A mossy bed of hyper green pressed into the spiral patterns of your fingertips. The surface of a riverbed stone so smooth that you must hold its weight on your tongue. We find ways to co-regulate with the more than human world while reckoning with the rising waves and ultraviolet light increasing on the hyperobject Earth. 

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Queer ecology is a field that combines queer theory with science and environmental studies to challenge heteronormative ideas about nature. It aims to create a more inclusive understanding of the natural world, one that allows for slippages and porous edges, one that encourages an approach to the more-than-human world that is collaborative and compostable. 

In the words of psychotherapist and author Bayo Akomolafe, “There is a swirling, polyvocal community of celebration and voices around us.” This sonic reference to a chorus of voices and life beyond the anthropocene reminds us of the work of David Abram, in particular his devotional book, The Spell of the Sensuous, which poetically ponders the disconnection between our bodies and the natural world.

His book is an ecological philosophy that is grounded in the senses and grounded in the belief that while we are delighting in the world around us, it may well be delighting in us too. This dance of reciprocity and reverence is captured when he says:

“We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because - by virtue of our own carnal density and dynamism - we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous. We can feel the tangible textures, sounds and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight. Nourished and sustained by the substance of the breathing earth, we are flesh of its flesh. We are neither pure spirits nor pure minds, but are sensitive and sentient bodies able to be seen, heard, tasted, touched by all the beings around us.” 

The book explores the fluid, participatory nature of perception, the sensuous relationship between the multispecies on earth and the possibility of a non-hierarchical terrestrial life which includes and celebrates us all. More than anything it is a call to prayer, a desperate song to the masses, a manifesto which reminds us how desperately entangled we are. In this sense, the work embodies queer ecology, citing an interdependence that could not only save our souls, but perhaps even life on Earth.