adrienne maree brown has been on my radar for a while. As a thinker, activist, and teacher, she provides essential insights into how we relate to both human and natural ecosystems.

Our conversation started with the prompt to discuss the term queer ecology. As we spoke, we veered away from and back toward the term several times, proof of how widely relevant the ideas that underlie queer ecology are.

It is an essential time to think about uplifting the work of our communities. We all give in different ways, and we have to find the places where we can be our most authentic, energetic selves. This is the moment to amplify the voices that have been working to bring light and solutions to the stark realities of climate change and environmental racism. For decades, I have worked in and supported these movements, keeping up the fight for social justice and for Mother Earth in my activism.

In these times, we must be like the mycelium that adrienne refers to. Our networks are both above- and belowground. We will not always agree with one other, but that diversity is reflected in nature and its many different life-forms. If we reach out, we will find the threads that connect us, even when they don’t feel apparent, and even when we are scared and hurt. Despite all the devastation we’ve wrought through our extractive practices, nature always wins. And so, for us to survive, we must learn from our Mother. Queer ecology would call this the work of mutability and mutualism. Call it what you like—and, in our conversation, adrienne and I call it many things—we must find the grace to learn these lessons.

This conversation was helpful to me. I hope it’s helpful to you too.

—Amy Ray

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Amy Ray (AR): It’s incredible to have discovered your work. It came at the right time.

adrienne maree brown (amb): I’m really grateful we found each other. I think we’re gonna have a good conversation. But first—how are you?

AR: There’s been a lot of change in my life this year, and I think I’m trying to sit in it and not be scared of it. And then, you know, Asheville, Hurricane Helene. I have a lot of friends up there in western North Carolina, but also northern Florida and South Georgia.

amb: Yeah. I moved to Durham, North Carolina, in 2021, and my whole family is from the Carolinas. And then I have family in Florida, as well.

AR: Oh, God!

amb: It’s heartbreaking to be here and to feel like I can’t stand in the way of the storm. But I’m also not just gonna be a witness. There’s some in-between role of trying to be a light in the storm, whatever that looks like. I’ve really been feeling that pressure of loving people and losing them, and loving people and watching them lose their homes, loving people and watching what feels like a very unnecessary man-made crisis happening. You know, in action movies, there’s those scenes where the person’s running, and the ground is falling out beneath them? I keep having that feeling as I’m moving through the world, like the destruction is just there, right behind, and not everyone is making it. How to be an artist, how to be a lover, how to be an auntie, how to be a sister, how to be a good person, how to show up well for my life in this condition?

AR: I go through that too. I’ve been touring since I was eighteen, and I love it. I love community. I love activism the most; it fuels all that. And I don’t want to stop doing any of it, but I have a ten-year-old. And when the hurricane came to North Carolina, because North Carolina is like a second home for me, the next day I wanted to run up and just do whatever I could do to help. And then I was like, you know what—you’ve been on the road. Your mom needs you. Your child needs you. Be home for a little bit. Let the volunteer opportunities come up that are appropriate for you, and go do them then.

amb: The metaphor of mycelium keeps coming up for me. The way I see the people who care is like this mycelium web under everything, and when stuff like this happens, we all feel it. It sends red-hot lightning through the mycelial thread of pain, despair, loss. How do we flow some kind of cool, comforting energy back along those threads? How are we getting resources to people who need them? I totally feel that, drop it and go rescue. But you can’t rescue a whole region. What you can do is send what you can in that direction. I think that maybe flows us right into our topic, right?

AR: Yeah, it does.

amb: We’re here to talk about queer ecology. I kept thinking, what does this mean to me, and it’s exactly this—who are the folks that I turn to and trust in these moments? It’s this ecology of care that has been generated and sustained in queer communities: Here’s how we take care of each other beyond the traditional concept of family. My queerness comes from saying, Here’s how I truly am, and now I have to shape a world around that reality. So, to me, queer ecology means being with the true fluid, adaptive, post-binary nature of the world, and managing the resources and the well-being of that ecology. And then, of course, looking at all the queer animals and geeking out. What does queer ecology mean to you?

