This is the third post in the Succession III: Queering the Environment series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Estraven Lupino-Smith, and Addie Hopes. For this series, contributors were invited to explore ideas of queer rebellion as interruption and resistance.
On days where I’ve spent too much time working with information instead of my hands, I tear myself away from the screen to get out of my head and back into both body and environment. My usual walk follows Amsterdam’s Westland canal south, cuts west to the Schinkel River, shimmies up a tiny sliver of land (once a tow path, now a coveted houseboat landing), and loops around an 1890s cemetery to arrive back home. Along the way, I wave to screeching rose-ringed parakeets, dodge carcasses of American crayfish discarded by seagulls, admire prodigious patches of Japanese knotweed, and pay my respects to a resident family of greylag x domestic goose hybrids. These are the more notable feral species who share my neighborhood, though surely there are many more I have not yet met. As fugitive pets, ship ballast stowaways, garden escapees, or simply visitors who’ve worn out their welcome, these folks tend to annoy or even alarm my human neighbors. And yet I’ve personally come to love these characters (yes, even the knotweed) for their gentle, yet very firm, refusal of human mastery.
You might find my affections here wantonly (or dangerously) contrarian. Surely, we can appreciate unruly nature without having to care for organisms who are actually a menace? After all, my neighbor knotweed, crayfish, and graylag geese have all been branded as pests of serious concern here in the Netherlands. Further afield, kudzu, emerald ash borer, rosy wolf snails, and water hyacinth, are similarly famous examples of excessively exuberant nature: organisms that profoundly disrupt biological and commercial ecosystems while also resisting almost every human effort to tame them. Even the critical discourse around invasive and feral nature suggests that while the terms of the debate may be deeply flawed, ferality on the whole remains a danger. Anna Tsing and collaborators’ 2021 Feral Atlas, for example, defines ferality less as a matter of undesirable species and behavior, but rather as any human project that, courtesy of the entwined forces of colonialism and capitalism, has run amok. Even infrastructure can go feral. But while critical research like the Feral Atlas shifts culpability back onto longstanding human regimes of domination, extraction, and profit, it still frames ferality more as a curse rather than a potential blessing (despite protestations otherwise). My intransigent nonhuman neighbors, however, have led me to wonder whether there might in fact be a lot to love and learn from the feral.
The tension between the domesticated and the wild lies at the heart of how we understand ferality. The term implies a lost intimacy with humans—that a creature has abandoned us and our human desires for something altogether less docile and agreeable. The feral thus also carries the taint of so many of the complicated emotions we humans often feel around our (un)naturalness; feral creatures are no longer wild enough to be romanticized but have strayed too far from our designs to be appreciated as useful, beautiful, or companionable. Indeed, our feelings about the feral sometimes look suspiciously like those of a spurned lover. Having rejected our affections (or control?), the feral can do no right. And here it begins to have something in common with the trickster. Elated to live in the world that we have wrought, while absolutely refusing our control, the feral is a mischief-maker. Perhaps even more so when we acknowledge that feral rebellion is entirely a product of our own minds: obviously, crayfish, greylags, and knotweed haven’t set out to frustrate my human neighbors. The wildness of the feral so thoroughly sidesteps the question of anthropocentric desire that it embodies a deep weirdness in the face of predominating human ecological aesthetics. The feral becomes monstrous, both a fearsome character that plagues us with ecological anxiety and a “transgressive creature” that refuses human categories, norms, mores, economics, and so on. It’s in this constellation of rebellious traits that the feral has captured my heart as a fundamentally queer archetype.1
Just sixty years ago, greylag geese were almost extinct in the Netherlands. Both human reintroductions and wild dispersals from other migrating populations saved the species from dying out locally in the 1970s. But within two decades, the greylag recovery had become too much of a good thing. Conservation measures, warming winters, and a new landscape mosaic of protected areas and intensified agriculture had sent Dutch goose populations skyrocketing. In the mid-2010s, 600,000 geese (three-quarters of them greylags) resided year-round in the Netherlands, with over two million birds visiting for the winter months. The comparatively tiny Netherlands had become the favorite destination of European wild geese, with enormous consequences for agriculture, road safety, and aviation. In the winter of 2016/17, these birds caused €21.6 million in agricultural damage.
