic tutus and bright knee-socks tearing off chucks of real flesh with the front wheels of their trolleys as they fill their miniature shopping carts full of organic gummies and salted caramels.
I criticize parents and parenting because I see my straight friends forced to come out of their nonreproductive closets to admit—in full defiance of the supposedly universal “norm of pronatalism”—that they aren’t having children, only to face the shock and disappointment of family and friends. Accused of being selfish and careerist, they face as much disdain as many gay couples do just for existing as such. But this kind of self-centeredness has an essential role to play as an ecological imperative.
QUEER ECOLOGY mounts a challenge to a fitness-focused Darwinism by examining the importance of human behaviors that appear to accomplish nothing. Under the influence of Darwinian feminists like Patricia Gowaty and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, anthropologists are going back into old data sets collected decades ago to reassess the contributions made by nonreproductive individuals as documented within hunter-gatherer communities in Africa and South America. These self-identified homosexual individuals helped provision related offspring, provided protection and education, and in many cases were also shamans and spirit healers. They created and helped pass on sets of cultural genetics and ensured the survival of their own genes in the bodies of nieces and nephews.
The nature-versus-nurture debate collapses when we realize that nonreproductive individuals, influenced by genetics and purposefully integrated into cultures, have a huge influence on how societies sustain themselves and how they evolve. Queer people today have an opportunity to help redirect human ecological trajectories by resisting economies of increase, ones championed by the current political malignancy in power, and can instead help foster a slowdown in human growth and environmental exploitation. Queer ecology compels us to study ecological limits and the urgently needed social mechanisms of limiting. If we choose to limit, our behavior becomes a vital part of human ecology as we address climate and habitat change. How do we creatively learn to desire less, buy less, procreate less, eat less, develop less? Limits are essential to the study of any ecosystem.
When you think less of yourself as human and increase your ape-awareness, you have the opportunity to think less of the culture that made your self and more of the forces that produced your species. When you think less of the self and more of the species, you become wonderfully strange. You become queer. You enter the strange poetic beauty of Robinson Jeffers: “Mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. … Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity.” Queer ecology asks us to include the choice of nonprocreativity into the brave, thoughtfully conceived, and beneficial pantheon of life choices that enjoy social acceptance. But is this even possible? Can we allow people without progeny to help shepherd a human ecology into and through contraction?
What being a queer ecologist may mean is that less is more. It is an ecology of contraction as a human choice (favored by culture) as opposed to a demographic collapse at the hands of natural selection. Less now or less later. We can do this the hard way, or we’ll end up doing it the harder way. The problem with choosing contraction, a life with less, is that our social constructions, predetermined before we were born, demand increase—increase in progeny, in comfort levels, in control. Increase is what defines both Victorian Darwinism and American-style consumerism. Increase equals happiness. Contraction equals death and chaos. In a culture hoarding seemingly limitless stores of different commodities, any loss, no matter how small, causes panic. This is the primary effect of the grand American bloat obstructing and disabling our current political system. No one wants to propose actions that might challenge the ideology of perpetual expansion. Such proposals can only arise at the grassroots level.
Human ecology is not a stagnant concept. Constant change is the one hard-nosed reality of thinking like a queer ecologist. For now, there is no normal. No normal highs or lows in temperature. No above or below normal rainfall or snowpack or water levels. During times of dramatic shifts in ecosystems, there is no normal. Here’s where queer theory comes in handy.
“Normal” is a made-up construct. Normal is based on what excites and girds power structures. Ski industries, monoculture agriculture, oil producers, stock markets, daily calorie counts, wedding planners, diaper makers, plastics—all are established and maintained by straight white men. If it serves the landowner, the general, the CEO, or the politician, normal can be manipulated according to conditional metrics designed to maintain control. How is it possible to wrest control from the mechanisms fueled by increase? Do more of nothing. We can choose to do less of what keeps these institutions in power.
How then to navigate contraction? How to live with more of nothing, more of expenditure without return? More sex without babies? More home gardens instead of home businesses? More walking without weight-loss goals? Being ecologically queer amidst normal means dropping everything to the ground to stare change in the face—this burning house, these melting walls of ice, this explosion of insects, these whirling winds, this present, terrifying but terrifically ecstatic moment in time.
This message may be first one of caution to the gay community—a community of which I count myself a proud member. I worry about gay people becoming “normal”—reproducing, over-consuming, aerating thick green lawns praised by the executive next-door who has recently “evolved” on the issue of gay marriage. The danger is that gay becomes less queer (in the old sense), and the push against all that is normal becomes sluggish. The same power structures remain. Being accepted into society—which for Americans means being accepted as well-vetted, well-vested consumers—has long been the prize for the gay rights movement. But shouldn’t the prize also include the right to remain different? Shouldn’t the prize include having a place at the table to make the announcement that my partner and I have decided not to marry, and not to have children?
Living with less seems impossible inside current normativity. The existential shift from growth to contraction is inconceivably frightening. After all, contraction, in economic terms, means recession. This shift must be championed by people who worship less. Maybe gay folks need a moment to examine what our place could be as material agents of change as nonreproducers. Can we lead others into these ecologies of contraction?
Queer ecology is a post-humanist ethic that seems impossible to embody or enact. Acting more like an ape does not mean shedding clothing and copulating in front of strangers in public parks or stealing food off the tables at outdoor cafes. But we can adapt to our new and changing habitats by re-examining the genus to which we belong. Letting go of normal sexuality means better understanding the unique ape-ness of homo sapiens. Letting go of what is socially appropriate and embracing more of what is ape-congruent means letting breasts hang out with no cover when a child is hungry. More ape, less human means strapping a child to your chest wherever you are for as long as the child needs. It means freeing those infants from the plastic cocoons, strapped and restrained and disoriented. More ape, less human means taking cues from our cousins, the bonobos (Pan paniscus) and using sex as a means of social organization and recreation. More ape, less human means we know where our food comes from. We know where we leave our shit. We see once again our naked bodies.
The queer ecologist asks that we uncover ourselves: drop the robes, wipe off the makeup, put down the implements, cease using so much language and simply see flesh and bone as they exist without the manipulation of human culture. Less speech, more grunts and groans.
Eric Robertson studies and practices queer ecology among the mountains and Mormons of Utah, where he teaches environmental humanities at Utah Valley University.
