Queer Ecologies: One Year Later

Abstract

Reflecting on a soundart installation one year later troubles the question, “What are we going to do?,” decentering objectives with justification. Nested “laters” anticipate and evoke memories of past futures and future pasts, challenging direct study of crises and catastrophic predictions that reproduce an anthropocentric fixation on “What knowledge is of most worth?” Knowing and sharing things is magical, empowering, and individually self-fulfilling. Yet we can learn from those indigenous traditions in which magicians and shamans simultaneously offer prayers and ritual gestures to other animals, and to the powers of the earth and sky. The obligation is to ensure from the edges of our village that boundaries between human culture and the rest of nature stay porous and overlapping. Sharing what we know will not save the world. Developing forms of leadership, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement that enrich and expand reconnection with stewardship has a chance to do so