Feral cormorants (and greylags by extension) thus expose the brutality of anthropocentric care, in which an organism can transform almost instantly from an object of affection into one of violence.
At Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, geese have been shot or captured and gassed to death in the tens of thousands to prevent airline collisions. Other national control measures have included expanded hunting seasons, egg-shaking, and—more humanely—programs to harass geese with dogs and pigs. How little time it took for a species to transform from conservation object into a very expensive and frightening (at least to airline pilots) nuisance worthy of extermination. But such is the nature of the feral. Catriona Sandilands describes a similar metamorphosis in the cormorants of Toronto’s Spit. By flourishing “excessively”—that is, beyond the bounds of human acceptability—cormorants became the target of culling, hunting, and egg-oiling schemes intended to bring populations down to more obedient levels. Sandilands notes the ease with which a living being became mere “matter” to be manipulated and killed simply for having failed to indulge human desire. Feral cormorants (and greylags by extension) thus expose the brutality of anthropocentric care, in which an organism can transform almost instantly from an object of affection into one of violence. Multispecies collaboration has its limits, apparently.
But if cormorants and graylags reveal the violent contradictions of human ecological values, it’s the knotweed that asks whether the entire project of managing feral nature might be flawed, at least as it’s currently understood. Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) has become a panic-inducing newcomer in most places where it has been introduced outside of its native east-Asian range. Like many weedy plants, knotweed thrives in disturbed soils. And in the absence of its co-evolved pathogens, it thrives excessively. One of the more acute expressions of knotweed panic emerges in the real estate market, where it has a reputation for rapid, pervasive growth and assaulting both underground pipes and building foundations. For property owners who do manage to remove the plant, it’s said that just two centimeters of forgotten root fragments will see knotweed return in all its unwelcome glory within a year. These paired excessive traits—of persistence and aggression—made knotweed-hosting properties in the United Kingdom virtually unsellable for a time. Here in Amsterdam, where the municipality is attempting a massive, multi-pronged approach at control, enormous fields of knotweed have emerged alongside roadsides and canals, in public green spaces, and people’s yards. I had to give my downstairs neighbor the troubling news that I’d spotted a clump from my balcony.
None of this sounds like the “gentle” refusal I sketched in my introduction, but that might be a matter of lost perspective. Recent studies have suggested that knotweed’s destructive prowess is much more limited to structures that are already in disrepair, which many native tree and vine species are similarly guilty of destroying. Meanwhile, the aggressive chemical and mechanical removal programs being marshalled against knotweed are not only perhaps more damaging to the environment than the knotweed itself, but also create the very disturbance conditions in which the plant thrives.
Ellie Irons is a Brooklyn, NY, artist who works with weedy species—or, in her words, “spontaneous urban plants”—as both a source of dyes and a collaborator in rethinking her (and our) place in nature. In a brilliant article about kudzu, the weedy vine that famously “ate the South” of the United States, Irons observes that most aggressively weedy species have established themselves in landscapes “prepared for them by settler-colonial world-building activities.” Feral invasions are, in reality, “co-created collaborative” multispecies events where we see the intimate commingling of both human and non-human desires and ingenuity alike. If we were to really focus on what has made kudzu (and, by extension, knotweed, American crayfish, greylag geese, and so on) thrive, we would have to take a much harder look at ourselves. Each of these eruptions of ferality have gone hand in hand with colonization, resource extraction, and capitalist intensification. Indeed, the destructiveness with which American crayfish attack canal banks in the Netherlands can only be understood in the context of the massive over-engineering of this landscape to begin with.