AR: It was so interesting because I had honestly never heard that term. I’m so queer—how could I not know that term? In my life, I have always looked at everything that I’m doing as a little ecosystem. When I looked at queer ecology, mutability and mutualism were the two things they kept talking about. And that’s what has helped me stay alive: the idea of how you adjust to the situation you’re in to survive, which is what nature is doing all the time. And then how do you build community to support each other within that? That’s also what nature does. I think it’s been inside me for so long. It’s kind of like when I heard the first articulations of gender. I was like, Oh, my God! That’s me. There’s language for it. I’m not female. I’m not male. I’m really a collective of the two things.

amb: So often as humans, we think we’re discovering something when actually, we’re just finding a language to express what is right. In a lot of my work, like Emergent Strategy, I observed the world. Whatever parts of me had felt unnatural, through observing the world, I understood that I was as much a part of nature as a mosquito or a river. The difference is where the strength in an ecological system comes from. I’m observing this, and I can feel the people around me also observing this but not able to talk about it coherently enough to use it. So, we come up with a language. If I judge my grandparents from the perspective of the wisdom I have gained in this lifetime, then it seems so antiquated. But if I sit and I ask, What was the world you were born into? What was the set of ideas that you were given? Then I get curious. How would I talk to you like we share this Earth? How would I understand you and be understood by you? I’m much more interested in trying to have the connection than not having the connection.

AR: Was it curiosity that made you happy to reach out? Or was it just for survival?

amb: I think it’s been getting more honest with myself about the fact that even though sometimes those folks couldn’t see me, I still already loved them, and they already loved me. I kept having experiences like, I know my parents love me even though there’s some homophobia happening, or I know that my grandparents love me, even though they can’t really understand why I’ve got tattoos. But I think that I would be lying if I didn’t say there was survival underneath it. If I thought that as queer people, we could just go off somewhere and live in total peace and Earth would be okay, the folks who don’t think the way that we do would be busy destroying everything. So there’s a big part of my sur-vival technology that is wired toward, We have to keep those folks close. Right now, we’re in a place where we can see that playing out. If you just say, Y’all just go down that path of war, that leads to nothing good. Y’all just go down that path of fracking the world to death, that doesn’t lead to anything good. There has to be some aspect of our work that is engaging those folks. For whatever reason we were put on this planet at this time together, and I think we’re supposed to figure this out together. Every aspect of nature and every healthy ecosystem has that divergence.

AR: In the environmental movement, there are so many important scientists, and then there are so many important people that understand the language of Earth in a different way. You have to get these two groups speaking together. If you go into a coal mining town and you just say, Stop mining, and you don’t answer the questions of, How am I going to feed myself? or What is the legacy of your family? or any of this stuff—you have to start at that level. Just like how you can’t have a monocrop. You can’t have a forest with one kind of tree. It won’t work. There has to be all sorts of species and pollination, and different kinds of animals, and some of them you don’t like. I hate being stung by bees, but I love what they do.

amb: Exactly. One of the things I’m always thinking about is culture shifting. If we don’t attend to creating irresistible cultures and welcoming cultures and sanctuary cultures, then we leave so much on the table. We leave entire communities on the table, and someone else is aiming for those hearts. I think about how many queer people still don’t feel safe being out, and they’re being told, Your belonging is contingent on not being yourself. Belonging is so valuable that they’ll try to risk going without what their body wants and needs, what their soul wants and needs, for their entire life. We have to create an irresistible culture of belonging that says, You don’t have to surrender anything of yourself. Actually, we want all of you.

The reorientation I’m always trying to get to is like, What if we fundamentally all belong to Earth, if we start from the idea that belonging is a birthright? We have a land that wants us and wants to feed us and hold us, and gravity is going to make sure we don’t float off into space, and that’s so loving. I don’t think that the way we have constructed nation-states is conducive to belonging. It makes it seem like you’re part of something. But it’s not natural. The universe, whoever created this beautiful planet, wasn’t like, Here’s a line, and here’s a line.

