On Writing Unsettling: Surviving Extinction Together

As a kid I knew I was queer. By the time I was in middle school I’d had my first intense crush on a girl—one of my best friends—though I didn’t realize at the time it was a crush, because no one had ever told me that a girl could like another girl like that. Not long after, I watched with bewilderment as several more of my friendships went up in flames due, in retrospect, to queer miscommunication. By high school I knew I was bisexual, even if I’d not yet even kissed a girl, because why cut off the possibility of loving half the population just because they were the same gender? 

On weekends when I was a kid, my dad would take me hiking on trails along the Potomac River, not far from where we lived. We’d scramble over rocks, look at plants, watch kayakers dance in the rapids. Or we’d go downtown to the National Zoo or to the Natural History Museum, where I’d bring us to the same sequence of exhibits every single time. As a child I wanted to be a veterinarian; as a teenager I wanted to be a zoologist. I wanted a life where I could go hiking and backpacking all the time, to be in nature and with animals.

But for a long time I didn’t think these two things had anything to do with one another. My queerness had to do with who I loved. My love of nature had to do with where I felt most myself.

It’s hard to live a life bisected, though. I craved both at once. I started hanging out with climate activists, and gravitated toward the queer folks in that space, and I attended the LGBTQ Outdoor Summit, a gathering of queer people working in the outdoor industry. And I started writing a book to try to put the two of them together.

I began writing Unsettling: Surviving Extinction Together because I wanted to know what queerness and climate change and nature have to do with one another. 

The damage we’re doing to our environment disproportionately affects minoritized folks—queer people and people of color and poor people and everyone else on the fringes of society. Poor communities are more likely to be located near oil refineries, factories, dumps, highways, and other polluting projects, all places that are responsible for poor air quality and toxins that impact people’s health. In cities, minoritized communities also tend to live in areas with fewer trees, and because there’s no shade, heat waves hit far harder. And impoverished communities are the least likely to get aid after natural disasters like hurricanes. The same forces that put these communities at risk—capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy—have made climate change our reality. 

Climate change is a problem of the way we consume, of capitalism. Our desire for constant economic growth is more than the planet can stand. And the way we consume is possible because of our history. The United States became the economic powerhouse it is by dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of their lands, kidnapping Black people and enslaving them, and ripping the Earth apart for resources. Other wealthy nations have similar blood on their hands. If we want to truly survive climate change, we need to change the way we relate to one another, and to the land we live with.

In writing Unsettling, I sought to understand climate change as a symptom of an unjust society, the same society that made me feel awkward and out of place and in danger as a queer person, the same society that puts queer folks—especially queer folks of color—at risk of mental illness, poor health outcomes, and early death. And I sought a way out. I wanted to know how queerness and other forms of otherness could help us survive, the same way nature had helped me survive a teenhood in queer turmoil.

Many of the essays in Unsettling are, at their root, about grief: grief for a damaged planet, grief for the many queer elders lost to the AIDS crisis, grief for the animals we’ve sought to eradicate or sent to extinction through neglect. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it,” and I’ve found love for this planet and for my queer community through looking at what it really means to grieve what has been lost.

Out of that grief I found a feeling of connection, to my community and to the land. I expected to find hope, too, but instead, I found desire. Because at its root, isn’t that what queerness is about? Desire for something different. Desire for love. Desire is what drives me to make this world live for future generations. I hope it does the same for you.

—
Elizabeth Weinberg is a queer essayist and science communicator. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, American Wild Magazine, SEVENSEAS magazine, and other publications. She lives and writes in the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Chinook Peoples (Portland, Oregon) with her spouse, Leslie, and their dog, Pigeon.

Website: elizabeth-weinberg.com

Twitter: @eaweinberg

 

Unsettling: Surviving Extinction Together

The time has come to reimagine our relationship to the environment before it is too late.

As wildfires char the American West, extreme weather transforms landscapes, glaciers retreat, and climate zones shift, we are undeniably experiencing the effects of the climate crisis in more and more destructive ways. Climate change is impacting every inhabited region of the world, but there is much we can still do.

Unsettling explores human impacts on the environment through science, popular culture, personal narrative, and landscape. Using the stories of animals, landscapes, and people who have exhibited resilience in the face of persistent colonization across the North American continent, science writer Elizabeth Weinberg explores how climate change is a direct result of white supremacy, colonialism, sexism, and heteronormativity.

Travel through the deep sea; along Louisiana’s vanishing bayous; down the Colorado, Mississippi, and Potomac rivers; and over the Cascade Mountains, and examine how we as humans, particularly white humans, have drawn a stark line between human and animal, culture and nature, in order to exploit anything and anyone we find useful. With gorgeous and pointed prose, Weinberg weaves together science, personal essay, history, and pop culture to propose a new way of thinking about climate change–one that is rooted in queerness and antiracism.

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Category: On Writing