‍Why Ecology Needs a Queer Lens

Even today — outside of Pride Month and curated campaigns — queerness is often treated as invisible, peripheral, or unsafe. LGBTQIA+ people continue to face discrimination woven deep into social, cultural, and political systems. But oppression doesn’t just operate in the streets or in laws. It operates subtly — in norms, assumptions, and the stories we tell about the world.

Queer Ecology brings this awareness to the environmental movement. It asks: What if the way we think about nature is shaped by the same binary logic that marginalizes queer lives? And what if queerness isn't just a human identity category, but something that exists all throughout the natural world?

In doing so, Queer Ecology opens up a more expansive, inclusive, and honest way to engage with both ecology and identity.

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What Is Queer Ecology?

Queer Ecology is an emerging field that brings together queer theory, ecological thought, and critical science studies. It questions heteronormative assumptions in science and environmentalism — and offers alternatives rooted in fluidity, multiplicity, and interdependence.

As Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson write in their foundational collection Queer Ecologies, the concept challenges “compulsory heterosexuality as it manifests in our perceptions of nature, ecology, and environmental politics.” It’s a call to reimagine both sexuality and nature as non-binary, dynamic, and relational.

Mainstream ecology has often reinforced narrow ideas of what counts as “natural.” For centuries, scientific studies assumed heterosexuality and gender dualism as biological norms — sidelining or ignoring the vast diversity of sexual, reproductive, and gendered behaviour in the more-than-human world.

Queer Ecology doesn’t just point out those blind spots. It reframes them. It sees queerness not as an exception in nature, but as part of its very fabric.

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Nature Has Always Been Queer

Across ecosystems, plants and animals defy binary expectations. Same-sex pairings, gender fluidity, non-reproductive sexuality, and complex social behaviours are widespread in the natural world — yet often erased in scientific narratives.

Take the famously bonded penguin couple, Roy and Silo, at New York’s Central Park Zoo. These two male penguins built a nest together, courted, and raised a chick named Tango. Their story symbolised how queerness exists — and thrives — in nature, regardless of how humans frame it.

Or consider the New Mexico whiptail lizard (Aspidoscelis neomexicana), an all-female species that reproduces through parthenogenesis. Two female lizards engage in mating-like behaviour to stimulate ovulation, yet scientific discourse often labels their reproduction as “asexual” — erasing the visible sexual behaviour because it doesn’t fit the heterosexual mould.

This tendency reflects what some scholars call a cultural feedback loop: our cultural norms shape how we interpret nature, and then we use those biased interpretations to justify the very norms we started with. As Morton puts it, “We are losing touch with a fantasy Nature that never really existed.”

By revealing how queerness is already present in nature, Queer Ecology destabilizes the myth that heterosexuality, monogamy, or gender binaries are biologically predetermined.

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More Than Just Biology

Queer Ecology isn’t only about animals and reproduction. It’s about how ideas of “naturalness” shape our politics, spaces, and identities. Nature has long been used as a moral compass — invoked to define what’s right, pure, or “normal.” But when “nature” is presented as heterosexual, binary, and orderly, everything outside of that frame gets cast as deviant or dangerous.

This framing shows up in national parks designed around heteronormative ideals of the nuclear family. It shows up in environmental rhetoric that talks about “toxicity” in ways that echo the stigma against queer communities. And it shows up in assumptions that LGBTQ+ people are urban and disconnected from “the natural world.”

In response, Queer Ecology invites us to reimagine how we relate to nature — not as something to be mastered, purified, or “protected” from queerness, but as something already strange, intimate, and interdependent.

Morton calls this radical reimagining “the mesh”: a tangle of connections that defies clean boundaries between human and nonhuman, inside and outside, living and nonliving. In this view, ecology isn’t about balance or harmony. It’s about coexistence in all its messy, beautiful, and uncomfortable forms.

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Queer Ecology in Practice

So what does Queer Ecology actually look like in practice?

It might mean pushing scientific research to account for the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive behaviours in animals — and naming them without bias. It might mean challenging environmental campaigns that rely on idealized images of “natural families” or untouched wilderness. It might mean reclaiming land and space for queer ecologies: from lesbian land trusts to queer farming collectives to eco-sexual performance art.

It also means language. Words like “unnatural,” “primitive,” or “deviant” carry histories of exclusion — in both science and society. Queer Ecology calls for more careful, reflective language that doesn’t impose rigid frameworks on the living world.

And perhaps most importantly, it means recognizing that the fight for climate justice is linked to the fight for queer liberation. Both require us to question the systems that tell us who belongs, what is natural, and whose lives are worth protecting.

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Rewilding Our Imaginations

Queer Ecology is not a metaphor. It’s a framework for seeing — and living — differently. It reminds us that the binaries we inherit are not inevitable. That nature is not static. That interdependence is not a weakness.

It also reminds us that science, like society, is shaped by values — and that both can evolve.

As we face overlapping crises of climate, culture, and care, Queer Ecology offers more than critique. It offers a way forward: rooted in difference, grounded in connection, and open to the possibility that another world is not only possible — it’s already here if we’re willing to look closely.