Suffering Nature

Kneel

And the curly worm sentient now

Will light the word that tells the poet what a poem is.

—Anne Spencer, 1975

Introduction

For much of recent history, Nature¹ has been suffering.

Not merely in a biological or ecological sense, but in a discursive one—Nature has been suffering. The language we use to describe Nature has flattened rich ecologies into symbolic tokens for human expression. We use Nature to reflect the attitude of the Human:² to metaphorize our struggles³ and internal conflicts.⁴ It is made the red rose of romance or the lone yew of death. It is the storm within one’s mind or the calm lake when one closes their eyes.

Our extraction of rhetorical utility from Nature structures our relationship to it: naturalizing a hierarchy in which Nature’s primary value lies in its metaphoric and literal convenience for humans.

Even in moments where we seek to center Nature, we do so with a paradoxical detachment from it: either pampering it as an object in need of protection,⁵ or fearing it as a wild beast. The former seems a reflection of managerialist impulses, where logics of domination frame Nature as a system whose complexity must be organized, bounded, and stewarded by humans. Environmentalism often adopts this stance inadvertently, falsely assuming that to protect Nature is to assume authority over it. Conversely, literary traditions that fetishize “the wild” tend to position Nature as an adversary to be subdued as a proving ground for human exceptionalism and rugged masculinity,⁶ constructing “The Wild” for “The Man” to conquer. In either case, we center Nature by distancing ourselves from it.

Despite its prevalence, many ecologists have argued that this distance is fundamentally an illusion. Nature is not “over there.” Instead, we exist within a mesh of ecological interdependencies that exceed human control. “[H]umans, as all other animals and plants, are not individuals or single units, but are holobionts,” diversities of bacteria unified under a shared “recogni[tion] as ‘self’ by [our] immune system[s]” (Rosenberg 2-3). Since our own bodies reject notions of distance and clear boundaries throughout our ecologies, our language’s perpetuation of distance goes against the grain of our inherent relationality.

Within ecopoetics, one response to this has been to grant Nature a form of personhood. Poets often animate Nature, addressing fauna and flora as sentient beings while attributing human-like affect to nonhuman entities. This personhood-mode of ecopoetics even mirrors ongoing legislative efforts to grant legal personhood to rivers, forests, and ecosystems—aiming to deconstruct anthropocentrism through expanding the category of the person. Yet this approach raises tension: What does it mean to place Nature within personhood—a category built on anthropocentric assumptions? Does extending personhood acknowledge Nature’s sensibility, or does it reproduce logics of domestication: folding Nature into a form it isn’t meant to take.

This essay examines those tensions by putting ecopoetics of personhood into conversation with queer ecologists to arrive at an ecopoetic practice of shared suffering and embraced abjection moving beyond personhood. Ultimately, I argue that the most generative ecopoetic and ecological framework may not fully dissolve the human-nature separation at all, but rather embrace overlapping queerness to foster relationality rather than indistinction.

I. Ecopoetics of Sensibility and Personhood

Ecopoetry that grants Nature “personhood” often emerges from a well-positioned desire to treat the nonhuman world with respect and serious ethical consideration, attempting to acknowledge Nature as an active participant in the poem. William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring,” for instance, personifies Nature and its vegetation, treating “budding twigs” as active subjects “spread[ing] out [...] to catch the breezy air” in the bloom of spring (lines 17-18). Wordsworth's diction—”spread out,” “catch,” “breathe”—constructs Nature as bodies taking deliberate, volitional action towards their own ends (lines 12, 17, 18).

Volition is further illustrated through the focus on “pleasure.” When Wordsworth claims, “every flower / [e]njoys the air it breathes,” he imbues Nature with affect and innate pleasure-seeking, the flowers and the budding twigs feeling joy in the growth of spring as Humans often do (lines 11-12). Pleasure, typically regarded as a marker of sentience, thus becomes shared experiential ground between Human and Nature, highlighting the “link” between the two (line 5). When Wordsworth laments “what man has made of man” (lines 8, 24), he can be understood as lamenting how man has created the artificial category of “man” as separate from Nature.

Yet, Wordsworth, in his reflection on Nature’s sentience, also subtly reintroduces distance, an inherent separation between Human and Nature as the “thoughts [of Nature]” “cannot [be] measure[d]” by the Human (lines 14-15). His lamentation, though rooted in a desire to dissolve the Human-Nature divide, is ultimately self-defeating since, to put it plainly, humans and plants are different.