This is not to make a romantic, purist argument for completely abandoning contemporary human life in order to “save” nature (in which the death of the human species as a whole would be the best outcome). Rather, it’s a reminder about casting stones from glass houses. In North America, where kudzu has taken root in a landscape altered by genocide and settler colonialism, followed by chattel slavery, mass industrialization, and (increasingly) climate change, Irons’s critique against invasive panic is especially trenchant:
Attacking the turfgrass, highways, and sprawling developments that are the driving force behind the decline and extinction of many native species requires attacking the American way of life. Degrowth and economic restructuring for greater equity and sustainability requires long-term commitment to a complex process without a clear roadmap. Redirecting anger, fear, and a sense of environmental impotence toward othering and eradicating kudzu is less risky and more straightforward.
Indeed, in another piece of writing where she contemplates a stand of knotweed and the tattered plastic landscaping cloth that had been used to suppress it, she wonders which is the more dangerous invader: a plant that cycles through both life and decomposition, or the “ubiquitous, endocrine-disrupting, degrading-but-never-disappearing microplastics” of the plastic sheeting.2
Pioneer species like kudzu and knotweed succeed so easily because they have evolved to grow as rapidly as possible, often by acquiring as many resources as possible from their neighbors. Potawatomi biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer notes that so many of these pioneer species have been introduced around the world thanks to pioneer cultures—capitalist forms of social organization that are likewise fixated on rapid resource competition and acquisition.3
The impulse to control ferality now, at any cost is arguably just another expression of such pioneer culture, one that leads us to overlook the patience and wisdom that may actually inhere in ecosystems.
The impulse to control ferality now, at any cost is arguably just another expression of such pioneer culture, one that leads us to overlook the patience and wisdom that may actually inhere in ecosystems.4 In the Netherlands, for example, environmental manager Sus Willems has documented many native plants that are capable of competing with and constraining knotweed. He has also suggested it may be possible to help speed the co-evolution of local pathogens to recognize knotweed as a new host. The patient, curious, ecological approach that Willems brings to knotweed management recalls Indigenous perspectives, which suggest that all plants and animals—even those that fail human desire—are members of extended more-than-human families. And, as in all families, all of these beings have a place and a purpose, even when (much like one’s obnoxious uncle at family gatherings), it’s not immediately clear what those might be. What would it mean, asks Catriona Sandilands (drawing significantly on Indigenous voices), to stop trying to control feral nature and instead meaningfully engage with these beings to better understand and transform the invasive human ethics that facilitated said ferality? In a nod to Donna Haraway, Ellie Irons declares weedy plants to be our “companion species” for navigating the Anthropocene.5 But given how radically the feral demands that we re-assess anthropocentric desire and care, I would add that feral beings are also our companion species for queering and unraveling the Anthropocene. To extend love and care to the feral, on its terms, precisely for the weirdness and intransigence of its nature, is to radically trouble anthropocentric desire and the values that cascade from it.6
Notes
1 Plenty of thinkers, however, would argue that all of nature—as a profoundly weird world of flowering, rotting, oozing things—is a queer archetype. See: Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 121-158; Timothy Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA vol. 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 273-282). On queer ecology more generally, see:Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
2 Ellie Irons, Feral Hues: A Guide to Painting with Weeds (Hudson: Publication Studio, 2023), 36-41.
3 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015), 283-84, 376.
4 For a soft counterfactual, see Michael Pollan, “The Idea of a Garden,” in Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 176-204.
5 Also see: Catriona Sandilands, “Loving the Difficult: Scotch Broom,” in Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose, eds. Thom van Dooren and Matthew Churlew (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 33-52.
6 On cultivating care for difficult and unlikeable nonhuman others, see: Astrid Schrader, “Abyssal Intimacies and Temporalities of Care: How (Not) to Care about Deformed Leaf Bugs in the Aftermath of Chernobyl,” Social Studies of Science vol. 45, no. 5 (2015): 665-690; Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures, 11.
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