AR: When you’re working on a river issue, the river is going through six different states.

amb: It also belongs to the fish that are in it, and the bears that come to fish there, and everyone else. Maybe this brings me to one of the questions I had written for us. You and I have both drawn on Indigenous worldviews to help us understand our place in the world. I’d love to hear you share a little bit more of how that has manifested in both your activist self and how you show up in community, but also your artistic self. I hear it in a lot of your music and your lyrics.

AR: Being in the woods and being in nature, I think a lot about white people and how, in the span of four hundred years, we really made nature dangerous to people of color. I love that birdwatcher J. Drew Lanham. He writes books about birds. He’s amazing. And all these people that are opening up the natural world again—Indigenous people, people of color—they were more rooted in nature and taught us more about nature than we ever knew. Through colonization, we just tried to build this fear into people, and it pisses me off. The natural world is for everybody. White people don’t own the national parks.

amb: I’m a swimmer, and when I talk to Black people, I understand from the Middle Passage exactly why we don’t feel comfortable there, and yet the ocean wants to hold us as much as it wants to hold anyone else. I feel like so much of the work of landing in my queer Earthling identity has been recognizing that, everywhere I go, I am in relationship to the land in that place, and I am welcomed by the land to be in that relationship, and any confusion is human error. Anything that makes me feel unsafe on that land is human error. And then that becomes my work: is there something to create that could invite people back into the right relationship with the land?

AR: Yeah. Emily and I, the Indigo Girls, we heard Winona LaDuke speak at an Earth Day show, and we thought, Oh. This is the way to do environmental work. It’s not working for an organization that has an all-white, straight, male board. Put the amplification

behind these Indigenous activists that are doing the work already. The biggest thing we learned was basically, What does grassroots really mean? What does community really mean? And how do you not be the white person in the room that takes over? We had to really quiet ourselves down and learn that. Being a middle-class white girl that wants to be seen in her lesbianism is not the issue when you’re fighting a nuclear waste dump in the Skull Valley Goshute area.

What Winona and the Indigenous women’s network always talked about was, like, if we go to Augusta, Georgia, and we work on a nuclear power issue, what we’re doing is working with the laundry company that’s in charge of washing all the clothes of the workers and all the people that work there. We’re working with environmental racism. We’re working with classism. We’re working on all different levels. You have to understand that you’re in someone else’s community. You have to be so respectful and careful and take it so seriously, and not worry about your needs. Worry about their needs and trust what they’re saying to you.

amb: I think one of the things you’re speaking about, which has changed in our lifetimes—your lifetime even more than mine—for me, when I came out, it wasn’t a big deal. It was a big deal for me. But when I told my mom, it wasn’t really a big deal. She was really curious about it. My dad struggled a bit more, but he’s come around. The freer I am, the more I’m actually creating the world around me that I need, the more that my parents have seen that. I feel like that has shifted a lot in our lifetimes, where there was a period where to stand up and say you are queer could cost you your livelihood, your career, your family, your connections, your safety, everything. We have seen a lot of shifts in that.

I think part of that is because of what it means to be queer, the embodiment of it, is so good for Earth. I mean that in a couple of ways. One is this practice of choosing family. I know how to create connections that function at the depth of family, which I think is a skill that everyone needs. I’m going to take responsibility for people who are not blood-related to me, and I’m going to take responsibility for mentoring them, for caring for them when they’re sick, for everything. I think we’re supposed to see all of each other as family, but I think queer people are the ones who are at the forefront of doing that with each other. We’ve had to do that to survive. I think queerness strengthens movements because you have folks who come in and are like, I know how to hold on and not let go. I know how to hold on and have good conflict with you, because we’re family. We’re staying, bitch.

AR: Yeah, yeah.

amb: One of my favorite aspects of queerness is that we have to be really intentional about who we bring into the world and how that happens. We’re in this period where there’s so much that has not been thought about, buildings built, structures created, and children born. And then all of a sudden, you have this explosion of queer relationships where it’s not a given that you’re just going to get pregnant anytime you fuck. And I remember having this lightbulb go off—the more queer people there are, the better it is for Earth. What queerness means is, there’s a certain level of intentionality around creating future and creating family and creating that is good for the ecology of the planet.