This is a central criticism of the personhood-mode of ecopoetics. Much like earlier criticisms of plant sentience that asked, “is it useful to talk about plant neurobiology if plants don’t have neurons and brains?” (Leonetti 85)⁷ more recent criticisms of plant personhood question whether the form of “personhood” is appropriate at all (Radziunas 131).⁸ There are “significant and complex challenges” at the process-level for the legal inclusion of non-human entities. Namely, there is much ambiguity with how Nature would be represented in legal processes (Houart 141). Many proposals center the idea of “guardians” or "trustees" who would “speak on behalf of ecosystems to uphold their legal rights” (Houart 141), but that ironically reproduces logics of anthropocentrism as humans are granted the authority to cohere, interpret, and present the desires of Nature to the courts.

A related criticism is that collapsing the distinction between Human and Nature risks erasing the ability to adjudicate conflicting interests. If the two are seen as one entity, “it becomes difficult to partition out various [...] interests in a principled way” (Gordon 83). How, for instance, could a legal system reconcile the extractive desires of corporations—who could claim themselves as part of “Nature” insofar as humans are living creatures—with the desires of the forests they wish to cut down? Total unity thus introduces further loopholes for anthropocentric domination.

Some legal systems attempt to grant rights to Nature while simultaneously circumventing this criticism by differentiating between the rights of persons and the rights of Nature. Ecuador for example, vests rights to Pachamama, the ancient Andean goddess of the Earth, but under a separate category from persons (Gordon 54). This model does sidestep some of the loopholes introduced by the latter criticism, but still falls victim to the former. With a clear distinction between Human and Nature, alongside the fact that Nature in the legal realm requires human representatives, it seems inescapable that Nature would become beholden to human interests and domination.

When Wordsworth relates to plants through a shared “pleasure” (lines 16, 20), one must ask whether this is truly a shared site of connection at all. Wordsworth uses the intangibility of plants as an excuse, suggesting that although he cannot truly glean the thoughts of Nature, “the [...] motion [of birds] seemed a thrill of pleasure” (lines 15-16). It is only his “faith” that informs him of the plant's pleasure-seeking sensibilities (line 11). “Research into plant cognition should address two main issues: i) the lack of communication between plants and humans that causes ii) difficulty in interpretation or misinterpretation of plants behaviors” (Leonetti 81). Wordsworth should thus be understood as an anthropocentric misinterpretation: the desire to fold Nature into modes of human cognition (i.e. pleasure).

Despite its ethical motivations, then, the personhood-mode of ecopoetics remains constrained by the categorical boundaries it aims to unsettle. Its insistence on granting Nature "personhood" relies on an anthropocentric model of agency that cannot escape its underlying logics of domination.

II. Nature as Queer/(Non)person

To respect Nature’s sensibility does not require respecting it through a lens of human relatability. “We [have been] assuming a priori that human cognition is the standard,” but “[c]ognition isn’t the possession of a brain or a neural system” (Leonetti 85-6). There is “no agreement on the definition of cognition,” it is defined only as a “set of phenomena”—”memory, thought, and language”—which humans have decided to undercode with human-specific forms (Leonetti 86). The desire to define cognition in relation to its human example is definitionally anthropocentric. Appeals to anthropocentric definitions of cognition—attempts to prove plants ‘think like humans’—are thus equally self-defeating. These attempts can only ever prove “cognitive-like” abilities which will never fully emulate human cognition due to Nature’s lack of human neurobiology. Yet that framing, the view of Nature as “cognitive-like” creates the “linguistic [...] implication” that “[e]ven when plants have cognitive abilities, they are categorized as similar, but imperfect compared to human cognition” (Leonetti 85-6).

It is here that queer ecology becomes useful. Rather than folding the nonhuman world into the human one, resulting in an inevitable anthropocentric domination, queer ecological frameworks question the category of personhood itself, approaching Nature not as a coherent person, but an incoherent amalgam that is fundamentally incompatible with personhood’s taxonomizing. Queer ecology does not seek to make Nature legible; instead, it embraces what Morton calls “strange strange[ness]”—the “uncanny familiar[ity]” of beings with whom we are irrevocably entangled yet fundamentally separate (Morton 277). We are simultaneously “familiar” with “every life-form” due to our “shar[ing] of DNA, [...] cell structure, [...] and subroutines,” yet we are also unable to communicate with or fully understand the flora and fauna comprising our ecologies (Morton 277). With this embrace of unintelligibility, when met with the plant cognition debate, queer ecological frameworks might simply redefine cognition. Rather than looking towards “[m]ental representations” which may be “specific to human cognition,” ecologists can look outward towards “intentionality” (Leonetti 87). Plants intentionally “intertwine and gr[ow] together” (Leonetti 87). They “actively support each other” and display “joint action” (Leonetti 87). They “sense neighboring plants and respond in ways that benefit their social environment” (Leonetti 87). And regardless of whether these displays can be considered cognition “in analogy to humans,” they can philosophically be considered “high-level capacity” regardless (Leonetti 92, 88).

