The brief, as it arrived
Lead an hour-long session for the whole organisation on an idea from outside their field, and make it useful to people who restore mangroves and broker carbon credits.
The problem underneath
Queer ecology can very quickly become theory for its own sake, and in a mixed room it can also be heard as a political position people are being asked to adopt.
The move
I gave the room a working vocabulary of four concepts (postnature, mutability, mutualism and transecology), each with an “in our work” application to conservation. It opened with a five-minute prompt, “What does ‘natural’ mean to you?”, and included a slide setting out what the session was and wasn’t arguing.
The writing
If “nature” has never been the fixed, orderly thing we were told it was, what else have we been calling “natural” simply because changing our minds about it felt harder than living with the category?Closing provocation
What changed
Colleagues questioned what “natural” means in advertising and everyday language, connected it to livelihoods and resource depletion, and asked for more Global South perspectives. One called it among the most engaging and collaborative sessions the series had run.
Who saw it
“Queer ecology can very easily become abstract or overly theoretical, but they were able to make the ideas accessible and connect them back to the kind of work we do with communities, ecosystems, and conservation.”