AR: If this heteronormative thing wasn’t sold to people on TV and in marketing, I really, truly believe that a lot of people would be set free.

amb: When I’m around queer people, very few people identify as one thing ever. I date men and women and everything in between. And I remember sitting down with some of the straight men I was dating and asking questions like, Well, do you like this? Or have you ever dated a man? Just asking questions that don’t presume that they have no spectrum in them. There’s always this little moment of like, Yeah, why are you asking me that? And then, actually, there is some spaciousness or curiosity. I don’t walk around being like, The whole world is queer. My thing is like the whole world is actually beyond binary.

AR: Yes.

amb: You see it in the natural world. There are creatures that can actually move between genders and shift and change. We see it in ourselves. I think one of the most fundamental things for queer and trans people is, I just am. I exist. So the world is gonna have to deal with me existing. If I could change the world, that’s one of the first things I think I would attend to. At an elementary school level, rather than us giving you a set of boxes to check and figure out how you fit into the preexisting limitations, I want to open the door and just be like you show us who you are. Here’s a bunch of books and a bunch of things to make art with, and a bunch of things you can build with, and things you can learn with. See what you like, become yourself. You already are yourself, but we’re not going to put any boundary on that. Give them room to play and become somebody, instead of being like your only path is to become a dominant alpha blah blah, you know. Dominant alpha energy is not actually good for humans.

AR: It’s not good for anything. It’s not good for the environment.

amb: You know, queer ecology is actually, I think, a path for humans to move forward in right relationship to Earth. I think that’s really what we’re saying.

AR: Is there something in this conversation that brings it into this moment? I mean, we started out talking about hurricane stuff.

amb: I think for me, the biggest thing I keep thinking about is emergent strategy as a biomimicry practice. I’m always thinking about, in this condition, How is nature surviving this? In Emergent Strategy, I wrote about how, after Hurricane Katrina, the oaks were the only thing still standing in some places, and it was because they had rooted together underground. So when the wind came, they weren’t just trying to stand on their own root system.

And then the other thought I keep having is, in a wildfire, there are certain seeds that only get released under the conditions of a wildfire. War, for me, is a human wildfire; it’s this thing that starts because of some spark that doesn’t get contained and then all of a sudden, everything is burning. So what seeds are getting released in the wildfire that’s happening now, and then how do we put the wildfire out? I can kind of see how what the hurricanes are unveiling could, and I think will, make us galvanize away from war toward caring for each other. But caring for each other is going to mean we’re having to hold on tight in ways that might seem underground. Very humble, very local, but very, very tangible.

AR: When you talk about the fire of war breaking open these seeds, the problem I’m having with Gaza and Israel is I feel that this war is not creating any possibilities. Instead, it’s planting the seeds of hate and fear.

amb: The only thing I’ve been able to see that seems like a small seed has been in speaking to my Palestinian and Lebanese friends, who are saying this is the most people who have ever understood us. There’s a way that, when apartheid is happening, sometimes the story is being told by whoever is holding power. And a lot of times, whoever’s holding power still sees himself as a victim. We can see that in our country, too, that MAGA is a bunch of people who, if you talk to them, all feel like victims. In Israel, what’s happening is a very different story of victimization, because there is a real and present recent traumatic shared history that is being manipulated to create these fiery conditions. But I think that’s the only seed I can see right now; the worse it gets, the more people understand, but also the more it just feels out of control. Each death is generations of pain and generations of trauma that have to be recovered from.

I do know that there are folks on the ground there who are thinking about this all the time, and my job is to get behind the queer ecologists in that space. I remember early on as the conflict was happening, and folks were like, Well, there’s no safe place for queer people in the whole Arab world, and that’s just not true. There’s tons of queer people in Palestine, in Gaza, in Lebanon, and actually the thing that would help them is not being bombed.

AR: It never made sense to me when someone would say that. It’s certainly hard as a young kid to come out where I live, or to be out.

amb: I really give you all the flowers, because I think that part of the work is being like, I’m gonna stay, and this community has to contend with me. You asked me earlier about my familial relationships. And I think part of it is that my existence here is resistance. It is educational. It is transformational. Just the fact that I’m here, and every day that you see me, or every day that you know me and love me—you love me, so you already love queerness. You’re in relationship to it already.

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