The rigidness of personhood may exclude Nature, but this is not at the fault of Nature. Instead, this is an inherent flaw of personhood in its rejection of relationality. Personhood understands one human being as one individual. Each self is singular and separate from each other. There is no acknowledgement of the several thousands of microorganisms that constitute the “individual” (Rosenberg 2). There is no acknowledgement of the ecologies we coexist in. Instead, personhood is a system of boundaries. A drawing of lines between individual persons, as well as the “person” and “non-person.”

Differences—such as the presence or absence of neurons—are often used to erect these categorical boundaries. Yet these separations should not be viewed as ontological truths, but arbitrary categorizations. Some beings have neurons, and some do not, but by defining the category of cognition, which largely determines the ethical consideration we place on a body, in the context of neuronal function, we arbitrarily abject the non-neuronal world. Thus, the naturalization of distance between Human and Nature should not be seen as a neutral understanding of our differences, but instead a hegemonic desire to erect those differences as categorizations: trying to reorder an ontologically relational world into an anthropocentrically hierarchical one.

This illuminates the second way in which Nature is queer—its abjection. In human discourse, Nature is constantly made the queer Other. We abject it through environmental destruction, and further denigrate on a discursive plane through metaphorization, objectification, and flattening via anthropocentric moral hierarchies. Attempts to reintegrate with Nature, to “close the distance,” thus function as moves to innocence rather than authentic recognition. Rather than coexisting as strange strangers, we attempt to bring Nature into artificially constructed categories of personhood that will obviously leave Nature as a grotesque outsider since these categories were never made for it.

Have we ever stopped to ask:

Has Nature ever wanted to be person?

III. Death, Decay, and (Dis)connect at the Queer End of the World

It is in this abjection and the gratuitous destruction of ecologies that we find a potential site for connection with Nature. Perhaps not by the Humans, but the (Non)humans—the queers. As discussed, the over-limiting categorization of “Human” leaves much to be abjected outside of it. And through this abjection, we find a shared site of suffering through which a Nature-Queer connection can be formed.

Ross Gay’s “smear the queer” exemplifies this, staging a play of beautiful affect—of words like “shimmering” and “luminous” and “iridescent”—as an act of anti-queer violence (Gay). The poem literally depicts a childhood game, referred to as “smear the queer” or “kill the man,” which is premised on targeting a vulnerable figure and physically piling onto him (Gay). Gay depicts this with brutal imagery. He paints the victim as a “pronghorn,” “juk[ing] and whirl[ing]” to escape predation, or a “buffalo boy” “chug[ging]” along, and hauling a whole “flailing pride” with him (Gay). The word “pride” here is not technically accurate to describe a group of buffalo, but instead serves as a reference to gay pride—a group of queer boys trying to escape “the chase” (Gay).

Ultimately though, they are caught and “dragged [down].” They are “pil[ed] on” and assumedly physically beat considering the presence of the “bloody-knuckled boy” contrasting the “long-haired boy” (Gay). This anti-queer violence finally culminates in someone being crushed in the pile as one of the boys “die[s] bad” (Gay). Yet it is this violence that seems to open the world of the poem.

Somehow, the smearing of the queer is what paints the beautiful depictions of Nature that follow. Only as the corpse of the queer boy “tumbl[es] and swan-div[es]” downwards does his “flesh” conjure:

[...] a mountain

within which a cave

where was heard

a stream’s faint murmur

and seen the mirrored glance

of an iridescent bird’s

luminous eyes

The queer can perhaps be seen as paint, smeared to create the scene which unfolds right after his death. This is further reinforced by describing cave paintings of “a herd of elk” “gallop[ing]” “across the ridged walls” of the cave (Gay).

It is important to note that this depiction of queer death is specifically what paints the transformation of queer bodies into elements of Nature. The poem starts rather detached from Nature, only “watch[ing] the savannah” “from afar” (Gay). But through anti-queer violence in queer death, the body becomes itself a “moonflower,” a flower which seems to mirror the precarity of queer life (Gay), blooming only once a year and dying within 12 hours (Burchell). Thus, the site of abjection and gratuitous violence which Nature and Queer share is thus generative, creating connection between Queer Human and Queer Nature.

Derek Jarman erects this site of shared suffering as his garden itself, made on a plot of land that was “mined and [had] anti-tank fencing put up” during WWII (Jarman 63). These war-time aesthetics of the minefield places an emphasis not only on queer death, but more specifically on the precarity of both Nature in the Anthropocene and queers in the AIDS epidemic. In the face of such precarity, both “are no longer securely positioned within the realm of the living” (Ensor 119). As Ensor notes, terminality here acts as a site for relation. In The End of the World, there is no need for preservation, so Jarman’s garden can act as a site for accompanying the dying rather than saving the living. Nature turns barbed-wire fences into “climbing frames” and meddles in “mine craters” (Jarman 63). It would perhaps be a misnomer to call this flourishing, but it may be seen as what Ensor calls queer lasting—“persistence,” not survival in terminality (Ensor 53). And accompanying Nature in its lasting, Jarman seems to take note—treating the garden as “a pharmacopoeia:” a reference book of medicines to learn from—learning new forms of healing.

Jarman’s poetics are thus an ecologically inspired—and ecologically linked—survival strategy: “walk[ing] in this garden / holding the hands of dead friends” (Jarman 81). While Gay’s “smear the queer” finds connection after an instance of queer death—an erection of terminality—Jarman’s loss is inherently ever-present, due to his AIDs, and needs no such trigger. His grief is situated within the physicality of the garden itself, mourning the dead by holding hands with the garden itself. And as he weeps queer loss, so too does he weep ecological loss: “[the] gilly flowers, roses, violets blue” (Jarman 81). In this act of mourning, just as Jarman acts as an ecological ally, so too does the garden act as a queer ally: “steadfast warriors / against those who protest their [queer/ecological] impropriety / even to the end of the world” (Jarman). In the apocalypse of both their worlds, on a site of post-war desecration, an ecoqueer alliance seems to form.

And even when “the light fades” and “death comes even for stones,” Jarman and the garden find an immortalization for queer/ecological love. It is only in the “submarine garden,” when the garden has been fully submerged, and the “shingle[s]” of Prospect Cottage have been covered by “deep solemn waters,” does Jarman’s elegy find resolution (Jarman 86). Only in shared suffering with the “stones” whom death has also come for, do the “lost boys / sleep forever / in a dear embrace, / salt lips touching” (Jarman 86). Linked by death and a sort of Naturification of the queer body—turning it to “salt” and “marble”—in the post-apocalyptic submarine garden, the queer and Natural finally find connection; as the queer body learns Nature’s rugged survival strategy, clinging to each other’s bodies not unlike the plant clinging to survival—growing on the underside of an old landmine. The queer and the Natural have thus found shared understanding in their suffering. Ultimately, it is the “winds of the deep” who mourn the queer dead. And the “waters” who “fan [their] antique smile[s]” (Jarman 86).

The waters fan

your antique smile,

deep love

drifting forever on the tide.

And through the use of the comma and the isolation of the term deep love, it becomes unclear whether the ‘love’ is shared solely between the boys or if, perhaps, the waters have begun to participate in the loving as well: the queer and Natural in deep love, drifting forever on the tide.

IV. Let the Worms Guide our Poetry

What emerges from these ecoqueer readings is not a mandate to repair the Human-Nature divide, nor a naïve hope that queer and ecological subjects can truly “understand” each other. Instead, it is an insistence on dwelling in irresolvable unintelligibility. It is persistence in the paradoxical distance that underlies our inherent ecological relations.

Shared suffering does not abolish difference. But it may make coexistence possible.

If the personhood-mode of ecopoetics can be seen as a quest towards assimilation of Nature into Humanity, the shared-suffering-mode is towards a poetic of lasting in ecoqueer terminality.

To write with Nature, then, is to articulate our shared precarity rather than naturalizing our similarities as complete oneness. It is to recognize that relation does not require full likeness. Rather, an ethic of attention can emerge where comprehension fails. We need not directly commune with Nature to empathize with it. We need not comprehend Nature to find solidarity in our abjection. Illegibility is not a barrier to relation. Instead, it is one of its conditions: a reminder that we meet other beings not through sameness but through fragile, mutual vulnerability.

In that sense, ecopoetics becomes less a project of understanding and more one of accompaniment. We last together at the End of the World.

And let the sentient worm guide our poetry.

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